It sounded almost like someone dragging a wooden box across stone.
Samuel reached for the heavy iron poker kept beside the pantry door.
Clara whispered, "There's someone in there."
He looked at the wall.
And something changed in his expression.
Not simple fear.
Recognition.
As though a memory he had buried years earlier had suddenly returned.
"Samuel?"
He swallowed.
"My father used to make that sound."
Clara stared at him.
"What?"
He did not answer immediately.
Instead, he slowly lowered the poker.
Then he pressed three fingers against the pine boards.
His face had gone pale.
"When I was a boy," he said, "my father told me never to open the northern wall."
Clara looked at the boards.
"Why?"
Samuel's eyes remained fixed on the wood.
"Because he said there were things beneath this mountain that were better left buried."
Samuel rarely spoke about his father.
Clara knew the outlines of the story.
His father, a hard mountain farmer named Gideon Thorne, had built the original cabin almost thirty years earlier.
He had been clever with tools, skilled with stonework, and notoriously suspicious of strangers.
He died when Samuel was eighteen.
His mother had died before that.
Afterward, Samuel inherited the property, the debts attached to it, and a collection of tools so worn that most men would have thrown them away.
But there were things Samuel had never explained.
Why one corner of the cellar had been sealed with stone.
Why his father refused to let anyone sleep near the northern wall.
Why old men in Blackwood sometimes fell silent when the Thorne family name was mentioned.
And why Samuel had once told Clara that his father was not a man whose memory deserved protecting merely because he was dead.
Clara had respected his silence.
Now she wondered whether that silence had protected something far worse.
"Did your father build this pantry?" she asked.
Samuel nodded.
"Most of it."
"Did he ever tell you what was behind the wall?"
"No."
"Did you ask?"
"Once."
"What did he say?"
Samuel looked down.
"He struck me."
Clara's expression softened.
"Oh, Samuel."
He shrugged, but the movement was stiff.
"I was twelve. I had heard something moving behind the boards. Thought maybe a fox had gotten trapped."
"And?"
"He told me that certain doors only brought suffering."
Clara reached for his hand.
Samuel squeezed her fingers.
Then he looked back at the wall.
"For years, I thought he meant the old mine."
"What mine?"
He pointed toward the mountain.
"There's an abandoned copper mine on the far side of the ridge. My father worked there before I was born."
Clara frowned.
"I've never heard of a copper mine."
"Most people haven't. It closed after a collapse."
"When?"
Samuel hesitated.
"About twenty-seven years ago."
The words hung between them.
Clara looked at the raw ribs.