The Hidden Back Room

by Jason A. Wyckoff

  Instead of pushing the button for the lobby, Davis instinctively pushed the button for his floor. The office appeared deserted. He ran to his desk. He curled into a ball on the floor between a blue recycling bin and a two-drawer file cabinet. And there he remained until Monday morning.

  If his co-workers noticed that he was unshaven, that his clothes were dirty and still the same from Friday, or that his face was frozen in a rictus of fright, they gave no sign. They seemed to notice him no more or less than any other day. Perhaps they were distracted—happily distracted—by the adjustment to the atmosphere of the office. It was pleasant in the office for the first time anyone could remember, not overly hot and stuffy. Davis overheard praise that ‘they’ had finally got the ventilation working correctly.

  No one came for Davis. Nor was he summoned or sent any unusual communication. Not that day or any other.

  When he finally left the office that night, Davis noticed that the hidden panel in the elevator had disappeared. It wasn’t as though the panel was sealed, but rather that it had never been there at all—as though the entire section of wall in the car had been replaced.

  Mustering his courage, Davis crept around to the old service elevator that came up through the sidewalk. He discovered that his master key no longer fit the operating mechanism.

  The decrescendo of Davis’s fear carried over many weeks, but eventually he felt ‘in the clear’. He wondered what had happened to the dragon. He wondered what had happened to the man he’d left behind. But he couldn’t ask, and neither could he see any means of investigating without raising suspicion. Despite his relief at feeling safe again, Davis couldn’t help but feel frustrated that the matter was ‘closed’—whether he liked it or not. He thought it would have been nice to know something more (as though he knew for certain that no matter what, he would never be granted full understanding, though what partial element would grant him closure, he couldn’t guess).

  The pleasant atmosphere brought on by the cooling of the office persisted through the autumn. Davis’s co-workers were noticeably more happy, and charitable to each other, and cooperative. Unfortunately, the division was losing money hand-over-fist and massive lay-offs ensued. Davis was among the first let go; his departure was no more noteworthy than any other.

  His subsequent job search took on an odd form: He would drive around the city at night to note which office buildings ventilated steam after-hours (quite a few, he discovered). He would then return home and sit by his fireplace (he had discovered what a soothing hobby the building and tending of fires could be) and search to see if any offices in those particular buildings had any openings available. Davis was not at all put off by failure; the hunt was enjoyable, and he felt confident that someone would eventually have need of his particular skill set.

  IN THE LIBRARY

  A hidden library! Of course I was interested.

  ‘I can’t quite figure out whose library it was, though,’ Professor Randall said. ‘The original house was a narrow two room affair with a separate kitchen built in 1799. We’ve identified five renovations or additions from records, plans or physical evidence—three in the nineteenth century and another two in the twentieth. The house is a patchwork; the additions fit like pieces cut from different puzzles. With the fifth major renovation, the owner, with some sort of ambivalent regard for history, I suppose, rather than raze the whole thing and start over, elected instead to encase three-quarters of the existing building under a new layer. Not simply a new façade, mind you, but new corridors and rooms and galleries where the old exterior became the new interior wall. The original two rooms became their own museum, displaying things found in the house and other historical pieces from the region. I would guess half the treasures were bought at auction. The larger room is a roped off sitting room meant to simulate the period, though of course the original house had no such luxury.’

  I was anxious to hear more about the library, but I’d learned not to interrupt the Professor. I wasn’t afraid he would take offence, but rather that he would lose his train of thought such that we would have to disembark from the original station a second time. Near retirement, Randall’s memory was still sharp, his observational powers above reproach, but he had indulged too long and too often in discourse to be a proper conversationalist. Nevertheless, I was once his pupil and we were attuned.

  ‘You’re wondering about the library,’ he surmised. ‘Yes. Let me see.’

  He blinked and searched the upper corners of his office. I did not prompt him. He mumbled for a bit and waved the fingers of his right hand in front of his mouth as though playing a tin whistle.

  ‘I found the room!’ he announced triumphantly, not out of personal aggrandisement, but rather with the relief of remembering where he’d left off. He laughed. ‘I found it in the least ingenious way possible: by looking at the plans. There’s more to it, of course—more mystery. I had been there three days already, finding a few prizes for the university among the otherwise unremarkable collection. I have two grad students to help me with cataloguing, a young man and a young woman, both capable; it’s more likely I misplaced the sepias we were working from than either of them having done it. In searching for the missing plans, one of my students found an older set, apparently from the fourth renovation done around 1915. And there it appeared! Upon seeing it, we were confused as to how we hadn’t guessed its presence. I suppose one doesn’t look for such things, and if you stare at a signed and stamped piece of paper informing you otherwise, you might not divine the obvious errors another piece of paper reveals. But upon looking at these plans, we could feel ourselves back in the rooms and we knew even then, when we were in them, that the dimensions weren’t right. Of course we questioned whether we imagined those feelings, in our excitement over a secret passage, when just as likely the thing had been eliminated with the next renovation. It is pleasantly dizzying to be excited that way, I’m sure you know.’

  I did know—but I waited patiently.

