Trespass Against Us, page 17
Jacob lowers his finger slowly until he’s pointing at the step they’re standing on, the one that ascends to the pulpit.
Riley shuffles back, glancing down. “What?”
No answer. He looks up. Jacob is gone. It’s just Riley alone in the corpse of the chapel. Riley had never realized the absence of a ghost might be more frightful than its presence until this moment.
“Shit,” he mutters, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Fuck me, I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
He wishes Vee were here. Colton, even.
He wishes, as he has every day for years, for Ethan.
That’s enough to get him moving. He told Ethan he wasn’t leaving this house without him again, and he’d meant it. He rolls up his sleeves, crouching down where Jacob had pointed, running his fingers along the wooden step, searching for . . . god knows what.
Dust coats his fingertips. Down here, Riley can smell the dampness and rot of the chapel clear enough to wrinkle his nose. But if Jacob wanted him to look, Riley would look.
His fingers catch on something. Frowning, he presses down and feels part of the wood give. Click goes the step, and Riley watches, amazed, as he slowly slides it away to reveal it hadn’t just been a step at all. A trapdoor, cut from the same wood as the step surrounding it. As it rattles back, it unearths several steep steps into the bowels of the chapel. The bottom step ends at a steel door, battered and bowed toward Riley, as if somebody on the opposite side had kicked it with force. A metal bar holds it closed.
Riley stares, open-mouthed. He’d seen blueprints for Dominic House before. This wasn’t on them.
“Oh my god,” he marvels. “I’m in a fucking horror movie.”
The candles flicker and Riley glances over his shoulder but sees nothing. That doesn’t make him feel any safer. He looks back to the steel door and takes a deep breath. “Fuck. Okay. I’m really doing this.”
He goes down the stairs slowly. He has to skim the first few on his ass. There’s not enough room to stand, but by the fourth step, he manages to get to his feet, so long as he hunches over. The gold of the candlelight recedes behind him, and his flashlight washes the world in pale yellow.
When he presses his hand to the door, it’s cold as ice. His breath fogs in front of him. He half expects the trapdoor above to close, but it doesn’t.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay, okay.”
The bar is on a hinge, set to be levered up and off. Riley grips the bar and heaves at it. It resists him, fused in place by age, and Riley experiences a moment of fear that he’s not going to be able to move it—then it gives, snapping clean off its hinge in his hand, and Riley nearly staggers beneath the weight of it.
It clangs to the floor. Without the bar, the door handle turns in his grip, and the door gives a discordant shriek as Riley pries it open.
Behind it, the stairs continue. A dozen more, maybe. Riley sees where they open into a shallow room, dark as a tomb.
Riley does not want to go down there.
He glances to the steel door. From this side, he can see just how hard somebody had fought to open it. Dents mar it from top to bottom, and pale scratches frame the handle.
Riley’s scars ache looking at them. Unable to help himself, he places his hand to the scratches, and his fingers fit perfectly.
Somebody had wanted out more than they’d wanted anything in their life. Looking down the stairs, Riley doesn’t blame them.
“Fuck,” he says, once more with feeling, then picks up the metal bar, places it to keep the door wedged open, and descends.
It takes a lifetime to reach the bottom. Eight steps, at least eight thousand years. When his boots hit dirt, something rattles against his heel. Frowning, Riley looks down, and his flashlight illuminates a skull staring back.
Riley swears and tries to scramble up the stairs, only to lose his footing. As he falls, he throws out a hand to catch himself. It plummets right through a skeletal rib cage at the foot of the stairs.
Bones crunch beneath his palm. He feels dust between his fingers.
I’m going to be sick, Riley thinks, but there’s nothing left in his stomach, and when he yanks himself free and curls into a ball, all he can do is pant for breath, staring at the dirt floor. He’s keenly aware of the bone chips that once belonged to a human being lodged beneath his fingernails.
His breath is so loud down here. Like being trapped in a coffin.
It’s that thought that levers him upright, so quickly he gives himself a head rush. Spots dance before his eyes as his vision hurries to clear. Finally, he gets his first real look at the hellhole Dominic House’s poisonous roots sprout from.
