Chapter 32
Adam isn’t back by the next morning. He’s not there when I get home from work, either. Neither is Nadia, of course.
I text my sisters. Hey, what are you up to? Does anyone want to grab dinner tonight?
Teal: I’m so sorry but I can’t. I got dehydrated last night at the opening and woke up with a gnarly migraine.
Sage: Oak is cutting his first tooth. He was up more than half the night. I’m going to collapse as soon as Tenn gets home from work. How about tomorrow?
We make tentative plans and then I sit down at the kitchen table, wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do with myself tonight.
I’m aware I’m experiencing my first heartbreak ever.
According to the series I like to watch, that means I should go to the store and get a bunch of chips and ice cream and veg out while eating my feelings.
But the thing is…I woke up feeling kind of numb.
I don’t have access to the feelings I should be eating.
So food right now, beyond what I need to get my stomach to stop growling, it just doesn’t seem appealing.
I bury my face in my hands and wonder if a Tylenol PM would be a good plan, just to go to sleep far earlier than normal so I won’t have to deal with this restlessness, when I lift my head and blink at the first thing that I see.
It’s the key holder mounted on the side of the cabinet, right next to the entrance into the living room.
It’s old as hell, been there since I could remember, which means it might’ve been there when Nadia bought this house decades ago.
I stand up to examine it, because something about this is bothering me. And I can’t figure out why.
It comes to me when I see a sticky note next to a collection of keys on a ring hanging on the rightmost hook. Return to Mother Michelle ASAP.
I nod. These are the keys Nadia borrowed from the church for the summer festival. Clearly she’s pretty delayed in returning them to the nun who wanted her to have them for the event, in case someone got locked out somewhere.
Which means I know how to properly distract myself now.
It doesn’t take me long to find the director of education’s office.
Almost all the buildings around St. Theresa’s are open, even this late in the evening.
There’s choir practice happening in the sanctuary.
Bible study in some of the classrooms Nadia used to force me to teach Sunday school to little kids in as a teenager.
The director’s office is hidden behind two large rooms. One was where we used to eat Thanksgiving dinner with other churchy kids while Nadia did churchy things with their churchy parents.
The other was where youth group used to meet up and eat pizza after evening Mass every Sunday.
I glance in the big trash can on my way through the room, and yup, it’s got some empty Papa John’s boxes stuffed into the bottom. Very little has changed around here.
The director’s office is locked. I go through the keys on the key ring, and it only takes three to pop the door open.
I close and lock the door behind me, and then I am alone in the quiet room.
There are two desks wedged in here, between a number of bookshelves filled with Bibles and other religious books.
Sage said this was where the strange room was.
The one that might answer all my burning questions about the cult that may or may not have met up here for literal decades.
I feel a curl of glee around my belly. Whatever is going on, this is working. I’m barely thinking about the way Adam ripped my heart out and stomped on it last night. It only took committing several crimes, is all.
It takes me a minute to find the door. The room being dark doesn’t help, but I skim my hands on the wall until I find a small, silver knob.
From there I make out the door edges. They’re very tight, and both the door and the wall are covered in busy wallpaper featuring piles of books, cups of coffee, and apples in a pattern over a deep green background.
Makes me think it was chosen intentionally, to draw the eye away from secret cult entrances.
Actually, who am I kidding? That’s exactly what happened.
Everything here is intentional, from the removing of key architectural plans in the old book still on my work desk to the wallpaper choice in here.
I slide the keys in, one by one, and it is the smallest, most ornate one—decorated in carved swirls—that fits.
As soon as I turn the key, the door eases open without a sound.
I have to bend down to peek inside. A smell of earth and moss comes up my way, along with thick humidity.
I use my cell phone flashlight and face down into the dark.
Well. It’s a good thing I didn’t just march through.
Because it’s nothing but stairs as far as the light can reach, made of stone and covered in Hooker’s green lichen.
I’d have fallen right onto my face and smashed a cheekbone open, or worse.
Someone grabs the office doorknob behind me and I gasp, leap onto one of the stair steps, and shut the secret door behind me just as the office door swings open.
My door locks. It seems to echo all around me, and down into the staircase, with a final sort of dread.
I hold my breath, waiting for someone to throw this door open and demand to know what the hell I’m doing.
But I hear next to nothing. Footfalls, maybe.
Whoever’s in the office isn’t paying much attention to their surroundings.
Which, good. Means I can make my way down the stairs now without worrying about being chased.
And that’s exactly what I do.
There is no rail to hold, so I have my left hand clutching my phone, holding the light up, and my right one using the wall for leverage.
Because these stairs are not flat, or even stable.
One of them has a crack and wobbles under my feet.
I shudder when I imagine what on earth could be beneath that I might fall toward if this whole thing broke apart on my next step.
An underground river? A den of lions? It’s only now that I begin to get a sense that what I’m doing might not exactly be the fun sort of distraction, after all.
I might well encounter something straight from a horror film.
Finally, I reach the end of the steps and look around.
