A fluorescent light hung over the main walkway, which was covered with wide wooden panels on top of the cement. I eased out of the alcove into the light, leaving my carbide lamp still burning for now, and looked down the walkway, first to my left and then to my right. Gray doors were at the end in either direction. Neither door gave any indication as to what was behind it, but the one to my left was halfway open. The light was off in the room beyond it, nothing visible in the deep shadows.
“Over here,” Jane called from the other side of the open door.
I started in that direction, stopping at a junction where another hallway branched off to my right. This hallway was wider and filled with sagging paper boxes, random-sized boards, and what looked like a chrome dumbwaiter door on the wall. The fluorescent lights flickered in the side hallway, making my upper lip sweat. Those suckers had better not go out. I’d had enough of the dark for now.
At the other end of this wider hallway, about twenty-five feet away, was a brown door with the word “Stairway” posted on it. More boxes were stacked two to three high on each side of the door—file boxes, from the looks of them.
A stairway to what? What was I under? Another Deadwood building? Or was I somewhere else now?
I took a step toward the brown door, feeling pulled in that direction by some invisible towline.
“Violet,” Jane called out from the shadows beyond the partially opened gray door. “You’re almost there.”
Almost where?
Something clanged in the darkness beyond the open gray door.
My hackles rose, instinct urging me to take a step back and return to the hole in the wall I’d climbed out of moments ago.
Behind me, I heard hinges creak. I turned partway around, keeping Jane’s door in my peripheral vision. The other gray door was now open a crack. A shadow moved in the darkness behind it.
Shit. Now here I was playing monkey in the middle.
“Jane,” I called, gripping the steel bar in my hand tighter as I glanced back and forth between the two gray doors.
An odd clacking noise came from the other side of the door where Jane was supposed to be, sounding like bone on bone, or teeth clattering, or …
Wait! I knew that sound. The image of my great-grandmother’s craggy face flashed in my mind. She was standing in the attic, holding her bag of rune stones in her gnarled hands, staring out at me from the shadows through her narrowed eyes.
“Come here, child,” Jane said, pulling me back to the present. Only Jane’s voice was rustier now, sounding just like my great-grandmother’s. “I smell death on you.”
Goose bumps raced up my arms and down my back. My breath trainwrecked in my throat behind my tongue, which was curled back in fear, blocking the way.
The gray door opposite Jane’s hiding place creaked, opening wider. I looked back at it. The shadow I’d seen before had taken on a more solid form. I squinted, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Whatever was in there stood just out of sight. It was big, almost as tall as the doorframe. As I squinted into the darkness, it shifted closer. A pair of eyes reflected the fluorescent lights. They looked like shiny silver coins, large and round. A snuffling-snorting sound came from that direction, followed by the stench of rancid meat.
“What are you?” I whispered, trying to make sense of what I could see.
“Come closer and I’ll show you, Scharfrichter,” it answered in a wet, sludgy voice. A wheezy laugh came through the crack, the hitching sound making my ears ache.
I eased back toward the hole in the stone wall. Maybe it was time to head back to the Hellhole. Maybe that ward on the wall at the base of it was there to keep whatever was hiding in that dark room from making its way to the surface. Maybe this creepy thing was why Jane was keeping the closet sealed shut.
But then why did she lead me down here?
A scuttling sound came through the hole in the wall, reminding me of a dog’s claws on rock—a lot of claws. I looked at the hole, nearly crying out at the sight of a thick arm with long, red webbed fingers ending with sharp talons reaching out through it. It swiped at the air between us, grunting with each swing.
What the fuck was that? Had it been in there with me, hiding in the dark? Did it come from the other fork in the tunnel? The one leading down deeper?
A high-pitched, hissing sound came from the room that Jane had been luring me toward, the one where she was still hiding with her “secret.”
Realization hit me like a Mack truck. That wasn’t Jane. There was no secret to show me. I’d been duped from the start. We all had. That was why Cooper had said Jane’s image kept shifting between the way she’d looked in her memorial ceremony picture and the much more gruesome, already dead vision he was used to seeing. It wasn’t Jane’s ghost back in Calamity Jane’s office. Nor were the closet and trapdoor opened by Jane.
What we had here was an imposter, and I’d been led right into its trap.
I raised the steel rod. “Show yourself,” I commanded to the imposter, not expecting any results. I had a feeling this was really a game of tag, only if I were caught, I wouldn’t get to be “it”—just dead.
To my surprise, Jane strolled out from the shadows into the light. Her smile was wide. Too wide. Frighteningly wide. Her eyes were dark, bottomless, like black holes staring back at me.
“Come closer, Violet,” she said in my great-grandmother’s voice. “I need to show you my secret.”
“You’re not Jane,” I said, sounding far more calm than I was on the
