The Bone Cell

  This was not what they had expected. An old building, sure. Maybe like a couple of the wrecks work crews tore apart downtown, but nothing like this! Because, and they really had to face the truth, if anything in the world could be haunted, then this ancient church surely was! The crow's ominous words came back to the boys then. It had said the Church was abandoned, that the cat was back. That the creature had become crafty.

  Ian shivered and looked at Connor. The older boy looked back. “We're supposed to go in there?” Ian asked, dumbfounded. Connor just nodded, pausing to point a shaking finger at the ancient site which stood before them like doom personified.

  “Man...I doan know...” Ian said, not even making a move to swat the fly that buzzed loudly around his left ear. So had it not been for the flapping of wings at that very instant, the whole course of events would have probably gone far differently. But it did come, accompanied by a flashing shadow in the grass a few yards away. And with it the forest sounds suddenly erupted to a strange, natural symphony that made both boys yell and grab for one another in surprise.

  Chapter 23: What the Boys Found

  The crow wasted no time getting to the point. It was panting, straining for breath and eyeing them desperately as it fanned the air because it read their fears perfectly. “I know! I know!” it squawked, bouncing around in the grass on its one good leg. “It's not what you imagined, worse yes, but really, don't be afraid! It's not so bad!”

  “Not So Bad!” Connor shouted. “What are you talking about?” He pointed across the overgrown clearing. “Look at that! And you want us to go in there?! Are you crazy?”

  The crow threw its wings high above its head and squeezed its eyes shut. Then it stood there, balanced on one leg until the shouts died out amid the ridiculous pose. When the bird addressed them again it was with a deadly seriousness. “This is no fairy tale, boys,” it said. “This is no story you can put away till daylight to see how the scary part ends. This is real. This is the reason behind everything I told you. And there is nothing to be done about it...it is what it is. If you will help us, you'll have to go inside. As I told you, the cat is back and it makes any pilfering around in there by the mouse or me extremely dangerous. But not for you. What chance would a cat have against the likes of you two?” The crow finished off its appeal to their manliness and closed its beak. There was nothing left to say.

  The boys looked at one another, as opposed to walking off, and the crow took this as a step in the right direction. Its whole life was hanging on a hook before its very eyes. If the boys turned away, its fate was sealed.

  And as was becoming their habit, no words passed between the boys. The Glance only intensified, and when they finally turned their eyes back to the bird, the decision was still not clear. “Okay, here's the thing,” Connor said. “We'll go in there and look around, even if we don't know what we're looking for. But this is no joke: we have to be home before the streetlights come on. That's just straight-up fact.”

  The crow nodded its head vigorously. “Yes, yes, yes!” it said. “It should be no problem. Of course, you were aware of the time knot on the way over?” A nod from both. “Good, good. Just so you know, not much real time has passed since you left the tree house. I'll work up another one soon, but I didn't think you'd want to ramble around inside the Church with it so quiet and all. I know it's not the most welcoming place...”

  “Uh huh,” Ian replied, switching his gaze from the bird back to the brooding Church. “I'm just glad it's daylight. I wouldn't be caught dead here at night.”

  “Oh yes, and I'll do my very best to keep it that way,” the bird said.

  Ian leveled his eyes back on the bird. “So you really have no idea what we're looking for.”

  “Sadly no.”

  “Well,” Ian said and whistled. “There's no reason to waste any more time lollygaggin around here.” Without another word the boys turned and struck out for the ruin.

  “Be careful, boys,” the bird whispered to their backs.

  It wasn't that hard crossing the overgrown clearing if you didn't mind the vines, but the ominous, black stone facade moldering away in this shadowed light was anything but welcoming. The crumbling wreck seemed to rear up before their eyes, home now to God only knew what.

  The remains of another tree rotted wetly in the thick blades of crabgrass that punched up through the ground, near the broken archway that held what was left of the doors. When Ian kicked at the porous, barkless hide, his foot simply broke straight into the spongy interior. “Man, even the trees here are ghosts...” he whispered. Connor made no show that he'd heard. He simply stepped over the log and crept carefully up to the doorway. There was only darkness within. He turned to his friend.

  “You still got the flashlight?”

  “Yeah,” Ian replied. He pulled it out and stepped up to the doorway. He clicked it on, shined it in through the broken archway. The place was a shambles. Most of the roof had caved in and taken the pews with it. Broken, scattered pieces of lumber and furniture were everywhere, coated in dust, cobwebs, leaves and broken branches, bits of fragmented stained-glass, and a blanket of mildew that breathed out through the archway like the dead breath of a mummy.

  But at least nothing was moving.

  Ian squeezed Connor's shoulder. “Doan forget about that cat,” he said.

  “Don't worry. It's right here!” he said, touching his temple with a forefinger.

  They pressed in through the doorway.

  The tree from the outside was but a shade of itself in the collapsed room. Only in here could one truly see the effects of the sickness. Many huge, gnarled branches were completely bare of leaves, and some of the older ones had broken away entirely, adding to the clutter on the floor. Connor trained the light along several of the larger, healthier-looking limbs, working backward until finally finding the colossal trunk, now completely choking what had been the pulpit and what remained of the choir loft.

  “It's so big...” Ian mused into the swirling, mildewed air.

  “Yeah, I've never seen anything like it.”

  “So...”

  “Yeah?”

  “You see anything looks important?”

  “How would I know?” Connor said. He trained the powerful flashlight beam around in an arc, cutting a wide swath in the huge darkness around them. Rubble filled every niche, had blown into every corner. To the left of the collapsed pulpit, underneath the only balcony that looked like it would survive the next storm, another darkness yawned out of the shadows. They both knew what that must hold. The beam remained frozen on the smaller, more lethal darkness. “Guess we better check it out,” Ian said miserably.

  Connor nodded, all the while squinting hard into the darkness that waited for them. The route to the back wall was no easy go. A lichen-wormed branch had fallen, smashing several rows of pews to broken slats and sawdust, its many fingerling branches making a climb through them near impossible. They moved closer, first sloughing through a foul puddle of bubbly water almost ankle deep near one end until another drift of broken planks afforded them a makeshift platform toward the far end near the wall.

  It was then they saw the scattering of hair.

  Connor trained the beam as Ian squatted down, breaking loose a rotted branch. He poked it into the hairy mass and peeled it off the wet wood like old newspaper scraped from a garage floor. He held it into the light.

  Cat hair.

  “So...” Ian said, dropping the stick. “We should be pretty close.”

  A ruffling flutter on the wind gave both boys pause. They turned simultaneously, looking up. Through the tattered ceiling of branches, leaves, and broken walls, they still had a pretty clear view outside into the half-gloom. And if you put a little imagination into play, it really was not so hard to imagine where the window had once been, set firmly into the wall several yards above the last row of balcony seats. Through this opening they could see the crow, far out and above them in the uppermost reaches of a magnificent red oak. How they
'd even heard it at all was an even bigger mystery. Connor was the first to speak. “Watchin' us through the window,” he said.

  Before Ian could reply a rush of reeking wind blew through. Clearly coming from the deeper darkness where the door waited. They could just see it from here, they would have no trouble reaching it now.

  And that is when they saw it.

  A vague light began to build within the darkness. A vague, green light. It seemed to be coming on, getting brighter, pulsing slightly and taking on substance. Closing on them from the tunnels, its odd shape defined by the entrance through which it came. It was obvious that at least a little of the door remained. Of course it was a rotted mess, but the metal frame still feebly managed to hold what was left of the wood together. But it would pose no obstacle. Long, zig-zagging cracks yawned away from the steel support and through every seam.

