Texas Gothic - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,120

front of my mouth. I could see it in the faint glow coming from deeper in the cavern.

Búscame …

The word breathed through my mind.

I felt for Ben’s hand and held tight. “I think we need to go that way.”

“I thought you were calling it to you,” he said.

“My Spanish is a little rusty.” I looked up at him, barely able to see his outline in the spectral light. “But do you want to stay here?”

He cast a quick look around the cave, the dead end of our current situation, and squeezed my fingers. “Let’s go, then.”

The light led to a passageway, became brighter as we followed it through twists and turns. The passage narrowed until Ben had to squeeze through, and I saw him pale with pain as the rock dug into his ribs.

I wanted to let him rest, but an urgency pulled me forward. When I’d connected with the psychic knot inside me, it had drawn inexorably tight.

When the passage got too low I dropped to my knees and crawled. I finally emerged into a small chamber. The ghostly glow suffused the space, illuminating a dead end, and a dead man.

The skeletal remains of the soldier were dry and ancient and lay sprawled on a fall of earth like a rocky bed. The tatters of a uniform still clung to the bones, but the buckles and buttons and insignia had fallen ignominiously from the scraps of cloth.

Ben, muttering pained curses, squeezed through the entrance into the small cave, falling onto the floor with a grunt. “Your ghost,” he wheezed, “must hate me.”

“Shhh.” I knew better, from working on the dig that week, but I reached out anyway, picking up a brass crest, marveling at how old it was. It was still shiny under a layer of tarnish. “Ben, look. He was a soldier.”

He did look. He looked at the bones, then looked around the cavern, which was barely tall enough for him to stand up and stretch his arms. “This isn’t an escape, Amy. It’s a tomb.”

39

“your ghost,” accused Ben, “has led us to a trap. Maybe the same trap that killed him.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said. But he was right about one thing. I couldn’t see an exit. The side of the cave where the skeletal figure rested seemed to have collapsed. Maybe that was why he’d died here. Or maybe he’d been killed by someone and never found.

“His head is resting on something,” I said, crawling closer to look.

“Amy, are you listening?”

“It’s a bundle of black cloth!” With apologies to Dr. Douglas, I eased a finger under the stiff and rotted material, gently bracing the skull with my other hand so I didn’t dislodge it. “There’s something shiny. I can just see it.”

“Amaryllis!” Ben’s voice seemed far away. “Come back to earth. We are in trouble here.”

He grabbed my arm just as I pulled free a heavy metal object that rasped across the stone. The sound echoed through the cavern and down the passage we’d crawled out of.

In my hand was a solid gold cross, barely tarnished, and inlaid with gems. They didn’t gleam in the ghost light, and I couldn’t see their color. But this was a precious item.

Ben stared at it, too. “Oh my God. It is the Mad Monk.”

A faint breeze stirred the dirt on the floor. “I don’t think so, Ben. This was hidden. And it’s not very … monkish.”

“Did you read the story?” he demanded. “The one in the book? About how the Mad Monk—or whoever he was—ran off with the expedition’s treasure and was killed by his collaborators?”

The wind was getting stronger, and colder. “If you knew that story,” I snapped, “why did you follow the light?”

“Because we didn’t have a lot of options.” He chewed on his next words, and spit them out reluctantly. “And I trust you. But I don’t trust this ghost.”

I could see his breath, as the temperature kept dropping. “Ben, now is not the time to be a jackass.”

The glow that suffused the cavern seemed to pull in on itself, to gather near the wall closest to the skeleton. It brightened in the center, until I had to shade my eyes against the blue-white light.

Ben’s hand tightened on my arm hard enough that I gasped in pain. Surprise made me drag my eyes from the gathering specter, and I saw that the fog of Ben’s breath had gone still and his other hand clutched his side.

I knew that feeling. But if he struggled against the