Buried Things

It could’ve just been the pipes creaking—the shop was an old building, after all. But no one really believed that.

It was always in the small hours. The thudding heart. The taut chest. The breathlessness after waking from the same dream that had haunted Sylvana since visiting the cellar and finding the corpse: the feeling of being smothered, trapped in suffocating darkness. And yet it wasn’t the memory of Digweed’s body—discovered while searching for a missing Rhea—that held her. It was the unknown presence behind that cold, damp wall.

Even after the police cleared the shop, the air still felt like breath trapped in stone. On the surface, life returned to its usual pattern: customers drifting in with gossip, donors trailing through with boxes of clothing, the clatter of hangers and chatter of weather. But nothing felt the same. The cleanup crew had scrubbed and bleached every inch, but memory clung like mildew.

Patrick stood behind the till, fingers digging into the ring of keys that had once jingled at Rhea’s waist. Even now he couldn’t say her name without his voice catching. Only in her absence did he realise how deeply he had valued her. They’d worked together for years—she the dedicated manager, he the volunteer treasurer. Now all that remained were questions, and the cellar keys Sylvana had added to the fob.

Sylvana seemed full of questions too. She never voiced them, but Patrick saw them behind her blue-grey eyes. She was growing thinner by the day, twitching at every noise, as if expecting something terrible to rise from below. He watched, helpless and wary. Something about her avoidance made him made him wonder how much she truly knew — what she wasn’t telling.

*****

It had all started with Judd Digweed. He was a storm disguised as mist, carrying trouble the moment the normally unerring Rhea accepted him as a volunteer. Before his death, they used to joke about the unused cellar. Patrick once teased Rhea that she kept troublesome customers chained up down there. She’d given an enigmatic smile, the kind that revealed nothing, and said quietly, “Maybe some things are better off locked away.”

He missed that smile most.

At the sorting table, Sylvana folded scarves mechanically. Earlier, a waft of vinegar had risen from a bag of old clothes, and suddenly she was back on the pier. The cry of gulls. The wind whipping Rhea’s hair as she finally confessed the terminal diagnosis, the blackmail, and Digweed’s drug den in the cellar.

“I couldn’t take any more, Syl,” Rhea had whispered that day, her eyes fixed on the grey horizon. “He came at me with a knife. I acted in self-defence.”

Sylvana’s hands froze on a blue silk scarf. That has been the lie. The necessary lie. Rhea had wanted to spend her remaining days by the coast, not in a cell. She had left Sylvana a pay-as-you-go phone and a map—a gift from her archaeologist father.

“I want you to have this. When you’re ready, you’ll understand more.”

Only Sylvana hadn’t been ready then. She had only just lost her. But now, another ghost stirred.

Athelred.

The name drifted from her dreams, like something seeping from the wall itself. In her research she found out about him: a brilliant young monk buried alive to silence his questions.

Just as Rhea had buried her illness.

Just as Sylvana had buried her love.

Just as Patrick buried his guilt about his secret love for Sylvana in paperwork.

All three lived in silence.

*****

Sylvana had just locked up and unchained her bike when she first heard it.

Tap…tap…tap.

Not pipes. Not footsteps. Faint, unmistakable. Coming from the cellar.

Her throat tightened. She strained to hear it again—praying she’d imagined it—but the tapping returned. Three knocks. A signal. A plea.

But it couldn’t be Digweed. He was gone. Only she and Patrick had keys. Gripping the handlebars, she fled into the sharp night air.

*****

The second time, she was hanging coats. The sound rose through the floorboards like a touch on her spine. She stepped back, the world narrowing.

“You have to tell me what’s wrong,” Patrick said gently, stepping out from the office. “I see you flinching.”

“I…”

“Is it the cellar?”

She nodded.

“I’ve been hearing things too. Whatever it is—we face it together.” He lifted the iron key.

“I can’t keep running,” Sylvana said, surprising herself.

“We’ll probably find it’s just the settling foundation,” Patrick said, though without conviction.

“No.” Her eyes fixed on the cellar door. “It’s him. Someone—or something—else.”

Inside, the air hit them like a grave exhaling. Old dust embedded in stone. A faint hint of incense. Patrick’s torch beam dragged across empty shelves.

“Here.” Sylvana walked to the far western wall, where industrial shelving units stood bolted to the floor. It was pulled forward from the wall by about a foot—a common enough practice in damp cellars to prevent rot—but the gap behind it was choked with decades of cobwebs and shadows .

“The police checked this,” Patrick said. “They shone lights back there. It’s just a wall.”

“They may have looked,” Sylvana said, moving to the side of the unit, but they didn’t feel. They had no reason to.”

She squeezed into the narrow, dusty gap between the shelving unit and the damp brickwork. It was tight fit. The air back there was colder, moving in a way it shouldn’t.

She ran her fingers over the rough plaster of the back wall. To the human eye, it was a seamless grey surface, stained with mildew. But under her fingertips, she felt a hairline crack. A rectangle.

“It’s a false panel,” she explained, voice shaking.

