Underneath

Underneath

  Heather Marie Adkins

  Copyright © 2012 by Heather Marie Adkins

  Published by CyberWitch Press, LLC

  Louisville, KY

  cyberwitchpress.com

  [email protected]

  First edition, published June 2011

  Second edition, published October 2012

  All rights reserved.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  Disclaimer: The persons, places, things, and otherwise animate or inanimate objects mentioned in this novel are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional. The author humbly begs your pardon. This is fiction, people.

  Edited by Theo Fenraven

  Cover Art by Eden Crane

  This ebook formatted by CyberWitch Press, LLC

  Author Photograph © 2011 Meagan White|White Photography

  Contact the author at [email protected]

  Sign up for her MAILING LIST to receive updates on new releases!

  Underneath is a ten-thousand word novelette. It was originally meant to be a stand-alone story, but due to great feedback and lots of What happens next??, there will be a sequel in 2013.

  For Andrew:

  Thank you for always believing in me.

  Chapter 1

  When the Clifden Museum of Ancient History broke ground for a new addition on a rainy March morning in 1999, no one was prepared to watch Governor Matthew Garner fall through the earth.

  I had the television on in the employee lounge, just a lowly unpaid intern stuck at the Clifden Natural History Museum while all my comrades were on site to witness the ceremony. I had only been at the Nat for about four months and was still two years from my degree, but I’d settled in nicely. There was a small diamond on my finger and a tiny person growing inside me, so life was looking up.

  I watched the ceremony on a miniscule TV older than I was while I gave in to the first of a slew of pregnancy cravings: dipping cheesy puffs in honey mustard dressing. I had no idea it would be the last time I’d ever touch either again without remembering that day.

  The Ancient hadn’t done any renovations or remodeling since it was built in 1908, so the addition was a big deal for the city. It was a huge shindig: the Mayor showed up in his Rolls Royce, as did several state senators with their slimy smiles and graying temples. Even the actor guy from my hometown who got famous for that stupid barbecue show made an appearance. They popped champagne and gave speeches, talking about the “spirit of innovation” and “grand history of the world” before Governor Garner picked up his shovel.

  As he pushed it into the earth, a perfect circle of darkness opened like an ink spill beneath him, and then he was gone.

  He didn’t even have time to scream.

  The governor toppling shovel-first and ass-over-heels into the hole was captured by three news channels—one of them by helicopter. That was the angle I watched with a cheesy puff caught between two fingers, dripping sauce on the old table.

  They found the governor later. Much later. It took weeks to shift through the dirt and rubble. Neighboring cities sent public safety personnel to assist in his recovery, but the whole town of Clifden knew that was all it was—a recovery effort. There was no chance Governor Garner survived a forty foot tumble into the bowels of the earth.

  The question repeated over and over was why. Why had the sinkhole suddenly given way, rending a scar-like gash beside the museum? A team of geologists studied the catastrophe, offering theories that ranged from weak fault lines to combustible gases beneath the surface. No matter what answers they proposed, none of them was the right one. Just… possibilities.

  In honor of the governor, rest his soul, they called it Garner’s Sinkhole.

  *

  A couple of months into the excavation, the goldmine that lay under the earth was revealed.

  A city. A civilization that, little by little, would prove to rival anything we had yet discovered about Native American cultures. A culture of brutal barbarians, so devout in their increasingly complicated system of beliefs that sacrifice was a daily, and painful, ordeal.

  The system of underground caves went on and on. The few pictures released to the public showed rock dwellings and large temples decorated in lavish depictions of everyday life. There was a plethora of wheeled carts and brightly colored pottery, as well as beautifully made furniture and tools that bore the wear and tear of use.

  And bodies. Tombs containing bodies, laid out in state with a lifetime’s worth of treasure. The cool temperatures in the caverns had preserved everything about the dead, down to the hair on their heads.

