Bits of mud dislodged from Plumtree’s sneakers tapped his head and face and hands in the total blackness, and he thought about pausing to strike the lighter; but the strong clay-scented draft from below would probably have extinguished the flame instantly, and anyway he wasn’t sure he wanted to see how close in front of his face the bricks were, and see the narrow space overhead blocked by the shoe-soles of only one of the three people whose bodies clogged the way back up to air and light and room to move. When his right elbow swung free in a side opening, Cochran’s eyes had been in total darkness long enough for him to detect a faint gray glow from the side tunnel, which slanted downward at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. Faintly he could hear voices coming up through it.
“Side chute to one of the fireplaces,” he whispered upward. “Don’t take it—keep going—straight down.”
He heard Plumtree relaying the message up to Pete and Angelica as he resumed abrading himself down the angular stone esophagus.
After a dozen more rungs he knew he must be well below the level of the ground floor—and when he had hunched a few yards farther down he was sure that he heard far-distant music from the impenetrable darkness below his feet, and that the upwelling draft was elusively scented with hints of cypress and coarse red wine and crushed night-time grass.
He thought of whispering Getting dose how, but told himself that the others would detect it too.
He didn’t realize that he’d been nervously bouncing the heel of each shoe off the back wall between rung-steps until the moment he swung one foot back and it met no wall; and he almost lost his grip in surprise. But then he noticed that the scuff of his feet wasn’t tightly amplified anymore, either, and soon he felt the bottom edge of the scratchy brick surface at his back scrape up across his shoulders and then ruffle the hair at the back of his head. He could stretch out away from the iron ladder in the darkness now, and the sound of his breathing scattered away behind him with no echoes.
And, though it was only the dimmest ashy diffraction, there was light—Cochran could see the backs of his hands as faint whitenesses bravely distinct from the background blackness.
Soon came a moment when his left foot reached down and instead of swinging through empty air struck a gritty, powdery ground, jolting his spine. He got his other foot down onto the ground too, but he whispered for the others to stop, and then spent several seconds pawing around with his shoe soles and flexing his knees before he dared to unclamp his hands from the last rung. He flicked the lighter then, and, looking away from the dazzling flame, saw that he was standing on a patch of soot that covered this corner of a broad dirt floor. Stone walls and a low stone ceiling receded away into shadows, but he could see an arched doorway at the far end of the room. The distantly musical and sylvan breeze was even more remote now, but seemed to be coming to him through the arch.
He cupped his free hand around the lighter flame until his three companions had climbed all the way down out of the chimney shaft and joined him on the sooty patch of dirt, and by that time he was able to look directly into the flame without squinting. When he let it snap off to cool his thumb the darkness seemed absolute again by contrast.
“There’s an arch ahead of us,” he whispered.
“No… presences,” whispered Angelica; “I don’t sense ghosts down here.”
At that moment Cochran jumped and gasped in pure panic, for he had the clear but visually unverifiable impression that a big, warm hand had clasped his right hand, and was gently tugging him forward out across the dirt floor. “Follow me!” he choked urgently to the others as he stumbled forward.
By the echoes of his panting breath he knew when he was passing through the stone arch—and then the dim gray light was strong enough for him to see his empty hand stretched out in front of him. And as soon as he could see that no other hand held his, the sensation of it vanished. He lowered his arm, aware now that his heart was pounding rapidly, and as the sweat cooled on his face he blinked around at the racks and knobs that covered the closest wall.
The racks were wine racks, and the knobs were the foil-sheathed necks of bottles lying horizontally in them. “We’re in the wine cellar!” he whispered. He remembered Mammy Pleasant telling them yesterday that Mrs. Winchester had walled up the wine cellar after seeing the black handprint of her dead husband on the wall.
He flicked the lighter again, and by the sudden yellow glare he walked over and lifted one of the dusty bottles out of the nearest rack, and wiped the label on his windbreaker—and when he had peered at it he shivered and glanced around in suspicious fright, for what he held was a bottle of the fabulous 1887 Inglenook Cabernet Sauvignon, the very same California vintage that Andre Simon had described in 1960 as “every bit as fine as my favorite pre-phylloxera clarets.”
He heard a rattling knock from behind him, and Angelica yelped, “Jesus, a skull! There’s a goddamn skull on the floor here!”
Cochran turned around, still holding the bottle; Angelica was standing stiffly by the arch, her feet well back from what did appear to be a human skull lying on the dirt. Focussing on the dim corners around the room, he now saw pale curls and ribby clusters that might be other bones.
“At least one other skull,” whispered Pete through an audibly tight throat, “over here. And—an antique revolver.”
“They’re old,” Cochran said to Angelica. “They may have been down here a hundred years.”
“I know, I know,” she said, obviously embarrassed at having been frightened. “Sid,” called Plumtree softly from the opposite wall, “bring your lighter over here a second.” She was standing beside a section of plain white plastered wall, pointing at a shadowed spot down by her knee.
Still holding the gas-release lever down, Cochran carefully carried the light over to where she was pointing, and crouched to illuminate the spot.
It was an old mark, in still faintly adhering soot, of a tiny hand.
Angelica had hurried up beside Cochran, and now she bent over to look at the handprint. “Ah!” she exclaimed sharply, stepping back. “The baby! It wasn’t her dead husband’s ghost that the god finally asked Mrs. Winchester to give over to him! Mammy Pleasant had that wrong. It was the ghost of Winchester’s dead baby daughter!” And Cochran saw the bruja of Solville make the Catholic sign of the cross. “She couldn’t bring herself to do that, just as Agave couldn’t disown the ghost of her killed son, in Arky’s Euripides play!”
“And she entombed the wine,” said Pete Sullivan shakily, “but she left a chimney air shaft to link this cellar with her bedroom. I’ll bet she never permitted any fires in any of the fireplaces that connect with that chimney, after she walled up the cellar.”
Cochran let the lighter flame go out, and he handed the hot lighter to Plumtree while he walked back to the rack to reluctantly replace the legendary Inglenook. And after he had put the bottle back, his hand twitched to the side—
—and in his nose was the sagebrush-and-dry-stone smell of the Mojave Desert outside Las Vegas, and the acid perfume of Paris streets after rain, and the hallucinated mildewy staleness of the Victorian hall in which he had seen Mondard in a mirror—
—and his fingers were pressed firmly around another bottle. He lifted it out carefully and carried it over to Plumtree, who struck the lighter.
The label on the bottle was Buena Vista, Count Haraszthy’s old Sonoma vineyard; and below the brand name and a statement of limited bottling was the date, 1860, and the single word PAGADEBITI.