  ‘A few quick measurements dispelled any doubts. That still left the matter of gaining access. Rather than running off to poke around interminably for a catch, we looked to the plans for a clue. Now, as I said, it looked more like a passage than a room, albeit a rather wide passage. It had a reversed L-shape, running tall north-south, with a second shorter leg turning right from the top. In addition, there was a stubby peg off the east side towards the bottom, and a sort of broader alcove off the west side towards the top. Damn, I should have brought the plans with me.’

  ‘I can see it,’ I assured him.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he nodded. He muttered for a moment, retracing the form, ‘Reversed L with another turn at the top . . . yes . . . and the alcove . . . ah!’ He clapped his palm on his desk. ‘Then there was this! Though the room was on the plans, there was no entrance indicated, as though whoever drew up those plans knew that the room existed, but knew it to be sealed. The architect couldn’t have thought the room a secret—not if he included it to be seen by anyone who looked at his drawings. So why not show the entrance, as well? But see here: as Therese and I looked at one sheet, Karl searched the rest and discovered that the room continued up to the second floor! It was shaped very differently, shorter but wider than the ground floor, more like a rectangle with one corner cut away.’ The professor smiled and patted his fingers against his dimples. ‘We were absolutely buzzing then,’ he added needlessly.

  ‘How did you find your way in?’

  He looked at me, still enraptured by memory. ‘Hmm?’

  I repeated the question.

  ‘Oh, Brent, I’m so ashamed,’ he said, though his smile belied the statement, ‘We never did find the door!’

  I chuckled and groaned, ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Oh my, yes! We were very careful about it, of course. I decided that the angle at the base might be a sensible place to fashion an entrance. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to be neat about it, as there was plaster over lath on both sides of the beams. When we did get through, it
was right into the back of one of the shelves. A few books were unavoidably damaged.’

  I winced.

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘See, here: I won’t say too much more about it, because you’ll just have to see for yourself, but there’s one thing odd about that room.’

  ‘One thing!’ I interjected.

  Luckily, the professor stayed on course. ‘The bookshelves line the walls. All of the walls. If there is a secret door on the inside, it is just as well hidden as from without.’

  I found the detail intriguing, but could make no more of it. As the professor said, I would have to see for myself.

  ‘So. The room, absent of entry, shows up on plans for the fourth renovation, though it is not clear if it was part of that renovation or already in existence, and then disappears on the fifth. It certainly wasn’t part of the original house. So, as I said, it’s unclear who built the library. Here are the “suspects”, if you like.’

  He passed a manila folder across his desk.

  ‘A bit of family history and such. I have my ideas, but I don’t want to prejudice you. Now as to who stocked the library—there is of course an obvious clue in the books themselves.’

  ‘Publication date,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘The most recent we’ve seen is 1925, though we’d barely begun the search when I decided to pull back until you had a look . . . over the objections of my current students, I might add! The collection is . . . well, it’s damned odd, Brent.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Every book is a first edition.’

  I salivated.

  ‘But I didn’t recognise a single title or author.’

  I swallowed, my dreams of ‘a Bostonian’s’ Tamerlane and Other Poems temporarily on hold. A terrible shadow reared. ‘Please don’t tell me you discovered a secret trove comprised entirely of vanity press publications.’

  He ignored my mock horror and answered seriously. ‘No, I don’t think so. At least some of the books are from legitimate publishers. I have a friend, another old pupil—did you know Henry Dennis—no? After you, I think—he works for Little, Brown. I asked him about two books with their mark, but he could find no record of either. I meant to bring them with me to show you.’ He bent behind the desk and rummaged through a leather satchel. ‘I don’t know why I’m looking again. I could have sworn I’d put them in there, but I guess my mind is not what it once was.’

  ‘But all the books you saw are contemporary for the period of the house?’ I asked.

  ‘Eh? Oh, yes,’ he said, still searching the severely limited recesses of his pack.

  So there was another dream to dismiss; I seemed unlikely to discover any rare occult offerings imported from someone’s ‘old country’.

  He sat up again and looked at me. I was shocked to see something like desperation, or fear—perhaps something for which even he could not account. ‘I don’t know. It’s just amazing to me that not a one of those books . . .’ He shrugged it off. ‘I should just stop with “it’s just amazing”, because that’s what it is. We barely scratched the surface, and you’re the expert, anyway. I’m indebted to you for coming.’

  ‘Professor, I haven’t been this excited in years,’ I said.

  A vacant graduate student dorm room had been made available for my stay. The sparsely-attended summer session was two weeks from commencing, so the building was nearly empty; I heard no one else on my floor. I have no idea who supplied the sheets on the bed, but they smelled fresh—unlike the dorm room air, tinted with the mild sourness of sweaty feet that somehow has clung to the disparate flooring of every dorm room I’ve ever known. Fortunately, the night was pleasant and I opened the windows—as far as the safety measures would allow. Do students often leap to their deaths from the third floor?

