The darkness clapped shut over them like the lid on a coffin. There was a thunk as the bolt slid home, locking them in. The raw horror-story sound of it pulled an involuntary whimper out of her throat. Then Rouse’s footsteps crossed the floor overhead.
The other stairway. She exploded out of the water, seeing, now, with precious seconds wasted gaping at the dark, the pale rectangle that was the other overhead door. She ran for the other stairs as if running in a nightmare, legs dragging through shin-deep water, damp cobwebs curling across her face, barely outlined brick support columns looming in her way. She was halfway to the stairs, splashing and gasping, when she heard the complaint of rust-eaten hinges.
“Dr. Rouse!” she screamed. “Don’t do this! Don’t leave us down here!”
“I’ll send someone,” he said, his voice hollow. “When it’s safe.”
“For God’s sake!” The door kachunked closed, and the pressure wave flattened the air around her, thinning her voice, pushing it into the far, unseen corners of the cellar.
For the love of God, Montresor!
She shivered violently, hot and cold all at the same time.
“Clare?” Russ’s voice, rough and waterlogged, brought her back to herself. He coughed and retched, and stirred in the water.
She slogged toward the sound. “Keep talking,” she said. “I can’t see anything.”
“Are you all right?” His words induced another round of coughing.
“I think so.” She slammed into a brick column and reeled backward. “Or I will be if I don’t knock myself out,” she wheezed. She slowed down and let her outstretched hands take the lead. “You sound terrible. How’s your leg?”
“I just swallowed some water when I fell.” He coughed. “So much for avoiding showers to keep my cast dry.”
Her hand touched his hair. She knelt in the water beside him, wincing at its bite, and touched his face, his chest, his arms. He was soaking. “You’re okay? What else did you hit?”
He was touching her, as well, the pat-pat-patting of fingers asking, Are you here? Are you whole? He folded one of his hands over hers. His fingers were cold. “I twisted when I fell. I knocked my arm pretty good, but at least I didn’t break my head open. How about you?”
She rotated her arm, and a steady throb in her shoulder sizzled into a cramp of pain. She sucked in her breath. “I think I banged up my shoulder a little. Everything else is working fine.” She stood up, holding on to his hand. “Let’s get out of this water.” She found his other hand, clasped it, and hauled. He was taller than she, and heavier, and she had to lean backward to get the leverage. When he was upright, she wrapped her arm around his waist, he slung his arm over her shoulder, and they hobbled toward the stairs.
She could hear him every time he had to step on his broken leg. He breathed in through his nose, hard, and held it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This hurts, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll be fine.” He clipped his words.
The back of her outstretched hand banged against wood. “Ouch,” she said. “Okay, let’s get on the stairs.”
She waited until Russ had sat on one of the steps and pulled himself up out of the water. Then she crept up the stairs, bent over, one hand touching the edge of the wooden planks so she wouldn’t fall off, the other held over her head. Her fingers hit something solid. The trapdoor. “I’m going to try to open it,” she said. For a second, she thought of the stuff she had seen on it, the mouse pellets and the dirt and God knew what else. It’ll shower off. She braced her shoulders and upper back against the door and pushed. Nothing.
She went up another step so that she was folded tight beneath the door, and pushed again. This time she felt something giving way, the ripping sound of wood splitting. Her feet slid inward. She heard a crack.
“Holy crow!” She scrambled to a lower rung just in time to avoid breaking through the step. She reached down. She had splintered it into two pieces.
“I’ve discovered the stairs are weaker than the door.” She made her way hand and foot back down the steps. He took up most of one rung, so she sat above him. “I suppose I should try the other one.”
“Bolted shut?”
“Yeah.”
“Then the other one probably is as well. Give it a rest before you try it.” They sat for a moment. “Was that who I thought it was?” he asked.
“Allan Rouse.” She was seized with another spasm of shivering. “Showing some flexibility on that ‘First, do no harm’ thing. At least he promised to send help back for us.”
