IT TOOK A SECOND INJECTION AND A LOT OF WRONG TURNS TO TEASE some more details out of Glass. The closer we got to the truth, the funnier he seemed to find it. It was everything I could do to keep from knocking that smile right off his face—or letting Sampson do it.
After two long hours, we found ourselves on a dark secondary road somewhere south of the Pennsylvania border and Michaux State Forest. The middle of nowhere, basically.
Mahoney kept our speed low and the high beams on. The result was—we were going nowhere. We had no final destination yet.
“Hang on,” Sampson said suddenly. “What’s that?”
Ned stopped and angled the car at the side of the road. A wall of high grass and brambles was broken in one spot, like it had been trampled and bounced back. On the other side, it looked like an old ATV trail, or maybe a driveway, running into the woods.
Glass let out another long, drunken laugh.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ned said, and pulled in.
As we drove on, a single set of tracks showed itself in the dirt. Someone had been here recently, but the trail wasn’t well traveled.
Had Glass been coming in from more than one direction? I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
About a hundred yards off the road, the trees cleared and I saw an old farmhouse straight ahead. It was falling down all around itself, barely holding onto the clapboard.
Beyond that was a three-story barn, standing a little straighter in the dark, and my stomach knotted right up. It looked like just the kind of place where you might find an old root cellar.
Ned pulled around and stopped, with the headlights shining inside the barn. Everything about this was eerie and scary, even though we were the ones supposedly in control. But Glass still was, wasn’t he?
“What the hell’s that?” Mahoney said.
A half-decomposed animal carcass, or maybe more than one, was piled right in the center of the open barn doorway.
“Nice welcome mat. That’s supposed to keep us out,” Sampson said. “I think we’re in the right place.”
“Cuff him to the door handle!” I was already out of the car. This thing had me in its own slipstream now.
I ran straight inside the barn, past an empty tack wall on one side and a row of stables on the other.
“Ethan! Zoe!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Anyone here?”
The only sound that came back was Glass’s obnoxious giggle from the car.
At the back, the barn opened up all the way to the beams overhead. Vines and saplings had worked their way in through the walls, but those were the only signs of life I could see.
“You got anything?” I shouted to the others.
“Nothing over here,” Sampson called back.
“Nothing,” Ned said.
“There’s got to be a way down. Stairs, or a ladder, or something.”
I came back and stood in the alley between the tack wall and the stalls, shining my Maglite in every direction. What were we missing? Were the kids even here?
As I came around again, I noticed that all but one of the stalls were empty. The one farthest from the door was piled high with junk. It looked like someone had taken everything they could find and dumped it in one place. Why?
“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey! Give me a hand!”
By the time Ned and Sampson found me, I was already throwing splintered wooden pallets and loose lumber out of the stall. There was a truck axle, a few bundles of rusted wire mesh, some concrete pilings, and an old corn shucker—the kind of thing I hadn’t laid eyes on since I was a little kid in North Carolina.
As soon as the space was clear, we dropped down and started brushing away the dirt and gravel and old remnants of hay.
While I did, I noticed some of the debris was trickling down through a crack in the boards. Right away, it showed itself as a straight line—and then a definite rectangle in the floor.
“It’s a door!” John said, and we dug our fingers into the gap.
We heaved straight up and flung open the whole panel. Then we picked up our flashlights and shone them down into the space we’d just opened.
“Oh, my God,” Mahoney said. “Oh, no.”
Sampson and I stood there, speechless.
Just below floor level, there was a layer of dirt. It was dark, and moist, and looked like fresh earth to me. Like someone had only recently filled this hole.
The only other thing to see was the top of an old wooden ladder, just breaking the surface.
It looked like a grave.
And behind me, I could still hear Rodney Glass laughing in the car.