by Matt Ruff
“You hope,” said Abdullah. “What if he sees through you? Or what if he buys it, but decides to hang on to your great-grandma’s book until you find the real secret room?”
“That’s like six bridges ahead,” George said. “I’ll cross it when I come to it.”
“Better to resist temptation by avoiding it altogether,” Abdullah suggested. “Let’s play it this way: I’ll get my cousin to let you into the museum tomorrow, but I’m coming with you. If we find The Book of Names, you give it to me.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“That building on Calumet where we just opened the new prayer room? It’s got an incinerator in the basement . . . Worse comes to worst, you can tell Braithwhite that Abdul Alhazred went back to memorizing the Koran.”
George didn’t like it, but he could see Abdullah was prepared to stand firm on this—and maybe he was right to. “OK,” George said. “The book’s yours, if we find it. But—”
Mortimer interrupted again: “This is great!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “What time do we meet up at the museum?”
“You couldn’t just tell him no?” Atticus said.
“He’s a brother of the lodge,” George replied.
“Not the steadiest brick in the pile, maybe,” added Montrose.
Quarter to midnight, and the three of them huddled by the staff entrance on the museum’s east side, watching Mortimer Dupree make his way towards them. Rather than follow the sidewalk, Mortimer opted to use the landscaping as cover, darting from tree to tree in a manner that would surely have raised the suspicions of any passersby. Fortunately between the late hour and the near-freezing temperatures, the area was deserted.
“Nice outfit,” Montrose said when Mortimer finally reached them. The dentist had on black shoes and trousers, a black pullover sweater and black wool cap, and black suede gloves. Slung over his shoulder on a strap was a bulging black bag, which rattled. “Those your burglar tools?”
“Be prepared,” Mortimer said. He pointed at the more modest bag George was holding. “Did you get the decoy?”
“Yeah,” George said. “It’s a Hebrew encyclopedia of kabbalah, in a nice old binding.” He pulled the book out so Mortimer could see. “We got it at Thurber Lang’s shop. Closest thing to a real magic book he had.”
“It doesn’t matter how nice the binding is,” Montrose noted, not for the first time. “Braithwhite’s going to know it’s not right.”
“Of course he is,” said George, “but that’s OK as long as he doesn’t figure out we made the switch.”
“Yeah, so you keep saying.”
“We just have to sell it right, when we give it to him.”
“You should have let me booby-trap it,” Montrose said. “Have it blow up in his face when he opens it, see if he’s immune to that.”
Abdullah and Pirate Joe arrived just before midnight. Abdullah led the group down a flight of steps to a basement door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. At 12:01 the door opened and Abdullah’s cousin looked out frowning.
“What the hell, Percy,” he said. “You brought the whole club with you?”
“Hey Bradley,” said Abdullah. “Remember that time you got evicted and the sheriff gave you an hour to move all your stuff out? I don’t recall you complaining when I came by with a big crew then.”
“Well, that was that and this is this,” Bradley said. But he stepped back from the doorway and waved them inside. “Quiet as the grave until we get upstairs,” he said.
He ushered them through a locker room and down a hallway, past a half-open door marked SECURITY. A radio was playing inside the security office; they heard a rustle of newspaper pages and then a white man’s voice said, “Fucking Irish cunts.” Bradley put a finger to his lips. They continued on, on tiptoe, to the end of the hall and up a flight of stairs, emerging in the museum gift shop.
“My supervisor, Mr. Miller,” Bradley said, judging they were safely out of earshot. “Most nights he doesn’t leave the office except to use the toilet, but every now and then he likes to check I’m not goofing off on my rounds. He thinks it’s real funny to jump out and go ‘boo,’ too, so I don’t always hear him coming.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t let him sneak up on us,” Abdullah said.
“Uh-huh,” said Bradley. “Tell me about this secret room you’re looking for. You even know what part of the museum it’s supposed to be in?”
