Sheriff Norris came out onto the deck with Robiquet behind him. The fussy-looking man made no move to assist, but Jackson took a rope from the mate’s hands. When the mate had hopped up onto the dock, the sheriff tossed him the rope. They worked together to tie the old boat to the dock.
Sara didn’t wait for a hand up. She leaped from the boat to the dock. Robiquet hesitated, but she didn’t have the patience to wait for him. As she strode away, she heard Jackson talking to the captain, assuring him they’d be back to the boat in no more than an hour. Then the sheriff and Robiquet were hurrying after her. Apparently the goblin had gotten over his anxiety about leaving the boat.
When they reached the entrance to the fort, they found the gates padlocked.
Sheriff Norris turned to Robiquet. “There another way in?”
Sara started following the outer wall, turning to call back to the sheriff over her shoulder. “We’ll walk around. At the back, you can walk up the hill-it’s not too steep-and get right to the lookouts at the top of the fort.”
She kept ahead of them. It wasn’t just impatience that drove her on. If all of the things Robiquet told them were true-and she believed they were-then this spot was the closest she had come to the truth of her father’s fate since he’d vanished in December. Sara felt breathless as she hiked the outer edge of the island, keeping the fort to her right. The terrain became difficult, but she did not slow down. That sense of nearness to her father propelled her forward, even as a terrible dread weighed upon her heart.
Robiquet didn’t seem to have any trouble with the hills and pathways on the outside of the fort. Of course, he wasn’t human. Sheriff Norris, on the other hand, labored to keep up. The man was in decent condition, but he wasn’t exactly young, anymore.
Sara didn’t slow down to wait for them until she had reached the rear of the island. There, she stood and stared up at the squat stone towers where the lookouts would have been posted. The frigid wind whipped up off of the water and it was icy on the back of her neck, but she barely felt the cold.
When Jackson and Robiquet caught up, the sheriff gave her a hard look, an admonishment for not having waited. Sara ignored it, and she paid no attention to the way he stood, catching his breath, obviously hoping for a rest.
She started up the hill.
At the lookout post, she moved around the tower and dropped down to the walkway behind it. She could not help wishing that she had brought her camera. Even at the worst of times, Sara saw the world through a photographer’s eyes.
Again, she waited impatiently for the others to catch up with her. Robiquet kept pace with the sheriff, perhaps thinking that he would rather deal with Sara’s impatience than Jackson’s annoyance. When they reached the lookout, the sheriff sat on the edge of the wall and slid down to the walkway. Robiquet hopped down with the ease of a child.
Sara took the peculiar man’s measure once again, still seeing in her mind the image of his true face.
“Lead the way,” she said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Robiquet turned to look at her, the human mask he wore furrowing its brow in displeasure. “You think I would have dragged you all the way out here if I wasn’t sure?”
Sara shrugged. “I don’t know what I think, especially when it comes to you.”
Slowly, Robiquet nodded. “Fair enough, I suppose. Come along, then.”
He led them to a set of darkened stairs that led down into the tomblike stone passages of the old fort and prison. From above they could see that even during the day the stairwell descended into impenetrable darkness. Sara went to follow Robiquet, but Sheriff Norris put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head.
“I’ll go next.”
She understood immediately. There was no way to know what the goblin might try, down there in the dark, or what else they might encounter. If there was going to be trouble, Jackson wanted to be the first to come up against it. Sara bristled at the idea that she needed protecting, but she couldn’t deny that a part of her was relieved.
The whole world-even familiar places-had become unknown territory to her and the sheriff since they’d met Robiquet. If there was some passage here on the island to the world of legends and monsters that he had told them about, then she was relieved not to be the first one to descend into the dark.
But she followed.
Her father had never asked her for anything except to come home and see him from time to time, but she had failed him in that. Ted Halliwell had his shortcomings, no question. But Sara had spent the last few months coming to terms with the truth, that he had not been the only one at fault.
She needed to tell him that.
Sara blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dark. The stairs led straight down and then turned right. Her fingers trailed along the granite walls as she took each step, just in case she stumbled. The presence of Sheriff Norris in the passage below her only made it darker, blocking out any light that might have come from below.
“It’s this way,” Robiquet said, his voice echoing back to her from somewhere ahead.
Then she reached the bottom step, turned left, and found that the three of them had entered a chamber that must once have been a part of the prison. The walls were featureless, windowless stone, save for one in which a doorway led out into the huge, grassy staging area inside the fort. Whatever door had once hung there had long since been removed, leaving only a crumbling frame.
“Why isn’t there a door?” Sara asked.
“Maybe to keep people from getting trapped? The way they remove the doors from refrigerators at the dump,” Sheriff Norris suggested.
Robiquet studied that doorless frame.
“Or maybe because they’ve got a bad history of closed doors around here,” Sara suggested. The idea chilled her. Maybe whoever was responsible for overseeing the island as a National Historic Site had grown a little afraid of the doors on George’s Island over the years.
The sheriff looked at Robiquet. In the gray light that streamed in from outside, Sara saw the concern on Jackson’s face.
“But this isn’t the door we’re looking for, right?”
Robiquet shook his head. “No. Your world isn’t on the other side of the door we want. And there would be guards, remember? It’s this way.”
The fastidious man wiped his hands together as though just being in the damp, dusty fort offended his sensibilities. He did not lead them out onto the grass of the fort’s interior but across the chamber to another passage.
They followed him through what appeared to be a sequence of cells or bunk rooms, ending up in a large chamber whose entire inner wall was open to the vast courtyard at the heart of the fort. Wan daylight flooded the room, and Sara welcomed it.
“It’s here,” Robiquet said.
Surprised, Sara narrowed her eyes. At the back of the chamber, recessed into the granite, was a heavy iron door. The first door they had seen inside the fort.
Her heart skipped. A moment of uncertainty made her pause.
Sheriff Norris had no such hesitation. He strode over to the door as though confronting a troublemaker in a bar, every inch the cop that he’d been all of his adult life. The sheriff reached out and grabbed the door handle and gave it a pull.
Rust flaked and sifted to the floor, but the door did not budge.
“It’s not going to open for you. What kind of secret would it be if any ordinary human could walk right through?”
Sara stared at the door, then stepped up beside Robiquet. In the half-light at the back of that chamber, she felt she could almost see the goblin face beneath his human guise.
“Open it,” she said.