I’m in a room. I think. My iPhone light isn’t exactly going too far in the pitch black.
I look along the stone walls with my lamp and my hands, and finally I find a switch.
I hesitate for a moment, my hand hovering above it.
What if clicking it on means some alert goes off somewhere? What if it sets off a trap?
Then I remember my heartbreak. Adam’s gone. My entire body remembers the pain of everything, and it resounds deeply, as though the hurt were a bell someone rang through my cells, and so I flip the switch as quickly as I can.
An enormous light fixture set in the middle of the low ceiling goes on. It’s huge and long with frosted glass set into windowlike panes around the lamps inside. And I can see everything.
It’s not much. The room is empty. The walls and the ground are made of the same stones, large and curvy.
The beach walk downtown is cobblestone, and these remind me of that, except they’re discolored and porous.
From age, maybe. I get the feeling that this place is really old, older than the church above me, even.
Behind me are the stairs, and in front of me is what appears to be a dark hallway. I slowly make my way to its entrance, my footfalls oddly soundless against the stone. I glance down at the threshold.
I guess the light switch worked here, too, because lightly glowing fixtures illuminate the way.
The hallway is narrow, much tighter than I’d like.
Since returning from the woods, I am much more claustrophobic than before.
But the only alternative is feeling what it’s like to have a heart that’s just been ripped to shreds and then lit on fire. So I keep going.
It’s only about thirty or forty feet when I find the end of the hallway. There’s a weird setup here, and I glance around, looking for a door or anything like an entryway elsewhere. But there isn’t any.
So I focus on the…thing in front of me. The light here is so dim, I can’t really see the details. But I can hear it. Whatever it is, it involves water.
I angle my phone torch at it and blink. It’s…
it’s a fountain. A wide, cement bowl comes right out of the wall, and water is bubbling up into it, creating constant, gentle waves.
I look underneath, expecting to see some piping, but there isn’t anything like that.
It’s just the continuation of the stone wall meeting the stone floor, all the same type of stones that were in the one circular room behind me.
Something glimmers at the edge of the fountain’s bowl and I bend closer, bringing the light with me.
It’s…well. Piles of coins. Some American currency, but lots not.
And tiny little pieces of paper, folded up into impossibly small squares.
And…beads. Some made of wood, some of what might be semiprecious stones.
There are also what look like seeds. Tiny black round seeds and enormous purple beans. Sage would know what these are.
I grab my phone to send a text, but curse when I realize that, unsurprisingly, I have absolutely no service down here.
Considering it wasn’t exactly early when I broke into the director of education’s office, I realize I need to head back as soon as I get some photos of this fountain—which is also an altar, I’m realizing—as well as the round room.
I sit down to get a detail of the bottom of the bowl when I accidentally angle my phone too high and freeze.
There’s something etched into the wall, high above the fountain. I jump up to stand on my tiptoes and hold my phone above my head, high.
There Is No Such Thing as Sin.
That’s what’s carved right into the rock in loopy all-caps.
Goose bumps prickle over my skin. Despite the message being pretty peaceful and nonthreatening, I get the feeling that I don’t actually belong here.
Not just the breaking-and-entering feeling.
But there’s a primal knowing that comes over me, about my intrusion.
Something primordial. I don’t belong. This is a cult and I haven’t been initiated.
Everything I am seeing, I haven’t earned the right to see it.
And what’s going to happen to me if they—whoever they are, whoever keeps up this place and leaves coins and seeds on the altar here—find out? I don’t want to know, actually.
I turn around and go back the way I came, through the narrow hallway, through the big, round stone room, and I click the lights off as I reach the staircase.
I take a big sigh as I think about how far I’ve come and how far that means the incline is.
I’m not Teal. I don’t spend my free time running up and down hills. Nevertheless, I begin the climb.
It takes longer, not just because it’s a much more difficult workout, but because I keep banging my toes against stone. And they hurt, even through the leather of my shoes.
When I finally reach the top, I sit down, catch my breath, and reach for the keys in my bag.
Only they’re not there.
I try to open the door, wincing because I’m pretty sure it locked behind me earlier. And yup, it’s definitely sealed as all hell. I try and shake it, and even give it a good kick, but it’s not going anywhere.
I look closely at the knob of the door and realize there isn’t even a keyhole. Even if I’d had the keys, I wouldn’t be going anywhere.
And now I want to kick myself for not thinking this through at all.
It’s Adam’s fault. It’s definitely Adam’s fault for breaking my heart and forcing me to break into an ancient cult gathering space under the big Catholic church.
I hold my phone against the door, hoping it picks up service, but it remains completely disconnected from the outside world. No matter where I move it, the little bars at the top right corner refuse to light up.
I sigh and lean back against the cold stone wall of the step I’m sitting on. It being Adam’s fault doesn’t change the fact that I’m locked in and not a single soul knows where I am.
Instead of running from my heartache, I have found myself stuck in the dark with no choice but to feel it.
Finally, I begin to cry.