“Where’s the stove?” I demanded. “The refrigerator? The sink? I’m a brass monkey if this looks like a kitchen.”
Barret laughed softly, going past me to the counter. He touched something. A panel lifted up out of the top to reveal the spiraled wires of an electric range. Another flick of his hand exposed a rectangular basin, two feet deep, containing a large, circular wire basket.
Kay was beside him, excited. “What’s that for?”
“You stack your dirty dishes in there, honey, and—” He must have toed a pedal in the base for abruptly steaming water sprayed into the cavity, from beneath its upper rim. The lashing jets met, swirled. Suddenly the wire basket was filled with a foaming mass of soap suds, as suddenly the sprays were clear water again, magically rinsing away the soap.
Barret chuckled. “Now isn’t that an easy way to wash dishes, Kay?”
“It’s swell. But you still got to wipe them.”
“No you don’t.” The basket was revolving. It was whirling so fast that it seemed to have disappeared. “You just whisk the wet away.” The panels closed down, as if of their own motion. “It’s all done by pressing these buttons—see here—along the edge of the counter.”
“What else is there?” Kay demanded.
“Well—I tell you what. Suppose you push all the buttons you can find and see what happens.” Barret turned to me, for all his silver hair very much like a youngster showing off. “Some of the devices in here I bought. Most I constructed myself, and even those manufactured by others I’ve found ways to improve.”
“Very clever,” I grunted.
“You certainly have a way with children.” Helen was admiring. “You couldn’t have thrilled Kay more than you’ve done, by letting her play with those gadgets, but I should think a boy would be in Seventh Heaven.” That was almost too obvious. “A little older boy. About twelve, say.”
“Quite right. Now I recall when—”
“Shall we go look at the other rooms?” Once more Mary Barret interrupted her husband, and this time I was positive she deliberately was forestalling some indiscretion.
“It’s getting on, and you ought to start back early enough to be on the Parkway before dark, that road through the woods can be treacherous at night.” Yet, as she took Helen’s arm and urged her out into the hall, she was just a smiling little old lady as demure and naive seeming, as the one Whistler once painted. “You have no idea how dark it gets.”
“Why, Mary,” Barret protested. “It’s only three-thirty.” He waited at the door for me to pass out. “They’ve plenty of time.”
I took my time about it, so that when I reached the passage the women were well down toward its end. As the old man started to follow I blocked him off and demanded, low-toned but imperatively, “Where’s Peter Carson?”
CHAPTER V
He was startled, no doubt of that. Shocked.
“Come across,” I growled. “What have you done with the lad?”
His gray lips quivered—The house was shaken by a dull thud!
A rolling growl was like distant thunder, but through the kitchen window the leaf-fretted sky was blue and cloudless. Once more the thud; and again, and the far-off rumble once more. “John!” There was alarm in Mary Barrett’s cry. “Those planes before—Are those bombs, John? Are they bombing New York?” and that reminded me of Kay asking the same question on the Sawmill River Road and I realized I did not see her back there in the kitchen.
“Kay,” I called, going back in. “Where are you?” A giggle pulled my eyes to a hitherto unnoticed door in the sidewall beyond the end of the row of cupboards. “Kay!” A dress hem flicked in the narrowing space between door-edge and jamb, and the door slammed shut. I reached it, grasped the knob. “Come out of there, you little imp.”
The door refused to open.
Barret reached me and I heard Helen, beyond him. Against the gray enamel of the door-frame the chromium disk of a Yale lock glittered. “Kay!” I called again, rapping the wood with my knuckles.
“Oh, John,” Mary Barret sighed, reproachfully. “You forgot again to make sure you’d pulled it tight.” A bunch of keys clinked in her husband’s hand. “Open it. Quickly. Before—” She checked, fingers going to her mouth, pupils dilating.
Abruptly the floor had commenced to vibrate. It was as if someone held an electric massage machine against my soles, and, the sensation was oddly frightening.