It’s a cellar. Or it was once, anyway. The floor is dirt, and the stone walls look sturdy and solid, interspersed with hefty wood reinforcements to keep them stable. Shelves line one of the far walls, although they’re dusty. An empty tub of rat poison sits on its side, its label peeling.
The room itself isn’t nearly so empty.
The skeleton Riley had tripped over stares up at him, its bare face ghoulish, what’s left of its ribs concave. The clothes that cling to it are rotted scraps—the white collar circling its throat the only thing to survive.
Well. At least he’s solved one mystery. Whatever happened forty years ago, Father Thomas went into this forgotten cellar, and he never climbed out.
The empty eye sockets unnerve him, and unable to help himself, Riley turns the skull so it’s staring at the wall. A sizable crack at the base of the skull flakes at his touch. Riley eyes it and then looks back toward the stairs.
Two mysteries, maybe.
He gets to his feet, brushing dust from his jeans, and as he does, his flashlight beam jumps across a shape in the corner. Riley turns to it. He’s expecting Ethan, Jacob.
It’s not.
Colton slumps against the wall, limp all the way through, eyes closed. There’s dirt in his hair, and his clothes are covered in cobwebs like he’s been dragged across the floor. Beside him, Vee lists against his shoulder, face doll-like in slumber.
Riley crosses the room in a heartbeat, sinking to his knees before them. “Hey! Hey!”
Neither of them wake. A vision of Josh on the floor flashes behind Riley’s eyelids.
Riley grits his teeth. “Sorry about this,” he says and slaps Colton clean across the cheek.
Colton jerks awake with a hurricane gasp. His hands shoot out, fisting in Riley’s shirt as he blinks frantically against the burn of Riley’s flashlight.
“It’s just me,” Riley hisses, shaking him gently. “Colton, hey. It’s Riley.”
“Riley?” Colton stops struggling, clinging to him as he gasps for breath. Shakily, he scrubs one hand across his eyes. “Shit, where . . . ?”
“You’re in a cellar beneath the chapel,” Riley says.
“The chapel?” Colton looks bewildered. “No, I was in the courtyard. With Josh. And then—” The bewilderment fades. Fury replaces it. His gaze snaps back to Riley. “Your fucking boyfriend is a piece of work.”
“That wasn’t Ethan,” Riley says grimly. “Come on, I don’t have time to explain. Can you wake Vee?”
For the first time, Colton seems to realize they’re not alone. He shakes her shoulder far too gently to be of any use.
“You’re going to have to be more forceful than that,” Riley says.
Colton squints at him, as if remembering. “Did you slap me?”
“No,” Riley lies and backs away, surveying the cellar as Colton gives Vee a more vigorous shove.
After the theatrics upstairs, Riley had been certain he was walking into a viper’s nest down here, but as far as he can tell, they’re alone. Father Thomas rotting by the stairs, and Riley’s friends bleary in the corner.
No ghosts. No Ethan.
Riley looks over his shoulder. Vee is half-awake now, one hand to her temple as she blinks uncomprehendingly at Colton. They’ll be leaving any minute, and Riley knows once they do, he’ll never come back again.
There has to be something here. Ethan didn’t disappear into thin air.
“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath. “Ethan, c’mon, please.”
He cuts a circuit around the room, trailing a hand along the mossy stone wall. The ground is uneven beneath his boots, and his flashlight casts everything into uncomfortable shadows. The whole cellar is maybe a dozen feet in either direction, bigger than his room back home but not by much.
He makes it to one corner. Turns to another. His light glimmers on something on the ground
It’s a chalice. Rusty with age. When Riley comes closer, he realizes it’s not alone. Bones gleam beside it.
For a moment Riley thinks he’s found Ethan, but as he draws nearer, he realizes all he’s found is another skeleton. Slightly smaller than Father Thomas but just as rotted. It’s curled up in the fetal position, the white of its bones a beacon in the dark.
Riley stares at. There’s nothing about it to recognize. He does anyway.
