Hanna slammed her shoulder into the portrait.
I jumped back. “Damn!”
Hanna did it again. Took a step back, then clobbered the thing.
“You’re going to hurt—” My words cut off when the left side of the portrait shifted. It dipped until it no longer lined up with the wall. “No way.”
Marni pointed to the opposite side of the frame. “There’s a tiny button tucked under here. Like a toggle switch. I’ll press it and you two push.”
I shoved against the side with Hanna. Pushed until the wall moved. The portrait turned until the side we pressed against slipped into the wall. A door. A damned door. We moved it enough for a person to fit inside. Hanna aimed her flashlight intothe unexpected entrance. The beam cut through the darkness, showing off the dust and tiny particles floating through the air.
Marni looked at me, then at Hanna. “What now?”
I didn’t need to wait for Hanna on this one. There was only one answer. “We go in.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Hanna
Stale air filled my lungs as I walked into the cavernous darkness. I breathed in, fighting to draw in clean air. The deep inhale ended in a fit of coughing. The kind that doubled me over. My energy depleted, I leaned against the gray wall of the passageway. Cold seeped through my jacket and into my bones. The sensation of bugs crawling in my hair and cobwebs sticking to my face had me standing up straight again.
I shivered, trying to throw off whatever creeped and crawled around us. “This is gross.”
“Understatement.” Stella waved a hand in front of her face. If something flew around her, only she could see it.
He had to be here.
The comforting words repeated in my head, cutting through the numbing fear. When the phrase started to fade, I mentally shored it up. Concentrated on saying the words over and over until a flicker of hope took hold.
Marni shuffled her feet but stopped when something crunched under her shoe. “There’s debris on the floor.”
“Are there lights in this part of the house?” Stella aimed her flashlight at the ceiling. “Oh, shit.”
The patchwork of rafters and beams strung together with thick spiderwebs had my previously latent claustrophobia springing to life. The fear of it all caving in, burying us alive, no longer felt like a remote possibility.
Strangled breathing hiccupped in my chest. I blew out a long sigh, trying to calm the frenzy of nerves firing off inside me. “It’s okay.”
“Is it?” Marni ducked, then stood up again. “I thought I saw... Never mind.”
I dragged the stick along the wall. A rough screech of wood against cement. No breaks. No change in tone. All of that meant no exits.
The search inched us forward but to where? The narrow hall cut a path through the inner workings of the house. No peepholes or windows showed the way. Soaring twelve-foot ceilings provided the only hint of comfort as darkness pressed in from every direction.
The faint beam of the flashlight brought us to an intersection. I almost slammed into the corner wall before I saw it. The passageway branched off in three directions.
“Which way?” Stella pointed her light down each hall, showing off an abundance of bleak, undefinable nothingness and little else.
I struggled to get my bearings as I mentally walked along ourpath, trying to place the rooms on the other side of the walls. The trail looped in my head until every inch of space blurred together. It had been years since I spent time in this house, and that was before walls buckled and beams rotted from water damage. Before furniture littered the floor.
I couldn’t come up with the floor plan. “There has to be a way through. A doorway. The passageway must lead into a room we recognize.”
Marni bent down as she shined her light to the right. “Does that one look like it goes upstairs? Maybe it leads to Noah’s old room.”
“Jeremy wasn’t in there,” Stella said.
Marni scoffed. “Not that we could tell.”
Jeremy alone. Cold. Hungry. Injured. The possibilities littered my mind. The dank air. Rats and who knew what other kind of animals holed up in here. People who wanted to hurt him. I didn’t let my brain tiptoe any farther into the unimaginable.
