by Ike Hamill
“The feel of the sun on my back,” she sang, “makes me want to burrow into the earth, taste the soft, damp dirt, and be alone with the rocks.”
Brad shuddered as the image she painted formed in his mind.
“Quiet and safe in the ground, much removed from harm’s way, I hear distant footsteps above that lull me into deep sleep.”
Brad had tucked his cane under his arm. The tapping on the floor made too much noise. Instead, he had leaned against the lockers or the walls. At one point, he had been creeping down one of the interior hallways of the school, trying to take the long way around to the locker room. It had seemed like the only way to get around her.
He had slid down a painted wall until his shoulder found the cork board mounted there. Trying to lean against that, he had scraped his hand on something sharp—maybe a pushpin. Ever since, blood had been dripping from his fingers, leaving a trail that he couldn’t see in the dark.
Now, Brad was waiting at the stairwell. She had been quiet for some time. He couldn’t help but think that she was down there, in the locker room. Maybe she was waiting between the rows of lockers. Perhaps she was hiding in the darkness behind the swing of the door. Not knowing where she was, Brad couldn’t force himself to go down the stairs.
Part of his brain told him that he was being irrational. There were people downstairs, and there would be safety in numbers. And there was no way that she had gotten ahead of him. She couldn’t be hiding down in the darkness.
A giggle floated down the hallway. Brad broke for the stairs. His feet tangled and he barely caught himself before he spilled to the floor. Catching himself at the doorway, Brad pushed off and threw himself in a limping run toward the stairs down to the storeroom. By the time he reached them, he imagined that he could feel her breath on the back of his neck. He didn’t care if he stayed upright as he descended. He only wanted to be down there, in the strange chemical glow of the glow sticks, amongst the other sane people.
Brad slid his bloody hand down the handrail and staggered into the storeroom. The circle of citizens were still standing there. They were all turned to see him and they held their sticks up in front of themselves. They were the patrons who had spent their money to see the haunted house. He was the paid ghoul.
“Brad? Are you okay?” Romie asked.
“No,” he said. “Quickly, bind my hands.”
“What?”
“Just do it.”
He stumbled toward Romie, holding his hands out in front of himself with his wrists pushed together.
Chapter 69: Ashley
As she moved down the cabinets, looking through the instruments and supplies stored inside, she was trying to piece the things together into an idea of what the facility had been used for.
Exploring around home, the function of relics had usually been obvious. If she couldn’t figure them out, then she could always bring her father to a mysterious place and he would explain.
Ashley remembered the time that she had gone looking for a birthday present for Brad. She knew what she wanted to find. Brad had a video game system that he enjoyed, and it had stopped working. In the winter, he would block out a few hours every week to sit down and try to finish whatever game he was currently working on. Sometimes, he even let Ashley join in. They would pass the controller back and forth trying to beat the current challenge. When Jim or Janelle would wander in, they would sometimes hand them a controller that wasn’t even hooked up and tell them that they were controlling the enemy.
Then, one day, the optical drive of the machine had stopped working. Brad had given up quickly on his search for a replacement console. He said that the games were too hard on his hands anyway. Ashley had guessed that he was just masking his disappointment, so she had taken up the search during her foraging expeditions.
One day, several miles from the house, she had made an amazing discovery. There was a house that was half-collapsed. Normally, she wouldn’t risk climbing through a place like that. Even her weight could break a rotted beam and she could be battling to extract herself from the debris.
But through a lower window, she saw something alluring.
The person who lived there had a whole wall of video game boxes, posters, and a shelf full of consoles. Ashley had moved around the back of the place to look for a lower entrance. The last thing she wanted to do was drop through a high window and then find there was no good way to get out. She had cut herself on glass trying to wriggle through one of those basement windows before.
Aside from the deadbolt, the rear door had been perfect. It had been at the bottom of concrete stairs and everything looked structurally solid. Ashley had used a pry bar from her pack to bend the door away from the frame. Deadbolts were only as good as the frame. She had never really figured out why people had been so obsessed with locking everything. They hadn’t needed to protect themselves from predators. And, from what she had seen in movies and shows, all people had to do was work a job part of the day and they could get money to buy whatever they wanted.
That day, looking for Brad’s present, she had pushed the door open carefully, still wary of the state of the house above her. Clicking on her flashlight, Ashley had seen things that she hadn’t been able to figure out. She had moved quickly past them and into the game room so she could grab the console for Brad. It wasn’t until later, when she was telling her father, that she had remembered the things that had puzzled her in that dark back room of the person’s basement. She had taken her father there later.
“If you ever see stuff like this again, just back out slowly,” her father had said, looking at the workbench that Ashley took him to see.
“Why? What is it?”
“This person was building a bomb, Ashley,” her father had said. “Those are detonators and that circuit there is probably what he was going to use to trigger the explosion. Those ball bearings and nails were likely shrapnel that would be packed around the explosives.”