“Jacob?” he whispers.
Upstairs, the cellar door slams closed. Riley’s flashlight goes out. The room plummets into darkness.
Before
Riley found Ethan in the chapel, gazing up at the crucifix.
The clouds had cleared and the moonlight painted his hair silver; the shadows hollowed the highs of his cheekbones. His hands were clasped in front of him, as near to silent worship as Riley had ever seen from him.
The candles were burning. Every single one.
Looking at Ethan, Riley couldn’t recognize him at all. Riley stood with one foot in the chapel, the other frozen in the courtyard outside. Across the room, his camera blinked at him from the pulpit, beckoning him closer.
Riley swallowed. His hands were stained with Colton’s blood. Somehow he found the strength to step inside. “Ethan?”
Ethan’s head cocked, as if listening to him. He didn’t reply. He didn’t move. The shadows of the chapel consumed him.
Riley’s heart was a rabbit inside his chest, beating heavy feet on the cage of his ribs. Ethan’s back was broad, his shoulders loose and relaxed. It occurred to Riley that he’d never paid much attention to Ethan’s back before—Ethan had so rarely turned it to him.
In a panic, Riley moved closer, reached out, snagged Ethan’s arm. When he pulled, he expected Ethan to resist.
He did not. He allowed Riley to turn him without a fight.
His expression was as empty as the blue of his eyes. Riley was standing half a foot from him, but he might as well have been a world away. Ethan wasn’t looking at him; it didn’t seem as if he was aware of Riley at all.
Riley squeezed his arm hard enough to bruise, shaking him. “Ethan! Ethan!”
Ethan blinked. His brows drew tight. Confusion burgeoned across his face, and relief swept through Riley like a tide.
It did not last long.
The shadows behind Ethan shifted, and when Riley looked, his heart froze.
There was a hand on Ethan’s shoulder.
Fifteen
“Riley, put your light back on!” Colton snarls.
Riley doesn’t bother replying. He stays stock still, conscious of the dead child at his feet, his friends at his back. The rest of the wide, empty space. He waits for his eyes to adjust.
Vee, more uncertain, says, “Riley?”
Riley turns toward her voice without meaning to. “I’m here,” he says. “Be quiet, okay? Just . . . don’t say anything.”
Riley’s not sure if that will help the situation. So far, none of his ghosts tonight have seemed to care one way or another how silent he was, how still.
He’s not a child, and nightmares can’t be chased away by hiding beneath the covers. Somehow Riley can’t help but try.
There’s a rustle of movement. Colton sucks in a breath to say something else but lets out a sharp hiss instead, like Vee has struck him in the ribs.
The darkness looms. Riley waits.
A hand lands on his shoulder. Solid. Cold. Riley very deliberately does not flinch.
In his ear, Ethan says, “You shouldn’t have come down here.”
Relief tastes like iron on his tongue. Riley reaches up to squeeze Ethan’s fingers. “Where else would I go?”
Ethan’s other hand lands on his waist, and with aching gentleness, he pushes Riley forward. Riley loses his grip on Ethan but finds Vee in the darkness. She lets out a surprised noise, but when she realizes it’s him, the outline of her shoulders sags in relief. Her hand envelops his. “What do we do?” she says, no louder than a whisper.
“Riley and I could break the door down,” Colton offers. His hand brushes Riley’s other one briefly in the dark, and Riley seizes it before Colton can try anything stupid.
“Trust me,” Riley says, “if something wants that door shut, we’re not going to get it open.”
A shiver chases through Colton. Riley wouldn’t have even noticed if they weren’t touching. “Then what the fuck do we do? God, I don’t want to die here, Riley.”
“We won’t,” Riley says, far more confident than he feels. “Ethan will get us out.”
“Ethan?” Colton hisses. “He’s the one who dragged me down here!”
Riley stamps down on his impatience. “I told you, that wasn’t him—not really. I think—I think the other ghosts have been possessing him. Or one of them, at least.”
“Other ghosts? Ghosts, plural? This gets better and better.”