Abdullah turned to George. “Montrose and I went through the museum’s annual reports at the library this morning,” George said. “There were a few different renovation projects during the years Hiram Winthrop was on the board, but we think the one we’re interested in was in 1925. Winthrop sponsored and led an expedition to the Sudan that year, and when he got back he oversaw the installation of a new exhibition hall. Assuming that’s when he put in the secret room, we want to look in the northwest corner of the building, on the second floor.”
“Second floor, northwest corner.” Bradley nodded. “That’s good. Mr. Miller doesn’t like to walk that far.”
They crossed the museum’s central concourse and went up to the second-floor gallery. The hall that had once housed Winthrop’s Sudan exhibition was now home to a collection of zoological specimens from the Amazon. Bradley left them at the entrance, beside a display case filled with hand-sized tarantulas. “I’m going back downstairs to do my rounds,” he said. “I’ll check on you in half an hour. Try not to make too much noise.” Eying Mortimer in his burglar’s outfit: “And don’t mess with any of the exhibits.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Mortimer said.
They spread out, searching for secret panels and trapdoors. They found nothing in the exhibition hall itself, but at the hall’s west end was an L-shaped passage that connected to another room. A tile mosaic on the passage wall depicted a pink stone archway in the middle of a desert. Blue sky and sand surrounded the arch, while the door-sized space within it was a dull and featureless black.
“That’s got to be it,” Atticus said. The sides of the arch were decorated with hieroglyphs, but the symbols on the keystone were individual letters, and he recognized the alphabet. “That’s the language of Adam.”
“Must have to press one of the tiles to open it,” said Mortimer. He stepped forward and went up on tiptoe to reach the keystone, but the tile was firmly fixed and wouldn’t push in.
Pirate Joe pointed at another tile on the right side of the arch whose hieroglyph showed a man holding an ankh like a key. “Try that one.”
The ankh tile didn’t work either. Abdullah and George offered additional suggestions, until Montrose grew frustrated. “Stop poking at it!” he said. “We got to be systematic about this.”
“What if it’s more than one tile?” Pirate Joe said. “What if you’ve got to press two at once? Or three, even?”
“Then we’re going to be here all night,” George said. “But if that’s what it takes—”
The snick of a knife blade got everyone’s attention. The Freemasons turned to find Atticus slitting his thumb.
“What are you doing?” said Abdullah.
“Trying a little natural philosophy,” Atticus said. “It’s a long story.” He moved to the front of the group and drew a line in blood across the keystone, taking care to touch every one of the letters. The tile soaked up the blood almost instantly, and as the stain faded, the hue of the keystone brightened. The brightness spread to the other tiles in the arch, while the dark tiles began to blur and flow together. The darkness grew vivid, acquired depth, until, in a moment of seamless transition, what had been just a suggestion of an opening became an actual hole in the wall.
When the process was complete, Abdullah was the first to speak. “Northwest corner of the building,” he said. “And this should be an outer wall, right?”
“Or close to it,” George said nodding. The dim light did not penetrate far past the opening, but peering into the darkness they all sensed that the passage within extended for some distance
—beyond the perimeter of the building into what should have been open air.
Mortimer got excited again. “It’s an alternate dimension!” he said. “Another universe, maybe.”
“Yeah,” said Pirate Joe. “So who wants to go first?”
George went first. Then Montrose. Then the others.
Past the narrow entrance was a straight, level passageway, about ten feet wide, with dark stone walls rising to a vaulted ceiling. The air was chilly and dry and unpleasantly stale.
George and Montrose had each brought a flashlight; Mortimer had brought three. The passageway continued beyond the range of the beams.
“Should we leave somebody here to mind the exit and let Bradley know where we’ve gone?” Pirate Joe said. Atticus looked sideways at Mortimer, who clutched his bag defensively. “No way!” Mortimer said. “I want to come!”
“Let’s just do this,” said Montrose, impatient. So they all set off together, with George, Montrose, and Abdullah in front, and Mortimer, despite his professed eagerness, keeping carefully to the rear.
