Chapter 51 - The Flame in the Deep
The sirens grew louder, their blue and red strobes flashing through the hairline cracks of the upper chapel floor like distant lightning. The two hired thugs, realizing the game was finished, dropped to their knees without further resistance, hands locked behind their necks.
Tyler, however, stared at the scattered, ruined papers with the hollow glaze of complete madness.
"If I don't get the estate..." he whispered, his voice barely audible beneath the sound of approaching police cruisers. "...then nobody gets it. Not you. Not the bastard downriver. Nobody."
Before Julian or I could react, Tyler’s hand plunged into his coat pocket. He did not pull out a gun.
He pulled out a heavy brass road flare.
"Tyler, don't!" Julian shouted, moving forward.
With a vicious, deranged strike, Tyler pulled the striker cap across the sulfur head. A violent, blinding hiss of white-hot phosphorus erupted into the crypt, casting terrible, dancing shadows across the ancient granite walls.
"Tyler, stop! The gas lines!" I yelled, but my voice was drowned out by his wild, unhinged laughter.
The sub-crypt sat directly beneath the nineteenth-century coal gas tanks that had once illuminated the chapel, sealed off decades ago but still leaking pockets of volatile methane into the subterranean bedrock. The sharp, acrid scent of kerosene that had greeted me at the cellar door was not fuel for a lantern—Tyler had brought two industrial cans of accelerant into the flume to burn away the evidence of his excavation.
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Tyler swung the burning flare through the air, hurling it straight down the dark, narrow tunnel leading back into the manor’s foundation.
A low, guttural roar rumbled through the floor beneath our feet. The temperature in the crypt skyrocketed in an instant, and deep in the darkness of the flume, an orange wave of flame began to swell, rushing toward us with the terrifying speed of an unleashed tempest.
