I admit that being buried alive is grim. But premature burial is not one of my phobias. I’m just plain scared of what might be down there. It’s not only H. P. Lovecraft who thought that underground tunnels were used by terrible creatures hungry for human flesh. Lots of our Indian legends, like the one about the Whisperer, tell about monsters using such tunnels, about caves where horrifying and evil creatures are kept locked away so they cannot harm the world.

“There’s a light switch to the right just inside the door,” I said to Mr. Patel.

My words came out as something between a croak and a whisper. I was so scared that I was trembling, and I was clutching Roger’s hand just about hard enough to break his fingers.

Mr. Patel leaned forward, his fingertips brushing the rough wood of the stairwell wall. I tensed up, sure that at any second there would be a scream and then something—a bony hand, a bloody claw—would snatch him down into the darkness. Instead there came the satisfying sound of the switch being clicked and the sudden glow of light from the single forty-watt bulb at the bottom of the stairs. It was twenty steps away, but it looked as far off as the tape across the track at the end of a hundred-yard dash. And it was so dim. A bulb that small in a cellar makes more shadows than it does light.

Mr. Patel peered down into the semi-darkness.

“We should wait for the police,” he said in a way that made his words half statement and half question.

Roger and I looked over his shoulder down to the bottom of the stairs.

“No,” I said in an urgent voice, letting go of Roger’s hand and reaching out to tug Mr. Patel’s sleeve. “We have to go down now. Do you see it?”

There on the bottom step, lying half open on its side, was Aunt Lyssa’s purse.

23

THE THIRD DOOR

I MUST HAVE slipped under Mr. Patel’s outstretched arm, because I found myself sitting on the bottom step holding Aunt Lyssa’s purse between my knees while I searched through its contents: her wallet, her clip-on library ID badge, her credit card holder, her brush, her makeup case, her notebook with three pens attached to it by a rubber band wrapped tightly around it. Everything was there except for the one thing I was looking for.

Roger was next to me, sweeping the strong beam of the flashlight into every dark corner of the cellar, behind the furnace, up to the rafters. His light seemed as reluctant to penetrate the dark corners of the cellar as I was.

“It’s not here,” I whispered.

“What’s not there?” he whispered back.

Whispered. A dark old cellar can have that effect on you, lowering your voice to a whisper and your anxiety to the brink of a scream.