“I don’t understand,” she had said. “A bomb for what?”
“Killing,” he had said. When he had looked at her, his smile had been funny—impossible for her to read.
She had shaken her head, but he hadn’t explained.
“Somewhere around here—maybe in that cooler, or that box over there, or even in the refrigerator—there could be an explosive. After all this time, there’s no telling how stable it is. Some explosives last a long time. Others can break down and they become very dangerous. Don’t come back here, and if you see any of these materials again, you have to back out slowly.”
“Okay,” she had said. “But, Dad, I mean, if it has been here this long, how dangerous could it be? There’s raccoon poop over there. Nothing has blown up.”
“Did you look at the back of this door?” he had asked.
She had shaken her head, no.
That was when her father had shown her how close she had come to disaster. There was a switch at the top of the door and wires that ran to a small box that was mounted up between the joists overhead.
“If that thing still had power, you would have set it off. Next time, it could be a mechanical trigger instead of electronic.”
Ashley had understood. For a while after that excursion, she hadn’t dared to enter any houses. The world had seemed a much more dangerous place after that.
Now, looking in the cabinet, Ashley had that same feeling again. There was a box on the shelf. The buzzing lights overhead didn’t reveal much about it. Reaching out with nervous hands, she put her hands around the back of the box first, to make sure that there were no wires attaching it to some mechanism that she couldn’t see. When she was sure that it was untethered, she pulled it slowly, being careful to keep the thing perfectly upright as she lifted it to the counter.
Ashley pushed her hair behind her ears and took a deep breath to steady her nerves.
“What is it?” Lisa called.
“I can’t tell,” Ashley said.
They gathered behind her, looking at the box o
ver Ashley’s shoulders. Even Penny seem transfixed by the thing. Lisa reached for one of the latches and Ashley put a gentle hand on hers.
“Careful,” Ashley said. “It might be boobytrapped.”
“You think?” Tim asked.
“I don’t know.” Something in her voice made Lisa retract her hand.
Ashley crouched down to study the latch from a different angle. Using her knife blade to reflect the light from above, she pointed it up at the catch. There was something attached to the metal hasp—a little hook that came through a hole from the interior. In her pocketknife, Ashley had a tiny set of tweezers. She pulled them out and used them to move the wire hook to the side. It had a resting place to the left of the hasp. If a clumsy hand were to open the latch without moving the wire first, it would have snapped back into the box, perhaps triggering something inside.
“How did you know?” Tim asked.
“Know what? I couldn’t even see what you just did.”
Ashley used the blade of her knife to start to move the latch upwards. Both Tim and Lisa were holding their breath. Ashley was careful to keep breathing steadily.
When it flipped upwards with a click, Lisa was startled backwards. Ashley moved on to the next latch. When both were done, she wiped her hands on her shirt.
“Take step back,” she said.
They did.
Ashley extended her arm and used the blade of her knife to start to pry the lid upwards. It was heavy and moved silently. When it was open an inch, she slipped the handle of the knife into the gap so she could peer inside.
“Anything?” Tim asked.
“There are holes in the underside of the lid. I think the wire was the trigger though. It should be okay.”
Before they could object, Ashley opened the lid.
The nature of the boobytrap was clear to her as soon as she could see into the holes. There were glass vials, filled with liquid, mounted in there. Through one of the holes, she could see the metal hammer and the spring that would have sent it into the glass. Had the wire snapped back, the liquid would have gone everywhere inside the box. It could have been explosive, or maybe just an acid that would dissolve the contents.
“That’s the same writing,” Tim said.
Ashley turned her attention away from the boobytrap and to the contents of the box. It was filled with papers and journals. The writing on the paper on top appeared to be the same language as the book that Tim had found and the sign on the door outside.
“I’m guessing that the secrets of this place are in these documents,” Ashley said. She pulled out the stack of documents and slid the box away. Tim began to sort through the pile.
“Are we finished here then?” Lisa asked.
They looked to her.
“I want to get back to the raft and try our radio. I want to see if electricity works in our things now. We have flashlights. You know how handy those would be?”
“Hold on,” Tim said. “Look at this.”
He unfolded a map.
Seeing the shape of the river from above completed the picture for Ashley. She had been keeping mental notes about its banks and how they differed from the satellite imagery. This map showed the bends they had been around since the falls. Tim put his finger on a building that must be where they were standing.
“And here, look!” Tim said. He pointed to a tiny rectangle upriver. “This is the cabin I stayed in, and here’s the little lake where I was fishing.”
“So, then what’s this?” Ashley asked. She followed a twisty road that led down through the contours from their current position, down to the river below. At the end of the road, another building was marked at the bank.
“It’s near the raft,” Lisa said. “Let’s go find out.”
They had a quick trip down the hill—excitement encouraged Tim to press faster than he should, but Ashley managed to slow him down a little. Back on the raft, Lisa checked out the electronics while Ashley pushed them along with her pole. The radio worked, providing nothing but static in reply to her calls. In one of the flashlights, the batteries had died. Lisa replaced them using the light from a headlamp. Once she made sure everything was working, she turned off everything except for one flashlight that she kept trained on the edge of the water.
