“You’d be surprised how many old houses in the South have a room like this.”
“If that’s true, then where does this tunnel go?” Now she was right next to me. I took an old lantern down from a nail that had been hammered between the crumbling bricks of the wall. I turned the key, and the lantern filled with light.
“How can there still be oil in there? This thing has to be a hundred and fifty years old.”
A rickety wooden bench lined one of the walls. The remains of what looked like an army-issue canteen, some kind of canvas sack, and a wool blanket were stacked neatly beneath it. They were all coated with a thick layer of dust.
“Come on. Let’s see where it leads.” I held the lantern out in front of me. All I could see was the twisting tunnel and an occasional patch of brick built into the dirt.
“Waywards. You think you can go wherever you want.” She reached up with one hand and touched the ceiling over our heads. Brown dirt rained down, and she ducked, coughing.
“Are you scared?” I nudged her with my shoulder.
Liv leaned back and yanked on the twisted loop of rope. The false door behind us closed with a sharp bang, and it was dark. “Are you?”
The tunnel dead-ended. I wouldn’t have seen the trapdoor over our heads if Liv hadn’t noticed a slice of light above us. The door hadn’t been opened in a long time, because when we pushed our way up, whole shovelfuls of dirt caved into the tunnel—and all over us.
“Where are we? Can you see?” Liv called up from below. I couldn’t get a solid foothold in the side of the dirt wall, but I managed to haul myself aboveground.
“We’re in a field on the other side of Route 9. I can see my house from here. I think this used to be my family’s field before they built the road.”
“So Wate’s Landing must have been a safe house. It would have been easy enough to sneak food into that tunnel right from the pantry.” Liv was looking at me, but I could tell she was a thousand miles away.
“Then at night, when it was safe, you ended up out here.” I let myself fall back down to the ground, pulling the trapdoor back into place. “I wonder if Ethan Carter Wate knew. If he was part of it.” After seeing him in the visions, it felt like something he would do.
“I wonder if Genevieve knew,” Liv said.
“How much do you know about Genevieve?”
“I read the files.” Of course she did.
“Maybe they did it together.”
“Maybe it had something to do with that.” Liv was looking past me.
“What?”
She pointed behind me. There were planks hammered into an awkward X. But the boards were rotting, and you could see a doorway behind them.
“Ethan. Am I imagining—”
I shook my head. “No. I see it, too.”
It wasn’t a Mortal doorway. I recognized the symbols carved into the old wood, even if I couldn’t read them. Across from the trapdoor that led into the Mortal world was a second doorway, which led into the Caster one.
“We’d better go,” Liv said.
“You mean go in there.” I set the lantern down on the ground.
Liv already had her red notebook out and was sketching, but she still sounded worried. “I mean go back to your house.” She sounded annoyed, but I could tell she was as interested in what lay beyond the doorway as I was.
“You know you want to go in there.” Some things never changed.
The first board splintered, coming off in my hands as soon as I pulled it loose.
“What I want is for you to stay out of the Tunnels, before this somehow manages to get us both into trouble.”
The last of the boards fell away. In front of me was a carved wooden doorway that framed massive double doors. The bottom seemed to disappear into the dirt floor. I bent down to take a closer look. There were actual roots connecting the doors to the earth. I ran my hands along the length of them. They were rough and solid, but I didn’t recognize the wood.
“It’s ash. And rowan, I think,” Liv said. I could hear her scribbling in her notebook. “There isn’t a single ash or rowan tree within miles of Gatlin. They’re supernatural trees. They protect creatures of Light.”
“Which means?”
“Which means these doors are probably from somewhere far away. And they could lead to somewhere equally far away.”
I nodded. “Where?”
She pressed her hand into a design along the carved lintel. “I haven’t a clue. Madrid. Prague. London. We have rowan trees in the U.K.” She started copying the symbols from the doors onto a page.
I pulled on the handle with both hands. The iron latch groaned, but the doors didn’t open. “That’s not the question.”
“Oh, really?”
“The question is, what are we doing here? What are we supposed to see?” I pulled on the handle again. “And how do we get on the other side?”
“That’s three questions.” Liv studied the doors. “I think it’s like the lintel at Ravenwood. The carvings are a kind of access code to get inside.”
“Figure it out. We have to find a way in.”