Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  Millett’s prediction held true, though its fulfillment perplexed Gracie. Had she dusted more assiduously above the doorframe to the kitchen in an effort to clean the construction dust? It seemed more than possible—it was the only rational explanation. But Gracie was still surprised when she knocked the iron key with a greenish patina of rust to the floor.

  Well, it’s here now, she thought, which she found a particularly unsettling way to phrase her acceptance of its existence.

  She was not shocked to discover the key fit and turned easily.

  She couldn’t say why she paused before pulling the panel down. Was she savoring the suspense? She wondered if she would be happy to discover something inside or relieved nothing was there. Perhaps she waited to stave off disappointment. She laughed at her foible and pulled the panel open.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. As the panel fell forward, it partially lifted the stair in front of it. Gracie felt a wobble in the wood and heard a loose piece knock softly against one of the longer boards. She envisioned a support strut freed from its locking notch swinging freely. The hypothesis seemed proved when she gently lowered both panel and stair step down into the vacant dark. She couldn’t yet see anything in the space beyond. An idea occurred to her. She removed and pocketed the key, allowing her to fold the panel and step flat against the next panel down. She yelped again when the next panel angled forward—and lifted the next step down in front of it, which then folded flat. She repeated the process twice more to collapse the bottom four steps of her staircase into an accordion fold which flipped backwards at the bottom to fit snugly into an alcove in the floor. When she set them flat, she heard a click and saw a wooden button pop out from flush with the rail along the wall. She guessed what it might do and pressed the button to confirm her suspicion. She heard the twang of a spring extending and the soft shunk of a counterweight sliding inside the wall as the stairs unfolded and snapped back into place. Only the top panel did not close completely. She smiled with delight at the ingenuity of the simple design as she pulled the panel forward and proceeded once more to fold the stairs back down into the floor.

  Even with the strange door completely open, Gracie couldn’t see far into the hidden compartment. It seemed to go much farther back than she had expected, possibly the full length of the stairway. She went to her kitchen and retrieved a silver flashlight from her “assorted” drawer. She kneeled down and turned it on. Though it was a small flashlight, it emitted a bright, blue-tinted beam…which still couldn’t dispel the gloom beneath the stairs. Gracie ducked beneath the opening and crawled forward on her elbows.

  When she was halfway into the opening, she became terribly disoriented. She felt pulled upwards, so much so that she was forced to put her hands over her head to keep from hitting the underside of the stair. As her weight was forward and she was unbalanced on her knees, she knew she should have fallen on her chin, but somehow she remained upright. She then concentrated on the second distressing aspect of her disorientation. She had the feeling she had twisted at the middle, even though she knew she had not turned her torso. She looked down the length of her body and saw the feeling was wrong, and everything was in alignment as it should be. But the knowledge made her feel worse, because what she saw was at odds with what she felt—and what she felt seemed so extreme she thought her back should be broken and ankles facing front. Gracie was scared. She tried to lean back in hopes of extricating herself from the compartment, but her sense of the working of her musculature was so discombobulated she instead torqued forward and pulled on the stairs above her, turning to face upwards—which was immediately, unmistakably down as soon as her body had passed through the portal.

  She slipped forward and smacked her wrist on another step. Her other hand shot out to keep her from falling further and she dropped the flashlight. It tumbled down a few steps before rolling out of sight, dropping through a gap where the vertical slat should have been. She looked back (and up—as though up the stairs, which should have been down, according to the bearings her mind clung to) but could not see into her house. The only light behind her was a dim slit at what must have been the top of the staircase—a staircase she now recognized by feel as being altogether different from hers. She considered that the underside of the stairs might not feel the same, but she was sure the cut was more coarse, the planks thicker, and the wood different. She curled her fingers around the front edge and felt neither rounded lip nor vertical board. She was quite sure she was sprawled on cellar stairs in a different house.

