The Hidden Back Room

by Jason A. Wyckoff

  Davis sighed, the act of which stirred the musty air in his lungs, provoking a cough. Well, at least now he knew, and that was something. He found an interior elevator and called the car. As he waited for it to arrive, Davis was suddenly confused by an incongruity—not only could he not recall any interior elevator having a button for basement access—that would have been the obvious way down if there had been—but based on his position in the building, he knew that the shaft he stood before was the one he travelled every day to get to his desk, so he was quite certain he couldn’t have missed that detail. He had just about guessed that the car could be called to the basement but not sent there when the doors opened. To his surprise, Davis saw not one additional button, but two. They were inset, where a panel might slide over to cover them. So it was at least possible that Davis truly had not seen these buttons before and the act of calling the elevator to the basement automatically opened the panel . . . which allowed the operator the option of not only going up but of going . . . further down?

  Did he really have a choice?

  Davis felt the descent continue much longer than he’d anticipated. Panic once more threatened to bloom just before the car stopped and the doors opened. Davis recoiled; he felt his pores flare open. The air in the dark subbasement was hot—not unbearable, but debilitating, like full sun in the tropics at mid-day, contrasting unnaturally with the inky gloom. The noxious smell invading the elevator was likely unfamiliar to anyone who’d never owned a turtle or an iguana kept in a terrarium that he’d neglected to clean. Davis once more considered leaving the dark underground unexplored. Unlike the basement, he was perhaps more afraid of turning the light on than of leaving it off. But the idea was doomed. He must see. The switch was on the wall to his right. Bored fluorescents were roused once more.

  Davis saw that he’d descended about three storeys (his imagination had it at twice that) to an enormous room with drains in a rutted concrete floor and ashen-crimson brick walls tallowed by black stains. Along the near wall to his right were metal drums and wooden crates on pallets. A huge arch spanned most of the wall off to his left, inside which, trailing out of site, was uncomfortably huddled a mammoth beast Davis could only assume was a dragon.

  The elevator doors closed. Davis’s overwhelmed perceptions failed to note the sound of the car ascending.

  At more than twenty feet by radius, the arch was nearly filled by the creature’s massive bulk. Its skin (scales, Davis guessed, though not flaked like fish scales) was a dark, dirty bronze on top, becoming mottled with patches of pink on its sides before running to waxy white near its belly, which was spread wide, smothering the floor. Its chin rested on its front claws, stubby feet with yellow, cracked nails. The head was not quite what Davis might have imagined, drawing from fairy stories. It was coloured in the same colour-sloughing wash as the body, turning abruptly black at the mouth, which was not slim and lizard-like, but more akin to a ram’s—indeed, a curved, rippled horn emerged from the beast’s left temple, its counterpart a broken stub. But the snout was nearly a beak, sharp and hard, and the golden eyes that flashed as they regarded Davis were decidedly serpentine.

  A rumble swelled in the tunnel, emerging as a sort of lethargic chorus of tubas; the creature spoke; the language was English, but the voice was nothing like human.

  ‘Disconsolate soul,’ it said, ‘Curious . . . a little frightened.’

  Davis was too much in awe at the existence of the creature to be shocked at its facility for language. In that moment, simple words were to him as incomprehensible as whale-song or the scream of a fox. He marvelled at the thing, at its size, at its grotesque colouration, at its broken horn . . . and as he absorbed each particular as a quality of the impossible sight before him, the reality of the creature settled in his comprehension like a pixelated image coming into focus. Heretofore there existed no partition behind which to accommodate such an experience, but Davis was accepting of all challenges, and with acceptance came assimilation.

  ‘Well, then,’ the dragon said.

  Though the existence of the dragon was clearly the most astonishing aspect of his discovery, Davis realised its presence was nearly as astonishing: There was an enormous chamber beneath his office building the size and shape of which seemed to indicate it had been constructed to accommodate the mythological beast. Moreover, one of the elevators—the one he used every day—descended to the mysterious chamber. Obviously, the dragon’s existence was not only known to whoever had built the dungeon (for Davis now had to acknowledge there seemed a constraining aspect to the room), but was known currently by someone in the office. The drums and crates behind Davis seemed relevant to the dragon’s upkeep . . . debilitating as the service might seem.

