“Still, it wouldn’t kill me to mind my manners. I’m so used to my crazy schedule at the hospital I forget there are folks like you keeping normal hours out there in the real world.”
“No harm done.” I went down a step or two. Now that my pulse had settled, I was genuinely curious. Macon was a student at the nearby Medical University of South Carolina, so I’d grown used to his coming and going at all hours. But so much early-morning activity was unusual even for him. “What are you building down there?”
“Building? Nothing. Just reinforcing some of the shelving so we can have a little more storage space.” He motioned toward the depths of the cellar. “Have you been down here lately? This place is a firetrap. You wouldn’t believe all the useless crap I’ve come across. Cartons of old textbooks and magazines, trunks of moth-eaten clothing and something that looks suspiciously like a mummified bat.”
I descended another step. “What’s that smell?”
He wrinkled his nose. “You should have gotten a whiff earlier before I aired out the place. I think something’s nesting down here.”
“Nesting?” I asked in alarm. “Like what?”
“Rats, maybe. Or possums. And did I mention the spiders?” He ran fingers through his hair with an exaggerated shudder.
“Do you need a hand?” I asked with little enthusiasm because the mention of spiders gave me pause. I’d had a mild case of arachnophobia since childhood and despite my years of prowling through web-shrouded tombs and infested mausoleums, I’d never quite managed to conquer my aversion.
“Thanks, but if you’ll make sure all your belongings are marked, I’ll take care of the rest.”
“I don’t have much. Just a few boxes that were left behind when I moved in. I’ll come down and take a look, though.”
I started down the steps, reluctant to leave the sunlight in the garden for the dimness of the basement. The house had been built on the site of the chapel of an orphanage that had burned to the ground at the turn of the last century. The cellar was the only thing that remained of the original structure, and sometimes when I went down there, I had an uncomfortable feeling that something lay hidden and waiting behind those brick walls. Something other than spiders and rodents.
The house had always provided a shield from the ghosts—a safe haven—but sometimes I wondered if the cellar might be a back door through the protective firewall of hallowed ground. The only spirit to ever breach my inner sanctum had been the ghost of Devlin’s daughter. Somehow she’d found a way inside my house, and if she could do it, how long before I experienced another intrusion?
I continued downward, my footsteps echoing eerily in the dank stillness. A second stairway at the back of the cellar led to the kitchen, but the door had been boarded up during one of the renovations. Once upon a time, that fortified passage had made me feel safer inside the house, but now I wondered if my peace of mind had ever been anything more than an illusion.
Funny how the same sealed door could make one feel secure on one side and trapped on the other. As I reached the bottom of the steps, I became overly aware of that single exit. Claustrophobia pressed in on me. For an archaeologist turned cemetery restorer, I tended to have a lot of inconvenient hang-ups.
“What’s that noise?” I cocked my head with a frown.
Macon paused. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Listen. It’s an odd drone. Sort of like an electrical hum.”
He lifted his gaze to the bare lightbulb. “Faulty wiring would be my guess. I doubt this place has had a proper inspection in years. Like I said, a regular firetrap.”
Rubbing my arms, I glanced around warily. Macon was right. Something had been crawling around the cellar, shredding old books and forgotten clothing while leaving behind the faint but animalistic odor of musk and decay. “I’ve never liked coming down here,” I said. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“Says the woman who restores old graveyards for a living.” Macon blew dust from a box, then lifted the lid to peer inside. “Junk, junk and more junk.” As he swung the carton off the shelf, something dislodged and tumbled to the floor—a card with two nearly identical photographs mounted side by side.
As I bent to pick up the curiosity, I felt a tug of recognition even though I’d never seen the man that gazed up at me from the dual images, let alone the two diminutive girls that stood in front of him. They were older than their size would suggest, in their midteens perhaps.
Judging by the odd attire, the photos had been taken long before I was born. The man was shirtless beneath old-fashioned bib overalls while the girls were draped in dark cloaks that covered their frail bodies from neck to ankle.
Something about the incongruity of those heavy cloaks, about the way they stood back-to-back with their faces turned toward the camera gave me an inexplicable chill.