Hope in Ruins Book I: The Burning of West Six

Chapter 24: The Ghost Locked in the Kiln

BEN

Ben made his way towards the front door through the field, moving softly through the limp grass.

"What are you doing," Peter whispered, suddenly at his side and glancing around as if soldiers and Burners would materialize out of nothing.

"I just have to check something in the house," Ben said and kept limping. "You go ahead. I'll be there in a minute."

"Soldiers tore it apart. I checked this morning. And remember, where you go...."

"Yeah, yeah. Where I go, you go. Then this won't take long," Ben said.

Before Ben left this place forever, he would find out what was in the basement that was so important to his parents, if it was even still there.

Ben stepped up onto the front porch and stopped cold. He stared at the front door. Someone had connected with chalk all the blue star flowers with white centers, the white centers his mother had painted. They made a symbol, a constellation, Perseus.

Ben pushed his way into the house and past the stars, unwilling to think about what they meant. Maybe they meant nothing. He hoped they meant nothing. Peter followed. Black and blue shadows swam in front of him as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. When they did, he saw that his home had been ransacked. Everything in the kitchen had been dumped onto the floor. Broken chairs, playing cards, shredded blankets, and smashed dishes littered their once neat living room. Ben limped like a ghost through the rooms, mourning what was left of his home.

He froze when he saw the basement door under the stairs. It was broken open.

Nine years ago, their mother had nailed that door shut before she died. Ben had painted over it and set an end table and a vase of flowers in front of it to help them forget. The vase lay smashed on the floor, the flowers rotting and brown. The end table was broken into splinters. Where the little door had been, where Ben had painted over and forgotten, was a gaping hole. In the darkness under the stairs, Ben could see rickety stairs descended into cool blackness below.

"It seems your parents had a thing for secret hideouts," Peter said.

"What are you talking about?"

"The shelter under the barn."

"What, you didn't make it?"

Peter shook his head. "I found it about the same time I found your stash of books. Viola didn't know about the shelter either. It had to be your parents. This wasn't broken open when I checked this morning."

"Seth," Ben said with a lump in his throat. "He said he found...."

"What?" Peter asked.

"My parents never let us down there. Whatever's down there, they didn't want Watchers to find it."

"Well, let's go see what they were hiding," Peter said.

Ben reached into the stairwell and found a light switch. He flipped it, not expecting it to work, the house rarely had electricity. To Ben's surprise, a bulb flickered and clicked on.

"Must be a generator," Peter said.

It was like walking into a crypt. A layer of dust from years of neglect coated the stairs. A single set of footprints went down the steps and back up. Ben brushed aside spiders dangling from silk webs as he descended, his crutch thumping all the way down. At the bottom, he paused and felt along the walls for another switch. He flipped the lights on, and froze, transfixed and frightened by what he saw.

The basement was nothing more than a concrete box, roughly the size of the house above it, and it was filled with strange medical equipment and hundreds of books. In one corner stood a long table with glass tubes, and syringes turned gray and opaque with dust. Metal scalpels and needles dulled and rusted from over a decade of neglect. And the books—so many books. Bookcases lined the walls, boxes of books stacked in front of already full shelves, piles lay on tabletops, and in corners. The place smelled of old, forgotten words, water and metal, and cold.