by Ben Farthing
"What do you mean? It's like a warm blanket. Cozy."
Finally, the tone of the HVAC noise changed. It was no longer muffled by a wall. Ahead, they found an open doorway. Inside, their flashlights illuminated a room of shuddering steel boxes the size of shipping containers. Chris assumed they were air handlers.
"I've never seen units like this," Leon said. "Of course, Goochland's pretty rural. The buildings I inspect wouldn't need this much air."
"They don't connect to anything," Chris noticed. He banged on a duct in the hallway. "None of these pipes even go in here."
"Are they even air handlers?" Leon walked inside.
Chris shone his light either direction up the hallway. He couldn't explain why, but he felt the need to keep watch while Leon investigated.
"No, here we go." Leon crouched down to shine his light under the closest steel box. "There's pipes into the floor."
He stomped on the concrete. "Feels solid. I thought they'd only lay concrete slabs on the lowest floor, but those pipes go somewhere."
"Sewer?" Chris suggested.
"Wrong kind of pipe," Leon said. "I'm telling you, we're on top of a big pit where they lifted the building out of."
Chris leaned into the room to check for any other doorways. Sometimes the maintenance room was attached to the HVAC room. He couldn't see any of the far walls with the steel boxes in the way. He took a step inside, but saw movement down the hallway in his peripheral vision. He whipped his flashlight around.
"Eddie?" Back the way they'd come, Chris thought he saw a shady figure walking away out of the furthest, gray reaches of his light. "Walking" wasn't the right word, though. He couldn't make out limbs, only the blurriest figure, but it was too tall to be Eddie.
It moved in quick lurches, up and forward and down, up and forward and gone.
Chris held his breath. His skin crawled. The stillness of the basement air felt thick. He stretched, holding the flashlight as far out as he could without stepping away from the doorway and out of view of Leon. He saw only the cement and pipes of the hallway.
"What are you looking at?"
Leon's cheery question startled Chris.
Leon laughed. "Getting spooked by shadows?"
Chris shook his head, but kept his light trained down the hall. "Maybe. Or could be someone else after the bounty." He didn't like the idea of other contractors bumping into Eddie. And the more he thought about it, he didn't want Eddie in here at all. Apart from the obvious, something was right about this building.
"You're jumping at shadows," Leon said. "You were edging up to a panic attack as soon as we got down here. " But he came out and shined his flashlights, too.
"I saw someone."
Leon called out, "Hello?"
No echo. The pipes and conduit jutting out from the wall and ceilings in this corridor trapped the sound waves.
"See?" Leon said. "You hate basements. No biggie."
"I don't hang out in a lot of basements," Chris said, "but I've never hallucinated before."
"Not a hallucination. Just catching the shadow wrong when you're nervous. Big difference."
Nerves hadn't created that quick lurching. "Let's find the maintenance room and get back to the courtyard."
They kept on the direction they'd started. They quickly found the end of the hall: a simple wall with a closed blue door.
Chris readied the prybar.
Leon tried the handle. The door swung open.
20
Chris leaned through the open doorway.
Opening the door had shifted the pressure in the air, and a soft breeze blew out of the room. Inside, his flashlight revealed a space no bigger than his kitchen at home. Steel cabinets lined the back wall. The other two walls were bare cement to match the floor.
"Awesome." Leon walked up to open the first cabinet. "Maybe we'll find some driver bits to fit those weird-ass screws in the vent covers."
"Wait." Chris didn't know why he said it.
Leon was already opening the cabinet. Hinges squeaked.
Chris flinched, ready to leap out into the hall.
"Nothing." Disappointment dripped from Leon's voice. He opened the cabinet wider. Empty shelves.
Chris noticed a pattern in the concrete floor. Waves and swirls from flattening and polishing, which together pointed toward a closed steel cabinet. That must have been where they started the polishing machine, when they did this room. He knew that didn't make sense, but nothing did.
Leon opened that cabinet to reveal a stack of short, wide drawers.
"Blueprints," Chris said. That style of cabinet decorated every architectural firm he'd been in. Wide enough to hold drawings.
"I figured they'd be on a computer."
"Me, too." Chris slid open the top drawer. The drawer slides glided smoothly and silently. Inside, a stack of thick off-white paper. He removed the top sheet. Leon shined his flashlights on it.
"Hot damn," whispered Leon. "You found it."
Black, blue, and green lines covered the paper. Black outlined the square of the building's outer walls and the hallways and rooms within it. Fixtures like stairways, doors, and windows were in blue.
"Looks like the basement we're in now."
Chris nodded. There was the elevator they'd come down, and the intersection where they'd turned down here. There was the room with the shuddering HVAC units.
Inside that room was the green ink. The strange symbols weren't any representation that Chris had ever seen on building blueprints. Each was about the size of a quarter, only most weren't round. They were triangular but with gaps in the sides, or inverted corners. Series of dots and dashes filled many of them. They weren't printed; they looked hand drawn. The thickness of the green lines varied with the weight the artist had put into his pen.
"What are those?" Leon asked.
