“Are you serious?” I snort-laughed. “I’ll flip a coin to see who goes first.”
“Cletus.” He waited for the wraith to manifest. “Search the area beyond the door. Make sure it’s safe.”
If you asked me, Cletus was throwing off smug vibes. The kind that said I knew you would be lost without me. That sense of self was unheard of in a wraith, but I wasn’t complaining. Maud had been an opinionated woman. He was continuing the family tradition.
The wraith returned minutes later and gestured toward the opening with a long limb.
“Go on.” Linus angled his light for me. “Just be careful. Please.”
I planted a quick smooch on him then lowered onto my stomach and shimmied backward into the hole. Not gonna lie. I never would have done it without Cletus watching my back. Awkward as it might be honeymooning with three, it had its benefits too.
Once my feet hit another wooden floor, I stood back to give Linus room to join me.
The walls were coated in splotchy plaster that had crumbled onto the floors, leaving behind a chalky residue pocked with foot—and paw—prints. Linus read the spirits as feline, and he was seldom wrong. That meant we were dealing with catlike beasts who weren’t afraid of humans, or else they wouldn’t have ventured upstairs. And someone or something else. The fabled demon? Or perhaps the Oliphants?
Linus’s feet hit the planks beside me, and he dusted off his tailored shirt with a frown for its stains. Or the stink. It was hard to tell. They were both equally offensive.
“Your friends have been through here.” I flashed my light across the marks. “This place reeks, but it’s not the rotten-egg smell from the pantry.”
Ghosts didn’t poop, though poltergeists had been known to fling it, so our suspect pool was growing shallower.
“Whatever they are, they’ve been denning down here for a long time.” He pointed out piles of shredded fabric, what might be old nests made out of curtains or sheets from fifty or sixty years ago based on the design and the state of decay. “How are they accessing the inn?”
Using my modified pen, I drew a sigil for light on my palm and gave my phone a rest. I didn’t need a new light source so much as I worried about the battery. If we got stuck down here, in this rickety wooden construct, I wanted every ounce of juice I could squeeze out of it to dial 911.
“The basement door was open,” I reminded him. “Either they can go incorporeal, or someone is letting them in and out.”
The figure in the library parking lot came to mind. That person had been able to perceive Cletus, so the shadow cats ought to be visible to them too. But we hadn’t stumbled across anyone but Kylie in the inn. As much as she enjoyed mocking visiting ghost hunters, she struck me as a devout nonbeliever.
“The latter would mean we’re dealing with two distinct creatures.”
“Maybe the Oliphants are involved.” It was worth throwing out there. “That would give us a classic creature/human combo.”
“There are traces of magic,” Linus said, dusting off his hands, “but the Oliphants are human.”
“How sure are we?” I had been too busy wrapping my head around our plot-twist honeymoon to pay much attention to our hosts. “There are charms and spells that can alter a person, or creature, enough to pass for someone or something else.”
Thanks to my former best friend, Amelie, I knew that for a certainty. So did Linus, who had aided in her transformation.
“We can perform a simple test if we find them in the house.”
“Works for me.” I ventured deeper into the hallway. “We should add Kylie to that list while we’re at it.”
“I agree.” He pocketed his phone and held out his palm. “Would you mind?”
Linus was more than capable of activating a simple light sigil, but it warmed me from tip to toe that he preferred I do the honors.
“You’re getting spoiled.” I clucked my tongue. “There was a time when you worried a light sigil from me would set you on fire.”
“There was a time when I thought sweater vests were the height of fashion.”
Smothering a snort of laughter, I drew the design, and illumination burst from his palm. “There you go.”
The sigils provided more than enough light for our vision to adjust, but the deeper we traveled, the more peculiar and precarious the landscape grew. The wood was in decent shape despite its age, but the floors were buckled, and the brittle planks groaned to accept an ounce more weight.
How did the Oliphants sleep at night knowing their guests perched on the edge of this yawning abyss?
Lost in contemplation about the potential for lawsuits, I tripped and almost face-planted into a wall.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I kicked a pile of extension cords snaking in every direction. “What are these doing down here?”
“Let’s find out, shall we?” Linus lifted one of the orange strands and followed it to where it plugged into a cracked outlet protruding from the wall. “I didn’t expect that.”
