We lay next to each other, eyes squeezed closed, hardly daring to breathe. Suddenly, I knew we weren’t alone. Squeaky footsteps were coming closer, and when I peeped through my eyelashes, I saw two small sneakers, lights blinking around the soles.
A small face bent to peer through the bars of the gate. It was a boy, maybe seven or eight. “Who are you?” he demanded in Japanese.
“A lady demon. And I’m going to eat your soul,” I said, smiling. I made a claw with my hands and he ran away, shrieking for his mother.
He tugged at her coat, pointing towards us as we hunkered in the shadows, but his mother gave him a scolding for telling lies and shoved him into the next room.
Natalie forced herself to her feet, brushing at her clothes. “Was that really necessary?”
“It got rid of him,” I said, tying the end of the yarn to the gate. I tossed her one of the plastic ponchos. “Now let’s go exploring.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Four hours and about fifty wrong turns later, we stopped. Natalie rummaged in her pack for a water bottle and a few of the energy gels we had bought at the sporting goods store. They were nasty but they did the trick, topping us up as we took stock of our surroundings.
Natalie was comparing a dozen printouts of various maps and overlays with the step counter we’d brought and a tiny compass she wore on a chain around her neck.
“This is it,” she said, pointing towards a small flight of steps cut into the stone. We climbed, dodging a few broken steps, until we got to an ancient door cut into the rock. A doorjamb had been fitted and the door itself was stout, old oak. The lock was rusted and the hinges were crumbling into piles of red dust. Natalie wanted to pick the lock, but I was tired at that point and picked up a handy piece of broken stone. Two good hits and the lock dropped off.
“Subtle,” she said.
“Natalie, I am tired, I am covered in mud that is at least seventy percent dead people, and I am hungry. Do not test me.”
The hinges were so wonky it took two of us to open the door enough to slip through. We didn’t leave it entirely open—no point in advertising our presence in case anybody else happened along. We hadn’t seen anyone during our recon and I was happy to keep it that way. We emerged into a wine cave, long abandoned, the barrels empty and cobwebbed. I flashed the light onto the name stenciled on the barrels and nearly whooped out loud. D’Archambeau. Natalie pointed and gave me a smug look.
“Natalie, you are flaky as a Pillsbury crescent roll, but you have a damned fine sense of direction,” I told her. Tactfully, I ignored the hours we’d spent making wrong turns and hitting dead ends. We’d found it and that was all that mattered.
We moved through the wine cave and up a flight of stairs into the cellar proper. It was stacked with broken cribs and empty demijohns and piles of rotting copies of Paris Match and newspapers curling with age. There was a fair bit of scuttling around—mice, no doubt—but no other signs of life. We picked our way carefully around the piles towards the door in the opposite wall. It was all beginning to feel a bit too easy, and I was a little relieved when we hit a snag. I’m not a pessimist, but all jobs have complications and it’s better to get them out of the way early. Our complication was a bright, shiny new biometric lock set in a heavy door of reinforced steel.
Natalie turned to me and swore. “I can’t pick that, and even if I could, I don’t have the tools.”
I looked around for another way in. Sometimes when a lock is impossible, the gods will smile and the hinge will be on your side of the door. Hammering out a hinge pin is heavy work, and we didn’t have mallets, but it didn’t matter. Scars on the doorframe showed where the door had been reset, the hinges safely inside the house proper.
I shook my head. “It’s locked up tighter than a Baptist virgin. Come on.”
We took our time moving around the cellar, searching for any sign of another way in. We had given up and were about to leave when Nat saw it. She lowered to her knees, groaning only a little, and pushed aside a stack of magazines. A few rodent bones went flying and I slapped them away.
“If I never see another bone, it will be too soon,” I said, kneeling beside her. “What have you found?”
She was working her fingertips around a panel set into the rock wall. It was no more than three feet square, flimsy wood that gave way as soon as she pushed. Air, stale and clammy, rushed out from the dark cavity behind.
“Natalie, if you have just opened the seventh seal and kicked off the End Times, give me a heads-up,” I told her.