  ‘Fed often,’ the dragon muttered, ‘exercised rarely.’

  At last one of the dragon’s utterances held meaning for Davis, and he was startled by it—was the dragon reading his thoughts?

  The dragon hummed, a sound like a boiler roused to life. ‘Am I heard?’ it asked.

  Davis sputtered, ‘I hear you!’ He felt oddly mocked by the echo that spat his voice back larger and more loudly than he himself had managed. ‘Are you a dragon?’

  The dragon stared for several seconds before answering disinterestedly, ‘It can be said, “I am what I am”.’

  Davis thought perhaps he was being chided for asking the obvious. ‘Well, you must be a dragon,’ he concluded. He thought the next most obvious question was better. ‘How did you come to be here?’

  A grunt strained from inside the dragon’s throat, but he did not speak.

  ‘You must have been in here for a long time.’ Davis said. After a bit of silence, he continued, ‘I would guess you were in this chamber before the office moved here.’ No response. ‘Before the casket factory?’ Still nothing. Davis felt irked. He took two steps forward and put his hands on his hips. ‘How long have they known about you?’

  The dragon huffed, apparently annoyed with the line of questions. It rotated its head slightly; its good horn scraped the side of the tunnel.

  Davis wondered if the dragon was already finished conversing. He couldn’t imagine why: he thought his questions were perfectly rational, he couldn’t imagine the dragon had been asked them so often as to be bored with answering them, and given the apparent neglect of the beast languishing in its squalid lair, it seemed likely to Davis that the dragon conversed infrequently with anyone curious about his well-being. Perhaps the dragon hated to be bothered.

  The dragon slumped.

  Davis squeezed shut one eye to fend off a drop of sweat, reminding him of the oppressive heat in the sub-basement. He ran one hand over his forehead and it came away slick. He grabbed a button and flapped his shirt. He found the scene dispiriting. Here was a thing of unimaginable importance to science, an unmatchable attraction, a wonder of discovery! Yet it was so sad and so listless as to be . . . useless. What good was a recalcitrant dragon, grown slovenly and locked underground? And it was not at all a new discovery—it was a thing that was likely ‘tended to’ by anonymous paeans and half-forgotten by its master jailers. Far from being a fearsome attraction, straining at its chains, it wallowed instead, decrepit.

  One thing was certain: the dragon was the source of the heat that afflicted the office building above. Davis wondered who among the management team knew of the existence of the beast. The ‘disconnect’ between the creature’s existence and the problem its body heat created was obvious (as the executives working in the ‘leg’ were unaffected), but addressing the matter to the wrong individual would violate a confidence (albeit one obtained accidentally), or quite possibly elicit doubts about his sanity! Not for the first time, Davis lamented how personal initiative often created a personal quandary (where the struggle, by definition, must remain unrecognised). The heat made it difficult to think logically, and determining whom to approach looked to be a difficult manoeuvre.

  ‘One horn too few,’ said the dragon.

  ‘Eh?’ The sound emerg
ed from being startled at the return of the beast’s voice as much as from hope of explanation—which did not follow.

  So Davis became exasperated once more. If the dragon meant to contribute nothing, then the situation must be addressed as it stood. However miraculous the existence of the dragon might be, if it failed to provide any quantifiable benefit, then its presence—its circumstance in relation to the office above—was a problem.

  The most direct solution was to remove the source of the heat. To do so by excavating the dragon from the sub-basement would be an expensive undertaking and would compromise the secrecy that somebody seemed to want to maintain. Davis had no way of knowing how far back the tunnel went behind the dragon or if it let out somewhere else. Even if it did, the dragon appeared unable to manoeuvre itself around. Perhaps the thing could float free if the chamber was flooded with water, but the potential damage to the building’s foundation might result in catastrophe.

  ‘Do not favour the experiment,’ observed the dragon.

  ‘Of course, if the “engine” producing the heat was “shut down” . . .’ Davis muttered.

  The dragon growled and the floor trembled.

  ‘Apparently, we do not favour the experiment,’ Davis quipped. ‘What, then, shall be done?’ No response. ‘If the source must remain fixed—if so—and the cooling system is insufficient to the task of making the office comfortable, then obviously the heat must be vented or otherwise harmlessly dispersed.’

