Upstairs, the hallway branched into three doors.
The first one led to a small bedroom: a made bed, a lamp on the nightstand, lace curtains drawn halfway. The air still held the faint perfume of age and sickness. Rick didn’t linger.
The next one was once Gordon’s, judging by the details. A dresser with one drawer half-open, a few broken toys: a headless tin soldier, a one-eyed bear. Movie posters lined the walls—The Hunchback of Notre Dame,The Phantom of the Opera,The Man Who Laughs—while rows of books leaned against one another on a shelf, spines cracked and faded with use. On the wooden headboard, an inscription was carved in spidery letters:‘I’m not a man. I’m not a beast. I’m about as shapeless as the man in the moon.’Rick gave it a hurried glance and moved on.
The third door opened onto a study. Papers crowded the desk alongside glass vials, a globe, and a sour tang in the air that reminded Rick of dried blood. A brass stand held a magnifying lens angled over a series of symbols scrawled on parchment—circles inside circles, each one smudged as if touched by a shaking hand. Beside it sat a shallow dish filled with something black and gelatinous, the surface filmed over like a dead eye. Whatever Gordon had been working on here, it wasn’t chemistry.
Rick backed out and retraced his steps, descending to the ground floor. Downstairs again, he followed the hallway toward the rear of the house. The place seemed to hold its breath around him. Then, just as he reached the back door, a train tore past outside. The whole structure shuddered; the windows rattling in their frames, the dishes trembling in the cupboards, dust sifting from the rafters. Rick felt the vibration deep in his chest.
A sound like distant thunder.
This was the place. He felt it in his bones, in that old animal sense that had never lied to him. Somewhere close, Ash was out there.
Rick moved through the narrow corridor, scanning for a latch, a seam, any sign of a way down. If there were any answers here, they would be below ground. Finally, he noticed a door half-hidden beneath a hanging coat tucked under the stairwell, as if someone had tried to make it disappear.
Basement. Exactly what he’d been hoping to find.
A breath of cold air slid over him as he pulled the door open, laced with mold and something fouler that prickled the back of his throat. His nose caught it before his mind did.Rot.
He found the switch and flicked it. A lone bulb trembled to life as it swung on its cord, its jaundiced light rippling over a cluttered cellar: crates stacked to the ceiling, cardboard boxes caving in from damp, an old bicycle leaning against the washer, plastic bins half-filled with rags and tools. And in the corner, at the edge of that sickly glow, sat a woman in a rocking chair.
Rick froze.Gordon’s mother?But that couldn’t be. She’d been dead for months. Buried. That’s what Kitty said.
He listened, instinctively. There was nothing. No heartbeat. No breath. Just silence and that slow, uncanny sway of the bulb above.
He took a slow step down the stairs, one hand on the rail, the other steady on the Colt. His instincts churned beneath the surface, wolf-deep, uneasy, as the questions piled one atop another, each more insane than the last.
The boards creaked under his weight, but the woman remained still, head tilted to one side, gray hair stringing down over a paper-thin neck. Her nightdress hung loose, faded and speckled. The chair squeaked faintly, though she didn’t move.
He approached, gun raised. “Ma’am?” His voice came low, cautious.
The woman’s head jerked up.
“What thefuck…” Rick muttered.
Slowly, unnaturally, as if the bones had forgotten how joints were supposed to work, the woman rose, the chair groaning, a wet sound crackling from her throat. Her face turned toward him, and the glow caught what time had done: the left cheek had sunk away, leaving a crescent of exposed teeth; one eye was milk-white, the other filmed over with grime. Then she lunged at him.
Rick leveled the Colt and fired. The shot punched through her shoulder, echoing across the basement. She staggered, but didn’t fall. He fired another round, the bullet thudding into her chest. She barely slowed. Her jaw opened in a voiceless snarl. Rick aimed for the head. The bullet tore straight through her skull, and the body toppled backward, collapsing onto the floor. The bulb above swung in widening arcs, casting shadows that danced across the walls.
A fucking corpse had just attacked him. Rick exhaled hard, heart hammering, Colt steady in his grip. “You should’ve stayed dead.”
Silence pressed in. Gunpowder and rot thickened the air, clinging to his tongue. He stood still, listening; nothing moved but the faint swing of the bulb above, its cord swaying slower now.
Something brushed his cheek. A thread of wind. Faint, but cold. He frowned, turning toward it, trying to catch it again. The draft whispered across the back of his hand, and he followed it, past the overturned chair, past a smear of guts sticking to the wall, until it seemed to bleed up from the floor itself.
He crouched, brushing away grit and sawdust, palm gliding over the warped floorboards. For a long moment, he couldn’t find anything—but then his fingers caught on an edge too cleanto be chance. He traced the line, found a shallow groove. A seam. Hidden, but deliberate.
He hooked his fingers under it and pulled. The hatch came loose with a groan, hinges screaming in the hush. Beneath, a narrow stairwell sank into blackness. The air that rose from it was colder, wetter, fetid with the stink of earth and decay. Rick steadied his breathing, his senses sharpening.
There, underneath it all, lingered another scent—faint, human, familiar. Ash.
I’m coming, kid.
He tightened his hold on the Colt and started down, step after step, vanishing into the dark.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
(1:14 p.m.)