They poled down the bank of the river for only a few minutes before Ashley saw the shape of the building tucked into the hillside. The water flowed right under the foundation. It looked like a garage suspended over the river.
“That’s a boathouse,” Tim said, barely containing his excitement.
Ashley had never seen one before, but she understood what he was talking about. The little building could house a boat, maybe winched up out of the water for storage or repairs. It turned out that he was right. Ashley jumped from the raft with the rope in her hands. She tied it quickly before she went to the door of the boathouse. It was locked, but gave fairly easily when she put her shoulder to it. Ashley clicked on one of the flashlights that Lisa had given her. She swept it around the dark interior. There was a boat, of sorts. To Ashley, it almost looked like a metal raft with a big engine on the back.
When Lisa spoke, Ashley jumped. She hadn’t heard her approach.
“That’s a pontoon boat,” Lisa said.
“What’s it for?”
“It’s just like any other boat, but I don’t think that they go as fast and they don’t require as much water. It’s probably more practical on the river. I’m just guessing though. I don’t know that much about boats.”
“Well, there’s no way it’s going to run. We didn’t bring any viable gas. The stuff in the tank is probably all dried up or sludge.”
“I don’t know,” Lisa said. She moved around Ashley, into the building. “The lights were on in that lab.”
“What’s in there?” Tim called from the raft. They had urged him not to disembark until they knew if there was something to look at. He had worked his ankle enough.
“Hold on, Tim. There’s a boat. We’re going to check it out.”
Before Ashley could even turn, she jumped at another sound. This one was a mechanical whine. She turned to see Lisa operating the winch that lowered the boat to the water.
“Once it’s down, we have to unhook these straps. Can you get the ones on the other side?” Lisa asked.
Ashley saw what she was pointing to. The straps connected to rings that were welded to the pontoons. Ashley moved around the bow of the boat to the walkway that led to the far side. The boat settled into the water and then bobbed. Reaching for a strap, Ashley snatched back her other hand just in time before the boat crushed it against the wood.
Lisa, on the other side, had flipped fenders over the rails of the boat before she untethered it. Ashley understood her mistake and followed her lead.
“Can you figure out that door?” Lisa asked, pointing her flashlight toward the rear of the boat. Ashley used her own light to follow the mechanism and then the wire that led down to a button next to the door. Crossing around again, she hit the button as Lisa stepped aboard and searched for the key. It was like magic. As soon as she pressed the button, the door began to go up on its tracks and a light came on overhead. Ashley saw a switch and flipped it. Overhead lights came on too.
A second later, Lisa said, “Yes!”
She stood up with a keyring around her finger.
“Cross your fingers,” Lisa said, moving to the seat behind the wheel.
Ashley folded her arms across her chest and worried at a fingernail with her teeth. When Tim limped through the doorway behind her, Ashley nearly jumped again.
“That’s a good looking boat,” Tim said.
“Yeah, but we don’t have any…”
She was cut off by a shrill tone, followed by the grind and rumble of the engine. After it smoked for a second, the engine dropped into a low purr.
“Am I unhooked?” Lisa yelled.
Ashley glanced to the corners of the boat. “Yeah.”
“I’m going to take it fo
r a quick spin and see,” Lisa said. Lisa reached down to flip a switch and the boat lit up with running lights and headlights that splashed circles on the wall. Before Tim or Ashley could object, Lisa put the boat in gear and it started to move backwards.
“Amazing,” Tim said. “There’s something weird about time here, wouldn’t you say?”
“How so?”
“The lights are on, the gas still works, and every time we’re apart we seem to spend different durations away from each other.”
“Oh?” Ashley asked. She moved by Tim so she could go outside and watch Lisa. The boat clunked as it moved from reverse to forward. The next thing Ashley knew, Lisa was motoring upriver. After being captives to the current for so long, seeing something defy the river like that was almost magical.
“I hope she doesn’t hit anything,” Tim said. “We don’t know if the water is high or low right now.”
“It’s normal,” Ashley said. Before Tim could ask, she said, “You can tell because the boat was even with the platform in the boathouse. Can’t be too low, or the boat would have been low.”
“Good point,” he said.
When they heard Lisa returning, they had already untied all their gear from the raft and moved it into the boathouse. Ashley had dragged the raft a little upstream and secured it with a couple of ropes to sturdy trees. She waved goodbye to the thing and then went to find Tim. He was leaning against a wall, pointing inside a storage box that looked like a chest freezer.
“Can you get these out?” he asked.
She moved alongside him to look. There were red cans of gas in there. At least she assumed they were gas. The lettering on the side of the containers was in that strange language. Ashley leaned in to pull one out and the world started to spin. Tim grabbed her shirt and dragged her out.