The passage ran on straight and unbranching and quickly grew monotonous. “Anybody counting steps?” Abdullah said.
“If we weren’t in Dimension X we’d be crossing the railroad tracks by now,” Montrose guessed.
“There’s an all-night coffee joint right outside the station on the other side,” Pirate Joe noted. “Maxie’s Depot. They got good doughnuts.”
“I could go for a doughnut,” said Atticus. “Mortimer, you bring a jackhammer?”
“What?” Mortimer sounded startled. “No, I—”
“I see something up ahead,” George said. Everyone got quiet and looked. A glimmer in the darkness. They continued forward slowly, the object emerging in the focused beams of the flashlights: A chest. A silver chest, resting on a dark waist-high pedestal. A change in the feel of the air and the echoes of their footfalls hinted at a large open space.
“Looks like we found the treasure room,” Montrose said. “Get your burglar tools ready, Mortimer.”
“Wait,” said George. He put out an arm to stop his brother and lowered the beam of his flashlight. Less than five feet in front of them, the dark stone floor dropped away.
George raised the light to the chest again and studied it more carefully. There was no pedestal; the chest was just hanging there in the darkness.
He sensed another object hovering nearby. He swung his light up and to the right. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.
The dead man had been white, in life; in death, his desiccated flesh had taken on a grayish cast. His suit hung loosely on his withered frame, and the hands jutting from his sleeves were hooked to display blackened fingertips and broken nails. His eyes were mercifully shut, but his lips stretching back from his teeth had opened his mouth up wide, and visible within was the pale tip of his shriveled tongue.
George’s hand holding the flash trembled slightly, and in the wavering light the tongue-tip seemed to wag, as though the former lodgemaster of Chicago were trying to speak. Or scream.
“It’s a sphere,” said Abdullah, shining his light over the smooth stone walls curving away from around the end of the passageway. “I’d say about fifty yards across.” The chest was at the sphere’s center, and the passageway opening halfway up the side. The dead lodgemaster floated in the upper hemisphere, somewhere around the horse latitudes, turning slowly like a piece of ocean debris caught in a sluggish current.
“What’s keeping him up there?” Montrose wondered. “And that.” He nodded at the chest, which unlike the corpse hung motionless, a fixed point in space.
George stepped to the brink and stuck out an arm experimentally. “Grab my belt.”
“What?” said Montrose.
“You and Atticus, grab the back of my belt.”
Montrose and Atticus stood behind George, each grabbing a section of his belt with one hand and hooking the fingers of the other under the waistband of his trousers. “All right,” George said, “hold tight,” and he leaned forward.
He hadn’t leaned far—just enough to get the majority of his body mass inside the spherical room—when gravity abruptly loosed its grip on him. His feet left the floor, and carried by momentum he tilted forward, going fully horizontal, arms flailing, while Montrose and Atticus fought to steady him.
“Holy God,” Mortimer said.
“Uncle George?” said Atticus.
“I’m all right,” George told them, laughing nervously. “Feels like I might lose my dinner, but it’s kind of fun, too. Just don’t let go, OK?”
The blast of air came without warning, striking George broadside. Like a parade balloon caught in a crosswind, he yawed and lurched violently to the right, dragging his handlers with him. Montrose, on the windward side, was shoved to the brink by George’s pivoting body. He leaned too far over the edge and suddenly he was floating too, leaving Atticus the sole anchor point.
Pirate Joe darted forward and grabbed one of Montrose’s ankles. Abdullah caught the other. Another blast of wind struck, but Pirate Joe and Abdullah and Atticus hung on and dragged Montrose and George to safety. As soon as they were back inside the passageway, gravity reasserted itself, and all five men ended up in a heap on the floor, with Mortimer standing behind them saying “Holy God!” over and over again.
George rolled clear of Atticus, on whom he had landed, and gave his heart rate a moment to settle. Then he pushed himself up and helped the others to their feet. He picked up his flashlight and shone it on the dead lodgemaster, who was still turning lazily in the upper latitudes.
