Page 1 of Spelunking Through Hell

Prologue

“Never could handle working on the trapeze, me. The one thing I never learned how to do was let go. I guess it’s just not something I’m built to do.”

—Frances Brown

The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan

Fifty-six years ago

The old Parrish place—socalled because the man who’d built it, Theodore Parrish, had committed the unforgivable but extremely memorable crime of killing his entire family with an ax as a sacrifice to a horrible swamp god who thankfully seemed to have existed only in his imagination—was never entirely quiet. No matter the hour of the night or day, the pipes rattled, the foundation creaked, and the windows shook in their panes, rattled by the wind whether or not the wind was truly there.

Alice Price-Healy had grown accustomed to the sounds of the house around her, and while she often missed the less intrusive creaking and rattle of the house where she’d grown up, a childhood spent with a colony of pantheistic mice living in her bedroom walls had left her a deep sleeper, if only in self-defense. She was dead to the world, one arm thrown up over her head, the hard arch of her stomach pointed to the ceiling. At this stage of pregnancy, sleeping in any other position was a fairy tale, and the suggestion was likely to result in something being thrown.

She was snoring. She’d done that during her first pregnancy as well and had denied it until Thomas got the mice to back him up. (The mice were rather more enthusiastic about the phenomenon than he was, declaring jubilantly that the Noisy Priestess had finally masteredthe art of living up to her name even in her slumber.) After a shouting match during which she declared that if her snoring bothered him so much, he could damn well figure out how he was going to carry their next child, or else she was going to start taking that pill the ladies at the library kept talking about, he had decided sleeping in the living room was a better choice.

But oh, some nights it was hard to leave her, even when she was so loud that he couldn’t possibly sleep in the same room. After five years of marriage, he still couldn’t fully believe they’d made it here. And even after everything it had cost them, everything it had costhimin specific, he didn’t have a single regret. She was lovely in the moonlight slanting through the window, casting shadows on her skin. She was lovely in the daylight, too, although considerably more likely to be covered in blood. With the baby expected sometime in the next month, he had finally managed to convince her to stay out of the woods. He’d been worried for a time that he was going to miss the birth of his second child when she went into labor while halfway up a tree in the middle of a forest that carried a distinct dislike toward him.

It was funny, in its own ironic way. He lived in the sight of an ecosystem that actively and impossibly didn’t want him anywhere near it, trapped inside the house that had been intended as his punishment for daring to question the Covenant, and he couldn’t imagine a world where he’d have been happier. Even trying to imagine a world where he was still capable of leaving the house didn’t work, because it required a world where he’d chosen not to bargain with the crossroads for Alice’s life.

She was his happy ending, if a man like him was allowed to ask for one. She was his reward for turning his back on everything he’d been raised to be and choosing a better path for himself: Alice, and their children. Kevin would be three soon. He was talking more every day, constantly discovering the world around him, and now that he’d mostly learned not to play too roughly with the mice or tailypo, he was an endless source of joy for their small family. His excitement over his new baby brother or sister was big enough to fill the whole house. Sometimes Thomas thought he might be even louder than the mice.

As if anything could be.

Alice made a snorting noise in her sleep, and for a moment, it looked like she might be waking up. Thomas reached over and smoothed her hair back from her face, and she stilled, slipping into deeper slumber. Yes. This was definitely one of the nights where he slept elsewhere. During the summer, his tendency to radiate heat likea broken furnace did neither of them any favors: her, because she would get too warm and wake up; him, because it meant he would be sharing a bed with his angry, extremely pregnant wife. Retrieving his glasses from the bedside table, Thomas swung his feet around to the floor and rose, heading for the door.

(Later, when Alice was climbing the walls in furious, impotent panic, she would demand the mice tell her exactly how the evening had gone, over and over again, until she had a perfect vision of events. The one thing they could never tell her clearly enough to satisfy her was whether she had managed to wake at all, or whether she had simply slept through the moment when her husband walked away from her, possibly forever.)