  The eldritch light settled just inside the doorway and thin drifts of green fog spilled out across the floor, soon covering the boys' ankles and continuing on. “Just like it said,” Connor recalled dryly. Ian said nothing. He simply rummaged around in a nearby pile of broken lumber and pulled free a short length of wood in a rough shape of a chair leg. He handed it across to his friend who took it without comment, staring past the broken door into the tunnels beyond. It took no more than a minute to secure another weapon, this one much like the first.

  And so armed, the boys moved forward. Into the tunnels where the light waited.

  “Do ya hear it?” Connor whispered.

  “What?”

  “Water's not dripping anymore. No sound. We're inside another time knot.” He turned his eyes down. “Look at the flashlight,” he said. Ian looked. The beam was fragmented to particles, as if a snowstorm of ice shavings had gathered in the mildewed air. Everything sparkling green, but no real substance. The ice-like shavings simply vanished a short ways ahead as if they'd never really existed in the first place. “Well that sucks,” Ian said. Connor nodded grimly and flicked the switch to Off but the pattern of light remained fixed in place, disengaged now from its maker.

  “What are we getting' ourselves into?” Connor asked aloud for the first time, though he'd asked this same question to himself a least a hundred other times. Ian stepped up to clear the rest of the way to the door. It took exactly two swings.

  Chapter 24: Following the Mist

  It was just as the crow had said, there was no mistaking the tunnels snaking away from the back wall. Ian cleared the dust from his eyes as Connor edged forward, but went down hard on his butt, slipping in the thin layer of scum that coated the smooth tiles. He was back on his feet in an instant, his pants even muddier and a good deal wetter than they'd been after the Buffalo Wallow Trail. “Man, be careful,” he said. “The floor's a mess!” He scraped away some of the muck and wiped it on the wall next to him. It didn't hold on the slick, sweating surface and plopped soundlessly back to the floor. Ian stepped carefully through the doorway and stood next to his friend, holding the club vigilant at his side. The mist had receded into the closest dank corridor. “I doan like this,” he said, unable to hide the tremor in his voice.

  “Yeah, me neither. But we can't go back now. It's just like the crow said. We really must be its last chance.”

  “Uh huh,” Ian said. “Lucky us.”

  The corridor stretched back about ten feet and made an abrupt left. The walls here were much moldier than inside the Church, and it was suddenly chillier too. Everything was wet, but the worst was the silence of the time knot which made the place even more tiny and claustrophobic. The green mist backed away and around the corner, leaving behind only a faint glow. “Let's go,” Connor said, starting forward with Ian at his heels, glancing back into the darkness every few seconds to assure himself that no one or nothing was coming up from behind.

  “Doan forget about that cat,” Ian said again.

  “That's all I'm thinking about.”

  The first little bit wasn't so bad, even though the descending, crumbling stairway leading down into the stifling darkness was enough to curl your hair. They found the half-lit corridor they next entered roughly the same size as the entrance from the Church and in fairly good repair. However, there was a good deal of mud and water on the floor, so you had to be extra careful moving along. The real danger, it seemed, hung above their heads. Bricks littered the corridor everywhere, having fallen from the ceiling or rounded walls years or perhaps minutes before. There were probably many more ready to let loose, and the boys hoped the stasis of the time knot would keep them from being knocked on the head.

  The mist led them down a short succession of like caverns, all of them muddy and saturated with mold but none in serious disrepair. They had even begun to feel an unwarranted streak of bravery when they happened upon another, more forbidding, corridor just a ways beyond. Both boys blinked at one another in dismay.

  This tunnel's ceiling had sagged and finally collapsed to half its original size. “Okay, this is not good,” Ian croaked. Connor gulped and continued to stare. If they were lucky they wouldn't have to crawl but they would have to walk doubled over. And the mist wasn't giving them much of a chance at consideration either. It leaked easily away into the smaller tunnel, leaving the remaining darkness to clutch tightly around the boys. They already knew the flashlight was useless, the time knot had canceled its influence. But there was no turning back. As before in the forest, there had been too many twists and turns to attempt it.

  They were as trapped as the crow had been, now.

  And the mist wasn't waiting.