  She tried to get her feet under her by easing her hips around the side. Her breath caught in her throat when her leg slipped forward and her buttocks slid hard down a step. She listened but heard no reaction from above. She wasn’t sure if it was essential to be silent or not, but she couldn’t very well explain her presence there, and with no knowledge of the house’s occupants, she had no way to gauge their reaction to her invasion. She squirmed into a seated position and at last felt some sense of physical stability. Her thoughts were not nearly so steady.

  She decided she needed to find her flashlight. She rationalized that if she’d come in—whatever way she had come in—then she could go back out again. As she sat, her eyes adjusted a little. It was late in the day but not yet dark. She realized there was some small amount of sun illuminating the room, though the light was terribly dim. She could just make out the outlines of narrow windows beneath the floor joists—windows made opaque with black paint.

  She stepped gingerly down the last few steps to the floor. She could barely see, but she had at least some sense of open space at the foot of the stairs. She turned around beside them, keeping one hand on the staircase, and knelt down to reach underneath. The floor was cool cement, indicating an unfinished basement. Gracie felt a moment of delighted relief when, after only a few seconds, she located her flashlight; a moment repeated when it flared to life.

  The basement opened to the right of the stairs and continued back behind them. Gracie swept the cone of light over a workbench running the length of the wall in front of her. Well-worn tools for carpentry and for landscaping cluttered the surface of the rough bench and hung from hooks in a dirty white pegboard behind it. A long table sitting parallel to the workbench was covered with large sheets of curling paper. Gracie stepped closer to see what was on them. Sifting through, she saw on each sheet a hand-drawn rendering of some sort of contraption accompanied by smaller detailed insets of construction phases and operating instructions. Only a few scrawled, nearly illegible words were paired with each machine, and at first glance Gracie thought she could never derive the mechanics involved from the drawings. But she soon understood how uncomplicated they were—though clever, too, in their simple utility and balance; she might have called the designs “elegant” if such a word hadn’t seemed at odds with such boxy and artless forms. She identified a short cabinet whose door opened upward to become a table, supported by a shelf which swung out to reveal another narrow shelf behind it. Another drawing showed a bar stool with interlocking legs which collapsed flat when a latch was released and the seat turned clockwise. There were many others, including some whose purpose was unclear, but none whose operation was complex enough to require arrows on the dashed lines to indicate the direction of motion.

  On the other side of the table were stacks and piles of building supplies, as well as several partial contraptions (whether in-progress or abandoned, Gracie couldn’t say). She thought there could be no reason to further explore the basement and was about to begin considering what means of egress she might use when something on the back wall caught her eye. She navigated through the wood and metal skeletons on the floor to get closer.

  As she suspected, a map had been tacked up. What interested her more was the wealth of notes pinned to it and the tracks of yarn tied between them. The collage was so dense the parchment underneath could not be identified as a map of the city until she stood before it. The strings came together in a mass in the northeast quadrant
. The location meant nothing to her, but Gracie guessed she stood at its center. Many of the notes pinned to the map looked as though they had been there for years. Most read “open” or “closed,” though some which read “open” were given the addendum “locked”(Gracie wondered at the distinction), while others had a large “X” or some other scribble bleeding into the fading paper.

  A sudden dread came over Gracie. A chill caressed her skin. She moved the light, following a red thread, tracing its course to a terminal pin stuck in the map right where her house would be.

  A crisp red square emblazoned with black ink noted, “Open—locked—lost key.”

  Gracie gasped and staggered backwards. Her heel hit a board and she stumbled into one of the unfinished forms. It began to topple. Gracie’s arm shot out as she squat and she managed to grab a two-by-four crossbar right before the entire thing crashed to the floor. As her breath whistled through her teeth, Gracie gently lowered the board to the cement.

  She listened. She listened for a full minute, but heard no sound in the house. As she waited, understanding came to her: She had come through a corridor between the houses. Somehow. It was impossible; she knew that. But the impossibility didn’t matter. What mattered was both the reality of the passage, and, perhaps more alarmingly, it’s condition of being known.

