Chapter 4 — Chapter 04

The cellar door was in the pantry, behind a shelf of preserves that hadn't been touched since the previous century. Mrs. Ashworth had refused to show it to me, but she'd gone to her sister's in Oakland for the weekend, and the servants had the afternoon off.

I told myself I was just being thorough.

The lock was old — older than the house, which was strange, because the house had been rebuilt after the quake. Whoever had installed this lock had wanted to keep something in, not out.

It took me ten minutes with my picks. The door swung inward on rusted hinges, revealing stone steps that descended into darkness.

I lit my flashlight and went down.

---

The cellar was larger than it should have been. I counted forty paces before the beam caught something other than stone — a wall of old brick, mortared rough, with an archway that had been sealed up. The seal was recent. The mortar was still soft in places.

I pressed my palm against it. Cold. The kind of cold that seeps through skin and settles in bone.

And then I heard it.

Not footsteps. Not voices. Something else — a sound like fire eating wood, like wind through a collapsed building, like ten thousand people screaming all at once, very far away.

I told myself it was the pipes.

I backed toward the stairs, keeping the flashlight steady. The beam caught something on the floor near the archway — a pocket watch, face cracked, hands frozen at 5:12.

The time the earthquake hit.

I picked it up. The metal was ice-cold, and for just a moment — just a heartbeat — I could have sworn I felt it tick.