My only prior experience with abandoned buildings was a dilapidated old cabin in the woods outside Donn’s Hill—a building with three decades of mold, mildew, rot, and vandalism added to its rustic charm. I expected to find some serious dirt inside the house, but it didn’t feel as abandoned on the inside as it looked from the outside. It felt more like an apartment that was between renters: a little dusty, a funky smell in the kitchen, and a living room carpet that could use a good cleaning.
Despite his reluctance to come with me into the house, Graham proved to be an able burglar. We moved quickly through the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers to check for anything Anson Monroe might have left behind.
“Just plastic utensils and some fast food napkins,” Graham announced.
I gingerly peeked in the refrigerator, sure it was the source of the rotten stench that permeated the kitchen. The foul odor of spoiled milk exploded out into the air around me as soon as the door’s seal broke, and I spotted a chunky white substance oozing out of the top of a gallon jug. I slammed the door closed, hunched over the counter, and willed the bile back down my throat.
Graham pulled his sweatshirt over his nose. “Did that look as gross as it smells?”
“Stop.” I clamped my hand over my mouth. “Please don’t make me remember it.”
It took several minutes of fighting off dry heaves before I felt safe to stand up straight again. I fished a piece of gum out of my purse—I had learned to carry gum with me everywhere after the first time I threw up on set with the Soul Searchers—and popped it into my mouth. Even though I hadn’t actually vomited, the sharp spearmint made me feel better, banishing the ghost of the rotten milk from inside my nose.
The master bedroom was off the living room, and it, too, was empty. So were the two smaller bedrooms beyond the kitchen. Apart from the appliances, not a single piece of furniture remained in the house, but rectangular impressions in the carpet convinced me Anson Monroe had lived here. But when? How long ago did he—or someone—empty these rooms and pull the pictures off the walls, leaving nothing but miscolored sections of paint as evidence that this had once been his home?
The more we searched, the more my body felt like a wind-up toy that was running out of juice. As we checked the last closet, finding nothing but a few forgotten wire hangers, the last of my enthusiasm escaped in a deep sigh. I could barely muster the energy to follow Graham through the kitchen and into the backyard, where nothing lurked but an empty chicken coop.
I had been so sure I would find answers in New Mexico, answers to questions I couldn’t even put into words. But all I found were dead ends. I mean, what had I learned, really? The name of an old man?
Most frustrating of all was my gut’s stubborn insistence that we had missed something. Even as I stared at the overgrown yard, the feeling in my belly persisted. It screamed that there was something here, something important. It warned me that if we left before we found it, I would never, ever be able to let it go.
Stop being absurd, the rational half of my brain lectured. There’s nothing here, and if you had any sense, you’d be relieved.
That much was true. But even as I acknowledged the fact, I still felt cheated. Tricked. Had the box in Camila Aster’s luggage really called to me, or had I imagined it? Was I just desperate to believe there was some mystical force informing my instincts?
Was everything I did, every discovery I made, really just luck?
I mentally grasped for someone or something to blame for this disappointment, but if I wanted to point fingers, I would have to point them in the mirror. This vacation had been my idea, but it was all as useless and empty as this house. I turned away from the building in disgust.
“That’s odd,” Graham said from behind me.
I craned my head over my shoulder to peek at the house. Graham stood inside the back door, where a small mudroom granted access to the kitchen. His back was to me as he peered into a closet.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I didn’t think houses in New Mexico had basements.”
“They don’t. Not that I’ve ever seen anyway.” My curiosity aroused, I allowed myself to be lured back into the building. “I remember thinking my dad was super rich when I moved into his house in Colorado because he had a basement.”
“Well, look at this.” Graham stepped aside so I could look in the closet.
It wasn’t a closet at all. I had assumed it must be; we’d explored the entire house, and there wasn’t enough space for another room. But beyond the door lay a wooden staircase leading down into pitch blackness.
Behind us, the back door creaked in the wind.
Before us, something moved in the darkness.
My heart stopped. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Graham asked.
Without waiting for me to answer, he leaned around me and found a light switch on the wall. A fluorescent bar above us flickered to life, illuminating the light gray floor below. And at the edge of the visible space, just before the ceiling blocked everything else from view, I recognized the unmistakable quilted blue pattern of a mattress.
My feet refused to move. I stood at the top of the stairs for a good five minutes, listening, waiting to see if anything moved again.
“I swear I saw something down there,” I whispered.
The back door creaked again. Graham pulled it closed.
“What was it?” he whispered back.
“I don’t know.”
“Should we leave?”
I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. But I worried if I didn’t get to the bottom of this now, I would find myself back here later.