Barrett’s key chattered against the lock, fell away. He looked at his wife, gray lips shaping a word that would not come. The vibration stopped, as abruptly as it had begun and I snatched the bunch of keys from him, jabbed the one he’d selected into the serrated slit in the shining disk. Someone caught at me but I had the door open, was going through it into a small windowless room.
A closet rather, it was barely six feet square. Its walls and floor were of dull lead, the ceiling also. The sunlight following me in was fractured into a myriad gleaming spears by the intricate, polished metal of a machine that head-high, unfamiliar, took up the cubicle’s central half.
“Kay!” Helen called as she entered. “Kay! Where are you hiding?”
“She must be in back of this.” I went around the machine—stopped short. There was enough light back here to show me every inch of the space. There was no other door. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could conceal so much as a rabbit but there was no Kay.
“Where is she?” Helen’s eyes were large and dark and appalled in a face suddenly chalk-white. “What has happened to my child?” and it was then I recalled saying in my office, “Kay’s the key to the whole thing,” and answered her, hoarsely. “The same as happened to Peter Carson.”
“Please.” John Barret laid a trembling hand on her arm. “Please, Mrs. Clark, don’t be alarmed. Your daughter is quite safe. A little frightened perhaps, but that is all. We can fetch her back in a twinkling if you and Mr. Gatlin will be good enough to step out into the kitchen and close the door—”
“So you can make your getaway through the same trapdoor she blundered into?” Over my first bewilderment, I’d guessed the answer. “What kind of fools do you think we are?”
“But I assure you there is no—”
“It’s no use, John,” Mrs. Barret broke in. “We’ll have to explain. Perhaps when they understand—”
“Explain be damned! Bring Kay back and then start explaining about Peter—”
“Hop to it,” George Carson bellowed, abruptly thudding in. “Pronto!” Barret spun to him, recoiled from the sudden, threatening apparition—slipped, fell heavily—
And lay motionless.
“John!” the old woman gasped, went to her knees beside the sprawled, frail form. “John!”
“If you think I could stay up there in the woods, wondering what was happening here,” George answered my unspoken question, “You’re crazy. I was crouched under that kitchen window when things broke loose in here, and my clasp knife was enough to get me in through the back door—”
“It’s his heart spell!” Mrs. Barret was up again. “I’ve got to get his drops.” She evaded George’s clutch at her, darted out. We both sprang after her jammed in the doorway.
Helen’s, “Let her go,” pulled us back in again. “We don’t need her. Kay saw something the moment she came in here, a—”
“Pushbutton!” I exclaimed, a step ahead of her words. “Like the ones he told her she could monkey with. Of course.” I pointed to a vertical slab of bluish soapstone riveted to the machine, facing the door. “Here it is.” I jabbed the button inset in the stone, glanced around the gray walls for a panel to start sliding open, at the floor for a trapdoor to appear.
Nothing happened.
“Maybe there’s another—”
“Hold it, Pop!” George cut in. “Hold everything. See this copper plate on the jamb here and this strap spring on the edge of the door? They match up. I’ll bet he’s fixed them to break the power circuit so that the thing doesn’t work unless this is closed.” The lock
clicked as he shut it. Blue-white glare struck down at us from a fluorescent double-tube in the ceiling. “Try it now.”
I obeyed. Nothing in the room moved. But the floor was vibrating again. Not only the floor. The lead walls. The air they enclosed. The vibration intensified swiftly, took hold of me every nerve, cell—
Blackness smashed into the cubicle!
Something jarred. That’s the wrong word. It was as if a stratum of rock on which the house stood had grated bodily along another stratum beneath it.
The dreadful tremor ended, that same instant, but the blackness remained, thumbing my eyeballs. “If I was aboard ship,” George said somewhere within it, “I’d swear a depth-bomb just went off under our keel,” and then his breath caught and I knew he’d recalled, as I had, the distant thuds, the far-off rumble of what had not sounded quite like thunder. “Let’s get some light on the subject,” he suggested evenly. “I think I’ve a pack of matches—Yes.”