  The archaeologists named the underground city Garneria. Instead of the originally planned addition to the Ancient, the museum designed and built a new wing to house the entrance to the cave and planned an exhibit to hold Garneria’s artifacts.

  The ten-year excavation was semi-secretive. It wasn’t open to the public and little information was released. Rumors flew of a sacrificial altar brown with dried blood, dwellings full of tools used for torture, and mass graves of brutalized and broken skeletons.

  They were comparing it to Atlantis: a lost civilization, buried for thousands of years and forgotten over time. But not even legends remained of this place. No passing mention from a great scholar, no obscure texts buried in the basements of the world’s greatest libraries. And instead of being swallowed by the sea, this uncharted land rested underground.

  Beneath the dirt of our town.

  From the very beginning, I knew that I had to stay away from it. For someone with my…sympathetic powers, Garneria could drive me to madness.

  Chapter 2

  My boss’s voice penetrated my thoughts.

  “Rebecca, I’m so sorry,” Missy Evans told me, her thin fingers clasped together so tightly on the desktop they were bloodless. “You know I don’t want to let you go. You’re my best damn technician.”

  I looked away from the print that hung on her wall, the one that had prompted my daydream: a snapshot of Garneria’s entrance. A steel hole in the ground capped like a well. It might as well be holding a nuclear bomb.

  “But I’m the newest,” I said dully, crossing my arms over the green sweater vest I wore. The Clifden Natural History Museum crest was embroidered over my heart where it had been for almost twelve years. “This place is all about longevity.”

  Missy’s lavender eyes, the color not real but faked by contacts, were sad. It didn’t make me feel any better. By the way she took a deep breath and avoided my gaze, I had a feeling she was about to tell me something I wouldn’t like.

  “Look,” Missy said, her voice nothing but a murmur over the steady patter of rain on the window pane. “I have a friend over at the Ancient. I’ve already told him about you, and he’s willing to take you on. See how you do.”

  “Work there?” My skin grew cold at the thought. Shuddering, I slumped in my seat and stared at my clunky black boots, the laces of one trailing on the floor. “That place is awful.”

  “Twelve years ago, you wouldn’t have said that about the Ancient.”

  “Twelve years ago, the Ancient didn’t have an open gate to hell,” I shot back.

  Missy sat up straighter, her back taking on the hardness it usually maintained while criticizing my mothering skills and hobbies. Pursing her lips, she snapped, “Rebecca King. Don’t be a child. How do you plan to pay for that house?”

  “I’m not giving up my parents’ Victorian,” I told her wearily. It was a conversation we’d had often and with much vigor. Leaning forward, I put my elbows on her desk and shoved both ha
nds through my hair as I stared at the floor. Scarred, stained hardwood. I wondered how many others had sat with their feet planted in the same spot and watched their dreams fade.

  I’d worked fifty-hour weeks for years, hoping to get noticed. The other technicians were lazy, more prone to gossiping about last week’s soap operas than doing their work, and I knew it was because they were comfortable. They’d been there for two dozen years or more.

  I had a master’s in museum management with an emphasis on natural history and stores of enthusiasm. I wanted my own exhibit. I wanted the saber-toothed tigers. I’d been with the museum for almost thirteen years, but that still wasn’t long enough. Turnover in the workplace was nil.

  “That is precisely why you need to take this offer and run with it,” Missy went on, always the surrogate mother. “You’d be getting a significant raise and the benefits at the Ancient are better.” Her voice softened. “You could buy Adara that bike she wants.”

  I thought of my eleven-year-old, her intelligent face with her father’s eyes and my wild ebony hair. She’d be thrilled to get that BMX. And it was almost Yuletide.

  Gods, I missed Eli. I touched the simple gold locket around my neck, conjuring an image of my husband’s face. He felt so distant, like a yellowed newspaper, edges curling. Eli would have known what to do.

  My mentor continued talking through my daydream, knowing she had me balancing on the ledge of “what if?” She’d been pushing my buttons most of my life.