  The dragon huffed and slumped.

  Davis wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. ‘It really is intolerable in here.’

  ‘Sometimes seems intolerable,’ echoed the dragon.

  Davis softened. The dragon’s situation was truly pathetic and almost certainly not of his choosing (though Davis thought it impossible to ascertain anything from the creature’s consistently elusive utterances). However uncomfortable it might make the workers above, the dragon was suffering worst of all, perhaps not only his confinement but the proximate effects of his own presence in the enclosure!

  Davis thought all situations had a win-win solution (provided one was sufficiently willing to compromise). It seemed likely that ample ventilation would not only bolster the efficiency of the office’s beleaguered cooling system, but would improve conditions for the sub-basement’s lone inhabitant. Clearly the presence of the beast was meant to remain secret—the beast’s chin scraped across the floor as its eyes scanned the arch of the ceiling—but if venting could be done at night. . . .

  Davis gasped. He’d seen it before—bursts of billowing steam erupting at night from vents near the ground of an office building. The first time he saw it happen he was concerned, thinking the building might be on fire, before realising that smoke would be darker than the plume disgorged. He’d guessed that the steam was the result of some sort of ‘purging’ process performed on the ventilation system after hours. But now—? Was it possible? Were there dragons throughout the city, ill-treated and left to languish in foetid vaults beneath hives of glass and steel and cement? To what purpose? It seemed impossible such a confidence could be maintained—Davis might not know the executive mind, but it seemed the elite would never deign to see to the ‘maintenance’ of the creature—such responsibility would be delegated.

  No, Davis concluded, the answer was obvious: that this secret, shocking to him only because he had never guessed it, was commonplace to those ‘in the know’. Therefore, it should surprise no one if he discovered it, and if it placed him in higher stead for knowing, then all the better.

  ‘Ah!’ Davis exclaimed, realising that nothing might come of his discovery after all. Perhaps the sub-basement was vented regularly—after all, he’d never been at the office late at night. The thought that his efforts would lead to nothing, that all contingencies were already accounted for, was discouraging. As he pealed his shirt once more from his chest, he hoped, for the dragon’s sake at least, that if such ventilation were due to occur, it might be soon.

  ‘Given little consideration on the weekends,’ the dragon grumbled.

  Davis panicked at the pronouncement and turned towards the elevator—to discover no call button on the wall. He rushed over, murmuring, ‘no, no, no, no.’ He felt the smooth wall and elevator doors as though there might be a hidden catch, but none was to be found. He jammed his fingers in the seam and strained to pull the doors apart, barely successful enough to see the empty shaft waiting behind.

  ‘Hello?’ he called desperately, and again.

  ‘HELLO?’ boomed the dragon’s voice, and the stone thrummed.

  Davis’s legs quivered and he stumbled towards the corner. As he steadied himself on one of the metal drums, he felt liquid shift inside it.

  ‘Rarely heard above. Little regard. Usually misunderstood.’

  His hands on the lid of the metal drum, Davis felt himself suddenly consumed by a strange mania, as though the definable, solid thing he was touching gave strength to impulse. He wrenched open the lock ring, tore free the lid, and hurled it like a discus at the far wall. It fell well short and clanged as it skipped on the cement. Davis thrust his arms to the elbows into the liquid and flung a cascade over his face. The water was not cool, but it was water. Davis drank. The water tasted bad; though the barrel was clean and free from rust, the metallic tang of hard well-water was so overpowering he nearly gagged trying to swallow; he spit repeatedly on the ground in a vain attempt to clear the acrid taste from his mouth—then gratefully repeated the process. Davis hunched over the barrel as his chest heaved, gradually slowing, slowly quieting.

  He looked at the dragon. A black tongue slithered over its cracked, beak-like mouth. Davis noted a shallow rut in the centre of the floor. He pulled at the lip of the barrel as though it was a steering wheel, rolling the drum across the floor. As the lid had been removed, the water sloshed freely on him, on the floor. After a minute’s clumsy procession, he lined up the barrel and pushed it over. The water trickled down the rut. Though doubtless the dragon had hoped for a more confident apportionment, it lapped at the water with slow, rough sweeps. Davis thought the gift was appreciated.