  Rather than a collection of random scraps, the folder with ‘a bit of family history and such’ read more like a dossier; I suspected that my former mentor was even more intrigued than he let on. Included were folded half-size sets of the various available floor plans (inexpertly copied in greyscale so that the sepia and blueprint originals from the third and fourth renovations were rendered nearly illegible), deeds and survey reports from the county recorder’s office, and a few newspaper notices related to the various owners clipped to their family trees (with every document annotated as to its history on the back).

  The house was built by John Cuthbert Coombs, whose forebear arrived on the Mayflower, but whose line appeared otherwise undistinguished. There was a curious break in the lineage around the beginning of the eighteenth century, but this was apparently due to an error in form: Instead of a link bisected by a question mark to indicate uncertain parentage, someone had clumsily placed the question mark in the place of a generation, for both mother and father—which would, of course, have made tracing the line further back impossible, not to mention being a burden on the offspring.

  Coombs arrived in Western Pennsylvania just in time to be arrested for participating in the Whiskey Rebellion. As only a labourer and not yet a landowner, Coombs’s involvement was likely either in line with the generally anti-Federalist sentiment of the working poor in the region or simply opportunistic. No punishment appears to have followed his arrest, and he subsequently made a small leap in fortune over the course of a few years, enabling him to buy his property and build his house. One can’t help but wonder if the whiskey trade contributed to his improved standing. However it was accomplished, the plot he bought in 1798 on which to build his house and operate a small farm was located a little ways north-west of Pittsburgh—desirable real estate today.

  As Professor Randall had said, the original building was simple, and I saw no evidence that John Cuthbert Coombs was a man of letters. Still, despite the fact that the Whiskey Rebellion had to do with the collection of taxes rather than a restriction on a legal trade, I couldn’t help but think of the secret chambers and passageways in use during Prohibition. Coombs’s small farm seemed inadequate for prosperity; might he have had other income kept ‘off the books’? The first renovation (no surviving record) is inferred from the second (undertaken just three years before Coombs’ death in 1840), which indicates the house built upon as being larger than the original two-room, but traces only the shell, providing no interior detail. Given that the hidden library’s location within the house (near, though not adjacent to the original two rooms), it seemed likely to me that Coombs may have begun the secret room, even if he did not use it for its ultimate purpose. Given the room’s reach, it is impossible that he used it in its finished form, of that at least I could be sure.

  John Whittier Coombs, a banker, inherited the house from his father, but did not return to his childhood home. What followed confused me. The son put the house up for auction, at which it was sold to a Henry Wintering, apparently the lone bidder, who was acting as the agent for an organisation named Coombs Local Trust, which five years later sold it to Owen Charles Coombs, John Whittier’s son, for one dollar. I imagine John Whittier knew what he was doing; I do not. Perhaps he inherited his father’s aversion to taxes along with the house. Owen Charles lived in the house upon taking possession of it, but apparently not before then. It appears to have been leased in the interim, but no name was given for the inhabitant, and I was inclined to think the lease was as much a ruse as the auction.

  I didn’t need to read the information on the page about Owen Charles Coombs to know that he was the professor’s ‘suspect’; the crinkled edges and myriad pen dots gave it away. Owen attended Dartmouth, and though he failed to excel there, that wouldn’t be enough to dissuade an academic like Randall from ‘fingering’ the college man. Owen’s only distinguishing achievement appears to be his leadership of The Gallowsmen, a knock-off secret society that appears to have died with Owen’s dismissal from the university. The group apparently had a reputation for casual licentiousness, and the better (more clandestine) societies scorned it.

  Young Owen may well have been a reprobate. Coombs would n
ot be the only family whose first son born to privilege was spoiled by it. Owen was arrested twice in Pittsburgh for public drunkenness within a year of his inheriting the house. After that, however, no further mention of him is available until a decade later, when a society article announced his engagement to Edith Hauser, a parson’s daughter. They had one son, Roderick, whose mother died when he was eight. Roderick left the house when he was seventeen. Nothing else is known of him. Owen died in the house in 1899, one month shy of the centennial of its completion. Nothing specifically ties him to the library, but I had to think he was responsible for the third renovation—it seemed unlikely his grandfather would have bothered with another renovation so soon after the second, and one would not expect it to have been undertaken when the house was unoccupied.

  But that left the mystery of the collection, if, as the professor said, the publication dates reached to at least a quarter-century after Owen’s death and ten years after the fourth renovation—on which the secret room is recorded. Curiously, the owners who commissioned the 1915 renovation, a Mr and Mrs Oliver DePauw, sold the house only nine months after its completion. The house went next to a circuit judge, Severin Whitehead, who lived there peaceably with his family, possibly unaware of the room’s very existence. It was Whitehead’s final renovation that ‘encased three-quarters of the existing building under a new layer’; the plans for which did not show the room at all (apparently ‘stretching’ the surrounding rooms unaffected by the renovation). Yet he would have been in residence at the time of the most recent publication date! No matter who had built the room or began the library, Whitehead would have had to have been the final curator. There were articles about the judge’s decisions and a few society notices, but nothing that shed light on his role. Perhaps there was more to the judge, but Randall, more invested in Owen Charles Coombs, neglected to pull at those threads. Whitehead left the estate to two daughters widowed by war—the ladies who bequeathed it to the University.