Levi kissed him again so he wouldn’t say anything stupid. “Let’s see if the other person is dangerous and figure out what to do from there,” he said as he pulled away. “We just need to look. Nothing more.”
“If they try to hurt you…” Asher raised the knife he held in his other hand.
“Yes, sure, you can kill them, but not until we know what we are dealing with,” Levi said quickly, trying to ignore the little spark of delight on Asher’s face and the way it made his cock twitch.You like seeing him happy, not the idea of watching him murder someone. This game is messing with your head.
The sound of crying was moving…but not towards them. It was growing fainter as they approached the pantry. Not someone sitting still but someone going deeper, the crying getting fainter, pulling away from the kitchen, away from them. Down.
They went into the pantry.
The shelves were deep — industrial kitchen storage, cans and dry goods and bulk containers. At the back, behind a rack of cleaning supplies, there was another door — not a pantry door but a shorter cellar door. Heavy wood, old iron fittings, the hinges dark with rust. It was open, and beyond it a set of stairs went down into cold air.
The sound was coming from below.
The stairs were narrow and steep, the wood old enough that each step groaned under their weight. Asher went first, the knife held out in front of him, one hand stretched behind him on Levi’s chest like he was trying to keep Levi at whatever distance he deemed safe. The air got colder with every step, the lodge’s heating not reaching the sub-level.
The floor at the bottom was concrete, the ceiling low enough that Asher had to hunch his shoulders and cobwebs still caught in his hair, pipes running along the walls — heating ducts, water lines, electrical conduit. The massive old furnace squatted in the center of the space, unused. The air smelled of damp stone and old metal and underneath those, something organic.
The sound led them toward the far end.
They moved through the cellar, past the furnace, past utility panels on the far wall. The organic smell was stronger here — sweet and wrong. Asher stopped at the panels, squinting at the electrical box, then at the wires running above his head. “The amperage is wrong for this gauge wire,” he mumbled.
The concrete walls gave way to older stone at the back of the cellar, and set into the stone was a door that didn’t belong here. Levi felt Asher go rigid and stop so suddenly he walked into his back. It was a door that looked like it belonged in a nice house— solid wood, paneled, the kind of door seen in an old estate hallway, with a brass knob gone dark with age and a skeleton keyhole set into an escutcheon plate that still had its decorative etchings. It had been beautiful once. It was still beautiful, which was why it was wrong.
Levi moved to Asher’s side and his stomach dropped. Asher’s face drained of color, every part of him still locked in place. “Asher?”
“That’s the lock,” he said, and his voice sounded smaller…younger almost. “That’s the sound. That’s exactly —”
The crying was coming from behind the door. Levi turned the knob slowly.
“Levi don’t—”
The door wasn’t locked. Levi pushed it open, the hinges protesting, the wood scraping concrete. Beyond the door was a small room, like an old coal drop, stone walls and stone floor, with a ground-level window set into the far wall, the small hinged kind that opened outward into the gap between the foundation and the earth.
A woman in a staff polo was curled up beneath it, the lodge logo on the breast pocket. Her head rested against her knees, her left wrist wrapped in a cloth that had been white and was now dark and wet. The crying was hers, quiet now, almost spent. She looked up when the door opened, her eyes bloodshot and flat.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whimpered. “You can seal everything. Tape every window. It doesn’t matter.”
“We can help you,” Levi said, already moving toward her. “Come upstairs. We have people. Warmth. You can tell us what happened.”
“It never lifts.” She looked up at the window. “They say it lifts. Three days, five days. It doesn’t. It just goes quiet and then it comes back. It always comes back and it doesn’t matter —”
She stood up and reached for the window.
No.
“Don’t —”
She pushed the window open.
The fog came through the opening like water through a hull breach, like a wall of cold grey that hit Levi in the chest and dropped him backward onto the concrete. A weight came with it, pressing against his body and seeping into his ears, and suddenly he heard all of it at once. The respirator. The heart monitor. The clicking of apertures and the shrieks of Dr. Faine’s monster and Asher whispering to him in the forest all pouredinto his skull through his ears and his mouth and the spaces behind his eyes. The cold locked his muscles. He could feel Asher’s hands on his arms, pulling, trying to drag him back toward the door, and then the shadows came through with the fog and Asher’s hands were gone.
They were physical this time — dark shapes in the grey with edges that pressed and small hands that gripped, finding Levi’s arms and legs, holding him against the concrete floor. Everywhere they pressed went numb, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t turn his head; he could hear Asher saying something, his feet scraping the ground. But he was slowing.
Slowing.
Thud.
The shadows pushed on his chest harder and harder. He couldn’t breathe. Or hear. They kept pushing and he felt something give, his chest buckling inward, but his scream made no sound. Fog poured into his throat as the shadows kept pressing, kept crushing bits of broken sternum and rib into each other, and Levi, for one second, could make out Asher’s face.
