thing, too. She had nothing else to do.
Arkeley’s body might be ruined, but he still knew how to push her buttons. Then and there she knew she had to at least take a look.
She locked up the car and together they headed down the trail. It ran through a field of wildly profuse grass for about two hundred yards, then ended in a simple campsite with a cluster of nylon tents and a big fire ring. There were no reenactors around, but a man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans was waiting for them. He shook Arkeley’s hand eagerly enough, then turned and smiled at Caxton as if he was waiting to be introduced.
“Trooper, meet Jeff Montrose. He’s from the archaeology department of Gettysburg College.”
Caxton raised an eyebrow, but held out a hand for Montrose to shake. He was of average height, and maybe a little pudgy. His brown hair was thinning on top and he had a long and elaborate goatee that he had dyed so blond it was almost white. There was something weird about his eyes, she thought, which worried her—but then she realized he was just wearing eyeliner. “Civil War Era Studies is what we’re calling it, but we get our hands dirty whenever we can.”
“Hi,” she said. His appearance didn’t bother her, but it wasn’t what she expected from an archaeologist.
He didn’t recognize her or ask her for her autograph, which was one thing in his favor. “Are you a professor?” she asked. She’d never finished college, but she didn’t remember her professors wearing eye makeup.
“A grad student. Running Wolf ’s technically in charge here, but he had classes all day, so he asked me to help you out.”
“Who’s Running Wolf?” she asked, confused.
He laughed. “Sorry. That’s what we call Professor Geistdoerfer. He got the name because he jogs through campus every day. He’s a fixture around here—I forget sometimes that people in the real world might not know him. The whole college does.” Montrose could not mask the boyish enthusiasm on his face, though every time he looked over at Arkeley he stopped smiling, as if that scarred face had reminded him this was a police investigation. “I’ve sent all the diggers out for lunch, so we have the place to ourselves.” He turned and walked to the largest of the tents and lifted its flap. “This is so exciting.
We’d really like to get back to work, so if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just show you what we’ve got.”
The three of them entered the tent, an enclosed space maybe twenty feet by ten. Long tables had been set up inside and covered with white paper. Muddy-looking bits of metal and deformed white bullets were laid out for inspection, with handwritten notes penciled around them. They didn’t interest her as much as the hole in the ground in the middle of the tent. A wide pit had been carved out of the earth there with a bright yellow ladder leading down into the ground. The walls of the pit had been shored up with timbers. In some places the pit had been excavated down to the level of wooden floorboards. Had it been the cellar of a house long since demolished?
Montrose went down first without any ceremony. Caxton followed and then Arkeley struggled his way down. He had trouble on the ladder, but he didn’t complain and he brushed her hands away whenever she tried to help him.
Montrose gestured at the pit around them. It was about six feet deep and Caxton couldn’t really see out.
A weird earthy smell made her eyes water. “We found this magazine site years ago but just now got the approval to open it up. The Park Service doesn’t care much for relic hunting, even when it’s done the right way. Too many people came through here with metal detectors over the years, digging up sacred soil.” He shrugged. “I figure that the best way to honor history is to learn about it, but I guess not everybody agrees with me. This was a Confederate powder magazine originally, a place where they stored barrels of gunpowder for the cannon. They kept them underground where it was cool and where if they blew up accidentally nobody would get hurt. There are magazines like this all over Gettysburg, most of them constructed very quickly and then filled in with earth after they were no longer needed.
Sometimes you find pieces of barrels or maybe some broken hardware from a winch or a pulley, but that’s about it. This wasn’t supposed to be a particularly interesting dig, but you always look, just in case.”
He headed over to the far end of the pit and Caxton saw another ladder there, leading farther down into the earth. Electric light streamed up from a hole cut in the floorboards.
“After the Battle of Gettysburg they intentionally blew it up. That’s not too surprising—the Confederates tore out of here in a real hurry when they realized they’d lost the battle, and they didn’t want the Union to get the powder they left behind. Except now we think they might have had another reason, as well.” He moved to the second ladder and crouched down as if to peer inside. “We were almost done here. We found some artifacts and maybe we could have gotten a paper out of this place in one of the lesser journals. I think we were all glad to be done so we could move on to more interesting stuff. Then one of my fellow students—Marcy Jackson is her name,” he said, waiting for Caxton to write it down, “told Professor Geistdoerfer that she thought the floor here sounded hollow. You’re not supposed to ruin the integrity of a site by digging just because somebody had a hunch but like I said, this place wasn’t very important. So Marcy took a chance.”
He headed down the ladder. Caxton started to follow but stopped when she saw Arkeley leaning on a support beam and looking bored. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.
“In this condition I’ll never get down there,” he told her, grimacing as he looked down at his stiff legs.
She nodded and turned to head down the ladder. This, then, was the real reason he’d talked her into coming with him. How much had it cost him to admit that he couldn’t do this alone?
The ladder went down about fifteen feet. At the bottom Caxton found herself in a large natural cavern, maybe a hundred feet from end to end and twenty-five feet wide. There were caves like it all over the Commonwealth, but this one was unlike the tourist caves Caxton had visited. Electric lights hung from the ceiling on thick cables, though they were clearly put there recently by the archaeologists. The cavern’s walls were rough and the ceiling was thick with stalactites. The floor was almost invisible. Almost every square inch of the space had been filled with coffins.
10.
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
11.
Caxton tried to breathe calmly. The electric bulbs overhead only dimly lit the cavern, but it was still daytime. There was no immediate danger of the coffins opening, lid after lid, and death climbing out.
“Isn’t this awesome?” Montrose asked her.
She shook her head in incomprehension.
“I love this stuff,” he said. “Ghosts and vampires and things that go bump in the night. It’s why I wanted to study this era in the first place—the nineteenth century was just so morbid. I pay for my tuition by giving ghost tours of the town. I have this velvet cape I wear, you know? And I tell people scary stories for tips. I never in a million years thought I’d see the real thing.”