  “OK,” she whispered, trying to calm herself with the sound of her own voice. “Yes. It’s there. I’m here. So—how do I get back?”

  She flashed the beam back at the stairs to confirm what she already knew: the steps were supported only on the sides; there were no vertical slats. It seemed unlikely—even allowing for the unfounded expectation that the gate of the return portal should match form with hers—that she could return through her exit.

  “Well, I can take a damn taxi if I can just get out.”

  Again, she listened. Again, she heard no sound of movement overhead.

  “Windows first, though,” she breathed optimistically.

  And then she noticed the other door, in the back corner behind the stairs. She bit her lip. Was it possible there were steps leading up to a storm cellar door on the other side?

  She crossed to the brown metal door. The handle turned smoothly.

  She had hoped to spy a sliver of light promising escape, but she saw there was no exit besides the door through which she’d entered. And though what she saw inside made her want to turn and run right back out again, she found she could not. Mystery beckoned.

  The focus of the room was the altar on the broad table set against the far wall. In its basic form, it was not so different from an in-home shrine a devout Catholic or Buddhist might erect for themselves: It was low at the sides and rose to the middle; ornamental scrolling adorned the frame surrounding the central figure; partially melted candles played sentinel in staggered lines on the dark-stained wood. The figure to which the altar appeared to be consecrated was not one likely to be encountered in a suburban American home, however. If in fact, as Gracie thought, the two-faced idol truly did represent Janus. She had never before seen the Greek god represented as smooth-chinned and blank-eyed, and carved from obsidian.

  Her attention drifted to another table, much like the one in the main room, likewise covered over with large drawings on curling paper. But while these drawings also depicted simple machines, their functions were inscrutable, and the annotations were far removed from the pithy scrawls on the other drawings. These notes included complex mathematical formulas. And though Gracie remembered little of higher function algebra, she guessed many of the figures incorporated in the formulas had never been used in classical physics or any other accepted science. Even tracing the curves of some of the symbols filled her with alien dread, as though instinct recognized the forbidden and the arcane.

  Gracie awoke to her situation. She shook herself from the grip of curiosity with the epiphany that the answers which might explain the riddles before her were ones she likely would not want to know. She turned to leave. She nearly tripped as she kicked a large clot of dirt. She shined her light down on the floor. The four low, oblong mounds implied only one possibility.

  Gracie whimpered and trembled. She grasped her flashlight with both hands. She knew she had no chance of keeping it steady, but she was terrified she might drop it and be plunged once more into darkness. She went back out into the main room and looked at the windows. Despite the nearly-opaque black paint, with her eyes better adjusted to the gloom, she now easily identified the bars on the other side.

  She looked up the staircase. It seemed impossibly long, and she found herself wishing she need never climb it—and wishing she was already at the top. She crept up the steps. With each creak of a bowing plank, she paused to listen. Nothing. Creep. Creak. Silence. Creep. Creak. Silence.

  At last she was at the top. And again she wished twofold, that the door was unlocked and that it wasn’t. It was. She cracked the door and put her eye to the tiniest gap. The house was dim, dark enough to merit electrical light, but none was turned on. The hinges ticked with each inch of aperture.

  She stepped out into a hall. The house was like any other clean, middle class, century-old two-story. Gracie saw the front door, at the end of the hall, at the foot of a flight of stairs. Her pounding heart urged her to dash for it, but she tip-toed instead, her head on a swivel, listening for any sound. Past the stairs the hall opened into a living room. Gracie craned her neck to scan the shadowed corners. Mere steps from the door, she paused. On the mantle over the fireplace sat a family photo. She cursed herself, but did not resist the pull. She crept behind a sofa and crossed a corded rug.

