“Douse those,” Adam said, and Nikki quickly put out the candles. They stood in the pitch dark, and Leslie nearly jumped a mile when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Adam. “I’m going for the gun.”
“Upstairs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“No!”
“I have to.”
“Adam—”
“I’ll be careful.”
He disappeared, but Leslie could hear Nikki breathing at her side. “We can’t just stay here,” she whispered.
“Do you have a better suggestion?” Nikki asked.
She did. Down in the basement. There were tools down there. Weapons with which they could fight back.
“Hey!” They heard a sudden cry from the parlor. “What’s going on in here?”
Brad! Leslie didn’t know whether to trust him or not. Had he cut off the electricity to take them by surprise? Or was someone else in the house, too?
She didn’t know the answers to any of those questions.
She dragged the table aside and moved the braided rug.
“Come on,” she whispered urgently to Nikki.
“No…you go down there. No one knows anything about me. You hide, and I’ll cover the floor with the rug. Go!”
“Nikki, I can’t leave you in danger.”
“I’m not the one in danger. I’ll hide, too, but if I don’t put the rug back, it will be obvious where you are. Now get down there!”
Leslie did. She moved down the stairs blindly, trying to remember where she had left a lantern. She groped her way around the various boxes, until her fingers curled around a lantern at last. After more exploration she also found a scraping knife. Then she hesitated, listening, trying to see the room in her mind’s eyes. A stack of boxes was piled to the right of the hearth. She slipped behind them, against the wall, the knife in one hand, the lantern in the other. She waited. And waited.
There was silence. Then…
Sobbing. She turned, staring in the direction of the sound, but the room was pitch black, and she couldn’t hear a thing. She remembered the way Joe had been running his hands over the wall the other day. In the dark, she began to do the same thing herself.
She touched a brick, and it gave. Stunned, she paused for a moment. Then she fumbled in the darkness, found the uneven brick again and pushed until it gave even farther. Her hand met something cold and metallic. She felt it with her fingers, trying to picture what it was. Finally she pushed it, and the air itself seemed to fill with a loud, creaking sound.
The entire wall moved. She swallowed, blinked, still in darkness, aware of what had happened only because a gust of stale air struck her. The door, however, had made a sound loud enough to wake the dead. If there were indeed a killer in Hastings House, he had heard it, which meant there was no way she could go back upstairs.
There was only one way to go.
Forward.
Someone was in the house. Adam Harrison knew it even before he heard the voice call out from downstairs. When neither Leslie nor Nikki answered that call, he decided to play it safe and made his way along the upstairs hall as silently as possible, reached his gun quickly and started back toward the stairway. Then he heard a whisper in the darkness.
“Adam?”
It was Nikki.
Before he had a chance to reply, there was a commotion from below. He hurried down the stairs. He could just make out a single figure in the entry hall, but it seemed to be fighting with an unseen opponent.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Adam shouted.
The figure stumbled out of the house, Adam in pursuit. “Stop, Adam!” Nikki called. “We’ll call the police!”
“No! He’ll be gone before they get here,” Adam shouted without stopping.
As he tore out of the house, he realized that Nikki was right behind him.
“Shit!” Nelson yelled.
Joe spun around, wondering if he should have saddled himself with such a rookie.
But this time there was a look of agony on the young man’s face.
“What?”
“My fucking ankle. I stepped into some kind of rut…there’s a twisted rail here. Hell!”
“I can’t walk. I’m sorry.”
“All right. I’ll get you out of here.”
“No…hell, no. You go on.”
“You want me to leave you in an abandoned tunnel?”
“I’ve got a light. My radio is shit down here, but the light is working. Just send help as soon as you can.” He winced. “I’m serious. I’ll be all right. Find that girl.”
Joe nodded. “All right. I’ll get someone back to you as soon as I can.”
“It’s a plan. Go on.”
Joe nodded and left.
Leslie turned on the light; there was no reason not to. She could hear footsteps overhead. It could be Nikki or Adam, she supposed.
But maybe it wasn’t.