Page 82 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
Perliett was shaking uncontrollably and couldn’t formulate an answer. She was more familiar with Mrs. Hannity, who was a friend of her mother’s.Mother!Perliett grimaced in pain as she opened her mouth to speak.
“My mother. She’s—home. Unconscious. Needs—a doctor.” Perliett let her head fall back against the chair. She heard, rather than saw, Mrs. Hannity give directions to her husband.
“Go retrieve the doctor right away! Send Mikey to check on Mrs. Van Hilton and to fetch us if a doctor is also needed there.”
“We’ve only got one doctor.” Mr. Hannity seemed at a loss at how to divide George Wasziak into two in order to service both emergencies.
Mrs. Hannity must have urged him to go, because when Perliett opened her eyes, Mr. Hannity’s form was retreating from the room.
“Not—me.” Perliett reached for Mrs. Hannity’s hand. “I’ll be fine. My mother.”
Mrs. Hannity leaned over her, clicking her tongue in astonishment. “You need a doctor, Perliett.” Her voice was soothing, nurturing. She pulled a crocheted blanket off a nearby sofa and wrapped it around Perliett’s shaking body. “Something awful has happened to you, dear. Who did this to you?”
Perliett shook her head. She had little to say to the woman. She had the memory of being attacked. The memory of being pushed to the ground. Hands on her body, and then ... nothing. Absolutely nothing until the little girl singing a nursery rhyme in the corn had stepped forward and offered to dig her a grave.
27
Molly
Smoke was supposed to rise, not fall. Which could only mean that the house was already filled with the suffocating fumes as they squeezed through every crack in the floor and began to fill the basement. Molly waved her hand in front of her face to clear away the dusky haze. The electric light hanging overhead was flickering. She could hear crackling overhead, worse than a campfire, the heat infiltrating to the cave-like abyss she was holed up in.
Willing herself not to panic, Molly scanned the basement for something that could help bust open the door to the upstairs. The crowbar had been a dismal failure, but it was probably her best option. Snatching it off the floor, Molly crawled up the stairs, coughing against the smoke that filled her lungs the higher she climbed. Wedging the crowbar between the bottom of the door and floor, she pushed down on it, praying that it would cause the door to crack, split, or—anything that would release her from this prison.
The door stood solid.
With an angry wail of frustration, Molly flung the crowbar down the stairs and reached for the doorknob withthe irrational instinct to rattle it and hope it would miraculously open. She tapped it with her fingers. It wasn’t hot. Not yet anyway. A good sign the fire wasn’t directly outside the door.
She needed to get out of here and call 911 to save their home—if it wasn’t too late already—but that was nothing if she didn’t make it out alive! Molly clambered back down the steps, the damp basement providing little reprieve from the fear that was consuming her. Like an idiot, she’d left her phone upstairs by the bed. She could see it in her mind’s eye, possibly melting in the flames now.
With a whimper, Molly raced to the plastic shelving Trent had put up. She rifled through its contents. There wasn’t much there of worth, let alone anything that would contribute to an escape. Paint cans, a milk crate filled with rags, various rolls of tape and other adhesives. Some unpacked moving boxes claimed her attention. Molly ripped them open, disappointed to find they were filled with trophies from Trent’s high school football days, and a few souvenirs from some vacations he’d taken as a kid. No wonder he’d stuffed them downstairs. They were artifacts of a life that seemed eons ago. Carefree. Hopeful. Dream-filled.
Smoke rolled down the stairs, and Molly cast a look upward to see smoke squeezing through cracks in the joists and floorboards. She took another wild spin around the basement. She needed something stiff to jam against the door and bust it free.
Molly dragged her fingers over the gravestone walls. Half-completed names and dates boasted their demise to her in stone. Invitations that she would join them soon. Trent would return home to find the house charred in smoking ashes. The floors would probably collapse on her long before she died of smoke inhalation. Would they even find her body complete? She’d read once about a house that had gone up in flames in the early 1900s, and it had been so hot it consumedall the family’s children, leaving only tiny, unidentifiable bone fragments behind.
She kicked at a five-gallon bucket that was empty and went catapulting across the floor. Dying was not a possibility Molly had entertained. For all her depression and darkness, the idea of going away from Trent was akin to the ultimate betrayal. A desertion of sorts. Now someone was attempting to make the decision for her.
There had to be a way out of here. Unwilling to be defeated, Molly attempted the door again. This time, smoke gagged her, slinking its way up her nose and down her throat. She was able to get some of the wood on the door chipped away, but even as she pushed on the door, Molly could sense there was an object behind it, holding it in place, as if the intruder had wedged something there to prevent escape.
Unable to catch a clean breath of air, Molly retraced her steps back into the tomblike basement. She was going to die here. Die against a foundation of grave markers.
“Please,” Molly begged aloud. She knew God was listening. But listening and actually doing what she wanted God to do was another matter. She had prayed and begged before. Miscarriages still happened. Distance between her and Trent still happened. God was on His throne—but it felt like He wasn’t.
Her gaze fell on the boarded-up concrete slab in the floor. She knew it wasn’t a cellar door or they’d have seen the entrance on the outside of the farmhouse. But could it provide a way of escape? A source of oxygen or maybe even a strong enough support overhead if she could fit into a crawl space, so that when the house collapsed she would have a shot at survival?
Molly retrieved the crowbar. If she couldn’t bust down a door, she’d be pathetic if she couldn’t pry apart a boarded-up hole in the floor! She coughed as a cloud of smoke assaulted her, burning her nose with its acrid scent. The crowbar madequick work of the first board. Whoever had built the cover had merely placed it here for protection so no one would accidentally fall through and hurt themselves.
The smoke continued to grow in its insistence, so Molly peeled off her T-shirt, leaving her in her bra and shorts. She wrapped the shirt around her nose and mouth even as she cast a futile look around the basement for water to soak it in. Finding none, Molly returned to prying up the boards in the floor.
The last one gave way just as the light from the overhead bulb flickered and went out. Plunged into darkness, Molly refused to give in to the tears that wanted to rip at her throat and spiral her into helplessness at her fate. She dropped to her knees, feeling the edge of the cement border and sticking her hand into whatever lay beneath the now-open hole in the floor.
Molly stretched her arm downward until her armpit connected with the concrete. She still couldn’t touch bottom. This was definitely a crawl space, which was what she’d hoped. Something crashed overhead, sending Molly to her backside as she swung her legs over the side of the hole. Pushing herself off, she braced for a fall. Instead, her bare feet landed on a hard-packed dirt floor.
Unable to see, Molly dropped to her hands and knees, feeling the ground in front of her, the walls, and the ceiling. Cool, damp air enveloped Molly as she crawled in. A thousand spiders probably scurried away from her, yet the infested crawl space was preferable to the smoke-filled, burning house above her.
Assuming the crawl space went only a few feet, Molly braced herself to run into earth. This must have been used as an in-ground cellar back in the day. There was no way she could stand. The dimensions of the space had to be less than four feet high and wide, giving her enough berth to go forward but not to turn around easily.
Five feet or so inside and realization dawned on Molly that the crawl space had to have already extended beyond the foundation of the farmhouse. She was legitimately underground. If the house were to collapse, it would trap her in this tight space, the basement filled in with debris, and odds were good there was no way out. The crawl space was a literal earthen grave. The idea sent claustrophobia coursing through her.
