Salvage (29 page)

Crazy Jo Dunsmuir threw a good punch at his shoulder. He laughed. "What?"

"Don't be a jerk," she said. "I'm trying to have a moment here."

"You're gonna have to get used to me spoiling the moment," he said, shrugging. "It's kind of my thing."

"Is that a threat?" she said, raising an eyebrow.

"It's a promise," Owen told her.

He dove in. Jo was mere steps behind.

2

There were other divers swimming languidly through the ruins in rays of sediment-mottled sunshine, floating among schools of crappies and sunfish, plucking rocks and junk from the dirt and tossing them away in mild frustration, searching for treasured keepsakes and knickknacks left behind when Peace Falls had been abandoned. Most of them would leave empty-handed. They might find a rusted Zippo lighter, or an old toothbrush scaled with silt, and imagine who they'd belonged to some thirty years ago—but the real secrets lay elsewhere, in a place none of them had dared go. The church cast a menacing shadow over the old town. According to Jo, few had attempted to gain entry since the Crucified Jesus had crushed a young boy to death in 1981 and the windows had been boarded, the doors chained shut.

Jo and Owen stood in its gloom, craning their necks to see the opening she'd kicked out in the second story window. Her plan had been to kick out all the boards barring entry, to let in the light, to provide the most daring explorers access, hoping they would find what others hadn't—what Jo herself
couldn't
, because Crouch wouldn't let her get close.

"I almost died down there," she'd said the night before, as the two of them lay in Hordyke's small bed under the dim glow of the moon. "There was a cave-in. The stairs collapsed on me, pinned me down halfway to the basement. If the landing below hadn't finally given away on its own, I would have drowned, for sure."

Standing in the shadow of the church, Jo pointed to the opening she'd made, and then turned to him, shrugging up her shoulders with a troubled look.
Still want to risk it?

He nodded.

Jo swam ahead, kicking up silt. Owen followed. He saw Jo slip in through the window and into the darkness beyond. He paused at the windowsill, unable to see through the murk inside. He drew the LED from his belt, flicked it on, and aimed it into the black maw of the haunted church, expecting to find the Reverend Everett Crouch inside, a welcoming smile on his dead man's face, and seated in a comfortable chair, bidding him to his side. There was nothing. He breathed a sigh of relief into the regulator, and then hauled himself in through the window.

His flippers came down on a heap of sediment that had been swept up against the window by the internal current of the church. He stood in front of a large desk and chair, close enough that he'd almost banged his knees climbing in. He swept the LED over the rest of the room. More eyes rose from the gloom, human eyes, flat and tacked to the walls: tattered posters that had somehow weathered the flood. Combo chair desks were scattered about the floor, others were gathered in a pile by the far wall. The pile shifted suddenly in a small avalanche, as if something had disturbed their rest.

This must have been our Sunday school. Maybe even our
only
school, after the Schism. Was it just Jo and me, sitting in the front of the class, listening to—who? My mother, or one of the others Selkie couldn't name, teaching us our ABCs and 1-2-3s? Or Crouch, rapping to us about God?

Where is Jo, anyway?
he wondered, shining his light over a mural of smiling, round-faced children with chubby arms and legs. All of them had big blue eyes full of joy and wonder, white, black, Asian and Native. They played hopscotch and Cowboys and Indians; they rode Big Wheel tricycles and hung by their legs from trees. One girl was dressed as an angel with wings and halo, praying over a dolly in a casket, while another stood in mourning, wearing a pillbox hat with a veil. Several others wore animal costumes beneath a sign for a production of
Peter and the Wolf
. The entire mural was hand-painted, but the sign for the play had apparently been meant to look as if it had been painted by the children. The wolf, another boy in a costume, peeked out from behind a bush in the background. He appeared to be licking his lips.

