14 (27 page)

It wasn’t that different from what they’d seen in Xela’s photograph. The floor was a single slab of concrete. There were two long cracks in it. One had been patched, one hadn’t. A few green roaches scuttled away from the light and vanished into the dark corners of the room. They left thin paths in the dust behind them. Nate could see thousands of trails the bugs had traced over time.

He glanced at Veek. “You going to be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.” She stomped her feet and sent ripples out through the carpet of dust. Nate noticed her pants were tucked into her boots.

“Light switch,” said Tim. He was walking the perimeter of the room. “You want to risk it?”

Nate looked around. “I don’t think this place is wired for high security,” he said. “Go ahead.”

The switch clicked and the room exploded with brilliance. An oversized bulb in the center of the room drove back the shadows and the last few brave roaches.

The room covered the front half of the building’s foundation. Its ceiling was wooden beams strung with a few decades of dusty cobwebs, made even brighter by the light bulb they surrounded. The walls were brick all the way around the room, and cast-iron pipes ran up each one into the building.

At the center or the room was the railing. It was made of pipes held together by oversized flanges. There were two horizontal bars. The whole thing was seven or eight feet long and three feet wide.

Between the pipes was a staircase. The steps were made of steel splattered with dots of orange rust. They led down into darkness.

Tim finished walking the perimeter. There were some tools in one corner—a shovel and a pair of push brooms—that had all faded to the same shade of gray.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s pretty much just a big empty room. And the elevator shaft.” He pointed in the corner behind the door. There was a steel cage with a wooden frame built around it. The door looked like a screen door made with heavier mesh. There was no sign of the elevator. The shaft was empty except for a pair of cables running up into the building and down into the sub-basement.

Veek snapped pictures with her phone. She photographed the coil on the wall and then tapped it. The coil swung and tore loose a few ancient cobwebs. They drifted in the air in slow motion. “It’s cable,” she said. “I told you so.”

“Not copper though,” said Nate, looking over her shoulder. “Maybe it’s for the elevator.”

She shrugged.

Nate crouched by the stack of newspapers at the base of the railing. The top page was a haze marked with a few roach trails. He blew on it and words and pictures appeared from beneath years of dust.

Tim stood next to him. “What’s the good news?”

“Planes are safe again. It looks like President Carter’s hoping we can all pull together and get through the energy crisis.” Nate smiled. “Oh, and Governor Brown cut three hundred million from the state budget by saying no to raises for state employees.” He blew more dust off the paper’s banner. “
L.A. Times.
July fourteenth, 1979.”

“Is that important?” asked Veek. “The date?”

Nate thumbed through the stack of papers. They were yellow and stiff, but not too fragile. “Doesn’t look like it. I think it’s just a stack of newspapers somebody dumped in here.”

“It does give us a sense of time, though,” said Tim. “Going off the rust on the lock and all the dust, I think it’s safe to say no one’s been in here since those got stacked there.”

Veek tilted her head. “Thirty-three years,” she said. “That’s ten years before Oskar was even living in the building. He may never have been in here.” She glanced around the room.

“Maybe he doesn’t have the key,” said Nate.

Tim moved to stand next to them. He peered over the railing into the darkness and checked his watch. “Tick-tock,” he said. “Fifteen minutes gone. We’ve got an hour left if we want to play it safe. Ready to move on?”

Nate looked at Veek. She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Want me to go first?”

Nate took a breath and lifted the flashlight. “I’m supposed to be in charge, right?”

Tim gave a thin smile. “Doesn’t mean you can’t delegate.”

“I’ve got it.” He switched on the light and aimed it down into the shadows. The bottom of the stairs was about fifteen feet away.

He set his foot on the first step. The metal creaked but didn’t budge. He went down another step and Veek put her hand on his shoulder. She gave it a squeeze. He reached up with his free hand to squeeze back.

They descended into the darkness.

Going down several steps into a pitch black hole with only a flashlight took a lot more nerve than Nate thought. Every step made the circle of light shake and waver, plunging the stairs into darkness for an instant before he directed the beam again. It was a scene out of dozens of horror movies. He kept waiting for the light to reveal a skeleton, a blood stain, or an albino creature that had been locked in the sub-basement for years. Veek’s grip on his shoulder kept him calm. It got tighter with each step. By the tenth he was sure she was leaving marks.

“I think we’re there,” he said after the eighteenth step. He let the flashlight trace wide circles around his feet to make sure he wasn’t on a landing. It would suck to slip and break the flashlight. Or his neck.

The stairs came out along a wall. The floor was metal. It looked like he was standing on the hull of a battleship. Some of the rivets were ringed with bright orange circles. All of it was covered in dust.

He felt Veek step onto the floor behind him, and sensed Tim a moment later. “Everyone here?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah,” said Tim. “Do you see a light switch? There might be one down here, too.”

Nate shifted the light to the wall and found a push-button switch right where he would’ve reached for it. The lower button was in, the higher one was out. He pressed the higher one and it clicked into place.

Six china-hat lights blossomed across the room, hung in two rows of three. The one closest to them flickered for a moment, flared, and died. The explorers blinked. A few small spots of green, the only bright color in the room, skittered away. It took a moment to resolve the dust-coated shapes around them. They spread out to look at everything.

They were in a rectangular chamber a little bigger than the lounge three stories above them. The walls were wooden planks, shrunken and warped with age. The ceiling was steel beams and concrete.

A desk and a long table dominated the half of the room closest to the stairs. There were overlapping carpets laid out under them, covering the steel floor.

