Chapter 29

All Alone, In the Dark, With the Dark Water

Candy had been here. But why? And how did she get in? Wasn’t the door always lock—

Snick.

The room was darker. I looked behind me. Yes, the door had closed. The door that I had left open.

I walked towards the door, my heart beating loudly in my ears. The age-blackened brass knob was cool to the touch, and it wouldn’t turn. The door was locked. As I knew it would be.

I put my ear against it, but no footsteps, no one breathing on the other side of the door, no one cackling maniacally as they filled the spring room with deadly gas. And no one in here with me, except a ghost with clammy hands who lured me to the deep dark well...

Get a grip, Ivy. The knob was old and the wooden door probably swelled with age and damp. I tried again, shoving my weight against the door. No. I was locked in.

Luckily I had my trusty cellphone. I pulled up Logan’s number. He might have been the one to lock me in, but he might not be. And if he was, I was about to leave an incriminating message on his phone, one that the police might be able to hear once someone realized I had disappeared. I congratulated myself for thinking like a PI even when locked in the basement near a haunted spring.

I waited for the call to go through. And waited. Then I looked at my phone, and took back the pat on the back I gave myself earlier. No cell reception. Too far down in the basement, I guessed. Too many layers, of rock and brick wall between me and daylight and...

Oh no.

Breathe, Ivy. Just breathe. You are in no danger here. What could happen to you here anyway?

“You could drown,” my old fear whispered. “Like Cody. Like the Lady...”

The Lady in White. The white scrap of fabric floated in front of my mind’s eye. I welcomed the distraction from my fear. Had it been a trick of the light? The ghost? Or...Candy’s costume was white. No. This room might have been a way station for my friend, but I couldn’t believe it was her final destination. The Candy I knew, the one I believed was still inside that cadaverous body, was full of light and love and laughter. She wasn’t drawn to darkness. She couldn’t be in the well.

Could she?

I knelt down again by the pool, my fear for my friend somehow making me brave. I stretched out and leaned forward, getting my flashlight as close as I could to the surface of the water, and...

Light poured into the room. “Aah!” I tipped forward, the hand clutching the cell phone dipping into the tepid water, the rest of me tumbling toward the darkness.

“Gotcha.” Someone grabbed me under the arms. “Sorry to scare you,” said Logan. “How in the world did you lock yourself in here?”

“That’s what I want to know.” I scrambled to my feet and pushed past him out the door, so I couldn’t get locked in again.

“I didn’t shut the door, if that’s what you mean. Though it does lock on its own once it shuts. Some sort of safety measure, I guess. Probably should’ve warned you.”

“Yeah, you should have.” I shook the water off my phone and tested it by turning on the flashlight. Still worked. “Why are you down here?”

“Thank you very much, Logan,” he said in a girly voice, “for rescuing me from the scary dark place.”

“I thought you were helping out with a follow spot problem.” I started down the hallway, past Logan’s Nightmare.

Logan followed. “The lamp just overheated. They figured out the problem before I even got up to the booth. When no one saw you upstairs, I thought I’d come down and check on you.”

“Good thing you did.”

“Thank you ever so much,” he said in the same girly voice.

“All right, all right, thank you. But how could this door have shut?”

“The ghost, maybe?”

I turned around to face him. “Do you believe in the ghost?”

“I don’t know. A lot of unexplained things happen around here. And, this may sound sort of strange, but I don’t really want to say that I don’t believe. Like it might make the ghost mad if she does exist?”

I got it, being a somewhat superstitious sort. I started back down the hallway, Logan by my side. “So that door—the one to the spring room—it stays locked, right?”

“It’s supposed to,” he said. “But every so often I find it cracked open.”

“How? Who has keys?”

“A bunch of people: janitors, a couple of docents. There are probably keys floating around all over the place. That lock hasn’t been changed in years.”

I pressed open the door that led into the broom closet and stepped through, happy to be somewhere that felt semi-normal.

“You see anything interesting down there?” Logan followed me out and shut the shelves behind us.

“Oh!” I’d left Candy’s MoonPie wrapper in the spring room.

“What? What did you see?”

“Nothing, just...do you think I could bring my Uncle Bob to see the pool? He’d get a big kick out of it, seeing as how he loves that Ghost Hunt TV show.” Uncle Bob could also help me look for my lost clue, shine a light into the depths of that dark pool, and keep me company. In case we found something.