Inscribed above all this was a motto, carved into a wooden panel along the length of the wall. The words
LITTLE CHILDREN
stood out under the LED, but the rest was covered in too much silt to be read from a distance. Owen swam to the beginning and wiped it clean, pulling himself along its edge, reading it letter by letter, until the whole motto was revealed. When he had finished, he swam back to take it all in at once.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN,

AND FORBID THEM NOT

TO COME UNTO ME:

FOR SUCH IS THE

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

All we've done is suffer
, Owen thought, though he knew the word had a different meaning here.
Crouch wouldn't let us do anything else.

His face prickled with oncoming tears, but he'd cried enough for his lost childhood. This place brought no fresh memories, only pain. It was as unmemorable as the child's—
his
—bedroom in the house behind the church. A single doorway led out of the classroom. The small hill of broken school desks beside it tumbled with a hollow metallic
thunk
. Owen swam out, eager to be gone, hoping he'd never have to come back.

He found Jo swimming near the end of the hall. She turned and waved as his LED caught her. Pitch black everywhere except in their little circles of light, the hall was an underwater topiary, its walls caked with mossy algae, the floors littered with broken boards and loose trash (
Refuse
, Owen corrected himself, causing another twinge of sadness), and baseboards sprouting a brownish, lettuce-like plant along its edge. The ceiling had rotted out entirely in places, revealing bare joists where track lights hung loose, their florescent tubes slick with algae. Boards littered the floor. A patch of spruce-like weeds reached out from a large hole between the exposed slats, swaying in the gentle undercurrent. Long, fibrous strands of dark green algae floated elsewhere. Owen pulled a slimy glob from his hair and cast it aside.

Brings a new meaning to the term
"
green building,
"
he thought, vaguely amused.

Jo swam toward an even darker stairwell, ignoring the doors on either side. Owen tried one, found the handle rusted solid and impossible to open without a great deal of force behind him. He skipped the other door, which was slightly ajar and blocked from the inside by several large wooden crates, and followed Jo to the stairwell, as her head sank beneath the rise into the yawning darkness.

The stairs lay twenty or so feet below. Jo's flashlight swept across a toothy jangle of steps, broken handrails, and balusters, before she disappeared out of sight below the second floor.

Must be the cave-in Jo mentioned. Lucky she made it out alive.

Owen followed, a dreamlike feeling washing over him as the perspective shifted, the objects and surroundings so normal and yet somehow otherworldly. Though he'd evidently been here before, this was no world he was used to: here was a realm of scaly, hard-shelled creatures and deadly microbes, a beautiful, shadowy microcosm of algae and human waste, a hauntingly beautiful aquarium. Before the flood, he imagined it would have been scrubbed and swept and polished. It truly was God's House now, more than when he and his mother had come to worship.

He swam down, down, following Jo's lamplight, and when he reached the jagged remains of the stairs, he performed an easy somersault. What he saw when his feet came to rest on the decayed floorboards left him breathless.

The collapsed stairwell opened on the nave, or sanctuary, a hall so high his light caught nothing of the cathedral ceiling, only brightening as high as the balconies, cluttered with damaged seating. Black stretched above them, like an endless upward-stretching abyss. He felt its oppressive weight as he followed Jo toward the altar.

The baptismal font had tipped and cracked in two. Pews were toppled like dominoes on either side. Bibles, and footwear of all sizes and styles, at least a dozen shoes in all—some paired, but mostly singles—littered the floor by the altar. The Blessed Trinity had left their shoes behind, unable or unwilling to carry them into the afterlife.

Dull colored light shimmered in through cracks in the boards covering the giant stained glass depiction of Moses and the Israelites standing before the parted Red Sea. Crouch had put the mural in after the Schism, perhaps to inspire his followers to believe they could, with divine intervention, part the flood and spare their place of worship from destruction. And when, at last, the Blessed Trinity understood God would not intervene on their behalf, they'd slipped out of their shoes and cast aside their Holy Books. Their Pied Piper had promised salvation in martyrdom, and they'd swallowed Crouch's lies until all that was left to swallow had been water.

Owen sat in the front pew, where he assumed he and his mother had sat when they'd been part of the church, the Dunsmuirs possibly sitting at their side. He closed his eyes, trying to reach into the past and dredge up memories of Father Crouch preaching damnation at the pulpit, of voices raised in song and prayer, of surreptitiously kicking Jo's saddle shoes to get her attention, and, when she turned, pulling a face to make her giggle.