“Oh yeah?”
“She could tell from his voice that he was shivering, too. “He didn’t provide a timeline for our rescue, by any chance?”
“No.”
“ ’Cause whether it’s before or after we die of hypothermia will make a difference.”
She hunched over, trying to find some core of warmth in her sopping clothes. “Yeah.”
“What do you have on under that coat?”
She rasped a laugh. “Are we back to that again?”
His voice was patient. “Just answer the question.”
“One of my clerical blouses.”
“Take off your coat and move down here next to me. Keep hold of it.” She could hear the zipper on his jacket, and the plank creaking and bumping as he repositioned himself. She struggled out of her clinging coat before carefully feeling her way to the next lower rung, touching wood and then a damp jeans-covered thigh.
“Excuse me,” she said. She swept her hand back and forth and realized he had straddled the step, jamming his good leg between this rung and the next, resting his cast on the step below them.
“Sit with your back toward me.” He had taken his arms out of his parka, leaving it hanging from his shoulders. She did as directed, drawing her knees up, draping her coat over them like the proverbial wet blanket. He wrapped his arms around her. “Better?”
“A little, yeah.”
“It won’t keep us in the long run. It’d take our clothes three days to dry out in this humidity, and the temperature can’t be much above forty degrees. But I’ve always found it’s easier to think when you’re warm.”
“This isn’t exactly warm.”
“Give it some time.”
She let her head tip back. He rested his cheek against her hair. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he sighed. “I should have made you stay in the car,” he said.
“Darn right, you should have.”
He laughed, and she joined him, laughing helplessly and shivering and clutching at her coat so it didn’t fall.
Eventually, they fell silent. Where their bodies met, wet shirts crumpling between them, she began to feel warm. Even the damp underside of her coat didn’t seem as frigid as it had a few minutes ago. “I think we’re throwing off heat,” she said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me.” His voice was dry.
She opened her mouth to make a joke and was amazed to hear herself say, “I’ve thought about this.” He was quiet. The darkness, the anonymity of it let her go on. “About you holding me, I mean. Not about being stuck in a wet, freezing cellar. In fact, when I imagine it, it’s usually in a much warmer place. With fewer clothes on. And, of course, none of those inconvenient moral issues hanging over us. So it’s pretty much a fantasy. Free-floating. Please stop me before I make more of an ass of myself than I already have.” Her cheeks were so hot she could have steamed her coat dry with them. “Sorry. I tend to babble when I’m nervous.”
He tightened his arms around her. “I know,” he said, his voice low in her ear. Then she felt his lips on her cheek, and she turned her head, and his mouth slid over hers and they were kissing. It was sweet, so sweet, and as his mouth moved over hers she felt a string she hadn’t known was tied tug free inside her chest, and everything that made her who she was fell open to him. She made a noise, encouragement, maybe, or applause, and he slanted against her harder, his hands tangling in her hair. His mouth, his hands, the moan trapped in his throat made her mindless. She licked, kissed, stroked, clutched, utterly lost in him until a twist of her hips sent her coat slithering down across her knees, heading for the water below. She yanked free of him and grabbed it before it fell.
They both froze. The cold, damp air chilled her blouse, raising gooseflesh all along her arms. She could hear him, rasping for breath.
“I’m—,” he started to say, and she cut him off.
“Don’t say you’re sorry.”
“God, no.” In the pause, she could hear him trying to catch his breath. “Are you?”
She ought to be. She knew that. “No,” she said.
Another sharp breath. She thought she could feel him, leaning toward her. Then he said, “This isn’t the time. Or the place.” His voice was thick and harsh.
There isn’t any time or place, she wanted to cry, but she kept it to herself. Instead she said, “Hold my coat. I’m going to try the other door.” A jolly wade through icy shin-deep water should cool her ardor. She thrust the coat at him and went down the stairs by hand and foot. They weren’t as far above the water as she had thought, and when she stepped off the stairs into the icy murk she knew why.
