by John Saul
No more than a minute later a large truck, creeping down the steep, narrow road in its lowest gear, rounded the curve from the north, and the driver saw the plume of smoke drifting up from far below.
“Jesus,” he breathed. As he switched on his flashers and ground the truck to a stop to check the wreckage for survivors, he reached for the microphone of his C.B. radio. “Got someone who missed the bridge above Barrington,” he reported. “Looks like it just happened. Car’s at the bottom, burnin’ like crazy.”
The telephone rang in Hildie Kramer’s apartment just as the morning news was beginning, and Hildie muted the television as she picked up the phone.
“Mrs. Kramer?” a male voice asked.
“Yes.” Hildie’s nerves tingled. The heaviness of the voice told her that whatever her caller had to say this early in the morning wasn’t going to be good news.
“This is Sergeant Dover, of the Barrington Police Department.”
Hildie’s heart skipped a beat. “Have you found Steven Conners?” she asked, already preparing herself for a carefully tempered expression of grief over the teacher’s death.
“I wish we had,” Dover told her. “It’s about the boy who found his car.”
Hildie’s mind worked quickly. Josh had been acting strangely last night. Had he slipped out of the house during the night? But why? He knew nothing of what was happening in the hidden laboratory. “Josh MacCallum?” she asked.
“The other one. Jeff Aldrich.”
“I see,” Hildie said guardedly, keeping her voice steady, although her sense of apprehension instantly rose. What had happened? Had Jeff told his parents the truth?
“I’m at the boy’s home right now,” Dover went on. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident, and the boy’s here by himself. He asked me to call you.”
“An accident?” Hildie echoed. “What sort of accident?”
“I’m afraid it’s his folks. Their car went off the bridge north of town. Happened about forty-five minutes ago.”
“Dear Lord,” Hildie breathed. “Chet and Jeanette? Are they all right?”
“No, ma’am,” Sergeant Dover replied. “I’m afraid they’re not. That’s why I’m calling you. Neither of them survived.”
Hildie steadied herself against a table as the words sank in, and when she spoke, her voice was trembling. “Ill be there right away,” she said. “Tell Jeff I’m coming.” Without waiting for a reply from the police officer, she hung up the phone, ran a comb through her hair, then left through the door that opened onto the parking lot.
Josh MacCallum was still in bed, but he was wide awake. He’d barely slept at all last night, for he’d kept waking up, thinking about the strange file he’d seen on his computer last night and what it might mean. He’d even dreamed about computers, dreams in which he was back in the strange world he’d seen on the virtual reality screen.
Except that in the dream he wasn’t using the virtual reality program at all. He was actually inside the computer.
But it wasn’t at all like Adam had told him it was. There was no wonderful world waiting for him to explore.
Instead, there was only an infinite labyrinth, a maze that twisted around him, unending corridors that led nowhere. Panic had overwhelmed him, and he’d run through the maze, turning first in one direction, then another, but always ending up exactly back where he’d begun.
It was a trap, a trap from which there was no escape.
He’d tried to scream out, but found no voice, and each time, it was the violent effort of trying to break through that soundless scream that woke him up, sweating and shaking.
Each time he fell back into a restless slumber the dream returned, and each time it was more frightening than the time before.
The last time he’d awakened, the early morning sunlight had brightened his open window, and he’d decided not to go back to sleep at all. Instead he’d reached for the book on his nightstand and begun reading.
Now, though, he heard the sound of a car on the gravel drive outside. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was only a few minutes after six. Curious, he slid out of bed and went to the window.
He was just in time to see Hildie Kramer’s car disappear through the Academy’s gates.
Where had she gone? And for how long?
Josh glanced at the clock again. None of the other kids would be up for at least half an hour. And if Hildie wasn’t in the house …
He made up his mind. If he was really going to go back down into the basement and try to figure out exactly where the second elevator actually was, now was the time to do it
But what if someone caught him? What about the people who worked in the kitchen? He didn’t even know what time they came to work.
Racking his brain as he quickly pulled his clothes on, Josh suddenly had an idea. Pulling his suitcase out from under his bed, he took it with him when he left his room. If anyone stopped him, he’d just say he was taking it downstairs to store it.
Clutching his empty suitcase, he left his room. The hall was as silent as if morning was still hours away, so he scurried down the corridor to the stairs, taking them two at a time as he went down to the ground floor.
It, too, was deserted.
He darted through the dining room to the butler’s pantry, then paused to listen at the kitchen door. He could hear voices murmuring as the cook began preparing breakfast, and he could smell the scent of coffee drifting through the crack around the swinging door.
Silently, he pulled the basement door open, flicked on the fight, then stepped onto the landing at the top of the steep flight of stairs.
He pulled the door closed behind him and breathed a sigh of relief. So far, no one had discovered him.
Carrying the suitcase, he descended the stairs. Somehow, being here for the second time, and knowing it was morning outside, the basement didn’t seem quite so scary. He set the suitcase down, then began making his way toward the place where he’d found the concrete shaft, turning on lights as he went. A moment later he came to it and found another light switch. The whole area around him lit up with the stark brilliance of four naked bulbs.