Possibly alone.
Probably in the dark.
I shook my head. “We have to check it out.”
We crept down the stairs together, wincing with each creak of the wooden treads and pausing every few steps to listen for any sign that we weren’t truly alone. Slowly, more of the basement came into view.
It was a small space, only about a third the size of the floor above and not nearly as nicely finished. The gray concrete beneath our feet was as unfinished as the drywall on the walls and ceiling. Beyond the stripped mattress stood another bare bed. A pair of tall dressers faced the beds, and a small table and two chairs took up the center of the space. At the far end of the basement, a trio of empty shelves looked sad without any books to hold.
Like the rest of the house, it was clear someone had lived here before. Possibly recently. There were scuff marks on the footboard of one of the beds, and the sagging mattresses were dotted with stains. But unlike the rooms upstairs, the walls down here weren’t blank.
These were covered, from floor to ceiling, in strange symbols.
Some were familiar, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs above the empty bookshelves. Others almost looked random, like they’d been doodled in a moment of boredom. All looked like they had been painted with the same wide brush, in thick black paint that seemed to glisten in the glow of the fluorescent bulbs.
Graham reached out a cautious finger and touched an abstract sun that had been painted above one of the beds. “Weird. It looks wet, but it’s completely dry.”
“I don’t get it.” I stared around the room, trying to make sense of the overwhelming variety of shapes that covered nearly every square inch of wall. The sheer sensory overload threatened to short-circuit my brain, but the feeling that I was supposed to be here remained in my belly. I felt sure there was a good reason I had come into the basement, but nothing around me made sense. “Is this some kind of cult thing?”
“Whatever it is, they’re mixing and matching from a lot of sources. Hieroglyphs, Judeo-Christian religious symbols, the zodiac.” He gestured toward different parts of the room, then raised a hand to point above me. “And those look Norse, but I can’t be sure. It’s been a while since anyone commissioned me to use Futhark runes on a sculpture.”
As I looked up to see what he was pointing at, my stomach plummeted into my shoes. Directly over my head, scrawled on the ceiling in slick black paint, were the same four symbols I had seen inside Camila Aster’s jewelry box. Needing to be sure, I pulled the box out of my purse and raised it with shaking hands.
Looking at them side by side left no doubt. They were the same.
“Hey,” I squeaked, letting out just a little of the breath I was holding in. “Can you… break that?”
“Break what?” Graham narrowed his eyes at the paint above me. “The ceiling?”
“No, the shapes.”
Despite my nonsensical instructions, Graham did as I asked. He picked up one of the wooden chairs by the table and heaved it above his head. I couldn’t get my legs to carry me out of the way, so I covered my head with my arms as he gouged a hole into the ceiling’s drywall with one of the chair’s legs. He repeated the process, tearing a chunk out of each of the four symbols.
“Are you okay?” Graham asked, sweat glistening on his chalky forehead from the exertion of wielding a chair like a sledgehammer.
I took my time answering. My heart raced in my chest, my lungs screamed for air, and my stomach felt stuck between wanting to vomit and wanting to collapse in on itself. But my head felt clear, just as it had after Striker attacked the jewelry box in the Shamrock yurt. I released my held breath in a rush and sucked in a new one.
“I’m fine.” Even though the symbols no longer tugged at my mind, I didn’t want to stand beneath them. I took a few steps toward the stairs. “Can we go?”
He set the chair down. “I thought you’d never ask. Let me just get a few photos. Stephen might know some of these symbols better than me.”
“Make sure you get that Eye of Ra above the bookshelves,” I said. “I used to think that would make a cool tattoo.”
“That’s the Eye of Horus,” he corrected me as he snapped a picture of it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, the Eye of Ra faces right. The Eye of Horus faces left. And see? There’s the symbol for Horus right next to it.” He pointed to a hieroglyph of a falcon, which, like the eye, faced left.
I stared at the hieroglyphs as Graham’s words echoed in my mind.
The Eye of Horus.
Horus.
My name is Horace, the so-called ghost at the Oracle Inn had told me.
Or rather, I thought he said Horace. I had spelled it in my mind as he spoke it aloud. H-O-R-A-C-E, like the poet.
But couldn’t it have been H-O-R-U-S?
In my mind, I saw his shadowed face, his pale skin, his red eyes. I saw his smile as he claimed, “My name is Horus.”
No matter how he spelled it, the name was a lie. I knew now who he really was.
Horace—no, Horus—was Anson Monroe.
And I was standing in his basement.
My brain overloaded. My body took charge. With Graham’s footsteps thundering behind me, I fled up the stairs and out of the house.