“The water’s rising.” She tried to keep her voice calm. “It’s up past my knees now.”
He swore. “The river,” he said. “It’s rising.”
“What?”
“Every year, we get some flooding with the snowmelt. Add in a few hard rains, and presto. Flash flood. Goddamnit.”
His muffled swearing followed her as she sloshed across the floor, hands outstretched. She cast about for the other stairs, and had a moment of disoriented panic before whacking into a semisubmerged step. She crawled out of the water to the top and pushed against the trapdoor. She shoved and rattled it for form’s sake, but she knew she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Any luck?” he called. His voice spread through the darkness, lapped against the outermost walls. She realized the cellar was bigger than she had thought, probably encompassing the entire footprint of the building.
“It’s not budging.” She gritted her teeth and descended into the water again. “Any idea how deep it’s likely to get?”
“Deep. The Millers Kill has been known to rise ten feet above normal, and we’re well below water level right now. There must be a weak spot in the foundation.”
“It’d have to be more than a weak spot. It’s got to be coming in by the gallon to rise this quickly.” She waved her hands in front of her and struck a brick column. She paused. “I don’t hear any water rushing.”
“Probably a chunk missing near the cellar floor. Could be this place is partially underwater most of the year, except maybe midsummer when the river is at its lowest. The good news is, the ceiling is definitely above water level, even when the river’s high, like it is today.” His voice was much closer. She sloshed forward, gritting her teeth against the cold slicing into her legs.
“It’s not much higher. If the water rises to level with the Millers Kill, we’ll be sitting in it up to our necks.”
In water a few degrees above freezing. He didn’t have to spell it out for her. As the heat leached from their limbs, they would go numb. Then, as their bodies started to shut down, they would get sleepy. Finally, when their core temperatures cooled to seventy degrees, they would die. She had seen a special on the Discovery Channel that had said fishermen in the North Atlantic could survive ten minutes in the water without survival gear. She and Russ wouldn’t last much longer.
She collided with the stairs. “I think there may be a way out,” Russ said as she hauled herself, dripping, up the steps. “I think there may be a bulkhead here somewhere.”
“You mean a door in the cellar? With steps coming down from the street?” She sat on the rung below him.
“C’mere,” he said, wrapping his hands around her arms and lifting her into the cradle of his legs. He drew her close and tossed her coat over her. “There’s nothing on the street side. But I’m pretty sure I remember seeing one facing the river. I used to fish all along the kill back when I was a kid. It was a long time ago, but it’ll still be here. Somewhere.”
“But if it’s facing the river, wouldn’t it be underwater, too?”
“Maybe. But even so, we’d be out of here. At the worst, we’d be carried down-river some until we could swim for the shore.”
“No, at the worst, we’d be swept away in the freezing water and drown.”
“Yeah. Well.” He tightened his hold on her. “I’m going to try it. I want you to sit tight on these stairs.”
“So I can be the girl from Titanic who stays high and dry while you, the guy, vanish beneath the icy waves? I don’t think so.”
“Didn’t we just agree you should have stayed in the car?”
“I was joking.”
“Clare.” Maybe it was the total darkness that made his voice so intimate. “If anything were to happen to you, I’d . . .”
“You’d what?”
The darkness, and the sense that they were the only inhabitants of a world bound by the unseen walls stretching out around them.
“I’d walk into my brother-in-law’s field and lie down and let the corn grow up around me.”
No one else in their world. No costs, no considerations, only two voices in the dark. And honesty.
“Okay. Same here.” She twined her arms over his, hugging him closer. “Remember the helicopter?” She had taken him for a disastrous ride last summer.
“I promise you, I will never, ever forget the helicopter. So long as we both shall live.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “You told me to hold on.”
“So now we’re both holding on. No you going and me staying behind. We sink or swim together.”
He pressed a kiss into her hair. “Even if I said please?”
“No.”
He made a noise deep in his throat.
