Solomon's Grave

between the concrete base and a door of some sort.

“Keep the light here. Good.” He straightened, then raised his hand to Nate, who handed over the crowbar. Tarretti worked one edge into the exposed rift between the two concrete sections, rocking the tool back and forth. Something shifted.

Vincent looked up and offered a tired smile. “Well, here goes nothing.”

He pulled back on the crowbar, exerting a slow but increasingly intense pressure. The silence of the night was invaded by a subtle hiss, like someone slowly opening a bottle of Coke. The sound grew in intensity, a ssssssssssssssssssss followed by what Elizabeth could only describe as a sigh. Air raced into the void under the concrete slab. Tarretti used the sudden release of pressure to lever the cover up and over an inch, enough so that it did not fall back into place. Once done, he relaxed, and the concrete slab settled back at a new, awkward angle.

The smell was of old dust, of clothes in her grandmother’s attic. Images of discovering a long-neglected trunk one weekend while her parents cleaned out Gram’s house after her funeral. Elizabeth was young, five or six years old, but the memory of the trunk being opened and the smell of decayed fabric and stale air came back to her now. As did the image of herself as a child, lifting one thin, long white dress from the trunk. Then the stale odor passed up from the breach in the grave and was gone, merging with newer, fresher air. With it went the unexpected memory of the attic.

It occurred to her only then that in the hole they’d just reopened was not a pile of forgotten dresses and shawls, but a body. A decomposed, perhaps mummified corpse of John Solomon, preserved by the airless vacuum inside.

It was time to go home. No question.

“Seen enough?” she whispered. “Can we leave now?”

Nate seemed to consider the suggestion, then slowly shook his head. At least he appeared to, in the afterglow of the light still trained on Tarretti’s hands. The latter was looking up with a worried expression. He’d apparently heard the question.

“Let’s get this over with,” Nate said at last, and Vincent nodded in undisguised relief. Using the crowbar, he wiggled it up and down slowly along the edge, until the slab was far enough off the base that he could move it with his own hands. He slowly dragged it clear of the entrance.

The three of them stood and looked down into the square black hole at their feet. The hole stared back like an unblinking eye.

Trying to keep out of Elizabeth’s flashlight beam, Nate walked up and stood beside Tarretti. The light bounced as Elizabeth joined him. She was like a guard dog, not letting him get more than a pace away.

She shined the light into the hole. The three of them peered in. A wooden ladder reached from the dust- covered floor to the lip of the entrance.

“I’ll go in first,” Vincent said. “This ladder is built into the side, see? Last time I was here it held my weight, but that was a long time ago. If it can still support me, you can follow.”

Without waiting for a reply, he sat on the lip of the concrete and carefully stepped onto the top rung. It creaked, but held. Using his hands to support himself on the edge, he stepped down two more rungs, far enough to grip the ladder. In the flashlight beam his fingertips were black from digging. This time, the ladder’s protests were more a moan under the weight. Before his head dropped below ground level, he took one last, deep breath of the night air. Then he was down, standing with a slight hunch on the floor.

“Not a very high ceiling in here; watch your head.”

Nate sat on the edge and mirrored Tarretti’s descent. It was Elizabeth’s turn, now. Using only one hand for support, she kept the flashlight trained always on some part of their host. Her first sensation as she moved lower was how much colder the air felt inside. When she stepped off the ladder, the floor of the room was, indeed, covered in dust an inch thick. From the way the chamber’s seal had hissed, she didn’t imagine much had fallen recently. Perhaps over the years, enough dirt and grime had settled into the cracks to effectively seal off any remaining source of outside air.

She took a tentative breath. Not as bad as she’d imagined, but then, it was the same air that had been outside a moment before. It tasted... older, though. Probably the dust kicked up by her feet, enough to remind her where they were. Elizabeth saw nothing in front of her, and kept Tarretti in her peripheral vision.

Then she felt it, like an electrical thrill in the air moments before a thunderstorm. Her imagination again, fueled by the cooler air.

Vincent whispered, “It’s over here.” He took a step forward into the darkness. Only then did Elizabeth shine the light in that direction.

Nathan grabbed Elizabeth’s arm. She didn’t react, but stared ahead and with a harsh whisper, said, “It can’t be true. It is not true....”

Chapter Fifty-One

Manny Paulson was constantly amazed by how bright the world truly was at night, once his eyes adjusted. He’d had plenty of practice lately. Every night for the past four days, Quinn had him sitting here in the cover of the graveyard’s utility road, with no purpose but keeping an eye on the house of the weirdo who ran the cemetery. Manny had worked night shifts in a couple of different jobs. Those hadn’t been very long-lasting, through no fault of his own. If the goombahs running the bottling plant couldn’t keep their money from going out the door, it wasn’t his fault.

The last job he’d had, doing data entry at a small mail-order shop, was even worse than his assembly line gigs. He’d been forced to hunker over a lone personal computer all night, entering names and addresses into a mail order program. The printing on the data entry sheets got smaller and smaller the longer the night stretched on. Heaven help him if the witch who ran the place came in to find he hadn’t met his quota of contacts. On that job, the challenge had been keeping awake, without drinking so much coffee that he spent most of his shift in the bathroom. More than once he tried to convince Boss Lady that converting from mail order to a cheaper spamming venture on the web would be the way to go. She’d insisted on staying in the dark ages. The company closed down six months after he’d been laid off. Well, he assumed that’s what happened. He never bothered to check.

Manny couldn’t remember holding down a job much longer than a year. Not that he wasn’t qualified, with an associate degree in business and a couple of older references that he still managed to squeeze onto one more application. But the time had come when his luck ran out, along with the country’s economy. He’d been living day to day as it was, but soon it felt more like dying day to day. The zombies at the unemployment office kept limiting his benefits because of sporadic work history. His options had been quickly drying up.

At least the letters demanding child support for his son and daughter, usually from someone claiming to be an attorney (though he was certain it was just some guy Melissa worked with pretending to be someone important), had trickled to an occasional note venting his ex-wife’s disgust for his lack of concern for “your children.” She was an accountant and made plenty of money. Manny once considered finding a lawyer himself and suing Melissa for alimony. But lawyers cost money, didn’t they? And money was tight.

As for his kids, fatherhood was never big on his list of goals. It was fun while it lasted, but now that he was free, Melissa could keep the headaches. Maybe if grandchildren came into the picture a decade or two from now, he might show his face again. He heard it was a lot less work with grandchildren.

Enter Peter Quinn, during one of Manny’s rare purchases of beer at The Greedy Grocer. He never had been much of a drinker, preferring to avoid any habit that might suck more coins from the bare cupboard his bank account had become. Still, now and then he’d splurge on a twelve pack of Bud and rent a couple of movies.

His first assumption when Quinn caught up with him outside the store was that the guy was homosexual and hitting on him. Manny had excused himself and headed for his car, but Quinn followed. He asked if Manny needed a job. Steady work, not very difficult, and the pay was good.

Sounded too good to be true. But Quinn hadn’t been lying. The work was easy, and the pay was twice anything he’d ever collected before. Everything was under the table, to boot. Nothing for Uncle Sam, or Melissa, to lay claim to. All Manny had to do was not smirk when Quinn started chanting to the devil or talking about some kind of valuable prizes buried in town. The guy was seriously nuts, no question about that. But he must be rich, connected with the mob or something, since the cash every week was real. The money had to