  He reasoned that, if water was in the drums, then food must be in the wooden crates. The top of the nearest was unattached; he tipped it over the side and let it fall to the floor. He looked inside and discovered to his surprise that the crate was not full of food after all. Instead, it was crammed to the brim with trophies layered in bubble wrap. The trophies were all of similar construction: a large, smooth piece of cloudy crystal was mounted on a polished walnut base emblazoned with a bronze plaque. Nevertheless, no two trophies appeared to Davis to be exactly alike—at least, not the crystal. The shapes were of a singular style, swooping teardrops and buds before bursting and the like, all smooth, all cloudy, but no two matching precisely. Unlike everything else in the room, the crystal was cool, though it felt oddly wrong to Davis, though he couldn’t say how—it seemed less to do with the feel of the material as it did the very act of touching it. The plaques, too, were odd—all were unfinished. Many were etched with some word, ‘Congratulations’—to no one, ‘Best’ or ‘Most’ offset to the left, as though the recognition was yet to be determined; many had a year at the bottom (the sample Davis examined fell along a course of recent years), but nothing else; others were entirely blank.

  Davis heard the elevator motor working and was abruptly beset by terror. Upon the brink of discovery, his ideas of revealing his knowledge of the hidden sub-basement and the dragon seemed suddenly, completely wrong. He rebuked his foolish thoughts of camaraderie with his superiors—he would be lucky to be shown mercy! It was instantly, terribly clear to Davis that this secret was not meant for him to know.

  ‘Anxious!’ hissed the dragon.

  Davis winced at the unnecessary assessment.

  He leapt across the room, trophy in hand. He flattened himself against the wall next to the elevator doors. The car settled. A bell dinged.

  The doors opened. Davis was surprised to see a man dressed just
as he was, in rolled sleeves and loosened tie, blithely emerged—not a uniformed guard or custodian in coveralls as he had expected.

  Davis swung out from the wall; the trophy glinted in the yellow light as it traced a wide arc; the clouded crystal dollop came down hard on the man’s head.

  ‘Ow!’ the man exclaimed. He stumbled and crouched, but did not fall.

  Davis brought the wooden base down between his shoulders.

  The man dropped to his hands and knees.

  A baleful hiss spun around the room.

  Blinking blood, the man tried to look up. ‘Dude . . .’ he whimpered.

  Davis smacked the crystal across his temple. The man crumpled to the floor.

  Davis looked at the blood-splattered trophy in his hand. He looked up at the dragon, the incongruous, obtuse, and fantastical beast whose discovery should have changed his life . . . but not like this. Meeting this creature of myth should not have made of him a destroyer. Davis, just as suddenly as he had been afraid, now became angry, and he hurled the trophy at the dragon. Like the lid of the drum, it fell well short, and then bounced through a jagged curl.

  ‘Frustrated,’ intoned the dragon, ‘Disappointed’.

  Davis screamed wordlessly at the ceiling. He challenged the dragon, ‘You say nothing!’

  The dragon sighed, ‘A gap too great between voice and words.’

  The fight drained from Davis. He felt he’d been found wanting. He looked at the man on the ground and felt deeply ashamed of his rash act. He was scared, as well, of what would become of him if anyone found out what he’d done. The urge to flee was overwhelming. What could he do—hide the body? How?

  He again looked at the dragon.

  Davis grabbed the man’s ankles and dragged the body across the floor, jerking his neck around every few steps to make sure that the dragon hadn’t moved. The dragon watched passively—perhaps bemusedly, thought Davis. When he thought he was close enough—he wasn’t sure, but Davis didn’t want to test the creature’s mobility—he pulled the man around parallel and then flipped him once, as though he might roll, which he didn’t. Instead, the man began to stir and moan. Davis yelped and ran for the elevator. Only when he got to the doors did he remember that there was no call button. But as he stood there, trying to decide if he should run back to see if the man carried a special key, the doors opened of their own accord. Davis jumped inside the car. He saw the man struggling to his knees. The dragon seemed to ignore the wounded man. Davis saw the eyes of the voluminous monster huddled in its dark tunnel glow dully, watching him as the doors closed.