They sat in silence for a while. Clare was damp where she wasn’t wet, aching with the chill, and both of them reeked. She felt as if she could stay right where she was forever. But the realization of it roused her. They didn’t have forever.
“I may as well get down there and see if I can find this bulkhead before it gets any deeper.” She leaned forward, folding her coat and draping it over one of the steps. She climbed down the stairs and waded into the water.
“Hang on.” She could hear a bumping sound as Russ went down the steps on his rear. He gasped when he hit the water. “I’m coming with you.” He jostled her arm, trailed down and took her hand. “Let’s see. The stairs are parallel to the river side of the building, so the wall should be right—” They struck an uneven patch of stone. “Here,” Russ said. “You go left, I’ll go right.” He gave her hand a squeeze before letting go.
She spread her hands over the dank stone and began her search. Step, sweep. Step, sweep. Cobwebs stroked her face and clung to her hair. She tried not to think of the creepy-crawlies that might be living there. At least nothing was squeaking. The only sounds were the lapping of water against stone, Russ’s periodic huffs of pain as he bore down on his broken leg, and her own chattering teeth. She reached the corner of the building.
“I’m at a corner. Do you want me to continue? This wall runs away from the river, parallel to the street.”
“No, come on back toward me.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. She waded through the water, trailing one hand over the stone to keep her bearings. “Where are you?”
“Right here.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Better. Of course, that’s because it’s gone numb.”
“Mine, too.” Touching his back to orient herself, she moved past him and pressed both hands against the foundation wall. The moldy, old, something-died-in-here smell was worse. She tried not to breathe too deeply. Step, sweep. Step, sweep. “Is it my imagination, or do you feel the water rising?”
“It’s your imagination.”
Imagination or no, the faster they found the bulkhead—if there was one—the sooner they’d be out of this death trap. She increased her pace. So she had no one to blame but herself when she tripped over a knee-high obstacle and tumbled into the water. The shock of the cold took her breath away, and she flailed and scrambled her way back onto her feet.
“Clare? What is it? What happened?”
She forced words from her tightly clenched jaw. “There’s something here. I tripped.”
He bumped into her, and brushed her as he bent over, feeling out the obstacle. She wrapped her arms around herself and shook. I will never be warm again.
“You found it, darlin’.” He straightened, pulled her into a tight embrace, chafed her back. “Steps. It’s a high bulkhead door, which means it may not be underwater. You ready to check it out?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“Good girl.” He released her.
She shuffled forward until her boots struck something hard beneath the water. She stepped up. “Take my hand,” she said. He interlaced his fingers with hers, and she steadied him as he mounted the first step. Stretching out one arm in front of her, she took a second step. The third was above the water. “It’s right here,” she said, thumping a wooden door with her knee. Russ stepped up beside her and she let go of his hand. Stretching up and down, she made out two crossbeams, bracing the vertical planks. “It must go right up to the ceiling.”
She heard his fingers tapping several inches above her reach. “It does,” he said.
The wood was soft and pulpy. Reaching left, she found out why. Water was rolling through the crack between the door and the jamb, running in swift rivulets down to the stone step below. “This thing is leaking,” she said. “There’s water backed up on the other side.”
“Not at the top. Lets see how high it goes.”
She traced the edge of the door upward, past one set of hinges, until her fingers moved past the running water onto damp, flaky wood. “It’s about as high as my neck,” she said.
“I figure there are two possibilities,” he said. “It could be water’s collected in the well created by the outside stairs. In that case, when we open the door, we’ll be hit with a gush. But we’ll be able to walk out once it’s drained.”
“And the second possibility?”
“The river’s risen above its banks here.”
“So when we open the door—”
“It floods the cellar. Right up to your neck.”
She didn’t point out that she was standing on steps that raised her a foot and a half above the floor. If the cellar flooded, it would be well above her neck.
