Jenn walked around the room, her steps echoing in the confined space. Nick didn’t move.
“Why here?” he pondered. “I mean, why was he collecting the heads here? What’s so special about this spot? Is there anything?”
Jenn shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because his bones are here? I wonder if we can find out.”
“Sure,” Nick agreed. “Can’t hurt to look.”
Jenn walked across the room to the gold handles bolted into the limestone. She pulled on them but nothing happened.
“What are you doing?” Nick asked, stepping up behind her and putting a hand on her tummy, but Jenn ignored the intimate touch. “Do you think it’s smart to open that?”
“There’s something about this room and the Pumpkin Man,” she said. “There has to be a clue here.”
“I thought you were just going to look for a name,” he said. “Your uncle’s, I guess. What else are you hoping to find?”
Jenn shook her head. “I’m not entirely sure. But the police were looking for fingerprints and blood and stuff, which isn’t going to help.”
“It’s not?”
She shrugged and pointed at the seam in the stone. “These handles are obviously meant to open something. And there’s a crack here.”
“Try pushing instead of pulling,” he suggested.
She did, and he leaned in to help. They both groaned with the effort but were unsuccessful.
“Maybe it slides?” Nick suggested.
Jenn pointed along the smooth face of the wall. “If it was going to slide, it would have to be in front. There’s no place for it to go. All the walls are evenly faced.”
“Yeah, and there are no hinges for a door mechanism either,” Nick noted.
They tried pulling the handles sideways, but nothing happened, just as they expected. Nick walked along the wall, pausing every ten or twelve paces to point out a tiny seam in the limestone. “Maybe they just had handles on the last two pieces of stone to help set them,” he suggested.
“Maybe,” Jenn agreed halfheartedly.
She walked around the stone pedestal twice. There was something about the way it was positioned in the room—not quite at the center, not against the wall—that had bothered her since the first time they entered. While everything else about the circular crypt was geometric, the coffin was off-kilter. She knelt at one corner of its stand where a fist-size chunk of stone had been chipped away from the base. Perhaps the men who’d had to lever it up the hill and then down the stairs had dropped it.
The floor looked darker near the missing hunk of rock. Jenn pushed against the stand, and it shivered a little but didn’t budge.
“Hmmm,” she murmured.
Nick was on the other side of the room, searching the outer walls, but Jenn had a hunch. Pressing both palms to the coffin stand’s bottom, she pushed with all her might. The entire stand seemed to shift, but only a hair. She could see that the tile beneath looked different. Dull black, not tile.
“Help me move this,” she called. She gestured.
Nick glanced over and shivered. “The coffin stand? I don’t want that damn thing tipping over and opening,” he said. “You push from that side, and I’ll pull on the other. Maybe we can squeak it along.”
They set to work. Soon the small chamber was full of heavy breathing, grunts and curses of frustration. The veins stood out on Nick’s forearms, and sweat stuck Jenn’s T-shirt to her chest. But little by little, the stone coffin stand slid across the tile. Surprisingly, it moved smoothly without scraping.
“I think there’s something on the bottom of this that’s helping us shift it,” Nick observed. “It weighs a ton. There’s no way we could have budged it if the base was flat.”
Jenn agreed. “That, and we’re not gouging up any of the tile. Probably it’s something like those little feet they put under stereo equipment. Though I’m betting these aren’t rubber.”
“No,” Nick gasped, pulling as hard as he could. “They’d have to be hard and smooth as Teflon! So why the fuck couldn’t they have just put normal wheels on it?”
Jenn laughed, blowing a strand of sweaty hair off her mouth. “Maybe this was put here before wheels were invented.”
“Okay, one more try,” Nick said. “On three. One, two . . .”
Jenn pushed so hard she yelled, and Nick’s cries echoed hers. At last he fell away from the stone to lie on the floor, breathing hard.
“That’s all I got,” he said.
“That’s all we need,” Jenn whispered. She tapped him on the arm without looking. Her eyes were fixed on the black space they had revealed.
The black tiles she’d first spied at the edge of the pedestal base were only the start. An intricate, undulating design lay beneath, black and highlighted by tiles flecked with silver. At the far end, just before the spot where the pedestal would have stopped in its original spot, a thin pink tongue protruded from a head.
“A snake,” Nick said. “Why would they use a coffin to hide the picture of a snake?”
Jenn crawled across said snake on her hands and knees, staring intently at the intricate yet faint patterns in the tile that gave the stone serpent the appearance of scales. At its middle the shape bulged, obscenely bloated.
She ran her finger across the center of that bulge, and in her mind Jenn gave a silent whistle.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a keyhole here.” Jenn pointed it out and looked up at him with a cocked eyebrow. “The belly of the snake is the entry point to something.”
“Sounds almost biblical.” Nick’s stomach suddenly felt like a home for bad eggs. This place just got more and more fuckedup. He knelt down next to her and put a finger on the irregular slot in the center of the serpent. “Soooo,” he began, hating to even ask. “Any idea where the key might be?”
Jenn reached into her pocket. “Works for everything else,” she suggested, holding up the key to the basement door. When she fit it into the floor slot, the key slid easily inside.
Too easily. The key to the doorway swam in the opening, and Jenn twisted it back and forth without meeting a tight fit.
“Works for everything
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Nick suggested. “Where do you think this goes?”
Jenn shrugged. “God knows. But somebody didn’t want it accessed very easily.”
Nick agreed. “No, I don’t think people were swinging this casket stand back and forth every weekend. But, what were they trying to keep hidden? What’s locked up under here?”
Jenn wiped the sweat from her forehead. “No idea. It’s too small to be a doorway.”
“Unless it’s for rats,” Nick suggested.
Jenn sat back on her calves and sighed. She’d thought they were going to find something or at last uncover an answer. Now she just had more questions. Where was the key to this? What was inside? Did she really want to know?
“I think I need to visit Aunt Meredith’s library,” she said finally. “I need to do some more reading. I
July 2, 2009
