They waited.

Andy sidled up to Matt. “You think she’s dead? I mean, was that her you found?” he asked in a stage whisper.

Matt shrugged. “No, not a hundred percent, but it kinda looked like a woman…sort of.”

“Sort of? What does that even mean – sort of?” Andy’s voice had gone up a notch, and Abrams briefly looked across to them before going back to work on his comms device.

Matt winced. “Andy, look…” Ah, fuck it, he thought. He’s a big boy, and this might get a lot worse yet. “Look, you remember Bill Anderson in the wall of the sinkhole? How we only found bits of him?”

Andy’s lips started to curl in distaste. Matt decided to pull back a bit on the details. “Well, we found something that might, and I mean might, have belonged to her.”

“She’s dead? Fucking hell. Drummond tore her apart?” Andy’s voice echoed.

Matt held up his hands. “Andy, we don’t know tha–”

“Hey!” Abrams shushed them as Hartogg stepped back into the room.

“Just more passage, but the decline is increasing to about twenty percent.” He looked at a large dial on his opposite wrist. “We’re already half a mile down.”

“Well, we’ve lost contact now – too deep.” Abrams looked at each of them. “Looks like we’re as good as it gets as far as the cavalry goes. So…” He nodded at the dark tunnel. “Only way is down.”

Hartogg grinned, and headed back into the tunnel.

They travelled on, ever deeper, once again through tunnels of brick, rock, ancient green stones, some wide, some train-tunnel sized.

Abrams stopped to shine his light around at the walls and ceiling. “Professor Kearns, the house above us…” He frowned as he stared at the tunnel walls. “Those old brownstones are usually about a hundred years old, but these tunnels…”

“The house is younger than the tunnels. Andy, what do you think?”

“Huh? What?” Andy still looked a little dazed.

“The rock.” He panned his light. “The house seems younger than the tunnels.”

Andy nodded. “You got that right. The geology in Kentucky is some of the oldest in the country and dates back to the Ordovician age – about 450 million years. The state was once a warm shallow sea full of trilobites and cephalopods.”

“Cephalopods, huh?” Matt felt ill.

“Yeah, they’re ancient types of octopus things,” Andy said, turning back to the walls.

“I got that,” Matt responded weakly.

“Anyway,” Andy continued. “To me, it’s pretty obvious that the tunnels were here first, and the house was built over the top of them. This underground structure is old…very old. And it’s not easy to work this rock – it’s like iron.”

Matt added his light. “And if you’re going to work the rock, why create passageways in these shapes? They’re not like anything I’ve ever seen before.” Matt pointed to some arches stretching along the tunnel and away into the dark. “We make doors and passages based on our physical form – we’re upright bipeds. These doorways are wide, bulged in the middle, and enormous.”