“If that’s the case,” he went on, “the best thing we can do is hang on to the door until the water levels have equalized. Then we can pull ourselves out and hopefully hang on to the building. Once we’ve got our footing, we’ll just walk out of the water to the end of the street.”
“Sure thing. No sweat.”
“Look, I’ll be more than happy if you want to get back up on the top of the stairs and wait. You’ll be above the water there.”
“We’ve already been through that.” She reached to her right and hit his arm. “How do we open the door?”
“There are two wooden bars resting in brackets. Maybe eight inches long, two inches high. One above the door handle, one below.” He shifted. “They’re swollen with all the water. So they’re going to be hard to move.” He stood, silent. She let him think it through. “This is how we’ll do it. I’m going to kick the lower one out of its bracket.”
“How are you going to do that with a broken leg? Maybe that should be my job.”
“Your job is going to be standing behind me and hanging on as tight as you can. The only place we can get a grip and not be washed away to the back wall is the door handle here. I’m going to hold that and you’re going to hold me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“All right, get underneath my arm here and help me balance myself.”
She ducked beneath his shoulder and took as much of his weight as she could, while he drew his uninjured foot off the floor. His breath hissed between his teeth, and she winced for what he must be feeling.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! He tilted forward and stood on his good leg again.
“Did you get it?”
“I think so.” He bent over, feeling for the bar. “Yeah. The door is bowing out down here. Whatever’s behind it, it’s got plenty of force. So hang on.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and clasped her hands over her wrists. “I’m ready.”
He sidled closer to the door, until his chest was against the planks and she could feel the spongy wood against the backs of her hands. He bent his arm.
Whump! Whump! Whump!
“Shit,” he hissed.
“Stuck?”
He blew his breath out in frustration. “I wish I had my work gloves.”
She could feel his muscles tensing, his whole body weighing in behind the palm of his hand as he beat against the stubborn bar. Whump! Whump! He grunted.
“Anything?”
“Yeah. It gave some. Hang on tight, this next one may do it.”
He brought his arm down a final time, clipping her shoulder, then struck the bar. She felt a shudder, and the door exploded open.
Clare and Russ were flung backward and to the side as the pent-up water crashed through the bulkhead doorway into the cellar. The freezing water battered her, yanking her away from Russ, who was swinging one-handed in the torrent, clawing for the door handle. She dug her fingers into her wrists, locking herself around his waist. A wave slapped her face, leaving her blind and choking, and before she had the chance to hack the water from her mouth another one broke around her, and her head was underwater. She scrabbled at Russ’s shirt, dragging herself up his body. She broke through to the air and gasped.
“—around my neck,” Russ was shouting, and she flung one arm, then the other, around his neck and pushed herself up until her head was level with his. She wrapped her legs around his waist and hung on as they tossed in the torrent hurtling through the confines of the doorway. They pitched from side to side, water sluicing over their faces, floating higher and higher as the river sought its level. She felt Russ’s arms straining downward against the flood tide, clinging to the door handle that had been their lifeline, but now threatened to anchor them under the rising water.
“It’s too low!” she shouted in his ear. “You have to let go!”
“Hang on!” he shouted. She tightened her arms and legs and felt a jolt as he let go one hand and the water tried to sweep them away. He whacked his free hand against the door, fingers scratching for some purchase. His back shifted, he heaved his other hand forward, and they were head and shoulders above the water again. His arms were trembling with the effort of tethering them to the door.
She blinked the water out of her eyes and looked through the doorway, where a patch of steel-wool sky threw off just enough light to limn the bricks of the outer wall and the white froth of the river gushing over the rocky embankment and whirlpooling through the doorway. Russ held them fast through the suck and slop of the water crescendoing in dark currents between the stone walls. They bobbed higher. The cascade eased, from a dam spill to a millrace to a stream. The flow from the river outside eddied around them.
“Hold on,” Russ said. “I’m gonna try to get us out of here.” He released his hold and pulled them, hand over hand, along the upper edge of the door. They were floating so close to the ceiling that Clare bumped her head when Russ hauled forward.
They reached the edge of the bulkhead door. Russ jammed his fingers between the door and its frame. “I’m not going to try to swim across this. The cold. It’s making it hard to move.”
She jerked her head in a nod. From here, the bulkhead opening looked to be a mile wide. Her arms and legs felt heavy, detached. Her hands, clasped around her wrists, seemed to belong to another person. She had stopped shivering, stopped hurting. Instead, she felt numb. Numb and exhausted. And she hadn’t even been working, like Russ had. She had just clung on like a limpet.
“I’m going overhand along the top of the door frame,” he said. “Once we’re out of the bulkhead, I think we’ll be able to walk through the water toward the higher ground.”
She nodded again.
“You okay?”
“Cold.”
He rolled over, facing upward, and reached for the frame. Clare clung to his back, her hair trailing in the water, her face tipped high so she could breathe. Hand by hand, he carried them across the current. Her head bumped against something solid.
“Wall,” she said.
He turned, plunging his hands in the water, feeling for the top of the bulkhead’s outer wall. “Got it,” he said. His voice was thin. Tired. “I’m holding on to it. Climb over my back up onto the bank. It’s only about a foot underwater there. Keep to the building.”
Clare had to flex her hands to get them to unlock. Her muscles were cramped and unwieldy. She could barely control her arms and legs as she splashed and floundered over Russ. For a second, reaching down past his head and feeling only more water, she panicked, until she struck the rubble that made up the narrow strip of land between the riverbed and the chandlery. She crawled onto it, turned to face Russ, and collapsed. The water came to her chest. “Give me your hands,” she said. “I’ll pull you over.”
His flesh had all the warmth of a dead fish. She tightened her grip on his hands, braced her unfeeling feet against the edge of the bulkhead’s stone wall, and, pushing and pulling, hauled him out of the pool that was the entrance to the cellar.
He flailed his way onto the submerged embankment and sagged against her, panting. “We gotta get out of here,” he said when he had caught his breath.
Leaning on each other, they lurched to their feet. Standing, the water was up to her shins. Russ steered her toward the side of the building, and pressed to the wet bricks for balance, they staggered over the uneven, moss-slick stones of the embankment. Her clothes were so sodden, and her legs so deadened, that she didn’t realize they were walking out of the river’s overflow until she noticed that the slosh-slap of her steps had changed to a squish-squelch of boots on rock. She moved away from the wall. “Let me help you,” she said, shouldering beneath his arm to act as his crutch. They stumbled over garbage and up the eroded slope to the road, and she could see Margy Van Alstyne’s car, and it was the most welcome sight in the world.
They crossed the road like zombies. Russ popped open the driver’s door, and Clare staggered around to the other side. They fell in at the same time, clunking the doors shut behind them. It took Russ three tries to get the keys out of his pants pocket, and when he finally started the engine and they were hit with the first blast of hot air from the vents, Clare went boneless. They sat in silence.
After a minute, she noticed his cell phone, dangling from the car charger. She tugged on the curly cord, fishing the phone off the floor. “Look,” she said. “You’re still connected to my phone.” Which was lying somewhere at the bottom of the submarine cellar.
Russ didn’t open his eyes. “Hear anything?”
She pressed the phone to her ear. “Glug, glug,” she said. He rolled his head to look at her. She started to laugh. He blinked, then started to laugh as well. They laughed and laughed until their bodies shook and the Camry rocked and tears rolled down their cheeks.
Eventually, they wound down to gasps and sighs. She pressed the off button, hanging up on the river, and handed him the phone. He stared at it as if he was having a problem remembering what it was for. He looked at her. “If you were Allan Rouse, where would you be right now?”
“That’s my guess, too.” He punched in a number.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to send two cars over there. I’m going to have one of ’em stop at the station for some dry clothes. And I’m going to drive to Rouse’s house and nail that son of a bitch to the wall.”