Six chairs were pushed in around the table. A few small jars were gathered at the center of it. Tim blew the dust off them. There was a white mass in one he thought was salt, which meant the jar of black and gray particles was probably coarse pepper.

Nate examined the desk. It was a large, solid piece of wood, the type of thing found in New England universities. He glanced over his shoulder at the staircase and wondered if they’d had to disassemble it to get it down into the sub-basement.

An ancient blotter covered the desktop. The edges around the pigeonholes were carved to resemble scrolling vines and leaves. A brass hook, brown with age, protruded above one pigeonhole. A ring bearing a trio of keys hung from it. They all had long shafts and blocky teeth.

There were a few papers in a box marked OUT and none in the box marked IN. Time had faded the ink and turned the paper to brittle sheets. A few of them had already crumbled on the edges under their own weight. A few more papers had been curled and inserted into specific pigeonholes, but most of them had cracked into fragments.

There was a calendar on the wall above the desk, hung by a nail. Like the papers, it had faded, but its ink had been thicker. Nate couldn’t make out the notes written on some of the days, but the calendar itself was open to November of 1898.

“I think that far wall’s just under the laundry room,” Tim said.

“No elevator here, either,” said Veek. She was standing at another steel-cage shaft a few feet from the stairs. The cables ran down into more darkness. She gave the gate a tug, but it was latched solid. She shook it and a cloud of dust formed in the air.

“Easy,” said Tim. “Kick up too much and you’ll choke us all.”

She snorted and snapped some pictures of the frame around the shaft with her phone. Then she dug into her pocket and pulled something out.

Nate tipped his head to her. “What've you got?”

“A nickel,” Veek said. “Call it.”

She tossed the coin through the gate into the shaft. It vanished. A moment later they heard a faint ping. Then silence.

“I think that was just it hitting the side,” she said.

Tim stepped closer and held up his finger for quiet.

“It didn’t hit bottom,” she said.

“How can you tell if you were talking over it?” growled Tim.

“It didn’t hit,” she repeated. “I think it’s still falling.”

Nate shook his head. “Can’t be.”

Tim pulled a quarter from his own pocket and silenced them both with a glare. He reached his hand through the gate and let the coin drop straight down. He cocked his head to the shaft and closed his eyes. Nate counted fifteen Mississippis before Tim opened his eyes again. There hadn’t been a sound.

“That’s disturbing,” said Veek.

Tim nodded in agreement.

“What are all those?” said Nate. There were three bundles leaning against the wall, like sheets of canvas wrapped around long boards. Each one was fastened with what looked like a pair of thin belts.

“I think they’re cots,” said Tim. He ran his finger along one and the canvas frayed at his touch. “Old camp beds.”

Veek walked past them to glance at the desk. She took pictures of the desk and the keys and the calendar. Then she moved to the back half of the room. It was separated from the front half by two concrete pillars sunk into the walls, almost making it a room of its own.

There were no carpets or wood plank walls in this section. The metal floor was a gong under her heels. A little further down the wall from the desk was what looked like a tool bench. Across from it was a row of lockers. Veek counted six of them. They were made of wood, but looked like every set of gym lockers she’d ever seen.

Her eyes followed the edge of the room and stopped at the back wall. The pattern of rivets was different there. They doubled up and traced a large rectangle on the wall. If she hadn’t been this close, she never would’ve seen it. Inside the line of rivets was a stubby handle, maybe six inches long, almost lost in the dust and cobwebs coating everything. She took a step closer and saw a dark blister at the center of the rectangle. It might have been painted black, but the thick layer of dust made it hard to tell.

Veek stepped to the wall. She crouched, took in a deep breath, and blew at the blister. The dust scattered and leapt into the air. A lot of it bounced back in her face. It revealed enough that she swept the rest away with her fingers.

“Oh,” she coughed, “wow.”

Nate looked over at her. “What’s that?”

“Come see.” She wiped the dust from her face and raised her phone. The camera clicked. She bent to blow another puff of air at the line of rivets.

Nate and Tim walked into the back half of the room. “Well, well, well,” said Tim.

Set in the back wall of the room was a vault door. It was tall enough for Tim to walk through without ducking his head. Veek had cleaned most of the dust from the combination dial. It was black with white numbers and lines, set into a silver ring. The squat handle was made of dull steel and still draped with cobwebs. As Nate studied the door he could see the recessed hinges along the opposite side. They’d been hidden by a century of dust.

Tim crouched to examine the dial. It was reset so the
0
was at the twelve o’clock position, just below the small arrow marking the position of the dial. To the left of
0
were four white lines and then a
95
. “One hundred digits,” he said. “A million possible combinations, assuming there’s only three numbers.”

Nate glanced from the dial to Tim. “There could be more?”

He nodded. “There’s different classes of combination locks, depending on how the wheelhouse inside them is built. Nowadays you’ve got class twos, which are your basic combination padlock or gym locker,”—he glanced over his shoulder at the row of wooden lockers—“or you’ve got class ones, which are the things on bank vaults, big safes, and so on. One as old as this doesn’t follow the actual classifications, but the technology really hasn’t changed much since Houdini was breaking out of them.” He reached out a hand and rapped his knuckles on the door. It was the dead sound of thick, solid metal. “The combination for this thing could have three digits, or four, or five...” He shrugged.

Veek had turned to snap pictures of the room from the other direction. “You know what this place reminds me of?”

“What?” asked Nate.

“A break room.” She tipped her head to the lockers. “There’s a place to hang your work clothes or your non-work clothes. A place to put your tools away.” She gestured at the other half of the room with her phone. “Have lunch, maybe get a quick nap. Somewhere for the boss to sit and get caught up on stuff.”