Page 118 of Stay Buried

Before we all saw it, Reverend Davies crossed himself, began reciting the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father, who art in heaven…”

“What is it?” I asked, hurrying to have a look.

I picked my way through the ashes, singeing the bottoms of my trousers on hot embers, thankful for my heavy, thick-soled leather boots.

At last I got to Luther and looked down.

I let out a cry, and raised my hand to cover my face.

There, in the ashes, was the charred skeleton of a man, bits of burned flesh and gristle still clinging to it. But where a human skull should be, the elongated skull of a horse sat, the eyes simmering with the red-hot coals that glowed beneath it.

FIFTY-ONEASHLEY

October 18, 2016

Still clutching her mother’s bag, Ashley barreled up the steps, tried the doorknob, shoved her shoulder against the door. It was locked tight.

She pounded on the cellar door with her fists. “Josephine! Unlock the damn door!”

She could hear footsteps moving away from the kitchen—Josephine was going to answer the front door. Whoever was outside was still banging on it. “Hold your horses!” she called.

Ashley pressed her ear against the door. She could hear voices: Josephine and a man whose voice she didn’t recognize. It sounded like several people were walking into the house.

“It’s the only way.” Josephine’s voice was muffled. “They’ve left us no choice.” The man mumbled something.

“They’re just like their mother,” said another man whose voice Ashley was sure she’d heard in Loon’s Call. “We tried to warn them, to send them away, but they just kept digging.”

The voices grew dimmer—they’d moved into the front parlor.Ashley imagined them there, a handful of people surrounded by the terrible little dolls, plotting something awful.

Her mother’s bag in hand, Ashley descended the steps and crossed the dirt floor. The basement seemed huge, the edges of it disappearing into the darkness beyond the light cast by the single bulb near the foot of the stairs. She ducked to avoid the low hand-hewn beams, breathing in the odor of musty earth and moist stone. It smelled like a forgotten place.

She called to her brother, who had moved on to one of the dark recesses: “That crazy bitch locked us down here!”

As she moved away from the stairs, the shadows got thicker, the air damper. The walls of the basement were made from stones cemented together, rough and uneven, bulging in places, the cement crumbling from years of freezing and thawing, constant shifting. She could make out Malcolm in the far right corner, shining his phone on a pile of junk and boxes. There was an old bed frame, some kitchen chairs, a wheelbarrow with a broken handle, a baby crib.

Ashley squinted, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light as she scanned the old cellar. To her left was an old boiler, directly in front of her a tool bench with an assortment of rusty, forgotten tools and stacked boxes full of clothespins labeled withSTODDARD FACTORY, BOONE’S FERRY, VT.

There, resting on the dirt floor beside the tool bench, was the chest that had been taken from Mal’s motel room.

“Did you see this? She’s got Gram’s trunk down here.”

“Yeah, I saw,” he called. He was moving some of the junk around. “I’m looking for a way out of here. Maybe there’s a bulkhead door or something? Do you see a light switch? It’s dark as hell back here.”

“No. Just the one at the top of the stairs that turned this light on.”

Ashley stood under the hanging lightbulb and opened her mother’s bag. Louise’s laptop was there, but she didn’t see a charging cord. Ash pulled out a file folder with printouts of the research Mom had been doing, including a family tree she’d been filling in. But whenAsh traced it up, found her way to Gram’s parents, she saw that her mother had scribbled Thomas Endicottt’s name out.

Ash pulled out a slim hardbound book, the kind that her mother had long used as a journal. Hurriedly, she flipped toward the end, her eye catching on a few sections:

October 10, 2014

She doesn’t believe the DNA test I took is accurate. “Of course Thomas Endicott was my father and he’s your grandfather. Now, leave it alone.” If she wants to live in denial that’s her business, but I refuse. Heading to Boone’s Ferry tomorrow.

October 14, 2014

HOLY SHIT, Anna and I learned things today in the archives. It wasn’t the flu at all, it was some kind of disease I’ve never heard of. The town panicked, started shooting anyone who was sick. They blamed this hermit that they called the knackerman, and burned him alive. There’s more, which I need time to process. So many levels of fucked-up.

Ash flipped to the next page, her fingers tracing her mother’s hurried scrawl in the last entry: