Yes, there was a bare electric light bulb hanging from the deteriorating ceiling. Yes, it glared forth a naked illumination, powered perhaps by some old generator left behind to rot. And, yes, it lighted the underground room for the first few yards that Amelia could see, as she held her breath and tried to work up enough gumption to get her legs to move forward. But she couldn't see beyond the light.
An improbable scene lay before her.
An antique barber shop. Underground. Chairs and all.
It was all revealed for the first time in who knew how many decades, by the bare light, to her astonished eyes.
The walls of the barber shop in the tunnel had been plastered, once upon a time, but she wouldn't want to touch the slime that glistened on them now. Amelia couldn't tell what color they might have been painted when the underground chambers were constructed seventy-five years ago. Fifty years before she was even born. She knew there wasn't merely this tiny barber shop but also a mercantile store, a church, and a town hall. Amelia felt there was no way she could work up the nerve to explore all of it, not now, not ever.
The decaying wood floor revealed earth beneath her feet.
It had all been a clever idea, a cool commercial and civic venue dreamed up by the citizens of Spale, Kansas, population 956 men, women, and children in the year 1922.
It's still as cool as a grave
, Amelia thought as she stood shivering in the doorway.
Just emptier
. Unless she counted herself, which in that context she didn't want to. The decrepit roads and buildings above her head were a ghost town now, with all the former residents fled to cemeteries or to other destinies.
In seventy-five years, everything made by the hand of man in Spale had changed. Not much in nature had, Amelia guessed. She imagined that the heavy heat of Indian summer hung as heavily on this day as it had all those many days ago. The humidity was probably just as high as it had ever been, and the falling leaves were no doubt just as golden as they used to be. They had escaped the heat and mosquitoes of their Kansas summers by coming down here to do their business and say their communal prayers, and they'd used it to escape cyclones and bitter winter days, as well. Thirty-two couples were married in the underground chapel. Countless whiskers were shaved in the barber shop.
Amelia knew all those facts and more.
What she didn't know was what lay in the darkness ahead of her.
At least there was light. She believed she could stand almost anything as long as there was even a glimmer of light. It was total darkness she feared more than anything on earth.
Amelia stepped reluctantly forward, until she could rest her left hand on the filigreed silver arm of the closest barber's chair. There was a badly cracked and distorted mirror behind it. She looked and saw herself. As if she were a distant observer, Amelia took in her own widened brown eyes, the disarray of her short brown, curly hair, the sweat stains on her red T-shirt, and the streaks of dirt on her jeans, and she thought,
I look scared
. Unnerved by the visual evidence of her fear, Amelia glanced away and down into the further darkness at the other end of the shop. As dim shapes revealed themselves, she realized there was a third barber chair and that someone was seated in it.
"Oh, there you are!" she exclaimed.
Several events seemed to happen at once.
Close enough now to the last chair to see who was in it, Amelia suddenly felt a deep, deep coldness. The man in the chair was dead. At the sight of his wide-eyed face, she was pierced by such unexpected sorrow that it temporarily submerged her shock.
Briefly lifting her gaze to a mirror behind the third chair, she then saw another man's face appear in the doorway behind her, and she— gratefully— recognized that man, too.
"Look!" she cried, whirling to face him. "Oh, look at what's happened—"
But instead of walking into the room to join her, he reached in with one hand. He jerked with fierce quickness on the chain attached to the light fixture. The chain broke off as the light went out.
"No! Oh, please, no!"
Pitched into total darkness, underneath the town of Spale, Amelia couldn't see the door close. But she could hear it slam with a dirt-muffled thud, and she heard the awful sound of the long wooden bar being thrown across it.
And she could hear her own screaming.
My God, what a fool she'd been.
* * *
Tuesday, September 16
"Ghost towns of
Kansas
?"
In New York City, in the office of the managing editor of
American Times
, Amelia Blaney had slapped the palm of her left hand against the side of her head, as if to clear her ears. The spontaneous gesture was meant to indicate, humorously, that— surely— she had misunderstood her boss. It was not possible, her facial expression suggested, that she had heard him correctly.
One side of Dan Hale's thin mouth lifted in wry acknowledgment of her humor, but he didn't say, "Just kidding." Instead, he inquired, bitingly, "Is it the word
ghost, town
, or
Kansas
that gives you trouble, Amelia?"
She was merely young, not stupid. She knew that Dan himself was originally from the state. Maybe he hated it; maybe he loved it. Already regretting her comic miming, Amelia trod carefully with her next words.
"No doubt," she said tactfully, "Kansas is beautiful in September. All that golden… wheat."
"It's not a wheat state."
"It's not? Corn, then."
"Corn is green in the fields."
Amelia grasped the edge of her chair to keep from throwing up her hands.
Okay!
she thought in exasperated surrender.
Whatever!
She decided to skip over Kansas altogether and cut to the truth.
"I'm afraid of the dark," she admitted.
She said it lightly, not really expecting her boss to believe her, much less to feel sympathy and to change his mind. But it was embarrassingly true. Ever since she was a small child, Amelia had been nearly pathologically afraid of the dark. As much as a claustrophobic hates closets, as much as an agoraphobic is terrified of open spaces, Amelia was scared of the dark. She felt panicky and sick on the rare occasions when she got caught without sunlight, nightlight, flashlight, or headlight. She didn't know why, hadn't even been able to tell a shrink what it was— exactly— that she was scared was going to "get" her in the dark. She only knew the fear was excruciatingly real, and only as far away as the next sunset.
Sure enough, the characteristic little curve appeared at the side of Dan Hale's mouth again. She could see that he thought she was joking. Nearly everybody did, including her last boyfriend, who had finally walked out, angrily accusing her of ignoring his needs because he couldn't sleep with a light on in the bedroom. She couldn't sleep without it. She had cried when he left, but the truth was that she was less afraid of being alone than she was of the dark.
In one scathing word, Dan summed up his reaction: "So?"
Amelia tried one last time, though she knew that no reporter with only six months of job experience between this moment and journalism school could afford to reject an assignment, no matter if it turned her knees to custard and made her feel queasy. Dan Hale could have told her to interview a serial killer, and she might not have trembled, but this— this hit her where she knew she had a gaping hole in her courage.
"So," she explained, "that's where ghosts live. In the dark."
Amelia smiled tentatively at her boss, knowing it must look more like a grimace. A skeleton's grin.
He didn't appear to notice. In fact, he next uttered what at first sounded to Amelia like a total non sequitur.
"You're an animal nut, right?"
Startled at the change of subject from ghosts to animals and taken aback at his phrasing, Amelia replied with a cautious, "Yes?" She was surprised that Dan knew of her passion for animals. She supposed it must show on her college transcript that she had had a brief flirtation with veterinary medicine, before switching to J school. The transcript would not, she hoped, betray how disastrous and tragic the outcome of that flirtation had been. Amelia had ghosts of her own that she would have hated for any reporter, such as herself, to investigate.
"I thought so," Dan said. His voice was brisk now, and she knew it was a done deal. She was going to Kansas. He said, "That's why I've made reservations for you at the Serengeti Bed and Breakfast."
Amelia nearly whacked the side of her head again. Incredulously, she said, "The
what?
"
"It's a bed-and-breakfast inn on the grounds of an exotic animal farm," he told her, which only increased her astonishment. "Camels, llamas, giraffes. Ostriches, elks, kangaroos. It's all owned by a vet."
"Now,
there's
a story," she murmured, then flushed with embarrassment because she'd said it loud enough for him to hear. But good grief! She couldn't keep herself from reacting. An exotic animal farm? In Kansas? Could such a thing be true? And if so, would she get to see these animals, maybe even touch them? As unlikely as it seemed, Amelia began to feel excited about the assignment.
"No." Her boss's tone was annoyed, sarcastic. "That's
not
the story. Ghost towns are your story, remember that."
His blunt words slapped her back to earth, and to her fears.
The dark honestly frightened Amelia, down in a deep, shadowy cave in her soul. But the man seated across from her scared her in a more immediate and direct place: her pocketbook. She had student loans to pay off. She was only a beginner. She couldn't afford to beg off just because an assignment unnerved her. Amelia didn't have to look at the crowded walls of Dan's office to recall how pivotal this man's opinion could be, to her, to the city, to the world.
Those walls held awards and photographs, personally and admiringly autographed, of Dan Hale with so many heads of state that Amelia was hard pressed to identify all of them by name and country. He might be only thirty-six years old, but already he was managing editor of one of the four most influential weekly newsmagazines in the world. He was a man whose opinion, it was rumored, could end a war or start one.
Amelia was, in the old-fashioned parlance of her adopted trade, only a cub reporter. She doubted she would even get to compose any of the eventual story; more likely, she would type up her notes and turn it all over to a senior writer. Dan was sending her out as a researcher, that was all. But it was really something, to receive an assignment personally from the man himself.
If I'm a cub,
she said to herself, as all these thoughts flashed through her mind,
then he's a bear
. It was an animal he resembled: tall, overweight, with a small-eyed, jowly face and a deceptive shambling gait that disguised a legendary ability to attack fools, in print and in the newsroom, viciously and without warning.
She felt flattered, even honored, by his interest in her.
There was nothing remotely romantic or sexual about it, Amelia felt sure. Dan Hale gave no sign that he even noticed Amelia in that way, and that was a relief to her. She liked very much meeting "brain to brain," as it were, editor to reporter. Amelia had been so saddened by her last failed love that she still tensed when a man showed any attraction to her. Compliments made her feel uncomfortable. She didn't want love, she had decided, it was work she needed, only work.
Thank God, she thought, that this interview between her and the legend was strictly professional. For some reason, this feared and respected journalist seemed to think that Amelia Blaney was worth his personal mentoring. Amelia sat up straighter and tried to swallow her doubts about the assignment. She concentrated instead on pleasing this difficult boss and reminded herself of how much she loved animals. He was doing her many favors with this assignment. She would try to appreciate it and live up to it.
Even if it meant ghost towns in Kansas.
He handed her airplane tickets and a highway map of Kansas, with certain town names circled in red ink. Then he impatiently dismissed her from his office. Only when she was standing outside his office, feeling rather breathless, did Amelia realize that he hadn't given her a single clue to
why
this assignment was made or what in the world she was supposed to be looking for.
She turned around, intending to barge back in and ask him.
But he was already on the phone, his back turned toward his window.
When she asked an older reporter about it, the woman advised her, "Don't expect explanations. Sometimes he never says why he wants you to do a story. That might prejudice your investigations. You're supposed to dig up the facts and figure out for yourself what the real story is." The older reporter grinned at Amelia. "And heaven help you if it doesn't turn out to be what he knew it was all along."
Oh, God!
thought Amelia, feeling a terror that had nothing to do with the dark.
* * *
