Page 17 of Overexposed

I nodded and took his hand, my camera moving to and fro over the front of my parka while I steadied the flashlight in my other hand.

We walked through the echoey church, displaying what religion so often marked as sin with the very gesture of holding hands. Auris went through two keys before the small sacristy door swung open. The lintel was low, and while the hinges didn’t squeak, a shudder ran down my spine when we passed through the door.

The sacristy had windows, so there were gray outlines of candleholders and cabinets, crosses, saints in gilded frames. I kept my flashlight aimed at the ground and followed Auris, who was steady in his exploring, not trembling with a blend of anticipation and something that was one half excitement, one half fear of the unknown.

“Okay, where is the crypt?” I asked, because I didn’t see anything.

“I don’t know. We’ll have to look.” He stilled. I didn’t see him sniff the air, but I was pretty sure he was trying to sense something.

He let go of my hand to open a large closet, and I took the opportunity to photograph shadows cast by the trickle of light in here: a cross, the windowpane, the distorted hand of a statue.

“What’s in there?” I asked when I heard banging from the closet Auris had half vanished in.

“Well, let’s just say this is a lot like the story of children finding a hidden world at the back of a wardrobe, except it’s very different,” he said. His face looked chalky when he turned and beckoned me to him. “Here. There is a hidden passage in here.”

“Wow. Okay, this is weird. Is this a normal thing for churches?”

More creaking wood. I wasn’t sure if Auris was breaking anything, or if this was what it was supposed to sound like.

“Some,” he said. “But I’m not an expert on the matter. All I know is that those who specialize in hunting demons liked having secret rooms and hidden basements. It would make sense they have a certain number of safe houses -- safe churches -- equipped for their nefarious needs.”

“Wow.”

Auris pushed the secret door open, and I felt a gust of cold air rush past me. “Do you want to wait up here?”

I immediately shook my head. “I think I’ll be eaten if I do that. That’s how it goes in horror movies, and besides,” I pointed with my flashlight. “Secret passage.”

“Fair enough,” Auris said.

He went first, and I followed. Stairs led into the darkness, narrow ones that had me point my light at the tip of my boots while I tried not to fall and break my neck. The low ceiling didn’t help much either. Auris had no issue with this stairwell, sweeping ahead silently, and, I assumed, gracefully. Not that I could actually see much.

We came out in an earthen basement -- a crypt. Bones filled half-moon alcoves here as well, thighbones piled high to pillow skulls, aged dust and cold dry air making this seem like another world, a portal place that could open to the past, the underworld, or to a monster’s dreams.

“Is this… like a labyrinth?” I asked after I’d followed Auris along the claustrophobic corridors.

“No. Or maybe it’s supposed to be one. I’m not familiar enough with Christianity’s practices to tell.” He stopped, turned, offered his profile to my flashlight’s glow. “I wonder what’s through here,” he said.

I swung my flashlight to where he was looking. Set in a wall, there was a door, old but sturdy, not wooden like you might have expected, but made of metal.

Auris pulled out the caretaker’s set of keys and went through every single one. None would turn in the lock.

“Do you know how to pick a lock?” I asked.

Auris glanced at me. “A skill I never learned. I usually get people to open doors for me.”

He gave the door a long look. I turned around, illuminating piles of bones and the disturbances of footsteps in the dirt. Some of those had to be ours, but there were others, and they looked recent.

“Are you sure no one is here?” I asked.

“I am,” he said. “It’s nighttime. You can’t ambush a vampire during nighttime.” He sighed. “Fuck it.”

The door’s protest was sharp, loud, and short lived. Auris broke it down like cheap plywood.

“Oh, that works,” I said and followed him into the next room across the bruised plank of the one-time door.

Claustrophobic thanks to the low ceiling and the raw walls, this room wasn’t exactly inviting. However, it lacked one thing present everywhere else in the ossuary: bones. Instead, I saw something that almost made my heart beat out of my chest, and before my brain could fully comprehend the sight, I found myself in Auris’s arms.

“You don’t have to look, Ethan. Listen to my voice. You don’t have to look.”

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