  “You haven’t stepped foot in that museum since they unearthed Garneria.” Missy reached out and rearranged the pens in the mug on her desk, putting all the red with the reds and blue with the blues. “How can you dislike it so much?”

  “Ritual human sacrifice, Missy.” I frowned at her. “We’ve had this conversation. Can you imagine the negativity that hangs over that place?”

  “You have to stop basing your life around that woo-woo nonsense.” Stern mother was back.

  That “woo-woo” nonsense wasn’t something I could make go away. Being an Empath, a particularly strong one, made even going to a graveyard an ordeal. Too many grieving relatives. It took days of meditation to take Adara to see her father. I decided not to answer Missy.

  Her long-suffering sigh was one I’d heard many times, much like the aforementioned “house” and “woo-woo” conversations. That’s what happens when your mom passes away young and her best friend takes over. “At least go meet him, Rebecca. Let him show you around before you decide to kick yourself in the ass and go broke. Lose the house, go on welfare, take your daughter out of that artsy school she loves…”

  “Okay, Missy,” I cut her off and glanced back at the picture of the portal to Garneria. It looked like a tomb. “I’ll go.”

  Chapter 3

  My old Ford pickup idled loudly in the stillness of the morning. I blew on my frozen fingers as I held them against my lips. Some mornings, I really wished I had a husband to scrape the ice off my windshield.

  Adara sat beside me in the seat, eyes wide. “Are you going to be okay?” Her breath was white fog inside the car. I needed to get that heater fixed.

  “Yeah,” I told her, but she didn’t believe me. I could tell by the way her skepticism settled over me like a cloak.

  My daughter frowned, her heart-shaped lips quirked down as far as they could go. Turning her back to the door, she faced me. “Did you prepare the way I told you?”

  I felt like the daughter in the equation, and it was distinctly uncomfortable. “I meditated all day yesterday. There’s a sage bundle in my pocket. I anointed my wrists with lemon and eucalyptus. I’m carrying a piece of black obsidian and the talisman bag you made me.” I patted my bulging pocket, even though she couldn’t see it under my big wool coat.

  She nodded once, her kinky curls bouncing around her pale, freckled face. “Deep breaths, Momma. Is Missy picking me up from school?”

  “Four, after your art group lets out, right?”

  Adara grinned. It emphasized her baby-faced cheeks for only a millisecond before the woman began to shine through once more. “You got it.” Leaning across the bench seat, she hugged me tightly and pressed a cold kiss to my cheek. “Good luck.”

  “Have a good day, baby.” I watched her slide out and grab her backpack, a purple affair covered in Girl Scout patches and band names scrawled artistically in white-out. A gaggle of her girlfriends met her on the school’s front steps, and she waved at me before disappearing inside.

  The drive to the Ancient took years longer than necessary. For the record, I did not take the long way, stop at Hester’s Cafe for coffee and a bagel, nor did I circle the museum twice before pulling in to the parking lot.

  I almost wished I were a smoker.

  An open parking spot loomed. I swiveled in and cut the engine, the stone monstrosity of the Ancient stretching before me. Taking a deep breath, I opened the heavy truck door and jumped at the unearthly squeal from the hinge. I fell out as ungracefully as usual, slammed it shut, and glared at it, shivering in the cold morning.

  I turned back to the Ancient, knowing it was now or never. Four Roman columns protected the entrance, as beautiful as they’d ever been, and the bulbous dome rose majestically from the roof. To the right was the addition, with its paler stones and secure, metal double-door entrance. It wasn’t right; a blemish on the building.

  I tossed the strap of my purse over my shoulder and walked up the pathway. Small, delicate flakes were falling intermittently from the sky, melting before they hit the pavement. Despite the slush of cars on the street behind me, the morning still held that strange, wintry hush I’d loved as a kid.

  Inside the glass doors, a blast of hot air welcomed me, warming my cheeks instantly. I waited to feel something. Anything. So close to Garneria, I expected fear, anguish, debilitating pain, but there was nothing. I breathed easily for the moment.

