“If anyone’s down there,” I said quietly, “that pressure release will let them know this door just opened.”
“What’s that smell?” Baby asked, sniffing the air. “Barn? Hay? Straw?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe this connects to that barn where they chained me up that night.”
“So-we go?”
“These guys go,” I said, and sent the shepherds down the passageway. If there was going to be an ambush, they’d sense it. They might not survive it, but we would. We picked up our lanterns and went after the dogs, Baby first and me in trail and still hunched over to keep from banging my head. I kept looking back, half-expecting that stone door to swing quietly shut like it always did in the movies, but it just sat there. Baby saw me looking and suggested we wedge it open. We went back through and wrestled with that post lever until we broke it off at the ground, which should keep anyone from closing it behind us.
The tunnel went straight for maybe two hundred feet and then hooked hard right, where it ended in a wooden door. The dogs were milling around in front of the door, but they weren’t excited. We could hear air whistling past the cracks around the door, and the barnyard smell was stronger here. There was a normal latch on the door, and black iron hinges on the other side. This thing had been here for a while.
“The lady or the tiger?” Baby said, drawing his Glock.
I pulled the shepherds back to me and took a position that would let me cover the opening as the door swung back. Baby put a lantern down just out of the arc the door would take when opening, lifted the latch as quietly as he could, flattened himself against the wall, and pulled the door open quickly.
Over the barrels of the shotgun I saw ten anxious eyes staring at us from a dark room. We’d found the kids.
Now: Where was the spider?
24
The door had opened into one of the shed barns, but not the one in which I’d been penned up. There was a double door at one end, hay piled up to the roof on one side, and a wall of farm implements on the other. There was fresh straw on the floor and a malodorous bucket in one corner. A second bucket with fresh water and a tin cup hung on one wall by the doors.
Baby stepped into the room first, and the children recoiled when they saw the gun in his hand. I followed him into the room and told them it was okay, we weren’t going to hurt them. The lantern revealed a ragtag collection of blankets on the floor. The children were all little girls, maybe eight to ten years old, dressed in plain, floor-length frocks, which were universally too large for them. They were pale, thin, and frightened. Two were sucking thumbs, a third had badly crossed eyes, and the other two had skin infections on their jaundiced faces. They all looked scared of the shepherds.
Baby put away his Glock and knelt down on one knee to talk to the kids, while I went to the doors and tried to open them. There was a good-sized crack between the doors, and I could see a heavy keeper bar across them. I got out my boot knife, slid it through the crack, and lifted. It came up and then fell off the blade when I got it past the brackets. I pushed the doors ajar a few inches and looked out. In the time we’d been walking the tunnels, the night had turned misty and colder. I could see the main cabin way off to my right; the barn where the dogs had been kept was right next door. The moon was barely visible, but it provided a diffused light in the mist.
“What’ve we got?” Baby asked.
“Fog’s coming in,” I said. “Nothing moving out there for the moment. Better move that lantern, though.” I didn’t want to be silhouetted. And we still hadn’t found Grinny Creigh.
“These kids are starving,” Baby said. “And scared.”
“Wards of Grinny Creigh,” I said. “They ought to be scared.”
He shook his head in dismay. “Barely human, some of them,” he mused.
“Problem is, how do we get them out of here?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking sideways out the partially opened barn doors. “We try to make a run for it, and she’s out there in the weeds with some of those dogs?”
“What if we could go back through the tunnels,” I said. “That would reduce our exposure to a fifty-foot run across open ground. Once we got into the rock passage, we could defend ourselves, and then get to the vehicle.”
As if in answer to my what-if, we both heard something, a noise in the tunnel from which we’d just come. One of the kids was staring at the open door, and then she started to cry. I sprinted for the door as I recognized the sound of running feet-far too many running feet. The shepherds recognized it, too, and leaped for the doorway at about the same time I got the thing slammed shut. Ten seconds later there were multiple thuds against the door and dark growls of frustration. So much for getting out through the tunnels, I thought. And Grinny had joined us on the web. Her web.
Baby had brought the keeper bar into the barn and then secured the barn doors using the brackets on our side. There was a lot of snuffling and growling going on in the tunnel and just that simple door latch keeping the door closed. I jammed a pitchfork up against the panels of the door.
“What time is it?” Baby asked.
I looked at my watch. It was twelve thirty in the morning.
“They’ll find that note when they go looking for you,” he said. “Then they’ll come here. All we have to do now is wait.”
“She’s here,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “She’s here.”
I peered through the crack between the barn doors. There was a cold draft coming into the barn, and the mist had deepened outside. I could see out into the building complex, but not very far out into the yards beyond.
“Well, we sure as hell can’t go out there,” I said. “There’ll be dogs and probably some black hats with rifles waiting. Don’t suppose your cell works, does it?”
He shook his head. I’d checked mine; same deal-no signal. Some of the dogs on the other side of the tunnel door must have heard us talking, because they began to jump against the door. The pitchfork held, but just barely. The kids were watching the door with terrified expressions. They apparently were all too familiar with Grinny’s dog pack.
“Hay bales,” Baby said, and we started stacking bales against the door. We got twenty of them set up, which had the effect of reducing the scary noises and also putting a thousand pounds of weight in front of that door. I went back to the front door to keep watch.
“What would you do if you were Grinny’s crew right now?” Baby asked.
“I’d surround this barn with dogs and black hats and then set it on fire,” I said. “Solve all my problems at once.”
He nodded. Apparently the same thought had occurred to him.
“Still glad you came?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he said. “How far is it to the main cabin?”
“Maybe three hundred feet,” I said, opening the door a crack to make sure.
“If we could get over there before she organizes her troops, we’d have that hidey-hole underground and a shot at that one escape tunnel. Here we have what’s called a barbecue pit.”
He had a point, but it was getting really foggy out there. We’d never see a brace of dogs coming, and they’d probably hit the kids before they hit us. We both looked out the front door. A substantial mountain fog looked back. Then, somewhere along the hill, a dog began to howl. Before I could shut them up, my shepherds howled back, and we were treated to a two-minute wolf-pack duet echoing across the ridges, strangely muted by the fog but eerie all the same. I let them go to it; I wanted whoever was out there in the trees to know there were four of us in here, not just two.
The dogs in the back tunnel went quiet when the howling started. The kids watched my shepherds with total fascination. Somehow the howling inside had comforted them a little bit. Baby was right: They were a motley-looking crew, all of whom would have been the subject of taunts at school for their defective appearance. But they were little girls, and the witch had been sending them to a butcher.