“Who puts an outlet in a maze?” I crouched to examine it. “See this?” I pointed out the dueling cartoon monsters plated in heavy battle armor on the outlet cover. “I remember when this cartoon released. It was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. That means this cover was added in the last fifteen years or so.”
“The wiring could be older.” Linus pulled a multipurpose tool from his pocket, which had replaced the knife I had stolen, and used its screwdriver attachment to remove the plate and get a peek at its guts. “Aluminum wiring. That dates it from the sixties to the seventies.”
“Aluminum wiring is bad, right?”
“Yes.” He replaced the cover. “Whoever has been using this outlet recently has been overloading it.” He pointed out scorch marks on the wall. “It’s a miracle they haven’t burned the house down around them.”
“It’s a pile of kindling,” I agreed. “I’m amazed there’s no water damage.”
Basements were notorious for flooding and moisture problems in our neck of the woods. Maybe this far north it wasn’t as big of an issue. Even with the brick perimeter shoring up the house’s foundation, I figured there would be more rot or mold, but this level was in decent condition. The next…who knew?
“The lower levels will tell.” He mirrored my thoughts. “Do you want to go deeper?”
“Do you think it’s safe?” The wiring worried me more than the creatures. “How accurate are the blueprints you found?”
“I believe we’ll be safe to go down another floor, maybe two. Beyond that, we’ll have to ask Cletus to scout for us.” He patted the pocket over his phone. “We can’t trust the blueprints beyond that point. They’ve been online for too long. Anyone could have seeded fakes. The first three levels down are the only ones that match up across all the records I dug up on the house.”
“Let’s go then.” I wished, just for a second, that Lethe were here. Her nose would have come in handy. So would her prey drive if these shadow cats proved to be tangible creatures rather than noncorporeal ones. “Lead the way.”
We walked another fifteen minutes before Linus indicated a warped hatch in the floor with a frown.
“There are more cords here.” He lifted the square of wood covered in nicks and shone his light down into the opening. “There’s a ladder.” He glanced up as the wraith appeared, no doubt summoned by his thoughts. “Well?”
Cletus drifted into the opening and performed his recon while Linus and I wondered at the modern touches to what he had been led to believe was a sealed relic from the inn’s past.
A low moan drifted from the darkness, and Linus beat me to the ladder. I’m sure he would say he went first because he stood closer, but I saw the bounce in his steps as he tested each rung along the way. He could be so adorable at times.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he called up to me. “Someone has been living down here.”
“You’re right.” I got down to his level. “I don’t believe it.”
Yet the evidence was scattered all around us. An inflatable mattress covered with rumpled modern sheets. A small flat screen TV fed into what appeared to be a Wi-Fi hub. A mini fridge stuffed with snacks and energy drinks. Clothes mounded in the corner, a rainbow of tees, jeans, hoodies, and sneakers in coordinating colors.
“This explains the open pantry door.” I rubbed my forehead. “Kylie didn’t say she stayed in a room at the inn. We made the assumption.” Aided by her fall down the stairs. “She said she comes here to hang out when there are no guests, but she never told us where.”
“Technically, she didn’t lie.” He picked up the drift of my thoughts. “She just didn’t tell us the truth.”
“She had to come up the stairs to fall down them,” I pointed out. “If she wasn’t staying in a room, she might have been spying on us.”
Nodding, he thinned his lips. “She might be working with our arsonist friend.”
“Heck.” The cat burglar getup meant we hadn’t seen their face. “She might be our arsonist friend.”
A weighty sigh moved through his chest. “What must her home life be like if she finds this preferable?”
Kylie and her grandfather had appeared to be on good terms at check-in, but appearances could be deceiving. Sure, he slipped up on the pronoun, but he was quick to apologize, and Kylie had laughed it off. Still, there might be tension we didn’t pick up on given the briefness of our interaction with them.
“A better question is how did these shadow cats get past her without her noticing?”
They would have made noise scrabbling through that door, the fact they roused Linus was proof of that. With the opening yards from her pillow, I couldn’t see her sleeping through the racket. Each time she touched the trapdoor to open it, her fingers would have found the grooves left from their claws too.