Chris scratched at the green lines. It wasn't ink on top of the page. More like a laser printer. But that didn't make sense with the wavering thickness of the lines. They must have used a drawing program Chris wasn't familiar with. "Couldn't tell you. Something to do with those HVAC units that pipe into the floor."
"Should we take another look at them?"
Chris didn't want to hang around down here any longer than necessary. "Let's get these plans upstairs into better light, and see if there's any answers."
"Sure, but I still want to send an elevator up and look down the shaft. Looks like there's an elevator and stairs over this way." Leon pointed on the plan to the opposite end of the hallway where they now stood.
They removed the contents of twelve drawers and rolled up over a hundred sheets, into six thick rolls. They tied them off with zip-ties that Leon had in his bag.
"You take a lot of people hostage while you're building hacking?" Chris asked.
"Sometimes you want to make sure a door stays open behind you."
They headed back. Leon shined his light into the HVAC room while they passed, but Chris urged him on. He kept expecting the lurching figure to appear again.
They passed straight through the intersection from before.
"We turned right here before," Chris said.
"Yeah, so?"
"But now these plans say there's an elevator and stairs straight ahead."
"Don't back out on me now. I want to see what's down there."
"I'm saying, up on the ground floor, this supposed elevator and stairs would be in the pond."
"Huh. Could be behind the pond."
"It was windows straight to outside. No space."
"Then maybe it's just to the basement levels."
Not an exit, then. The thought of walking deeper into this cavern made the walls close in, and their footsteps sound deader.
Oh no. They'd only searched the lowest of three basements. Eddie could be on the other two. Chris wanted to get back into sunlight. Eddie was nine--he wouldn't spend any more time down here in the dark than he had too. He was probably upstairs already. If Chris remembered their video game cor
rectly, the next possible hiding spot for the treasure would be on the sixth floor. But first he had to get out of this basement.
"Easy there, chief." Leon had noticed Chris breathing heavier. "I'll take a quick look, and then we'll head back upstairs."
Another three minutes of walking and they reached the end of the hallway. The narrow corridor opened twice as wide before shiny silver elevator doors, and a closed steel door with the right angles of a staircase etched onto it.
Chris shuffled the blueprints into the crook of his arm. He pressed the up button. A bell dinged. Motors churned below them.
"It was already up," Leon said. "We should have pried the doors first."
The hum of the elevator grew louder. Its tone grew deeper as it slowed. The bell dinged again, and the doors slid open.
Yellow light poured into the hallway. It emphasized the disjointedness of the pipes and ductwork more than the white light of their LED flashlights.
"Send it back up so we can peek and get out of here," Chris said. To help calm his nerves, he thought of the two hundred thousand dollars.
Leon handed his share of the blueprints to Chris and stepped inside.
"Hey, look at this," Leon said.
Chris's arms were full of three-foot rolls of paper. "What is it?"
"The elevator's not just the basement floors. Goes all the way up to one-twenty."
Chris mapped out the path they'd taken in his head. It matched what they'd seen on the blueprint. "That doesn't make sense. There was no elevator on this side of the lobby."
"We must have got turned around. I'll send it up." Leon press a button.
The doors starting sliding closed, faster than they'd opened.
Chris thrust his foot against one, but like before, they had no pressure sensor to stop them.
Leon slipped through, but his duffel bag caught on the doors. Chris dropped the blueprints to yank the strap off Leon's shoulder.
Leon fell out onto the concrete floor.
The doors closed with an audible clang. The yellow light of the elevator car disappeared.
"Shit, my gear." Leon jump back to his feet and mashed the up button.
Chris caught his breath. "That elevator was trying to cut you in half."
"Miscalibrated pressure sensor," Leon said. "That'd fail inspection, but it's an easy fix."
"Calibrated to not work at all," Chris said.
"Nah, just a screw-up. Let's get this door open."
"You already hit the button," Chris said. "The elevator will be back."
"I sent it up to one-twenty. We've got time."
Chris rolled the blueprints away from the elevator doors, then jimmied them open with his prybar. Their flashlights lit up the elevator shaft. Concrete walls, with steel tracks to keep the elevator car stable. The cables hung taut in the middle of the open space.
Chris leaned in and shined his light upwards. The same view for at least thirty feet. Little lines of sunlight above where it leaked through doors above them. "It shouldn't be concrete. The building is steel. Why would the elevator shaft be concrete?"
Leon was leaning in, looking the opposite direction. "Whoa boy. This goes down another six levels at least."
Chris looked down. The same view as above, only without the trickles of sunlight. Their flashlights didn't reach the bottom.
Leon whistled. "My theory about building underground and then raising it makes a lot more sense now, huh?"
Chris had to admit it was better than anything he'd come up with yet. Of course, he still had to inspect the plans.
"There weren't any buttons lower than B3 in the elevator," Leon said. "How do we get down there?"
The urge to flee up the staircase nearly overpowered Chris. There shouldn't be another six levels below them. They were already three stories below ground. This was a vacant lot yesterday. The pit loomed up at him, an inverse of the tower above. What if it was one hundred twenty floors up, and the same number down? Over fifteen-hundred feet of hole beneath him. If he slipped, he'd have a solid twelve seconds to contemplate his death.
