Page 21 of Radiant

I moved my flashlight beam around. “Okay, where is the crypt?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to look.” He stilled. I didn’t see him sniff the air, but I was pretty sure he was trying to sense something.

He let go of my hand to open a large closet, and I took the opportunity to photograph the shadows cast by the trickle of light in here: a cross, the windowpane, the distorted hand of a statue.

“What’s in there?” I asked when I heard banging from the closet Auris had half vanished in.

“Well, let’s just say this is a lot like the story of children finding a hidden world at the back of a wardrobe, except it’s very different.” His face looked chalky in the faint light when he turned and beckoned me to him. “Here. There’s a hidden passage in here.”

“Wow. Okay, this is weird. Is this a normal thing for churches?”

More creaking wood. I wasn’t sure if Auris was breaking anything, or if this was what it was supposed to sound like when you opened hidden doors.

“Some, but I’m not an expert on the matter. All I know is that those who specialize in hunting demons like having secret rooms and hidden basements. It would make sense that they have a certain number of safe houses—safe churches—equipped for their nefarious needs.”

“Evil people with kill rooms.”

“Pretty much.” Auris pushed the secret door open, and a gust of cold air rushed past me. “Do you want to wait up here?”

I immediately shook my head. “I think I’ll be eaten if I do that. That’s how it goes in horror movies. And besides—” I pointed with my flashlight. “—secret passage.”

He pushed the clothes to one side of the wardrobe to give us more space to go through. “Fair enough.”

He went first, and I followed. Stairs led down into the darkness, narrow ones that forced me to point my light at the tip of my boots while I tried not to fall and break my neck. The low ceiling didn’t help much either. Auris had no issue with this stairwell, sweeping ahead silently and, I assumed, gracefully, not that I could actually see much.

We came out in an earthen basement—a crypt. Bones filled half-moon alcoves here as well, femurs piled high to pillow skulls, aged dust and cold dry air making this seem like another world, a portal place that could open to the past, the underworld, or to a monster’s dreams.

I looked around, shining my flashlight down forks in the path of those claustrophobic corridors. “Is this…like a labyrinth?”

“No. Or maybe it’s supposed to be one. I’m not familiar enough with Christianity’s practices to tell.” He stopped and turned, offering his profile to my flashlight’s glow. “I wonder what’s through here.”

I pointed my flashlight at where he was looking. Set in a wall, there was a door, old but sturdy, not wooden like I might have expected, but made of metal.

“This isn’t creepy at all.”

“Hmm. You don’t sound very creeped out.”

I shrugged. “It’s more or less like a haunted house.”

“I’ll remember to take you to a proper haunted house next Halloween. Stay behind me.”

Auris pulled out the caretaker’s set of keys and went through every single one. None would turn in the lock of the mystery door.

I kept my light focused on where he was working, even though he probably didn’t need that. “Do you know how to pick it?”

Auris glanced at me. “A skill I never learned. I usually get people to open doors for me.”

“Right. Superior mind control. So how are we going to get inside?"

“Well…”

He gave the door a long look. I turned around, illuminating piles of bones and the disturbances of footprints in the dirt. Some of them had to be ours, but there were others, and they looked recent.

I turned back to him. “Are you sure no one’s here?”

“I am. It’s nighttime. You can’t ambush a vampire during nighttime.” He sighed. “Fuck it.”

The door’s protest was sharp, loud, and short-lived. Auris broke it down like cheap plywood.