She couldn’t pry it open from the outside – there was no handle. But that was the point. It was designed to be shut from the inside.

Patrick handed her a screwdriver from a pocket.

She couldn’t help smiling—in spite of the bleakness. “You’re a wonder,” she exclaimed.

“Always at your service,” he said lightly.

She jammed the flathead into the seam and leveraged it. There was a suction as a section of plasterwork popped inward.

It wasn’t a wall. It was a plug.

Sylvana pushed it and the panel fell backward with a thud, revealing the jagged mouth of the tunnel.

“She must have squeezed in here.” Sylvana’s voice trembled with admiration. “She crawled into the dark, and pulled this cover back into place behind her. She effectively sealed herself in.”

*****

Inside was a space narrow enough for crawling, leading downward into the priory’s forgotten foundations.

“I have to go in,” she said, resolved.

She stepped first into the narrow tunnel, the floor slick with centuries of damp. Patrick followed, not out of courage, but because loving her had always meant walking behind her into the dark.

The passage split. To the left, the tunnel continued into darkness. To the right, lay a small, domed chamber—a stone cell barred with iron. In the corner, slumped against the wall, lay the skeletal remains of a man in a rotted cowl. Curled in a foetal position.

Athelred.

Just out of reach, a set of heavy iron keys hung from a rusted hook outside the bars —placed where he could see them, but never touch. The cruelty of it made Sylvana’s chest ache.

She knelt in the dust. She didn’t try to use the keys; the lock had rusted shut centuries ago. Instead, she gently lifted the key ring from the hook. She reached through the bars and placed the cold iron into the skeleton’s open, waiting hand.

“You hold them now,” she whispered, tears falling onto the dust. “You’re free.”

The suffocating weight in the room lifted—like earth quietly exhaling.

By now, Patrick was standing at the entrance of the right-hand tunnel.

“Sylvana,” he called, voice echoing slightly. “Feel the draught.”

She joined him. The main passage sloped upward, the air growing fresher, smelling of rain, nettles, and exhaust fumes. They climbed a set of crude steps cut into the ground until they reached a heavy iron grate.

It wasn’t a door. It was an ancient storm drain.

Sylvana peered through the rusted bars. She wasn’t looking at open ground. She was looking at the back of a high, green, metal fence—the rear perimeter of the supermarket delivery yard.

The “exit” came out in the dead zone—a three foot strip of waste ground trapped between the shop’s steep rear retaining wall and the supermarket’s security fencing. It was a place choked with thick briars and trash, invisible from the road, inaccessible to the public.

“The delivery bay,” Patrick whispered. “The supermarket vans park right on the other side of that fence. The noise of the engines would hide…” He trailed off.

He pushed against the gate. It swung outward in greased hinges.

“She didn’t just know the way down here,” Patrick realised. “She cleared this. She could slip into the waste ground, squeeze through the loose panel in the fence and walk away through the loading bay like she was just another worker.”

So nothing had been left to chance. And from his face, Sylvana could tell Patrick had the same thought.

He shone his torch at the base of the grate. There, tucked into a dry niche in the brickwork, was a small box.

“I think this was meant for me,” Sylvana said.

*****

Back in Rhea’s old home, Sylvana sat on the bed and opened it.

There was no long letter. No dramatic confession.

Inside was a folded piece of paper and a receipt. The note was in Rhea’s handwriting, scrawled hastily:

My father didn’t live long enough to prove Athelred was here. I found him. I cleared the blockage to the culvert years ago – my secret backdoor. I never thought I’d have to use it.

Sylvana unfolded the receipt. It was from a hardware store in town.

Item: Utility Knife (Retractable).

Item: Heavy Duty refuse sacks.

She looked at the date. And looked again.

It was dated three days before Digweed had attacked her.

Sylvana sank back against the bed-frame. Confirmation that Rhea hadn’t just acted in the heat of the moment. She had known Digweed was dangerous. She had known she was dying. And she had prepared. Smashing the vase, the struggle—she had staged the ground for her own survival and silent exit. She had only told Sylvana half the story.

It made Rhea no longer just a victim. She was a woman pushed beyond her limits—lover, protector, plotter. Ruthless when cornered.

Sylvana recoiled from the cold calculation of it—and hated that she could accept it.

On the anniversary of Rhea’s disappearance, Sylvana opened the shop early. Across the road, the supermarket car park filled with the bustle of another unremarkable day. Yet beneath their feet lay forgotten steps, slow deliberate lives, and priory stone—part earth, part memory.

There had been talk of excavation once, but after the supermarket was built, nothing more was done. Maybe no one cared enough. Or, maybe they preferred to let what lay buried, stay buried.

Sylvana carried the weight of history now, the secrets she alone held. The terrifying dreams had stopped. Athelred’s spirit held the keys. Rhea’s truths had surfaced. And though letting go would take time, the air felt lighter.

She now knew Rhea was not perfect—no one is—but she had been worth loving. And she had shown her that life, even laden with buried things, was still worth living. At last, Sylvana could breathe among them.