The staircase back up to the sanctuary of the house is across the room. I would have to get around Donovan to go that way.

But there are other doorways here.

I choose one.

20

The tunnels beneath Wakefield Manor, I have heard, were once used by escaped slaves. Among the sorts of restitution the family sought to offer the world in the wake of Mad Catherine’s brutal conviction, they turned to their own spiritual atonement. It became clear that the townsfolk would remain unforgiving, and perhaps this is why they turned their backs on the law and on social propriety by delivering slaves to freedom. As you have discovered, of course, their story is much less interesting than the story of those who may have once traversed these very tunnels before they became flooded and impassable. This land does not welcome underground structures. One may as well dig anthills at the beach during low tide.

I have always believed the tunnels to be, if not merely dangerous, then utterly caved in or flooded through. In all my years of living here, I have never set foot down one of them; they are the only place in all the house, or under it rather, where I have not dared to tread, and they have held less fascination for me than the locked room, for there is nothing fascinating so much as dreadful about an uncharted, collapsing catacomb wending through the earth. I’ve no idea where they go, how far they extend, where they come out—or if they do come out at all.

The earthen floor is wet and sludgy, shocking my feet with bitter cold, and I cannot tell, by the wild searching eye of my flashlight, how these rocky walls have held up for so long against the erosion of the ages and the deluges of the swamp. The way is narrow, closing in around me like the throat of a great beast.

Behind me, I hear the splashing footfalls of Donovan’s pursuit, following the flailing white beam of my light. The farther we retreat from the basement, the colder it becomes and the more I begin to feel trapped—the more I begin to worry at where this tunnel is leading me, drawing me down its terrible length.

As I race through the dark, the air around me seems to vibrate with voices, the whispering voices of whoever once passed through here. We should turn back, a voice in some distant accent whispers, very close to my ear. I shake my head as if to frighten off a fly buzzing too near me. We have to trust, comes another whisper, amid the torrent of unintelligible ones. This is followed by humming. Did they make it? I wonder. Or did they die down here?

Now spindly roots hang down from the low ceiling, brushing me as I skirt past them, and now the icy water at my feet has risen above my ankles, slowing my pace but also slowing Donovan somewhere down the tunnel behind me. I am lithe, quick-footed; I am a panther bounding for freedom; I could have rolled out of the way and run off into the night if only my mugger hadn’t been holding a gun to my head; I bring my knees high, my feet darting in and out of the water like leaping fish.