What if Eddie had slipped?
He took a deep breath. Stepped back from the open shaft.
There was no reason to think Eddie would be peeking beneath elevators. He was too small to pry open the doors, anyways.
Chris counted to ten.
If the building had been constructed underground, then there'd be some sort of lift. Finding that lift would satisfy Micah's contract, and Chris would have enough money to give Eddie a stable home.
This pit was a problem that could be solved.
"Let's try the stairwell." He opened the door. The stairwell was as dark as the basement hallways. His flashlight revealed the same concrete floor, and an iron staircase. That was unorthodox, expensive, and a maintenance headache. Add it to the list of nonsensical construction decisions, that made the foyer, basement, and stairwells seem like the product of a first-year architecture student. What an amateur assumed a skyscraper would be like, without knowing any of the thousand restricting rules that came from practical construction and design.
But the key thing Chris noticed about the stairs was that they only went up. No way down to the emptiness below.
"There's gotta be some different stairs," Leon said. "Some way to get down there."
"If your theory is right, that this building was built underground and then raised up--which again, is impossible--then the whole thing was raised, including the basement levels. If this is the bottom floor, then it's empty space below us, except for whatever lifts raised the building. Whatever's now holding it up.
Leon nodded, thinking. "Telescoping elevator shafts."
"What?"
"Whoever built it needs some way to get down there to do maintenance on the lift. When the building raised up, the elevator shaft extended like a telescope. I bet the right key will allow us to descend below, like you'd need for a penthouse."
"We don't need to go down there-"
"The hell we don't. I want to see it."
"Okay, after we find my son, you can go spelunking." Even still, the building's mystery pulled at Chris. "But for Micah's contract, if this building was somehow raised on impossible hydraulic lifts, then we need evidence of those lifts. Or at least of the empty space below us. I bought an inspection camera. It'll only reach fifteen feet, but I've got some rope so we can lower the whole thing and record."
"I've got a thirty foot endoscope camera in my bag."
"I'm not waiting for it."
Leon mashed the button a few more times. They both looked up the shaft. No movement. The cables were still.
"Let's go with what we have," Leon said.
They powered up Chris's inspection camera, a digital camera with the lens on the end of a stiff wire. Chris had bought it on impulse with Sherri's credit card. You never knew when you'd want to see under a door or around a corner.
The camera was normally used to see inside walls, but the distance would let them see what was below their feet. If Leon's theory was right, and only the elevator shaft continued down--not the whole building--then there'd be no doors to block their view. Just a gap in the shaft where the floors used to be.
They tied up the camera, attached Leon's headlamp, lowered the endoscopic lens first, set it to record, and then lowered the rope. Chris lowered it slowly. He couldn't see what the camera was picking up, so he allowed it to gently rotate in his hands, and let it carefully slip downwards until he reached the end of his fifty foot rope.
"Alright, bring it back up, just as slow," Leon said.
Chris glanced up to make sure the elevator wasn't coming back down. Nothing but tiny lines of sunlight. The cables in the center of the shaft were still.
He pulled the camera back up.
They stepped away from the open shaft to hunch over the display screen on the back of the camera. The camera hadn't lined up perfectly with the headlamp, so the video showed the washed out circle of light off to one side. The view of the elevator
shaft rotated and descended. Ten seconds into the video, Chris and Leon saw the first opening in the shaft below them. The camera panned past the empty square. Despite the headlamp's fifty-foot range, the darkness beyond the opening and below the basement floor swallowed the light completely. Another ten seconds into the video, another gap with the same results.
They saw four total empty doorways before the rope reached its limit.
"Looks empty," Leon said.
Chris had to agree. The concrete floor under his shoes suddenly felt fragile. "Now can we go back upstairs?"
Leon rewound the video at normal speed. "Did you see that?"
He repeated the moment that the camera passed the final door, four vacant levels below them. A pinprick of light reflected back. "When my iPad makes its way back down here, we can blow up that image. Could be the lift you're talking about."
Chris leaned in close to the camera's display screen. He replayed the the tiny reflection. His stomach turned in knots. "Hold it still." He played it again, and couldn't deny what he was seeing. Whatever caught the light, lurched.
21
Chris couldn't scoop up the blueprints fast enough.
Whoever he'd seen lurching down the basement hallway was now below them, in the empty space beneath the building.
This wasn't a construction mystery--it was something weirder.
And Eddie was still inside.
"What's the deal?" Leon squatted to pick up a stray blueprint. He lowered his flashlight, which cast shadows of angled conduit across the floor.
The walls seemed to move in closer, and the fragile concrete floor looked ready to crack and send them tumbling into the earth below.
"It's the same thing I saw outside the HVAC room." Chris lugged his armful of blueprints to the stairwell door.
"Just floating in the air down there? You're assuming a lot from a little dot of light."
"It moved the same." Chris said.
"The same as what?"
Chris realized he hadn't told Leon what he'd actually seen, only that he'd seen something. No, somebody. It had to be a person, hopping instead of walking. Chris shined his flashlight back down the hallway. Nothing. "Can we discuss this upstairs?"