He circled around the concrete shaft, examining it carefully. The first three sides were nothing more than unbroken concrete faces. The cement was old, and there were places where it had been patched, but other than that there was nothing special about it.
On the fourth face he found something he hadn’t noticed the last time he’d been down here. Coming out of the floor was a plastic pipe, nearly three inches in diameter. The pipe ran straight up the wall of the shaft, broken halfway up by a box whose faceplate was screwed on at each corner. From the box the conduit continued up, disappearing into the basement’s ceiling, except for a single branch that made a right angle leading across the roof of the basement itself.
Josh cocked his head, staring at the pipe. When the house had been built, he knew, plastic hadn’t even been invented yet And anyway, the conduit didn’t look very old. When he studied the floor where the pipe disappeared into the concrete, the cement around the pipe looked new, too.
Could the pipe contain the cables that raised and lowered the elevator? It didn’t seem possible.
He headed back toward the stairs, searching the small storerooms until he found a toolbox. Inside there was a screwdriver, and a minute later Josh was back at the shaft, unscrewing the faceplate of the box that broke the pipe. As he loosened the fourth screw, the plate swung downward, revealing what was inside.
Cables.
But not the kind of heavy cables that would be used to pull an elevator up and down a shaft.
Computer cables.
Josh recognized them at once, their gray plastic coverings as familiar to him as the laces of his tennis shoes. There were at least a dozen of them, packed in so tight that Josh couldn’t even count them all. And all of them went not only up into the building above, but down into someplace beneath the floor.
But he still didn’t know where the machiner
y that operated the elevator was. As he screwed the faceplate back onto the access box, Josh pictured the house in his mind. The roof of the cupola that was the fourth floor was flat, so it didn’t seem like the machinery that ran the elevator could be up there.
But what if the cables that hauled the car up and down were on pulleys, and came back down through the walls? There was lots of room for machines down here.
He turned away from the shaft, his eyes following the single branch of the cable conduit. Perhaps fifteen feet away the pipe disappeared through a wall made of concrete blocks.
Blocks that looked much newer than the concrete of the basement floor, and which were pierced by a door.
His heart beating faster, Josh started toward the door.
Hildie Kramer pulled up in front of the Aldriches’ house. A police cruiser sat in the driveway, and a uniformed officer opened the door even before she rang the bell.
“Mrs. Kramer? I’m Sergeant Dover. The boy’s in the kitchen.” He nodded toward the living room and the kitchen behind it. “Through there.”
Hildie strode across the living room, pausing at the door to the kitchen. Jeff, still in his pajamas and bathrobe, sat at the kitchen table. When he looked up at her, the first thing she noticed was that his eyes were dry.
His face was pale, but his eyes were dry.
“I didn’t know who to call,” he said. “None of my family lives around here.”
Hildie went to the boy, lowering her heavy frame down to her knees so she could put her arms around him as he sat in the chair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Jeff turned to face her. “Can I go back to school now?” he asked.
Hildie’s breath caught in her throat. She looked at Jeff once more. Slowly, she began to understand.
No tears.
His voice was steady.
He didn’t care.
His parents were both dead, and he didn’t care.
Hildie’s mind raced. Had the officer noticed? Or had he simply assumed that Jeff was in shock and the truth of what had happened hadn’t yet penetrated?
“I—I don’t know,” she said. “Let me talk to Sergeant …” Her voice trailed off as the policeman’s name escaped her mind.
“Dover,” Jeff told her. “His name’s Sergeant Dover.”
Taking a deep breath, Hildie pulled herself back to her feet and went into the living room, where the officer was talking to someone on the telephone. He signaled her to wait, cut his conversation short and hung up. “Is he all right?” he asked.
Hildie shook her head. “Of course he isn’t. I’m not sure he even knows quite what’s happened yet But he wants to know if I can take him to the Academy.” As Dover’s brows knit into a puzzled frown, Hildie hurried on, wanting to press her advantage before the policeman had time to think it out clearly. “I suspect it isn’t so much going to the Academy he wants, as it is to leave the house right now. Given what’s happened, it must be hard for him to be here.”
“I think we should notify his family,” Dover began.
Hildie nodded immediately. “I can take care of all that. We have all his records at the Academy, and both Chet and Jeanette work—worked—at the university. Of course, I’ll do whatever’s necessary, but …” She deliberately left the words hanging, wanting the final decision to come from Dover.
There would be no suggestion that she had simply come to the house, scooped Jeff up, and left with him.
Dover made up his mind. It had been bad enough having to come here and tell a twelve-year-old kid his folks were dead, without having to call the people’s parents as well. When it came to kids, Dover had never known what to do anyway. For the half hour he’d been here, he’d hardly been able to say anything to the boy at all. At least this woman knew kids, and knew Jeff. “If you could, that would probably make it easier on the families,” he agreed. “If he has a grandmother, or something, it would sure help. I mean, if he doesn’t, we can call the social service people and find someplace for him to stay.”
