Page 121 of Stay Buried

“Well, we fuckedthatup! Those people up there, whoever they are, they’re going to come down here any minute, and—”

“Look at me, Mal,” she said, turning his face away from the table and making eye contact with him. “We’re going to find a way out.”

He nodded.

Footsteps thumped upstairs. Dust and cobwebs shook loose, drifted down from the floorboards overhead.

“There’s a doorway over there that’s been bricked over,” Mal said, pointing to the back corner of the root cellar.

“You think it leads outside?” Ash asked.

“More than likely.” Mal angled the clamp light toward it, went over to give it a closer inspection. “The mortar is crumbling like hell—I think I could get through this if I had the right tools.” There was a glimmer of hope in his voice.

“I saw a hammer and chisel on the tool bench. Go get them and see what you can do. I’ll keep looking around. Maybe there’s a sledgehammer or something that can get us out faster.”

Mal fetched the hammer and chisel and went to work. Ash began searching for a mallet, a splitting maul—anything with more heft to it. As Malcolm began tapping on the brick wall, she hoped they couldn’t hear him upstairs.

She could hear the occasional scrape of a chair on the floor, the low murmur of voices drifting down through the floorboards.

Ashley was pulling a tarp off a large, irregular pile of objects when she felt the back of her neck prickle. Her skin went cold.

Ash,came a whispering voice.

She held her breath and turned.

There, standing in the shadowy edge of the basement, was her mother. She wore her good camel-hair coat, though it was stained with blood. Her head was bashed open, revealing the cracked white skull and brain. Her face was swollen, her jaw unhinged.

Ashley closed her eyes and counted to three.

Tap, tap, tapwent Mal’s hammer against the chisel. She heard a brick fall.

She opened her eyes and her mother was still there, staring at Ashley.

Every hair on Ash’s body stood on end. The air felt electric.

She knew then. This wasn’t a hallucination, never had been.

Above them, there was more pounding on Josephine’s front door. Footsteps moved across the floor to answer it.

“I’m sorry,” Ash whispered. And she was sorry. Sorry she hadn’t believed her mother had been real. Sorry she hadn’t said yes to going for coffee, for being frustrated with her mother’s obsession with the family tree when they last spoke.

There was shouting upstairs. Ash looked up at the ceiling. It sounded like several more people had arrived and they entered the house like a small stampede. She could hear some of what they weresaying:

“It’s the knackerman’s mark!”

“He’s painted it on houses all over town!”

She looked back at the spot where her mother had been standing. She was gone.

Ashley heard Malcolm swearing from the root cellar.

Ash called, “You okay?”

“It’s a dead end. It just leads to another little room.”

Where her mother had stood just a moment ago, there was an old wooden stepladder draped with a worn rug, pushed up against the stone wall of the foundation.

Just above and behind the ladder, where the wall met the basement’s ceiling, there were a couple of boards nailed into something. She pulled the ladder out of the way for a better look.