Chapter 20 - The Excavation
The sky over the former Hartwell Estate was bruised purple and heavy with approaching storm clouds.
The main mansion was a hollowed skeleton now. Bulldozers, backhoes, and pallets of flagstone littered the perimeter where county contractors were turning the bloody grounds into a manicured city park. The high perimeter chain-link fence bore signs reading: *MUNICIPAL RESTORATION PROJECT — NO TRESPASSING.*
I didn't care about trespassing.
I cut through the rusted rear chain-link with a pair of bolt cutters. I wore heavy steel-toed work boots, carried a heavy-duty rotary hammer drill, a crowbar, and an industrial halogen lantern in a canvas duffle bag. In my waistband, my Glock 19 felt cold and reassuring against my spine.
The old cellar entrance had been sealed with a three-foot-thick temporary slab of reinforced concrete to prevent visitors from wandering down into the dangerous tunnels.
I hauled the hammer drill to the slab. The motor screamed in the quiet evening air, chewing into the curing concrete with vicious, rattling vibrations. Dust billowed around me, stinging my eyes, filling my lungs with the dry, alkaline taste of crushed limestone.
It took forty-five minutes of brutal, back-breaking labor to fracture the perimeter seal. I wedged the heavy crowbar into the fractured fissure, put my entire body weight into the lever, and hauled back.
With a deep, grinding groan that sounded like a dying beast, the concrete slab shifted and collapsed into the abyss below.
A blast of freezing, stagnant air rushed up out of the hole.
It smelled of damp soil, ozone, and rotting copper.
I lowered the halogen lantern into the darkness. The beam cut through decades of dust. Ten years ago, Elena had sat in the upper chamber. But now, looking down through the breached floor, I saw what the construction crews had missed: a square cast-iron hatch, bolted shut with heavy marine rivets, embedded deep in the bedrock beneath the cistern floor.
And the rivets had been freshly sheared off.
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The hatch was standing ajar. A modern, braided climbing rope was tied to an overhead rusted pipe, disappearing straight down into the black heart of the earth.
Someone was down there right now.
