Yet it was another preoccupation of Lyman’s that hindered progress at the stone house. The experience of the first night had never been repeated. Often, on the edge of sleep, he wondered if he had imagined the music; in the daylight the answer was unequivocal, but in the night less so. Then there had been the air blowing on his face, which suggested subterranean currents—perhaps caused by the springs Grosvenor had conjectured. So, against instinct, he lit a lantern and ventured down the cellar stairs.
As a rule Lyman avoided basements for the same reasons he avoided manual labor, for both involved dirt and stains and unfortunate surprises such as cobwebs across his face. The basement of the stone house was deeper than he had imagined, with abundant room between pate and rafter, and here and there a few streams of sunlight cascaded down from cracks in the floorboards. He paced the rectangle of the fieldstone foundation from the stairway around again, holding his lantern up to widen the circle of vision, but finding nothing of interest beyond an old crate and a clump of rags in a corner where long ago a rat had made its nest.
Dry as a chicken bone, the air musty and dense, no sign of Styx, no sniff of sulfur. The fiddle music had been his brain, Lyman accepted; being unaccustomed to the quiet of the woods, his mind had filled the emptiness with tavern noise. The breeze on his beard had probably been the wind outside, flowing through the roof hole then down between the floorboard cracks and up the stairs again in a sinuous stream. The only bogeyman in the house was Lyman, him and his too many years of city living.
Yet as he stomped up the stairs, between the gaps created by the absent risers he noted a shadow that did not bounce with the lantern’s light. He leaned over the shaky banister. Something there, fixed and stable behind the stairway: an aperture in the stone that swallowed illumination.
He descended again, ducked under the stairs, raised the lantern. At first an outline, then a recession, then an entrance leading away. A tunnel.
Based on the rough jambs it was not part of the basement’s original design; stones had been pulled out of the wall and a lintel inserted over the break. Lyman ducked, holding the lantern ahead of him, shielding himself from the webs and spider husks.
After ten steps the passage widened into a new chamber. Rougher and cruder than the basement, built of smaller stones, and round. Slowly Lyman rose from his tunnel hunch, holding the lamp overhead. He stood inside a dome: the stones fitted together like the blocks of snow in a child’s igloo. No one, Lyman believed, had been in the chamber for a long time: most of the iron in the rest of the house had been stripped and yet in the center of the chamber’s floor was set a large steel grate. It had been painted at some point, which, while flaked, had prevented it from rusting into a solid unmovable mass.
Lyman held his lantern down to the bars, figuring to see its light reflected in black waters below. When it wasn’t, he attempted to lift the grate one-handed, and when this failed, he set the lamp down and attacked it with two.
Once while walking along South Street, Lyman had witnessed a pair of ships collide in the harbor, their sides screaming as they rubbed past each other, the sailors swarming over the rigging and hollering and swearing to murder their brethren on the opposite vessel. Lyman wished the grate was as quiet as that. By bare inches it moved, and Lyman bent his knees and pushed himself standing, bringing it almost vertical—and then not. It slammed backwards to the dirt, the pit yawning and open, and for an instant Lyman teetered on the precipice, spinning his arms like whirligigs. But then a puff of gas, hot and rancid, blew up the shaft and pressed against his chest like a flat palm. He stumbled rearwards and away.
The lantern, when Lyman knelt on the edge and tepidly dangled it as far over as he could reach, revealed an iron ladder bolted to the sides of the shaft. At the bottom some ten or twelve feet down, the round mouths of more tunnels gaped at intervals into darkness.
“And there they shall remain, unexplored,” Lyman said aloud.
A cistern gone dry. He could conceive no other purpose for the pit, though an amateurish mineshaft wasn’t out of the question—maybe Old Man Garrick had come over from England to dig for gold. But here again, as ever since coming to Bonaventure, was an answer to a dilemma.
Lyman left the chamber, returning minutes later with the bag from under his bed. He knotted a double length of twine around its handles, locking it closed, then knotted the ends around a wrought-iron wall hook with a bowline taught to him by a stevedore. Hand over hand he lowered the bag into the pit; and when it reached its end, he clipped the hook onto the top rung of the ladder. The bag and its contents hung suspended in space, deep inside a pit in a secret basement beneath a half-ruined house in the wild Connecticut woods. No one, not even God squinting down from the cumulus, would find the money now.
“Mr. Lyman!”
Lyman jumped. From somewhere unknown a muffled voice, a hundred miles away, followed by thumps on wood. “Mr. Lyman, are you home?”
The front door. Lyman rushed from the chamber, crouched and shuffled through the tunnel, bounded up the stairs. He remembered to blow out the lantern’s wick before pulling open the door.
“Mr. Lyman!” said Minerva. “What—why look at you.” Lyman tried to steady the heavy breathing of his dash. She reached out to peel a cobweb off his sleeve. “I thought you might be out but now