He listened, trying to conjure up the voice of Crouch—whom he refused to think of as his father, no matter what the evidence said. He'd seen enough televangelists to know the shtick:
Put your hand on your television set, brothers and sisters, and the Lord will relieve you of your pain! Reach, brother, reach into the past and you shall see the light. The past is a bright, shining beacon, leading you home. Your soul is sick, your heart is sore! Here I come, Lord, I'm coming home!

He saw Crouch pacing the floor behind the pulpit, wringing his hands together obsessively, muttering to himself—
Speaking to God
, Owen's mother would have told him.
Speaking to God
. Owen tried to imagine what the words had meant to a five-year-old. He tried to imagine what he'd been doing in church while his father paced. Something like a memory slowly percolated into his consciousness. He seemed to remember lining up his army men on the pews, playing war until he heard his father's voice. He'd been sitting on the floor between pews, and his father hadn't seen him. Owen had peered over at the sound of his father's voice, had seen the man pull down on a candelabrum to the right of the pulpit, had heard a sharp click echo throughout the nave.

Crouch had opened a passage in the wall. He'd stepped into it, and the door had clicked shut behind him, flush with the wall. Invisible to anyone but those who knew of its existence. The divers looking for treasure, the police searching for the missing members of the Blessed Trinity, would have swam by without ever seeing it.

Jo floated near the secret door, looking but not seeing it, either. Owen pushed up from the pew and swam for her. He found the rusted remains of the candelabrum, and pulled with all his strength. A portion of the wall swung into the darkness with a cloud of silt. Jo turned to him, her eyes wide. She grabbed him in an excited hug before the two of them peered into the darkness.

Owen stepped in first, LED illuminating the wall directly in front of him, no more than three feet away. A bare bulb hung from the low ceiling, and a rusted chain pulley. It wasn't a room, as he'd expected—it was a
stairwell
.

He threw a look over his shoulder. Jo nodded, urging him forward.

The stairs were undamaged, eerily free of debris and algae, and descended to a riser before a sharp left into pitch dark. Owen swam down into the watery darkness.

Jo's light fell over his shoulder, throwing his long shadow in a snaking pattern down the steps. He settled his flippers down on the first riser, heart beating rapidly.

He's here, Owns
. His sister's words echoed in his mind.
Crouch is here, I can
feel
it. This is the place.

He waited for Jo to meet him on the riser, waited until she was standing right beside him, then he pulled himself around the wall, and shined his light into the dark.

A mere ten steps led down to a steel door of what was likely a fallout shelter. The large crucifix from the altar had been wedged between it and the stairs, barricading the door. Owen didn't know what to make of this; it didn't jibe with what they'd learned. From Jo's expression, neither did she.

Owen got down on his knees and began to pull. Jo crouched beside him, and the two of them strained their muscles until the cross came unstuck with a great groan, reverberating the stairs and shaking silt from the ceiling like flakes of brown-green snow. Together they moved the cross aside. It stood a good eight feet against the wall, even leaning.

He turned to Jo. They shared an anxious look.

How long has she been trying to find this place?
he wondered.
Years? If she finds what she's looking for, will she let that be the end of it?

Owen nodded her ahead. Jo descended the last two steps, reached out for the uppermost door handle. He came down behind her, reluctantly, and took the handle nearest the floor. They twisted them together.

The door came open with a groan of rusted metal and swung heavily outward. Its weight and the suddenness of its opening threw them back against the stairs. The regulator rattled between Owen's teeth as his ass struck a stair, sending a judder of pain up his jaw. They sat there a moment, both of them winded, peering into the cold, dark abyss of the cellar.

Jo shined her light inside. The chamber resembled the inside of a cave, walls coated with thick algae the color of sick phlegm, jagged stalactites of the same orange-brown oozing down from the ceiling. It covered the floor, too, mottled and bubbled, repulsive and slimy. The shelves lining the walls were so thickly buried it was impossible to determine the objects beneath.