  She had known before she picked it up. But the photo indicated an existence so discordantly unexceptional she couldn’t help shaking her head in disbelief even as she gazed at the broad forehead and crooked nose of pater Millett standing behind his wife and daughters. As she went to set the portrait back down, she noticed the familiar-looking key which it hid.

  Headlights swept across the room. Gracie yelped and ducked. A car pulled into the drive. She went back to the hall but realized she could no longer leave through the front. As she turned, she wondered if the back yard was fenced. And then she saw the tiny hole beneath the lip of the fifth stair.

  She fumbled the key out of her pocket, catching it but dropping her flashlight. She heard something crack and the light went out. She picked it up with one hand as she miraculously fitted the key on her first attempt with the other. But the key wouldn’t turn. She heard a car door slam. She scrambled across the living room, knocked the happy family out of the way, and snatched up the hidden key. Another car door slammed. She heard voices coming up the drive as she hurried back to the stairs. An unspoken prayer was answered as the key turned in the lock. She collapsed the stairs. She dove into the dark. She realized she didn’t know how they closed from inside—the button was outside. She heard laughter just outside the front door. Her fingers scratched at the planks. It seemed the wrong way to do it, but she forced them up into place. And she heard the turn of the latch in the front door just as she fitted the last slat.

  She didn’t feel upside down as she had expected. Nor was she in total blackness. She turned and saw the familiar landing of her own refurbished house. She crawled out on skinned knees, and, in a single motion, leapt to her feet, turned and pressed the button to snap the stairs back into place. She lunged and smacked the final panel flat.

  She sat in her living room in the dark for hours, listening to the quiet of her own house, trying to convince herself it was her quiet, inviolate. She deliberated: what had she truly seen? Perhaps nothing. No, of course, not nothing—she had followed an impossible portal to an occult workroom where bodies might be buried in the floor. Where there might be bodies buried in the floor. There had been nothing else to suggest malevolency—if the figure in the shrine was Janus. But even then: What God has not had evil done in his name? Gracie even chastised herself at one point for not being braver and investigating more thoroughly the
strange papers in the dark back room. And she wondered why, of all the possible connections indicated by Millett’s map, she had returned home—was it simply because it was where she wanted to go? Eventually she realized she was exhausted. She told herself the uneventful passage of hours proved even if he had known someone had been in his house, Millett—whatever his intentions—must not have known who it was. Her flashlight was still in her hand, so she tried to turn it on, but the bulb wouldn’t light. After she’d found a switch on the wall, she saw the lens was broken and a shard was missing.

  Her bedroom beckoned, but she was almost afraid to walk up her own stairs, as though they might open and swallow her. She upbraided herself for the hesitation, stomped up defiantly, marched straight through, slammed the door behind her, and didn’t bother to change before she collapsed onto her mattress.

  But tired as she was, Gracie could not fall asleep. She continued listening. Her fingers were cutting into her palms as though missing something to hold. She remembered the key and retrieved it once more from her pocket. She clutched it tightly and seemed to derive some relief from holding it, considering it, identifying it.

  The strange key.

  The key to the lock in the stairs.

  The key to the lock she’d forgotten to lock.

  At the first creak, she told herself old houses settle. At the second, she told herself even refurbished old houses settle.

  But, because the tight seal on her new windows shut out all the old drafts, she could not account for the sound of breathing outside her bedroom door.

  Her phone lay on her bedside table. Any requested aid would never arrive in time, but she grabbed it anyway as she sprang from her bed. Then she dashed to the door—not to lock it, but to go through. For, contrary to convention, but in consideration of just such a need, Gracie had affected a renovation of her own when she’d moved the hinges to the outside of her door so it would swing open, and if necessary, knock any hostile situated there down the stairs into a (hopefully) broken heap, leaving Gracie to rush down the hall to her studio at the front of the house, with its window access to the porch roof and the (hopefully) cushy lawn below. And if no one was there, then—well, she always reasoned it was better to be embarrassed than endangered.