The Fury

Instead, fighting nausea, she concentrated on Stefan's expression. It would tell her what was to be found in there. Pictures crashed through her mind, of parchment-colored mummified bodies, of rotting corpses, of grinning skulls. If Stefan looked horrified or sickened, disgusted…

But as Stefan looked into the open tomb, his face registered only disconcerted surprise.

Elena couldn't stand it any longer. 'What is it?'

He gave her a crooked smile and said with a glance at Bonnie, 'Come and see.'

Elena inched up to the tomb and looked down. Then her head flew up, and she regarded Stefan in astonishment.

'What is it?'

'I don't know,' he replied. He turned to Meredith and Alaric. 'Does either of you have a flashlight? Or some rope?'

After a look inside the stone box, they both headed for their cars. Elena remained where she was, staring down, straining her night vision. She still couldn't believe it.

The tomb was not a tomb, but a doorway.

Now she understood why she had felt a cold wind blow from it when it had shifted beneath her hand that night. She was looking down into a kind of vault or cellar in the ground. She could see only one wall, the one that dropped straight down below her, and that one had iron rungs driven into the stone, like a ladder.

'Here you go,' Meredith said to Stefan, returning. 'Alaric's got a flashlight, and here's mine. And here's the rope Elena put in my car when we went looking for you.'

The narrow beam of Meredith's flashlight swept the dark room below. 'I can't see very far inside, but it looks empty,' Stefan said. 'I'll go down first.'

'Go down?' said Matt. 'Look, are you sure we're supposed to go down? Bonnie, how about it?'

Bonnie hadn't moved. She was still standing there with that utterly abstracted expression on her face, as if she saw nothing around her. Without a word, she swung a leg over the edge of the tomb, twisted, and began to descend.

'Whoa,' said Stefan. He tucked the flashlight in his jacket pocket, put a hand on the tomb's foot, and jumped.

Elena had no time to enjoy Alaric's expression; she leaned down and shouted, 'Are you okay?'

'Fine.' The flashlight winked at her from below. 'Bonnie will be all right, too. The rungs go all the way down. Better bring the rope anyway.'

Elena looked at Matt, who was closest. His blue eyes met hers with helplessness and a certain resignation, and he nodded. She took a deep breath and put a hand on the foot of the tomb as Stefan had. Another hand suddenly clamped on her wrist.

'I've just thought of something,' Meredith said grimly. 'What if Bonnie's entity is the Other Power?'

'I thought of that a long time ago,' Elena said. She patted Meredith's hand, pried it off, and jumped.

She stood up into Stefan's supporting arm and looked around. 'My God…'

It was a strange place. The walls were faced with stone. They were smooth and almost polished-looking. Driven into them at intervals were iron candelabra, some of which had the remains of wax candles in them. Elena could not see the other end of the room, but the flashlight showed a wrought-iron gate quite close, like the gate in some churches used to screen off an altar.

Bonnie was just reaching the bottom of the rung ladder. She waited silently while the others descended, first Matt, then Meredith, then Alaric with the other flashlight.

Elena looked up. 'Damon?'

She could see his silhouette against the lighter black rectangle that was the tomb's opening to the sky. 'Well?'

'Are you with us?' she asked. Not 'Are you coming with us?' She knew he would understand the difference.

She waited five heartbeats in the silence that followed. Six, seven, eight…

There was a rush of air, and Damon landed neatly. But he didn't look at Elena. His eyes were oddly distant, and she could read nothing in his face.

'It's a crypt,' Alaric was saying in wonder, as his flashlight scythed through the darkness. 'An underground chamber beneath a church, used as a burial place. They're usually built under larger churches.'

Bonnie walked straight up to the scrolled gate and placed one small white hand on it, opening it. It swung away from her.

Elena's heartbeats were coming too quickly to count now. Somehow she forced her legs to move forward, to follow Bonnie. Her sharpened senses were almost painfully acute, but they could tell her nothing about what she was walking into. The beam from Stefan's flashlight was so narrow, and it showed only the rock floor ahead, and Bonnie's enigmatic form.

Bonnie stopped.

This is it, thought Elena, her breath catching in her throat. Oh, my God, this is it; this is really it. She had the sudden intense sensation of being in the middle of a lucid dream, one where she knew she was dreaming but couldn't change anything or wake up. Her muscles deadlocked.

She could smell fear from the others, and she could feel the sharp edge of it from Stefan beside her. His flashlight skimmed over objects beyond Bonnie, but at first Elena's eyes could make no sense of them. She saw angles, planes, contours, and then something leaped into focus. A dead-white face, hanging grotesquely sideways…

The scream never got out of her throat. It was only a statue, and the features were familiar. They were the same as on the lid of the tomb above. This tomb was the twin of the one they had come through. Except that this one had been ravaged, the stone lid broken in two and flung against the wall of the crypt. Something was scattered about the floor like fragile ivory sticks. Bits of marble, Elena told her brain desperately; it's only marble, bits of marble.

They were human bones, splintered and crushed.

Bonnie turned around.

Her heart-shaped face swung as if those fixed blank eyes were surveying the group. She ended directly facing Elena.

Then, with a shudder, she stumbled and pitched violently forward like a marionette whose strings have been cut.

Elena barely caught her, half falling herself. 'Bonnie? Bonnie?' The brown eyes that looked up at her, dilated and disoriented, were Bonnie's own frightened eyes. 'But what happened?' Elena demanded. 'Where did it go?'

'I am here.'

Above the plundered tomb, a hazy light was showing. No, not a light, Elena thought. She was sensing it with her eyes, but it was not light in the normal spectrum. This was something stranger than infrared or ultraviolet, something human senses had not been built to see. It was being revealed to her, forced on her brain, by some outside Power.

'The Other Power,' she whispered, her blood freezing.

'No, Elena.'

The voice was not sound, in the same way that the vision was not light. It was quiet as star shine, and sad. It reminded her of something.

Mother? she thought wildly. But it wasn't her mother's voice. The glow above the tomb seemed to swirl and eddy, and for a moment Elena glimpsed in it a face, a gentle, sad face. And then she knew.

'I've been waiting for you,' Honoria Fell's voice said softly. 'Here I can speak to you at last in my own form, and not through Bonnie's lips. Listen to me. Your time is short, and the danger is very great.'

Elena found her tongue. 'But what is this room? Why did you bring us here?'

'You asked me to. I couldn't show you until you asked. This is your battleground.'

'I don't understand.'

'This crypt was built for me by the people of Fell's Church. A resting place for my body. A secret place for one who had secret powers in life. Like Bonnie, I knew things no one else could know. I saw things no one else could