“So that’s what happened to him,” George said. “Stuck his neck out too far with no one to hold on to and got blown into orbit.”
“And then what?” said Atticus, brushing dust from his sleeves. “You think he died of thirst?”
“That, or hypothermia,” George guessed. “Or maybe he just cracked his head against the wall while he was tumbling.”
“He’s not tumbling now,” Montrose observed. “You suppose that wind only blows right here at the entrance?”
“Could be.” George saw where his brother was going. “Mortimer,” he said, “you got any rope in that bag?”
“Yeah, sure. Plenty.”
“We need enough to tie me a harness, with a good hundred feet left over.”
“No,” said Montrose. “Not you.”
“Yes me,” George said.
But Montrose shook his head. “You’re too big. So am I, for that matter. We want somebody small, somebody who won’t drag the rest of us into the void if we’re wrong about that wind.” He looked around, eyes settling on five-foot-four Mortimer Dupree. “Somebody we can toss.”
“On three,” George said. He and Montrose stood a few steps back from the end of the passageway, holding Mortimer suspended between them like a human battering ram. Behind them, Pirate Joe and Abdullah each had charge of one of two ropes, the first bound in a makeshift harness around Mortimer’s chest, the second tied to his right ankle as a backup line. Atticus stood to his father’s right, holding their most powerful flashlight.
“OK,” Mortimer said, reaching up to switch on the headlamp strapped to his forehead. “I’m ready. I’m ready.” He shut his eyes. “Jesus.”
“Don’t worry, Dupree,” said Montrose. “After this, the Illuminati will pledge you for sure.”
“OK,” George said. “One . . . two . . . three!”
As he was lobbed headlong into space, Mortimer opened his eyes again. The transition to weightlessness was instantaneous, but his brain clung stubbornly to the notion that a man hurled from a precipice must fall down, and hard. “Oh sh-i-i-i-i-i-i-i—”
A blast of air drowned out his exclamation. But he had cleared the edge of the sphere and the wind didn’t touch him. Pitching up slightly, he coasted towards the chest with his arms spread like improbably effective wings. Abdullah and Pirate Joe played out the ropes, trying to keep them from tangling. “OK,” George said. “Start putting the brakes on.”
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nbsp; By now Mortimer had recovered enough to call out his own directions: “Almost there . . . slow . . . slow . . .” Applying light friction to the ropes, Abdullah and Pirate Joe eased him to a stop within a few feet of the chest. From their perspective, he appeared to float just above and to the left of it.
“You OK, Mortimer?” George called.
“I could use a new pair of undershorts,” Mortimer replied. “But at least now I know how Superman feels.”
“Try using your X-ray vision on the box,” Montrose suggested. “What do you see?”
“Lots of decoration on the outside,” Mortimer said. “Stars and planets and like that. I can see more of those funny letters, too . . .” A pause. “I don’t have to bleed on it, do I?”
“Not yet,” George said. “Can you tell how it opens?”
“There’s no lock or latch that I can see. There’s a seam running around the top that might be the edge of a lid. If I drift a little closer, I could try . . . Whoah!” Mortimer twisted suddenly in midair. “I see a chain! A big one, stretching out the back, towards the far wall . . . It looks like cast iron, and it’s pulled taut, almost like the chest is hanging from it, except, you know, sideways.”
George turned to Montrose. “Could there be some kind of magnetic field?” he said. “Pushing the chest this way?”
“I suppose,” Montrose said. “But if there is, it ought to affect everything in the room . . . Hey Mortimer!” he called. “You feel anything tugging on your belt buckle? Or your fillings?”
“No,” Mortimer said. Then, concerned: “Why?”
“Tell us more about the chain,” George said. “You think we could cut it?”
“Not without a big blowtorch . . . Why’d you ask about my fillings?”
“Don’t worry about it. Can you see how the chain is attached to the chest? Could we unhook it, maybe?”