*
A few minutes later, we were back in the cemetery and had located the corresponding headstone. Like all the other markers, the number was etched into the face, but I could detect nothing extraordinary about the grave or the monument. The name in the inscription meant nothing to me. The deceased was but one of three dozen colonists whose lives had abruptly ended on that fateful day.
I dropped to the ground beside the grave, tracing the symbols with my fingertip as I searched for the next clue. Devlin knelt on the other side and smoothed his hand over the surface of the stone.
“Do you feel anything?” I asked.
“No, do you?”
“There’s something strange about the key engraving,” I said. “The bow looks a bit like an eye. And see those three tiny perforations? I believe that’s a keyhole.”
I removed the strange eye key from my pocket and held it in my palm for a moment.
“Another long story?” Devlin’s gaze was dark and inquiring.
You have no idea, I thought as I wordlessly inserted the pointed teeth into the punctures and felt something catch. The tumblers clicked and then Devlin and I watched in fascination as a compartment slid open at the base of the headstone.
“Now do you believe me?” I asked.
He glanced up. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“Yes, but usually in older graveyards. Hidden compartments in coffins and tombs were once very common. They were used to keep grave robbers from finding valuables buried with the deceased.”
Devlin removed a small pouch from the space and handed it across the grave to me. “You should do the honors.”
I didn’t know what I expected to find. A part of me had been hoping that Rose had squirreled away her long-lost key inside. I tried to tamp down my disappointment as I withdrew yet another stereogram.
Devlin came around the grave to examine the card over my shoulder. “Is that who I think it is?”
“It’s Nelda Toombs. The photos must have been taken not long after Mott died. Look at her awkward posture and the odd angle of her body. It’s almost as if her sister were still attached to her.”
“Maybe after the surgery she experienced something akin to the phantom-limb syndrome.” Devlin cocked his head as he studied the dual images. “The composition seems off. Nelda is standing far to the side, but there’s nothing else in the frame except the house in the background.”
“That’s because Nelda wasn’t the focal point,” I said. “At least, I don’t think she was. I found a stack of similar stereograms in Rose’s dark room yesterday. They were all shots of her house taken from different angles at various times of day. I know this sounds strange. Unbelievable even. But I think Rose was trying to capture a three-dimensional image of something that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye or even in a regular photograph. Something she’d trapped beneath her house.”
Devlin didn’t say anything to that, but he must have again wondered if I’d taken leave of my senses. I could hardly blame him. I sounded unbalanced even to my own ears, but for once, his incredulity didn’t thwart me. I plunged on, speaking almost to myself as I tried to work it all out. “I thought she’d installed the enclosure around the house to keep the entity inside, but that doesn’t make sense because what we encountered last night had no real form or substance. She must have had another means of containing or controlling it.” My hand strayed to the skeleton key around my neck. “The fence was never meant to keep the entity in, but to keep the unsuspecting out.”
“The unsuspecting?” he asked in the same careful voice I’d heard earlier on the porch.
“Rose knew the entity preyed on the weak and the innocent, and there were children living nearby in Kroll Colony. All it would have taken was a taunt or a dare for one of them to crawl up under the house.”
Devlin placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. “That’s an interesting theory, but you know it’s based on nothing more than imagination and conjecture, right?”
“Then, how do you explain the timing of my visit? How do you explain what we saw in the dark room and what we found in the cemetery?”
“I can’t. But I refuse to buy into this fantasy you’ve hobbled together from an inscription on an old headstone and your great-grandmother’s bizarre obsessions. Not to mention the general creepiness of this place. It’s not real, Amelia. None of this is real.”