“Colton, shut up,” Vee says. “I think I can hear something.”
Riley can’t hear a thing, but before he gets the chance to say so, his light flickers back on.
Riley is expecting Ethan.
It’s not.
He’s expecting Jacob.
It’s not.
Behind him, Colton sucks in a breath. Vee’s hand trembles like a leaf. It takes all Riley has not to back into the wall.
Death has rendered Father Thomas a shade of the person he was in life. His pale skin is near translucent, and his dark hair is plastered to his skull with blood, the white of his priest’s collar spotted with it.
His eyes are black pits, like the shadows of the decaying skull by the staircase.
“Oh my god,” Colton says. “What the fuck is that?”
Riley has an idea, and the idea amounts to nothing good. “Colton, Vee, get to the stairs,” he says, as calmly as he can, which is not that calmly at all.
“Riley—”
“Go.”
They scramble along the wall, Vee holding Colton up when his bad leg threatens to give. Riley keeps his back to them, walking sideways to slot himself between Father Thomas and his friends.
Father Thomas moves with them, turning in a half circle to follow their movements, watching them. At least, Riley thinks he’s watching them. It’s hard to tell when his eyes are more an idea than a reality.
Riley passes by Jacob’s bones. His heel catches on something, and he stumbles, hand out to the wall to keep himself upright. He glances down and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
A skeletal hand pokes from the dirt. The soil around it is uneven, shallow in more places than not. With dawning horror, Riley looks along the wall.
White gleams through in places, bright in Riley’s flashlight. Jacob is curled up alongside it all, as if a sentry, forever watchful.
How many students went missing? Four? Five, including Jacob? How many shallow graves is Riley walking on? How many children’s remains rot beneath his feet?
Colton and Vee are nearly to the staircase. Father Thomas is watching them, unworried, silent.
Riley says, “Did you kill them?”
A beat. Father Thomas looks to him. His hands are folded neatly behind his back. His cassock inspires worship.
Riley has never wanted to kill somebody who was already dead so much in his life.
He picks up a rock and throws it with all his might. It passes through Father Thomas and clatters against the far well. Father Thomas turns to look at it and then glances back at Riley, unfazed.
“I said,” Riley snaps, “did you fucking kill them?”
He’s not expecting a reply. He never is in this place.
Father Thomas says, “I did not.”
Riley stares at him. Colton and Vee are frozen by the doorway, watching them, so still Riley isn’t sure they’re breathing. He wants to tell them to move, to get going while Father Thomas is focused on him, but Father Thomas’s attention cuts like a laser beam.
“I don’t believe you,” Riley says. “Fuck, I don’t know why nobody figured it out sooner. It’s always the priest, isn’t it?”
Finally, Father Thomas’s face pinches. “The children were lost souls,” he says. “Dominic Savio’s was a salve to their wounds, but it couldn’t heal them. Their sickness—”
“Sickness?” Riley repeats, incredulous. “They weren’t fucking sick, they just needed support. They were teenagers—just kids. Who knows how they would have turned out when they grew up, if they’d been allowed to grow up at all.”
Father Thomas continues as if Riley hasn’t interrupted him. “—made their lives painful. Their parents recognized that. If left to fester, it would spread, and then they and everything they touched would be beyond saving.”
Riley looks to him and then to the dirt, to the bones littered at their feet. “You call this saving? Are you listening to me at all? They were children. Just fucking children.”
Father Thomas says, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.”
Riley thinks of the Bible, dusty and devout, stored in Father Thomas’s bedside drawer. “I don’t think God was asking for you to murder in his name.”
“They went peacefully,” Father Thomas says. “And our Lord was waiting to welcome them into his arms.”
Riley’s mind stalls on that. He turns his head, eyes landing on the ancient tub of rat poison atop the shelf, the empty goblet overturned in the dirt. His brain spits out a realization.
Across the room, Vee presses a hand to her mouth, cheeks bleached white.
“You poisoned them,” Riley says numbly. “They were kids. They didn’t . . . You took them down here, and what? You told them to take communion? And then they—”
