She ran her tongue across her lips and tasted the sour dirt particles gathering there. She’d had some faint idea of following her instincts. Of being able to guess which passages Ephraim would have chosen during his quest to hide his murdered relatives. Of knowing where to dig.

The passage split, and Margot chose left. It continued to slope downhill, sometimes rapidly enough that steps had been added.

This is a maze. I could spend days down here and still fall short of searching every hall and every chamber.

Her skin crawled, keeping her hyperconscious of how far she’d drifted from the surface. Still the path led farther down, drawing her deeper, dragging her into the hill’s darkest recesses.

These passages couldn’t all have been built by Ezra, surely. She stepped into a cellar and faced bare walls and bare floors, stains marking where barrels had once stood. Ephraim and his descendants must have continued them, expanded them. I need to find the original parts. The oldest areas.

As her eyes glanced over the endless tracks of bare earth and rotting wood supports, all of them vague and flickering in her weak light, she wondered how that would be possible. The passageways were starting to blend together. Sometimes they narrowed. Sometimes they took strange turns and seemed to double back on themselves. All the while, splits and offshoots robbed Margot of her sense of direction.

She just knew she was deep. She could feel the soil’s weight above her, heavy enough to crush even her bones if it were to collapse.

Margot staggered, eyes closed as she drew in sparse, aching gasps. The panic was rising again. Clawing up through her chest, slicing up her insides as it tried to strangle her throat.

In between her gasps, she thought she heard something coming from the passageway behind her.

Something metallic.

Her first thought was of the bells at the house, signaling that the dead were awake, that the fence line had been breached. But there was no way she could still hear that at her depth.

She put her shoulder against the crumbling, rocky wall and bit her tongue as she listened.

Metal jarred together, like a drawer full of cutlery being tipped out. It fell silent for a heartbeat, then the sound repeated, fractionally closer, fractionally louder.

Margot’s heart turned to ice. She raised the phone and pointed it to the passage at her back.

It wasn’t strong enough to reveal anything except the nearest ten feet of cold, damp earth.

She switched to the camera and set it to flash, then raised it toward the passageway again. A burst of light glared across the tunnel as she took a photo of the void ahead of herself.