American Heroes Series - 03 - Purgatory (26 page)

Nash was already in the gap,
calmly inspecting it, as Alec helplessly lifted his shoulders. “I didn’t do
anything,” he insisted weakly. “I just touched the wall and this… this door
opened up.”

Mouth agape, Elliot went to stand
next to Nash, both of them looking at what was apparently a secret door.  The
tiny, narrow stairs were built into the wall, incorporating the space from
underneath the back stairway in the kitchen into its design.  Nash squatted
down to get a better look, trying to see what was at the bottom of the secret
stairs.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “A
tunnel.”

Elliot was leaning over him,
looking down into the darkness. “I wonder where it goes?”

Nash shrugged. “Under the house,
somewhere.”

“Could it have been part of some
underground railroad?” Elliot wanted to know.

Nash shook his head. “Not down
here,” he replied. “The Aurys owned slaves and weren’t part of any liberation
movement, I can promise you. I really have no idea what this is.”

Elliot looked up at the open
wall, at the tattered old wallpaper. “Whatever it is, they blocked it off when
they wallpapered this wall.  How old did the conservationist say this wallpaper
was? One hundred and fifty years?”

Nash looked thoughtful. “That
would put it around the 1860’s, right around the time of the Civil War,” he
said. “That’s really strange. Why would they block up something like this?”

“Maybe there’s a tomb down
there,” Alec suggested. “Maybe the undead are down there and they were blocking
them in.”

Penelope giggled as Elliot rolled
her eyes. “More zombies,” she muttered. “It’s always zombies with you.”

Alec up his hands in a creepy,
pseudo-zombie way. “You know how the movies are,” he teased. “Four ignorant
people go down there and get eaten by zombies who were blocked in by the
previous owners. We’re going to die, dude.”

Penelope laughed and even Nash
grinned as Elliot waved her son off. “Enough with the zombies, George Romero,”
she scolded lightly. Then she looked at Nash. “Do we go down there?”

Nash shrugged. “I don’t see why
not,” he said. “I’ll go down and take a look.”

Elliot was already leaving the
dining room, heading for the stairs. “Let me change my clothes,” she called to
him. “Don’t go without me.”

Nash heard her, tearing his gaze
away from the old stairs to see that she was already on the move. “Why don’t
you let me take a look first, darlin’?” he called after her. “Just to make sure
it’s safe?”

She was already upstairs. “No
way!”

Nash pursed his lips in
resignation, looking at Penelope and Alec. “I don’t suppose she’ll forgive me
if I go down there alone.”

Penelope shook her head
seriously. “You’ll be in big trouble. You don’t even know.”

Nash wriggled is eyebrows, the
corners of his mouth twitching with a smile.  He turned to Alec. “Do you have a
flashlight?”

Alec nodded and headed off into
the kitchen.  Nash sat there, peering down the stairs, his gaze drifting over
the door itself, trying to figure out what it must have been. In all his years,
he’d never even heard of a secret passage at Purgatory.  Maybe it was something
that was forgotten with time when the door was sealed off.  He seriously
wondered why it was sealed off.

He could hear Elliot coming back
down the stairs just about the time Alec returned from the kitchen with a
flashlight.  Dressed in jeans and a blue scoop-necked t-shirt, Elliot was
pulling her long hair back into a ponytail as she entered the dining room.  
Nash took the flashlight from Alec and shined it down the stairwell.

“Well,” he said after a moment.
“The stairs go down below the house. I can’t see much except a wet dirt floor.”

Elliot tried to peer over his
head. “Can you get down these stairs? They look really narrow.”

He nodded. “It’ll be a tight
squeeze, but I think I can make it.”

“Are you sure? It can’t be more
than a couple of feet wide.”

Nash wriggled his eyebrows.
“There’s only one way to find out.”

He stepped into the stairwell,
testing his weight on the ancient wooden slats, which groaned and creaked but
held. It was so narrow that Nash had to turn himself sideways, taking the
stairs extremely slowly and holding out a hand for Elliot as she followed. She
held on to him tightly as they descended the narrow steps.

The old walls were tight around
them, traditional walls with a mixture of moss, mud and deer or animal hair called
bousillage
slathered in between big cypress posts.  Elliot wasn’t
claustrophobic by nature but she felt squeezed as she followed Nash down the
stairs. She felt something bump her from behind, startled until she saw Alec.
He wanted to explore, too. Penelope remained in the dining room, gazing
anxiously down at them with the big black head of Wolfgang beside her.

“I remember reading somewhere
that cemeteries in Louisiana are above ground because of the high water table,”
she whispered, trying not to bump into the walls. “People down here don’t
really have basements for the same reason. Do you think this is a basement?”

Nash was nearly at the bottom of
the steps, all twenty one of them. He ducked his head to pull it under the
floor level of the house, which he would have smacked into had he not been
careful enough to squeeze below it. 

He set foot on the mud floor
that, upon inspection, had about an inch of water. He shined the flashlight
around the room, digesting the sights, smells and sounds of the completely dark
room. It smelled old and earthy, like mold, and had a horrible damp feeling
about it.  It was like a tomb.

The bright beam of the flashlight
fell on a big structure towards the northwest corner of the room and, for a
minute, Nash actually startled when he saw it.  He stared at it, hardly able to
believe his eyes.

“No, not a basement,” he
murmured. The flashlight began moving crazily about the room as he hunted
around, spying more great blocks of stone and realizing with shocking certainty
what they were.  “Not a basement at all.”

Elliot couldn’t see what he was
looking at because he was moving the flashlight around so fast. “What is it?”
she asked, clinging to the back of his shirt.

He didn’t want to tell her. God
help him, he really didn’t.  But he had to; it was her house, after all. She
had to know. Shining the flashlight on the original block he had spied when he
had first entered the area, he made his way over to it through the blackness. 
He could feel Elliot behind him, holding on to him tightly.

“Look,” he said softly.

Elliot emerged from behind him,
looking at the big block of carved stone. It was long and rectangular, lifted
off the ground by a pedestal made from the same grayish stone. Moss grew on the
stone, and other mold that gave it spots of different color. Elliot gazed at it
curiously, not really making the connection.

“What is it?” she asked.

Alec, behind her, had been doing
the same inspection, but to him, it was much more obvious what it was because
things like this existed more in his world than they did in hers. He saw them
in his video games, all of the time, and knew the object on sight. Before Nash
could answer her question, he burst forth with a reply.

“Zombies!”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Dude, I told you!”

Alec was excitedly pacing around
the kitchen while his mother, sister and Nash sat at the small breakfast table
that they had brought with them from California. The women had cups of tea in
their hands, looking rather started, as Nash sat next to Elliot, his hand on
her leg as she sipped at her tea. His concerned gaze moved between the women as
Alec wandered about, rather excited.

“Crypts,” Alec was excited and
smiling. “I told you this house had zombies in it. That room downstairs proves
it. It’s a burial crypt!”

Nash looked at Alec, who grinned
excitedly at him until Nash shook his head and gave him a ‘kill the enthusiasm’
expression.  Alec’s smile faded as he came to realize that his mother and
sister were perhaps not so excited that they had just discovered an underground
crypt, long sealed off, beneath the house. In fact, they looked rather
frightened and disturbed by it.

“But why would they bury them
under the house?” Elliot wanted to know. “I thought everyone was buried above
ground in Louisiana.”

Nash patted her leg. “Usually,
that’s true,” he said. “But those crypts down there all dated before the Civil
War, so who’s to say?”

“All your ancestors?  Did you
look on the crypts?”

“I did,” he replied. “Four crypts
and four ancestors – Paul-Michel Aury, Joseph Aury, Saturnine Aury and Felicity
Aury.”

“Who are they?”

“I’ll need to check with my dad,
but if my memory serves, those are the children of Louis-Michel and Sophie.”

Elliot gazed back at him with
wide eyes, digesting the information, before turning away and shuddering. “Oh,
my God,” she breathed. “I don’t know if I can live above a cemetery. I love
this house and everything about it, but that is sort of a deal-breaker.”

“I know why they’re there,” Alec
piped up. “Those people are your pirate ancestors buried down there and maybe
they buried the treasure down there, too, so no one could find it. Didn’t you
say there was a legend about buried treasure around here?”

Nash wasn’t really in the mood
for Alec’s theories, but as he thought on them, they made some sense.

“Sure,” he replied. “That might
actually make some sense as to why the entrance was sealed up. Maybe my
ancestors were trying to keep people from finding whatever was down there.”

“But we found it,” Elliot said
quietly, seriously. “No offense to your ancestors, Nash, but I really don’t
want to live above them. Can we relocate them to a more appropriate place? Not
underneath my house?”

He nodded, trying to keep her
calm. “I have no problem with it and I don’t think my parents will, either, but
you have to remember that those crypts down there are hundreds of years old.
The State of Louisiana might have something to say about relocating two hundred
year old crypts. They’re considered historical treasures indigenous to the
history of Louisiana so we need to tread carefully.”

They suddenly heard sniffling
sounds and turned to see Penelope wiping at her eyes. She was trying not to cry
and Elliot stood up and went over to her daughter, wrapping her arms around the
girl.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” she
asked softly.

Penelope wiped at her eyes. “I… I
don’t know,” she whispered. “I just don’t like… Mom, I really like our house
but I don’t want to live above bodies. It’s just gross and disturbing.”

Elliot looked at Nash, seeing
sympathy reflected in his eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked Penelope.

The girl shrugged. “I don’t
know,” she said. “Maybe… I don’t know, maybe I’m just tired. I don’t feel very
good and that crypt-thing is just really scary. I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it either,” Elliot
agreed. “Nash and I will figure out what to do. I don’t want you to worry,
okay? Besides, you have your bodyguard Wolfgang to take care of you. He’ll keep
the bad spirits away.”

Penelope looked down at the dog,
lying at her feet, and felt somewhat better. “That’s true,” she said.  Then she
set her tea down and stood up from the table. “I think I’m going to go lay down
for awhile.”

Wolfgang stood up the second
Penelope did, looking at her eagerly.  She called softly to the dog, who bolted
after her as she took the kitchen stairs up to the second floor. They could
hear the dog’s nails clicking on the wooden floors above their head. Elliot sat
down where her daughter had been seated, across from Nash, and sighed.

“I swear to you, this house has
been one adventure after another,” she said softly.

Nash smiled faintly at her. “Any
regrets?”

She looked at him, returning his
smile. “Not all,” she winked at him. “Still, I’m with Penny. That whole
crypt-thing is disturbing.”

Nash sat back in his chair,
scratching his head. “Well,” he said slowly, “I could make a suggestion, but
you’re not going to like it.”

“What?”

“That ya’ll move to my house
until Purgatory is restored and the crypts relocated.  It might make everyone
feel a lot better not living in such unsettling circumstances.”

To his surprise, she actually
considered it.  At least, she didn’t out-right shoot him down. As she opened
her mouth to reply, Alec interrupted.

“Mom, can I go back down there
and look around?” he asked eagerly. “I’ll be careful. Maybe I can see what else
is written on those crypts.”

Elliot didn’t look too keen on
the idea, looking to Nash for his opinion. Nash looked at Alec. “I think it’ll
be okay, but please be extremely careful. Don’t touch anything. Stuff down
there is centuries old and you just don’t know about them, or if something will
collapse. And watch where you step; even though there were no obvious exits or
windows or holes down there, there could be creatures down there, poisonous or
otherwise. I don’t want you to get hurt.”