As for Thomas, he didn’t pause on his way out of the room, not to kiss her temple or even to look back at her. He simply left, unaware that this night was anything other than exactly like the night before.

Like so many of the other important people who had left Alice alone, Thomas Price never looked back.

Thomas eased the door carefully shut behind himself, trying not to wake Alice. She needed her sleep. If she woke, he would have been happy to make her toast and tea, or whatever else she wanted that they had on hand, but it would be better if she could sleep until morning.

Handling an increasingly rambunctious young boy who seemed to have inherited her fondness for the forest had been hard for her even before her pregnancy started to show, and—of course—he couldn’t help in any meaningful way. Everything outside the house might as well not exist for him and hadn’t for almost nine years.

Not since his bargain with the crossroads, which he had made with full understanding of the costs and possible consequences, and one he would gladly have made again if it had been required. What he’d gained had been more than worth everything he’d lost.

And if he needed to remind himself of that from time to time, when Kevin was having a tantrum or Alice was in a mood, well, it was a small price to pay to remain happy within what world he had remaining. He made his way down the hall toward the stairs, pausing to look into Kevin’s room and reassure himself the boy was fine.

The mice were sometimes a little overenthusiastic about reciting the catechisms of Daniel, Alice’s older brother, who they referred to as the God of Early Arrivals and Earlier Departures. Thomas hadbeen forced to sit down and have a long talk with the head priests, explaining how much they were upsetting Alice, before they would stop. But the damage had been done, and it was rare to make it through a night without at least one of them looking in on their sleeping son, half-afraid he would have been snatched out of his bed.

Not that most things potentially inclined toward snatching could get through the layers of protection Thomas had thrown over the house: wards and enchantments and thick walls of elemental energy. Even perfectly mundane home invaders would have trouble muscling their way inside. Every time Alice woke up crying out of concern for the brother she’d never known, he would research and add another protective screen, trying to keep his family as safe as he could.

It was something he could still do for them, even though he wouldn’t be able to drive Alice to the hospital, or take Kevin to school, or attend any of his milestone events as he grew older. No field trips or science fairs or graduations or weddings for Thomas Price. No, those things were for other men, men who hadn’t sold their souls to save their wives.

A jet of something that tasted too much like bitterness tried to force its way up his throat, and he forced it down again. He knew full well that the crossroads had only allowed him this much because they were sure, in their terrible, inhuman way, that he’d be suffering every day for the rest of his life. The happiness he’d been able to snatch was all the sweeter for being stolen, and he was going to keep stealing it every day for as long as he was able.

The stairs creaked as he descended, one more quiet message from a house that never stopped talking, and he stretched, beginning to fully waken. A cup of tea and then back to sleep on the living room couch, which was comfortable enough and would let the tailypo curl up with him. They didn’t like to sleep with Alice; she smelled too often of blood and gunpowder, and it unsettled them, but he had come to enjoy their company as a man might enjoy the company of a beloved dog, and it would be good to wake in their tangled, furry midst—

Then he stepped into the living room, and the gentle wakefulness he’d been stumbling toward evaporated in an instant, replaced by something cold and clear and altogether cruel.

Mary Dunlavy was waiting for him.

As always, their semi-resident ghost looked like a teenage girl with a pleasant face, the sort of girl who could be found in any American school or diner, except for her long white hair. She was even dressedin what he was sure was the latest fashion, a gray pleated skirt and a yellow button-down cardigan with a pressed Peter Pan collar. She looked at him solemnly, with nothing but sorrow in her eyes, which were the exact color of the sky above Penton Hall on a frozen winter morning. He shivered and forced himself to keep walking.

Finding Mary in the house was nothing unusual. She sat for Kevin when Alice needed a break, and she would be responsible for the new baby at least some of the time. She was the family babysitter. She had been since she died.

She was also the local representative for the crossroads, and the person who had helped Thomas broker his deal with them. Everything he had, he owed to her.

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