Cemetery Dance

Chapter 70

Summoning allthe presence of mind he could muster, D'Agosta slowed his breathing and focused on his mission. He had to free Nora. Somehow, shifting focus away from being trapped helped calm him down. The problem wasn't so much that he was stuck, but that the walls were so slippery; he simply couldn't get a purchase, especially with only one good arm. He'd ruined his nails in a futile effort, but what he really needed was something sharp and strong that would bite into the walls and help pull him out.

Bite…

There, not six inches from his hand, was a human jawbone, sporting all its teeth. He squirmed desperately, just managing to move his good arm sufficiently to grasp the mandible. Then he twisted his body sideways and jammed the teeth of the jawbone into a crack in the roof of the niche; by simultaneously pulling and wriggling at the same time, he eventually managed to work himself free.

With enormous relief he crawled back out of the niche and stood up in the chamber, breathing heavily. Everything was silent. Apparently, the zombii and the hunting party had both fallen back to deal with the protesters.

He returned to the central passageway and cautiously used his lighter to examine its length. It ended in a cul — de — sac. There were other crude burial chambers to either side, excavated from the same heavy clay and shored up with timbers, but they looked nothing like the mortared stone walls in the video. Nothing he had seen so far, in fact, resembled that kind of construction — the very stone was different. He had to look elsewhere.

Retracing his steps, skirting the well, he found himself back in the area of the vaulted necropolis. Along the walls were many small iron doors that led into what were, apparently, family crypts; he investigated each in turn, but there was no sign of Nora.

With mounting frustration, he painstakingly retraced his steps by trial and error, ultimately returning to the central cryptorium. There he stood, trying to build a map of the cellars in his head, to mentally fill in the sections through which he'd moved half senseless. There were doors in all four directions; one led to the catacombs, another — he realized — to the dead — end passageway from which he'd recently emerged. That left two more to try.

He picked one at random and took it.

Again it opened into a tunnel. Immediately this one appeared to be more promising: the walls were of crude mortared stone. Not precisely like the stone in the video, but closer.

A foul stench wafted down this corridor. D'Agosta paused, flicking his lighter on briefly, trying to conserve its fuel. The passageway was filthy, the stones splattered with mud and oozing with mold and fungus, the floor giving way unpleasantly at his touch.

As he played the light around, from the darkness ahead he heard a faint muffled cry — short, high — pitched, and full of terror…

…Nora?

Holding the lighter before him, he sprinted down the corridor toward the sound.