  The soft lights of the atrium pooled on the marble floors. I clicked through the puddles of gold in my high-heeled boots towards the reception desk. The museum wasn’t officially open yet, but a petite blonde sat behind the black-stained wood, flipping through a magazine.

  She looked up at my approach and smiled. Her lipstick was a bold shade of red that I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, but on her, it was classy. She radiated the kind of calm that balanced the negative emotions I often dealt with. I needed more people like her around me, especially so near to Garneria.

  “You must be Rebecca,” she said.

  “That’s me.”

  “I’ll call Darren and let him know you’re here, if you want to go have a seat on the bench.” She gestured with her head to the east wall.

  The wall nearest the addition. I wouldn’t question a good thing—why I could be in the museum and not feel the centuries-old emotions. But I wasn’t going to play with fire either.

  “I’ll stand, but thanks.” I scanned the domed room, noting the second-story balcony and the windowed ceiling. I couldn’t believe it’d been so long since I’d been there, yet it still felt like the same museum of my childhood.

  The sky outside was nasty. Adara had said more snow was predicted over the next two days. It was too bad I was so connected to the house; it would have been nice to live somewhere perpetually warm.

  The receptionist murmured into her phone, and then set it back in the cradle. “He’ll be here in just a moment.”

  The words were barely between us when a tall, lean man in wire-framed glasses came through the employee door on the west wall. His brown corduroy jacket fit terribly and his khakis were wrinkled, but I found the look completely charming. He offered his hand with a grin, and we shook.

  “It’s great to finally meet you, Rebecca, Missy’s told me so much about you.”

  His gray eyes were big behind his glasses, showing early signs of smile lines. Brown hair hung past his brows and brushed the collar of his jacket. I let go of his hand, noticing how long and slender his fingers were. Scholar’s hands.

  “Pleasur
e,” I replied.

  “If you’ll come with me, we’ll get the paperwork filled out, yeah?” He cocked a grin, one side of his mouth higher than the other.

  I just nodded. Hitching my purse higher and holding my breath, I followed him deeper into the museum. Away from Garneria.

  Chapter 4

  I saw the picture hanging on the wall of the hallway, and stopped cold, forgetting Darren’s presence for that of a man I knew was dead.

  Jordan Ivey, a twenty-eight-year old archaeologist from Australia. Well, twenty-eight when he went missing. He’d had a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in archaeology of some form or other. All gibberish to me. When Garneria was stumbled upon, he’d been one of the first to sign on to assist in the large scale excavation. He kept an office in the museum, built a hard-working team.

  One day, he was gone.

  Darren’s warm presence closed in behind me. “Did you know him?” he murmured. I could feel his breath on my neck, tickling the small hairs at my nape.

  I closed my eyes. The newscaster had given news of the missing archaeologist in an uninterested tone between reports of a new hospital on the south side and the most recent celebrity scandal in Hollywood. But, Jordan’s face: tan skin that set off his crystal blue eyes and wheat-colored hair.

  When they flashed his handsome, smiling face on the screen, I knew.

  I knew he was dead.

  “No. I just know he’s missing.” I pressed my hand to the glass, not caring if I left a handprint. The emptiness under my palm indicated a missing life force. Wherever Jordan Ivey had gone, he wasn’t coming back.

  My abilities, for better or worse, never lied.

  “He’s a nice guy,” Darren told me, as we walked away from the picture, slower this time. “Always smiling, always laughing. He loves Garneria.”

  “Mmm,” I said noncommittally. Darren still spoke of the man in present tense. That saddened me, not just for him, but for Jordan, too. “What do you think of Garneria?”

  Darren didn’t fight his shudder. “Dark. Creepy.”

  We came to a stop before an office. His name, Dr. Darren MacBride, was written in gold on a green plaque in the center of the wooden door. Below, it proclaimed him Head Curator.

  Huh. News to me. He was the head honcho.