They trailed after him.
It wasn’t quite as odd an entry as the one by which they’d entered. A little wooden fence surrounded a grate; they opened the entrance and then Roger bent down to lift a hatch. A steep narrow stairway led to the darkness below.
“Father Liam O’Leary is in the coffin directly beneath the altar,” Roger said. “The Irish Catholics liked to take their cues from Rome, I guess, and the Vatican. There are a number of coffins on biers just below here—glass encased. Sort of creepy. I’ve got a little penlight. Anyone else have anything?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Abby said, producing her key chain and a small flashlight. Malachi drew the light he’d used that first night out of his pocket.
“Prepared, huh?” Roger joked.
“Me and the Boy Scouts,” Malachi said. He shined his light over the circular room, directly beneath the altar where they were standing. Not surprising, it was dank and musty, and there seemed to be a verdant smell of the earth around them. He walked over to one of the coffins. The lid was glass; beneath it lay the decaying body of a priest in his vestments. His skin was growing brown as it stretched over the bone. Malachi dusted the grit and grime off the bronze plaque before him. His name had, indeed, been Liam O’Leary and he’d been born in County Cork in 1744 and died in Savannah, Georgia, in March of 1793, beloved of his “lambs.”
“First priest here,” Roger told him. “And around the room you have several more of the especially beloved fellows who served the faithful. I’m surprised they weren’t dug up—or carted out—when the church sold the property in the late 1890s and the building was deconsecrated. Could’ve been bureaucratic error, red tape, whatever. Seems strange and sad that these guys were down here while people were up above them drinking ‘Exceptionally Bloody Marys’ and watching vampire bats dance over their heads.”
Malachi and Abby both nodded.
“When I first started exploring down here, I was shocked,” Roger said. “And I didn’t even know there were catacombs or tunnels—until I leaned against the wall and it turned out someone had just boarded up the entry. I practically went through. But there are five tunnels leading out from here, with lots of corpses lining them. Again, kind of like the Christian catacombs in Ancient Rome. Savannah started off English, of course, but had a large Irish population from the beginning. Man, you should come for Saint Patrick’s Day! But that’s beside the point. These people were very Catholic. And when the church was established here, they emulated Rome.”
“Five entries—by each of the five dead priests?” Malachi guessed.
Roger nodded. “After I found the first, I tapped around the room and found the rest of them. Those three—” he pointed across from Father O’Leary “—must’ve caved in decades ago. The other trunks go on and on. It gets damper and damper as they head under the streets to the river. So...” He let the word hang as he lifted his flashlight to look at Malachi’s face. “You can pick door number one or door number two.”
“I think we should head out from behind our good Father O’Leary—what say you, Ms. Anderson?”
“I’m sure the good father would not lead us astray,” she said.
He smiled and raised his own flashlight. The beam played over Roger, standing between two of the glass-domed coffins and their decaying priests, and then over Abby. She appeared to be pale, almost ethereal with her jet-black hair and deep eyes. She would’ve been a perfect image, he thought wryly, when the place was a vampire-themed nightclub.
“Just push that piece of plasterboard aside. That’s the entrance,” Roger told them.
Malachi lifted the loose piece of wood—plastered over and painted white to blend with the wall—and moved it to one side. The first tunnel yawned directly before them.
“You can see why they don’t want the average tourist family with their four-year-old running around down here,” Roger said.
“Yeah.” Abby glanced at Malachi and then trained her light down the tunnel, which seemed to stretch ahead endlessly. She stepped forward and he followed. Roger quickly came up behind him.
Each side of the wall had shelving dug into it, and each shelf had been the burial point for one Christian soul. The shrouds on the bodies had long ago turned as dark and murky as the earth on which they rested; they seemed to have gone back into it, giving true meaning to the Biblical term dust to dust.
It was eerie and sad. Here and there, tree and brush roots were crawling through as if they reached down to embrace the last mortal remains of those who lay here, forgotten by time.
“We’re going toward the river,” Abby commented, walking ahead of him.