Cemetery Dance

Chapter 50

Slowly she drifted in and out of dark dreams. She slept, half woke, slept again. At last, full consciousness returned. It was pitch — black and smelled of mold and wet stone. She lay there for a moment, confused. Then it all came back to her and she groaned in terror. Her hands groped damp straw over a cold concrete floor. When she tried to sit up, her head protested fiercely and she lay back down with a wave of nausea.

She struggled with an impulse to scream, to cry out, and mastered it. Once again, after a few moments, she made the effort to sit up — more slowly — and this time she succeeded. God, she felt weak. There was no light, nothing, just darkness. Her arm was sore where the IV had been, and there was no bandage covering the injection site.

The realization settled in that she'd been kidnapped from the hospital room. By whom? The man in the orderly's uniform had been a stranger. What had happened to the cop guarding her room?

She rose unsteadily to her feet. Holding her arms out, shuffling cautiously, she made her way forward until her hands touched something — a wet, clammy wall. She felt around it. It was constructed of rough, mortared stones, powdery with efflorescence. She must be in some kind of cellar.

She began feeling along the wall, shuffling her feet. The floor was bare and free of obstructions except for patches of straw. She reached a corner, continued on, counting the distance in foot — lengths. Ten feet more and she came to a niche, which she followed — hitting a door frame, and then a door. Wood. She felt up, then down. Wood, with iron bands and rivets.

The faintest gleam of light shined through a crack in the door. She plastered her eye to the crack, but the tongue — and — groove construction defied her attempts to see through it.

She raised her fist; hesitated; then brought it down hard on the door: once, twice. The door boomed and echoed. There was a long silence, and then the sound of footsteps approaching. She leaned her ear against the door to listen.

Quite suddenly, there was a scraping noise above her head. As she looked up, a sudden blinding light burst over her. Instinctively she covered her face and stepped back. She turned away, narrowing her eyes to slits. After a long moment she began to adjust to the dazzling light. She glanced back.

"Help me," she managed to croak.

There was no reply.

She swallowed. "What do you want?"

Still no reply. But there was a sound: a low, regular whir. She peered into the brilliance. Now she could make out a small rectangular slit, set high into the door. The light was coming from there. And there was something else: the lens of a video camera, fat and bulky, thrust through the slit and aimed directly at her.

"Who… are you?" she asked.

Abruptly, the lens was withdrawn. The whirring noise stopped. And a voice, low and silky, replied. "You won't live long enough for my name to make any difference."

And with that the light was extinguished, the slit closed heavily, and she was once more in darkness.