Alden shook his head. “I can’t imagine why. This house wasn’t conscripted for use by the army. From what I remember of the records, it was simply shut up during that time.”
“Huh.” She touched the light. “Well, this is a modern bulb, so it had to have been someone in the recent past.”
“True.”
“What I don’t get is who would do it. Not Lady Sybilla or Adams—I can’t see either of them scampering around in the walls of Bestwood Hall.”
He flipped off his torch. The lights were spaced along the wall in such a way as to light up the passageway quite well. “No, I don’t think this is their doing... or at least, I don’t think they placed the light here. I wouldn’t put it past Lady Sybilla to have rented out secret passages, though. Let’s go this way. I believe it should take us toward the great hall.”
Mercy took hold of the back of his shirt, shuffling after him as he walked forward. Almost immediately, the passage took a sharp turn to the left, leading them away from the front of the house. Lights continued to glow at them approximately every twenty feet.
“You’ll notice it’s not super dusty in here,” Mercy said softly behind him.
“I had noticed that.” He kept to himself the fact that although the ground was littered with bits of debris—stones, small chunks of mortar and wood, and lots of rodent droppings—they had been pushed to the side, as if someone had cleared a path. The smell was close and dusty, which led him to believe although mice or rats had once been here, they hadn’t been for some time.
“Ah. More stairs.” He stopped at the top of another wooden staircase and looked down. Like the one leading up to his room, this one was lit from below. Beyond the top of the staircase was a blank wall and a small square alcove. He frowned, stepping forward to kneel and examine the wall and floor. On the latter, the dust lay heavy and thick, leaving the outline of several squares where something had obviously sat. Something large and bulky.
“What’s that?” Mercy asked, peering over his shoulder. “Or rather, what was that, do you think?”
“I have no idea. Crates of some sort would be my guess, but what was in them I couldn’t say.”
“Hmm. Odd.”
“Indeed it is.” He gestured to the stairs. “I guess we go down. Are you all right with that, Nancy?”
“Right as rain, Ned. Lead on!”
He smiled over his shoulder at her, then carefully made his way down the stairs. This staircase seemed to be in worse shape than the other one, causing him to watch anxiously as Mercy descended, but other than creaking ominously and weaving a little, it held up under their weight.
“I feel like we should be leaving a bread-crumb trail,” Mercy said when they set off down a slightly wider passage. This one dipped downward, and had awetter odor to it, the smell of mold driving out the drier, dusty scents of the passage above.
“I wouldn’t suggest that. It might attract mice,” he said, and brushed against the wall. It was horribly moist, causing him to recoil in revulsion.
“What’s wrong?” Mercy asked when he staggered backward a step. “Did you see a mouse?”
“No.” He reached out and touched the wall with the tips of his fingers. “It’s damp.”
“The wall?” She mimicked his movement. “Huh. That’s probably because we’re near the ocean.”
“We can’t be near the ocean. That’s a quarter mile from the house, and we’ve only gone half of that distance.”
She peered over his shoulder. Just as with the original passage, this one was very well lit. “I wonder where this is going. To the old part of the house?”
“I have no idea. Shall we see?”
“Yes.” She gave his back a little prod, and he continued forward down the passage, soon coming to another blank wall as the passage made a right-angle turn. This time, the floor was dust free in front of the wall, but there were a few torn scraps of paper, and a ghostly white object that lay forgotten in the corner.
“What on earth?” Mercy asked, picking up a milky white plastic bottle. “It’s a wash bottle.”
Alden gathered up the couple of bits of paper, frowning. “A what?”
“Didn’t you ever do any chemistry classes?”
“No, the physical sciences are not my forte.” He eyed the bottle she held. It had a red cap with a long tube bent at ninety degrees. “What does a wash bottle wash?”
“Anything you want.” She turned it around in her hands, tipping it so as to catch the light. “In my chemclasses, we used these for solvents. Which I bet is what this is—see here? Most of the lettering is rubbed off.”
She held the bottle to him, pointing out where the lettersCETONEwere written in red.
