Rogue Read Free

“pathways” doesn’t begin to do this process justice; you’re building superhighways.
    When Ajay looked in a mirror recently, he’d noticed his eyes appeared to have grown larger. His pupils had also become less sensitive to light, almost as if he welcomed it now, because it allowed him to keep them open wider and longer and to see more. He found that he was
hungry
to see more. Most alarming of all, the last time he’d tried on an old baseball cap, the fit was decidedly tighter than he remembered.
    He’d decided it was best not to think too much about these things.
    Ajay looked at his watch, then hurried to the east-facing window. He peered down at the path leading toward the shore past the graveyard and quickly spotted two figures moving along:
    Will and Mr. Elliot.
    Ajay widened his eyes, focusing in on them as he’d learned to do, details accumulating and enhancing the image.
    He saw Will glance back toward the tower, reach his arm back, and raise it behind the older man.
    Two fingers.
    “Good golly, Miss Molly,” whispered Ajay in alarm.
    He quickly moved to retrieve the knapsack he’d hidden in one of the boxes. Looked at his watch again: 6:50. Ten minutes before Lemuel Clegg would arrive to bring him his dinner.
    He removed his small school pager from the bag. The one he’d modified to avoid detection by the school’s server network.
    —
    “Sensing that he might be less receptive to the actual narrative, Lemuel Cornish never told Thomas about what his father and the Knights had found down here,” said Franklin as the doors slid open again. “My father never heard a word about it.”
    Franklin led Will out of the elevator into a narrow corridor. They hadn’t descended all the way to the bottom. This was a level Will had never seen before, built in a style decades newer than the ones in the old hospital, freshly painted, with portraits on the wall, men in nineteenth- and twentieth-century dress who he assumed must have been prominent members of the Knights.
    “What kind of a man was he?” asked Will.
    “Lemuel? Practical. Levelheaded. He understood only too well how his father had lost his way. That Ian’s obsession with what he’d uncovered under these grounds owed more to passion, or madness, than reason. You see, after his initial enthusiasm, Ian gradually became convinced that he’d made a dreadful mistake, that this lost city needed to be sealed off, buried for all time.”
    “I take it Lemuel didn’t see things the way his father did,” said Will.
    “He was a much more balanced man. Lemuel adopted a curious but cautious approach to the ongoing investigations. It was his idea, for instance, to install those great wooden doors at the mouth of the tunnel. Not to seal anything off, although he let his father believe that was the reason, but simply to prevent any unwanted or accidental entrance.”
    “Do you know who carved those words on them—
Cahokia
and
Teotwawki
?”
    “We don’t know exactly when he put the first one there, but we believe carving those words on his son’s doors was among the last things Ian Cornish ever did.”
    “But why did he call it Cahokia? You know about the one in southern Illinois, right?”
    “Oh, yes, the Native American archaeological site. Vast mounds of earth, laden with artifacts, evidence of an earlier civilization. French explorers stumbled onto it over three hundred years ago. It’s a state park now, complete with guided tours and a souvenir shop, although it wasn’t anything close to that organized back in Ian’s day.
    “But after he paid a visit there, Ian apparently came to believe that his discovery here and that one to the south were part of the same vast underground network of cities. Not a Native American one, mind you, but an even older civilization that the Others constructed long ago beneath the entire Midwest. A conclusion that, in Ian’s declining mental state, he believed supported the idea that they had once been Earth’s