  They ducked down and charged on, neither willing to let the eldritch glow get too far ahead. The idea of being cut off and blind down here lost in Time and darkness, below the earth, held a terror they had not truly faced before. Why, it could be years until someone found them, if ever. They surged ahead.

  It didn't take long for the tunnel to widen out again, but even so, their situation hardly improved. The section even on the “good” side of the cave-in was by far some of the worst they'd seen. And again, it was getting colder. Connor rubbed his wet pant legs vigorously.

  The glow continued along its way.

  The walls were completely black now, the bricks swollen with nests of spongy mold and moss. Insects of all colors and curious long-legged spiders were frozen in masses, jello-strands of clear liquid streaming from ceiling to ground. There were no tiles here at all. The corridor was no more than a cave, sliding along underground to God only knew where. They gripped their clubs tighter and continued.

  Switching back and forth between steadily worsening corridors, they followed the weird light. There was no way to tell how far they'd come, or even how long they'd been down. Claustrophobia was worse too. The corridors never got any bigger and each additional branch seemed intent upon squeezing tighter still. The construction down this deep also became suspect. Soon there were no bricks at all above their head, only occasional cypress-beam supports that had weakened over the long haul of years, their lengths sway-backed from the weight pressing down from above. And everywhere remained the intense penetrating silence of the time knot.

  The mist remained well out in front, never speeding away so that the boys were racing ahead dangerously, but then again, not slowing down much either. It seemed resolved to a purpose the boys would be forced to face, all other choices having long since fallen by the wayside. Only once during this journey did they actually come to a complete halt, staring wildly about as the mist continued on its unerring course. This was when they broke from the confines of one filthy corridor, suddenly surrounded on all sides by a strangeness neither could put his finger on. They pulled together instinctively and ducked their heads as if half-expecting a blow. Then they raised their eyes and their mouths dropped open.

  A chamber loomed above them.

  The glowing mist poured through this weird, sprawling place, even though the ceiling was lost high above their heads in a darkness not even the glow could penetrate. And even though the walls peeled
around in a vast circle, the room's diameter was simply unbelievable. No one had built this chamber. That was clear. The ragged walls were testament enough. No, this had been naturally, or more likely, supernaturally, formed. Its sheer scope of height and width was unnerving even in the half-light of the eerie glow. No longer was there the pressing doom of claustrophobia lurking close around their bodies, now there was just a sense of vastness all around them. Of exposure.

  But further exploration was not to be had since already the mist ducked into another tunnel across the way and was gradually sucking its light from the chamber. The boys had been standing still for too long. The nightmare image of them lost in this subterranean darkness returned. “Come on man! Let's go!” Ian shouted. Forgetting about the pot-holed floor, they raced toward the light, terrified of losing it now, and thankfully, finding it finally pausing like an impatient dog waiting for its master to catch up.

  What they found when they got there was hardly welcoming. Inside this new branch the walls and ceiling had totally collapsed. They would have to crawl. And from the looks of it, a fair amount of digging might be in the bargain too. A creeping fear made its way through them like a venomous spider searching out a nest of birds. “Oh...no,” Ian said. They bent to their knees in the muck and slime that filmed the ground. The bad spot looked to be no more than twenty feet or so, and the mist was waiting in what appeared to be a more substantial cavern just on the other side. “Looks like it just caved in around here,” Ian observed. “If we can just make it through--”

  “We'll what?” Connor asked. “Be in a bigger passage on the other side? So what.”

  “We doan have a choice.”

  “Right. So...who's first?”

  “You're the oldest,” Ian replied, only managing a tight, strained grin in the darkness.

  “I knew you were gonna say that,” Connor said, backing out of the jagged mouth of the tunnel and standing up. Then, without another word, he wrenched the flashlight down, breaking the grip the beam of light had on it. It was made out of steel, one of the big, heavy-duty types. In a pinch it just might come in handy for digging. Or at least prying. The cave-in looked big enough to squeeze through, but then again...