Barbara Michaels - The Walker in Shadows

"What about a drink?" Josef asked.

Pat bit her lip. She had been about to suggest that this was no time for alcohol. But Josef's habits were none of her business. She revised her comment.

"What about some wine? I think there is some Chianti downstairs, in the wine bin-"

Mark snapped to attention.

"Wait, Mom, don't go down there. I mean-I'll get the wine. I mean-"

"I knew you were up to something," Pat said wearily. "What did you do this afternoon, Mark?"

Mark tried to look innocent.

"Now, Mom, what makes you think-"

"You're too clean," Pat said, inspecting his unspotted T-shirt and neatly creased jeans. "You changed your clothes before we got home. You wouldn't do that unless-"

"Ah, so that's your secret." Mark smiled at her, and her treacherous heart softened. "I'll know better after this."

Kathy came running back.

"It's all right," she announced cheerfully. "I turned it down and added some water. Was that all right, Mark?"

"Never mind the damned spaghetti sauce," Josef snapped. "What did you two do this afternoon? You've changed your clothes too, Kathy. What-"

Mark caught the implication and-to the surprise of his mother, who had thought him impervious to innuendos of that nature-turned bright red.

"It isn't what you think," he said angrily. "We got dirty, that's all. Cobwebs and mud and… We opened up the tunnel."

"Tunnel," Pat repeated blankly. "What tunnel?"

"The doorway Dad uncovered in the basement," Mark answered. His angry color had not subsided, and he avoided Josef's gaze. "He walled it up again, remember? The ceiling looked as if it were about to collapse, and you said it was dangerous, and-"

"That wasn't a tunnel, it was a room, a root cellar or-"

"It was a tunnel. The ceiling had fallen in, that's why we couldn't see how far it extended. Don't you get it, Mom? This house was a station on the Underground Railway. 'Freedom Hall,' Mr. Bates's abolitionist sympathies…"

"Show me," Josef said.

Pat never went into the cellar if she could help it. Unlike modern structures bearing the same name, or the more euphonious appellation of basement, the substructure of her house had never been designed for conversion into family rooms or game rooms. It was almost wholly subterranean, dank-smelling and dismal. The whitewashed stone walls had smears of green lichen, and water often oozed from the floor. Jerry had converted an old enclosed porch off the kitchen into a laundry room, so there was seldom any reason for Pat to go belowstairs. Though she was barely conscious of the fact, her dislike of the area was not based solely on its physical unattractiveness. Its unpleasant atmosphere went beyond damp and darkness.

Now, as she descended the wooden steps, she saw a gaping hole in the wall behind the furnace. The floor was littered with bits of mortar.

"What a mess!" she exclaimed angrily. "Mark, how could you?"

"I'll clean it up," Mark said. His voice sounded distant, muffled.

"What were you looking for?" Josef demanded, ducking to avoid braining himself on the pipes that traversed the low ceiling.

"I don't know. I just thought maybe…"

Pat started forward, picking her way delicately through the debris. A low, eerie moan made her stop and turn. She saw Jud squatting on the top step. His bulbous eyes were fixed on the dark hole in the wall. He looked perturbed. But then, Pat thought, he often did.

"He sat there and whined all the time we were working," Mark said, indicating the dog. "That must mean something."

"It means he doesn't like damp, cool places," Pat said. "He's always hated the cellar."

Yet as she approached the gap in the wall she was conscious of a chill that transcended the normal dampness of the place. Cool, wet air wafted out of the darkness, like a draft. But there could be no passage of air through the earth that filled the far end of the hole…

Mark had brought a flashlight. He switched it on and turned the beam into the darkness.

Brick walls, green with mold, framed a narrow rectangle barely two feet wide. The floor was of beaten earth, shiny with damp. The low ceiling was supported by planks now gray and cellular, like elongated wasps' nests: the evidence of industrious termite colonies. Beyond the gap in the wall the open space was barely six feet long. It ended in a sloping wall of dirt.

"I remember this," Pat said. "Jerry found it the first year we lived here. We assumed it was just another room. What makes you think it was a tunnel?"

"I'm afraid he's right," Josef said, before Mark could answer. "It's too narrow to have been a room. Given Mr. Bates's abolitionist sentiments…"

For a moment no one spoke. The only sound was the heavy panting of the dog, so magnified and distorted by the low ceiling that it seemed to come, not from the stairs behind, but out of the darkness of the collapsed tunnel. Pat's scalp prickled. Surely more than one pair of lungs were emitting that agonized breathing. She seemed to hear gasps, low moans of effort and distress… How many weary, frightened men and women had crawled through that dark space, laboring toward freedom?

"Mark, you don't think…" Kathy began. She did not finish her sentence, but her gesture, toward the fallen earth, expressed the horrified surmise they all shared.

"No, no," Mark said reassuringly. "They would have dug the dirt out if the tunnel had collapsed while it was still in use. I think it gave way later, long after there was any reason for its existence."

"No ghosts here, then," Pat said. "You didn't find anything, did you, Mark?"

"No."

"Then let's go."

Their retreat was not dignified. If there were no ghosts in the buried tunnel, there was the memory of old cruelty and injustice. Pat recalled a friend of hers, an Army wife who had spent several years in Germany, describing a visit she had made to the former concentration camp at Dachau, now a memorial to the tortured victims. "I stalled at the gate," her friend had admitted. "I couldn't go in. I was sick at my stomach, unable to breathe." There was nothing supernatural or psychic about such impressions; they were simply a physical expression of the impact of tragedy on a sensitive mind.

All the same, she breathed more easily when they were upstairs, with the cellar door closed. Darkness was complete outside, and the rain hissed drearily against the windowpanes. After searching, Pat found a bottle of wine in the kitchen cabinet. No one volunteered to go downstairs again.

Josef drank most of the wine. He had had two drinks before dinner, and when they returned to the parlor, after eating, he went straight to the liquor cabinet. When he asked Pat to join him she shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. She could not see that he was visibly affected by what he had drunk. But she didn't like it. Her feelings must have shown on her face; Josef returned her unconsciously critical glance with a look of sullen defiance, and poured a sizable jolt of Scotch into his glass.

Mark settled down on the floor with the photograph album.

"I promised Jay we'd return this tomorrow," he said. "Mom, you better come with me."

"I have to work tomorrow," Pat protested.

"How can you think of work at a time like this? I'll call in for you, tell them you're sick."

"I can't do that!"

"Well, you can't sit up half the night and expect to work."

It had been expressed, the thought she had dreaded. Pat let her breath out in a long sigh.

"Mark, are you really going to go over there tonight?"

"We agreed," Mark said. "Nothing's going to happen, Mom. I promise."

Pat turned away with a helpless gesture, and met Josef's gaze. She knew what he was thinking as clearly as if he had spoken aloud. Mark was so sure. He had been un-nervingly accurate so far, in all his guesses and hypotheses. What source of information was he tapping? A possible answer occurred to her, and the very idea turned her cold with apprehension.