Devlin released the rope. The chains dropped and I jumped as the metal yoke crashed against the brick floor.
Terrible images flashed in my head as Devlin lifted the device with the pulley and tied it back into place. Then he walked over to examine the floor beneath the chains. The bricks looked darker from where I stood. I felt queasy as I watched him squat and touch his finger to the surface. Then he rose and resumed his search.
The silence stretched on forever.
“What do you suppose he used the chair for?” I finally asked. “Do you think he sat there and…watched them?”
“That or he had an audience,” Devlin said, so matter-of-factly that my blood turned to ice.
He moved the beam back over the walls and I rotated with him. The cobwebs were so thick in places, the strands so tightly articulated that the light couldn’t penetrate.
Devlin swore and I saw his hand jerk. I thought at first he’d seen another giant spider…or worse, the killer. But the light was trained upon the wall, almost all the way to the ceiling. Through a gossamer cocoon, I saw it, too.
A human skeleton shackled to the wall in the darkest corner.
Twenty-Seven
The skeleton was bound at the wrists, not strung up by the ankles as Devlin had described earlier. I had a feeling that was important, but I was too shaken at the moment to try to make sense of it.
There wasn’t much else to see through the webs. Bits of clothing. Tufts of hair clinging to the skull.
“It’s been down here for years, by the looks of it.” Devlin shifted the light from side to side, trying to get a better look. “I’m surprised it’s held together so well. Maybe there’s more ligament and tissue than what we can see from here.” He sniffed the air. “But no smell.” He took out his phone and checked the display. “No signal, either. We’ll need to get a forensics team down here. And get Shaw back out.” He was speaking quietly, but his voice echoed eerily in the chamber.
I had remained silent for a very long time because I didn’t trust myself to speak. If I opened my mouth, I was very much afraid I might start screaming.
Devlin ran the flashlight back and forth across the chamber. “What I want to know is where all those flies went.”
I hadn’t even thought about that. Now I looked at him aghast. “You don’t think there’s another body down here somewhere, do you? Or someone still alive? Someone…”
A week ago, I would not have been able to imagine such an atrocity. Now I felt a creeping certainty as I stared at that hole in the brick wall, that dark, menacing gateway.
“I’ll have to go in there and find out,” Devlin said, and I thought I detected a note of dread in his voice.
“Right now?” I didn’t even want to contemplate what lay beyond that gaping rift.
“If there’s even a remote chance someone else is down here, yeah. Right now.”
“But…shouldn’t we at least wait for backup? You said help would be here soon.”
“It may not be soon enough. Sometimes even a minute makes all the difference.” The quiet way he spoke made me think of his wife and daughter trapped in that sinking car. “I’ve got to find out what’s in there.” His voice was hard, resolved. No talking him out of it.
“Then I’m going, too,” I said, though in truth, I was operating more out of fear than altruism. I didn’t want to stay behind in that chamber of horrors. I’d take my chances with whatever lay beyond that wall. With Devlin.
I thought he might argue and I was fully prepared to stand my ground, but then his gaze lifted to those chains and he nodded. “I think that might be for the best.”
Shining the light into the aperture, he crawled through and I went in after him.
On the other side, the space opened up enough to stand upright. The walls here were also brick and slick with slime. When Devlin aimed the flashlight straight ahead, I could see nothing but endless tunnel.
The space was so narrow we had to move forward in a single file. When I glanced over my shoulder, the darkness behind me was complete.
“I’ve been thinking about the timing of all this,” I said softly, as I moved along the passageway behind him. “Hannah’s mother said the last time she saw her alive was last Thursday. If her body was buried sometime after I left the cemetery at four on Friday and when the storm hit at midnight, then she could have been down here while I was up there photographing headstones. I could have walked right over where he had her hanging. If only I’d heard something…seen something, I could have called the police—”
Devlin glanced over his shoulder, his face grim and shadowed. “Don’t do that. There was nothing you could have done.”
“I know, but it’s a hard thing to think about.”
“There are a lot of hard things in this world,” he said. “You don’t need to beat yourself up over something that’s out of your control.”
I wondered if he’d managed to take his own advice, or if he still played those terrible what-if games in the middle of the night, when sleep would not come and his ghosts would not leave.
We fell silent as we trudged along the tunnel. It seemed to me that we were descending, but I couldn’t be certain. The claustrophobic confinement and the utter darkness behind us were a bit disorienting.
And everywhere, more cobwebs. I couldn’t imagine how many spiders it had taken to spin them over the years.
“I can feel them in my hair,” I said with a shudder.
“What?”
“Spiders. They’re everywhere. Must be thousands. Millions…”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it. You know why I’m arachnophobic? I was bitten by a black widow when I was ten.”
“I was bitten by a copperhead when I was twelve.”
“Okay, you win.” I ran fingers through my hair, trying to shake loose the unwelcome visitors.
“I didn’t realize it was a competition,” Devlin said. “Should we compare scars?”
I appreciated his attempt—feeble though it was—to lighten the mood. “Where were you when you were bitten?”
“My grandfather has a cabin in the mountains. We used to go up there for a week every summer when I was a kid. I had an old bike I kept around to take out on the trails. The snake was lying across the path late one afternoon. I didn’t see it in time and ran over it. The body coiled in the spokes and when I tried to nudge it loose with my toe, the thing struck. Nailed me on the shin right through my jeans.”
“Was it bad?”
“Not as bad as you might think. My grandfather kept antivenin in the cabin. He gave me an injection and some antibiotics for the infection.”
I started to ask if his grandfather was a doctor, but then I remembered Ethan had said that Devlin came from a long line of lawyers. He was, in fact, the black sheep of the family, because he hadn’t followed the traditional path.
“You didn’t have to go to the hospital?”
“No. A little suffering builds character, according to my grandfather. I was pretty sick for a couple of days, but that was about it. Your black widow was probably a lot worse.”
“Not that it’s a competition.”
“Right. Where did it get you?”
“My hand. I moved an old headstone and disturbed her home and her babies. My fault entirely.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time in graveyards, haven’t you?”
“It’s my job.”
“Even when you were a kid?”
“More or less. My father was a cemetery caretaker. He had several that he looked after, but my favorite was