As he scratched one, I was thinking of how in England frustrated bombers would jettison their loads of death over some un-alarmed countryside and how people were sometimes buried alive for days beneath the ruins of just such isolated small houses as this.
The tiny flame blossomed. Its feeble flicker brought George’s set, gaunt countenance out of the darkness, wavered over Helen, straight and still, hand denting her sweatered breast. There should be a wall behind her. The match should be burning straight up, steady, in the windowless room where no one moved, not wavering in the soft and inexplicable breeze I felt stroking my cheek.
This should be a lead covered floor on which John Barret lay sprawling and somehow pathetic, not rough-surfaced stone.
I stared into the depths of dark space not thinking yet, not daring to think—Small feet scampered, somewhere out there! “Mumsy,” a childish treble piped. “Grand’pa Harry.” Kay ran into the dim, dancing circle of luminance, flung thin arms about her mother’s waist and sobbed, “Oh, mumsy. I’ve been looking and looking for you, all over.”
All over where? In the name of sanity, where were we?
CHAPTER VI
“It’s a huge cave.”
George Carson had struck another match and high above us some bits of mica sparkled. “A cave,” I repeated, as if by the reiteration I could make it seem reasonable.
“A bomb blasted a hole and we’ve dropped into it.”
“Without even shaking us up, or smashing that machine?” I didn’t need him to point that out. “And besides, Kay was here before us, wherever here is—Ouch!” The match arced away, went out. “Burned myself.” I heard George blow on his fingers and somehow the familiar act eased the hollow, empty feeling at the pit of my stomach. “Wait a second. I’ll light another.”
“Hadn’t you better go easy on them?” Helen’s voice was amazingly steady, coming out of the tarry sightlessness. “You’ve only the one book, haven’t you?”
“Right. But we’ve got to find a way out of here and we can’t do it in the dark.”
“It wasn’t dark here at first.” That was Kay. “Not black dark like this.” She sounded her normal self again instead of the terrified little tyke who’d scampered to us out of the unknown, and I realized why Helen held herself so sternly under control. “There was a little light coming in, from way off there.”
“Was there, dear? Tell mother—You came in the door from the kitchen and then what?”
“Gran’pa Harry called me but I dosed it to tease him and I saw this button and pushed it—He said I could, Mom. You heard him say I could push all the buttons and see what happened.”
“I certainly did, sweetheart. You couldn’t know he didn’t mean this one. So you pushed the button, and then?”
“And then everything started shivering and all of a sudden the light went out. I—I went back to the door to get out, but there wasn’t any door. I kept going farther and farther and I couldn’t feel the door or the wall or anything. And I called you and you didn’t answer and it was big in here and I couldn’t see anything and there was nobody.”
It was the breathless way she told it, rather than what she told, that made it so graphic. The blind groping in sudden, vast darkness. The calls echoing and reechoing and bringing no response. The realization of aloneness.
“I stopped calling and stood still, and it wasn’t so awful dark any more. Like when you go in a movie theatre, Morn. You can’t see anything right at first but pretty soon you can. You know?”
“Yes, Kay. I know. What did you see?”
“Well, far away there was this hole, like, where the light was coming in and I was in this great big place, just stone all around, all empty. I was awful scared.
“I wanted to run to the light but I remembered how when I was a little kid you used to tell me if I got lost I should stay right where I was and you’d come and find me, so I didn’t. But you didn’t come and it got too dark to see, and I didn’t know what to do. And then all of a sudden I heard people talking and this match lit up and it was you and gran’pa Harry and—Oh, Moms! I don’t like it here.”
“I don’t like it here either dear. I’m sure none of us do.”
“Then why don’t we go back?”
