Chapter 22 - THE DEAD MAN’S SAFE DEPOSIT
The front door was jammed.
Claire threw her entire body weight against the heavy oak slab, but the deadbolt wouldn't budge. In the faint ambient glow of the porch lantern outside, she saw why: heavy industrial screws had been drilled directly through the doorframe into the jamb from the exterior.
They were sealed inside.
"Daniel!" she screamed down the dark corridor, shielding Lily beneath her fleece coat. "The door is barred! Daniel!"
Heavy, erratic footsteps pounded down the stairs. Daniel burst into the foyer, his breath rattling in his lungs, his chest heaving. Blood was smeared across his left temple—a superficial gash from a falling piece of nursery lathe.
"Julian went down," Daniel wheezed, his eyes darting frantically in the gloom. "He dropped through the breach with a flashlight. Claire, there’s an entire sub-basement under the crawlspace. It’s an old root cellar that was walled off before we bought the place back from the estate. It has its own exterior bulkhead doors."
"I don't care about the architecture of this cursed house!" Claire hissed, tears of pure adrenaline burning her eyes. "Lily said someone spoke to her through the pipe! Someone gave her a ring! Who is in this house, Daniel? Who did your mother bury down there?"
Before Daniel could answer, Lily reached into the pocket of her overalls. Her tiny fingers pulled out a heavy object that landed on the hardwood floor with a dull, leaden ring.
Claire clicked on her phone’s flashlight and angled the beam downward.
It was not a child’s toy. It was a solid gold signet ring, deeply tarnished, bearing the crest of the Vance family—the soaring hawk clutching an anchor. But it wasn't the gold that stopped Claire’s heart.
Engraved on the inner band was a name: *Arthur Vance - Forever Bound.*
And wedged into the setting, wrapped around the stone with dried, brittle electrical tape, was a micro-SD memory card.
Daniel fell to his knees, staring at the ring as if it were a venomous spider. "That was my father’s wedding band. He wore it every day of my childhood. He never took it off. Not even when he worked on the boat engines."
"If he never took it off," Claire whispered, her voice dropping to a terrifying register, "how did our four-year-old daughter get it through a heating vent three hours ago?"
From the kitchen, the heavy hum of the backup generator kicked on with a sputtering roar. The recessed lights in the ceiling flickered to life, bathing the hallway in an eerie, jaundiced amber. At the same moment, the landline phone mounted on the kitchen wall—a line Claire thought had been disconnected six months ago—began to ring.
*Brrrrring.*
The bell was mechanical, harsh, reverberating through the dead quiet of the sealed house.
*Brrrrring.*
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Claire and Daniel exchanged a look of pure terror. Lily buried her face in Claire’s neck, whimpering, "Don't pick it up, Mommy. That's the mean lady who talks from the box."
***