“I don’t think that should become necessary,” Hildie told him. “I think either Chet or Jeanette has family in the city, and I’ll be in touch with them this morning. I doubt whether the social service people will have to get involved.”
“We’ll have to see what the family has to say,” Dover replied noncommittally, “and I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you for some ID. Not that I don’t believe you are who you say you are, but—”
“Of course,” Hildie agreed, burrowing into the large bag that she’d dropped on a chair as she’d passed through the living room a few minutes earlier. Dover glanced perfunctorily at both her driver’s license and her university identification, then handed them back to her.
“I can reach you at the same phone number I used this morning?”
“Or the university switchboard,” Hildie replied. “You can usually get me more easily that way during the day. The other number is in my apartment at the Academy. I’m the housemother there.”
Five minutes later she and Jeff were in her car, heading back to the Academy. They drove in silence for more than a full minute. Then Hildie spoke. “I’m sorry about your parents, Jeff,” she said. “I know how hard it’s going to be for you.”
For a moment she wasn’t sure if Jeff had heard her or not, but then he turned to look at her.
“Dr. Engersol is going to have to let me go with Adam now,” he said. “If the police find out what I did, they’re going to come and arrest me, aren’t they?”
Hildie, her hands tightening around the steering wheel, said nothing.
For nearly half an hour Josh had been puzzling out the machinery that was concealed behind the concrete block wall. When he opened the door and switched on the light, he knew instantly that he’d found what he was looking for.
Bolted to the floor were two large motors, each of which was geared to a reel.
One of the motors was old, its brass casing black with grease, its copper-wrapped coils clearly visible through the ornately embossed grillwork that ventilated it.
The second one, though, looked much newer. Yet Josh could still see the footprint of a twin to the older one, clearly visible around the smaller base of the more modern motor.
Had one of the old ones broken down? But if it had, why hadn’t they replaced both of them at once?
His mind still puzzling at the question, he examined the reels, both of which held cable that was thicker than Josh’s forefinger.
On the reel attached to the older motor, only a few turns of cable were wrapped around the drum.
The same was true of the reel attached to the newer motor. But the reel itself was much larger, though the cables were of the same diameter.
With his eyes Josh traced the cables that came off the reels, turned around heavy pulleys bolted into the concrete floor, then crossed the floor itself, to turn on two more pulleys. From there the cables went straight up, disappearing into twin shafts that appeared to lead up through the walls of the house.
In his mind’s eye he pictured them continuing upward through the walls to two more pulleys, which would turn them back toward the shaft in the center of the basement. The last two pulleys would be directly over the two shafts themselves.
It took Josh only a moment to figure out which motor operated which elevator.
The old motor, attached to the smaller of the two reels, must run the brass cage he saw every day, and which he knew was now sitting on the main floor, most of its cable wound off the reel.
Which meant the newer motor, and its much bigger reel, operated the hidden elevator. But that reel, too, was nearly empty, which meant that the second car, like the first, must be all the way down.
But how much farther down than the other one?
His eyes scanned the walls of the room, and a second later he spotted the controllers for the two elevators.
As with the motors themselves, one of the controllers looked as though it had been in place since the house was built
.
But the controller attached to the second motor was as new as the motor itself. And from its black metal case, running parallel to the coiled metal electrical conduit, emerged the plastic tube that had branched off from the large pipe clinging to the elevator shaft.
The hidden elevator, then, was controlled by a computer.
While the older one, the one that everyone saw, was still operated by the system that had been installed when Mr. Barrington built the house.
A sudden loud clank made Josh jump back from the controllers. Panic flooded him for a second as he thought he’d been caught in the basement, but a moment later it eased as he realized that what he’d heard was nothing more than one of the elevators starting.
He turned and watched the smaller of the two reels turn slowly, winding up its cable. Josh held his breath, unconsciously counting the seconds as the reel kept turning, the old motor and gear system rattling noisily as they worked. Almost thirty seconds later the reel was full and the motor clanked to a stop.
Josh remained where he was, rooted to the spot. A moment later the other motor came to life. The second reel began to turn, much faster, and with barely a sound. Once again Josh counted the seconds.
This time it was only twenty seconds before the elevator came to a stop, but Josh was certain the reel had been turning at least twice as fast as the older one. No more than five seconds later, the elevator began running again.
Someone, Josh realized, had taken the antique elevator to the fourth floor, called the hidden one, then ridden it down to wherever it led.
Hildie?
Had she come back? How long had he been in the basement? He didn’t know. But if it was Hildie, he could get back upstairs now, while she was still down in whatever was below the basement. Turning off lights as he went, Josh hurried back through the cellar to the foot of the stairs, his mind already working out what he would do next.
If the hidden elevator was run by a computer somewhere deep under the mansion, there had to be a way to get to that computer! And if he could get to it …