Helen laughed a little helplessly. I wondered how she was going to answer that, how avoid the issue. “We want to, Kay,” she said, matter-of-fact. “But we don’t know how.”
She hadn’t avoided it. I realized that treating the little girl frankly, as an adult, she was wiser than I should have been. Very much wiser. “Why that’s easy, Mom,” Kay was saying. “You just push another button. Like the elevator in our house.”
“‘Out of the mouth of a babe,’” I quoted softly. “Is my face red. How about some light, George?”
His fingers pawed at my sleeve, traveled down it and thrust the packet into my hand. “Here.”
“Afraid you’ll burn yourself again?” I tore off a match, struck it. The unsteady light was multiplied by the maze of curiously twisted rods and wire coils. George bent to Barret, at the machine’s base, lifted the fragile body and put it across his shoulder. “What’s the big idea?”
The eyes he turned to me were sultry. “Pete’s somewhere here, Pop. I’m not going back till I find him or—” The corners of his mouth twitched. He wheeled, strode away into the dark.
I started to call to him, changed my mind. “All right, Helen.”
“But—”
“Push that button,” I snapped, backing away, “Before this match burns out. You’ve got Kay to think about.”
“You’re not coming with—”
“I’m the demon editor, remember? On a story. Your angle’s Mary Barret. Get—”
“There’s just the one button, Mother.” Kay, at the slab, had not heard this interchange. “I can’t find any other.”
“It must work both ways.” I was now well outside the distance the cubicle walls had been from the machine. “Push it!” Her little thumb went to the stone. Flame stung and I flipped the match away. “It doesn’t work,” Kay wailed. “It’s busted.”
CHAPTER VII
The fourth match showed me Helen hugging her small daughter to her. “George,” I called. “George Carson! We need you.” He emerged from the shadows, carrying Barret as though the old man had no weight at all. “The Navy’s press agents pull a good line about all sailors being ace mechanics. How about your fixing that elevator?”
He put down his burden, went to the contraption. I struck five more matches before he reported, “I can’t find anything obviously loose or out of place. If I juggle with it, regardless, I may do some irreparable damage.” The light went out, we were in the dark again. “You’ll just have to wait here till the old devil comes to.”
Suppose he doesn’t, I asked myself. He looked rotten. Suppose he dies on us?
“We will have to wait here,” Helen was exclaiming. “We! What about you?”
“I’m going to look for my son.” His footfalls started away.
“Come back here, you young ninc
ompoop,” I barked. “Helen’s in this jam because she wanted to help you. Where do you think you get off, walking out on her?”
The footsteps hesitated, returned. “Okay, Pop. You win. What do you want me to do?”
“The least you can do is stay with us. What good do you think I would be if—Well, if anything happened?”
Silence gathered about us. Except for a faint whisper of breathing the blackness held no sound at all. No drip, drip of seepage, no scutter of anything living. It was as though the unseen walls moved in on us, entombing us.
“We can’t!” A thin edge of hysteria had at last come into Helen’s voice. “We can’t just stand around here in this awful dark. We’ll go—Let’s do something. Let’s try and find some way out of this—this cave.”
“Which direction,” I wanted to know, “Would you start looking?”
George had the answer. “This breeze must be coming from the cave’s mouth. All we have to do is walk into it. It’s worth trying, isn’t it?”
“It might be, if we could be sure of finding our way back here. If we had a ball of cord—”
“We have,” Helen offered. “Not a ball but something just as good. My sweater. I can start the wool at the hem and it will unravel as we go along—”
“That’s the ticket,” George approved. “That’s what we’ll do,” so eagerly that I didn’t bring up any more objections although I could think of plenty. We used one more of our now scanty supply of matches while Helen tied the end of a thread plucked from the bottom edge of her sweater to the machine, tested it to make sure it would pull out easily.
“We’ve got to keep touching one another,” I reminded them, “So we don’t get separated. I’ll lead.”
George lifted Barret to his shoulder again. We started out. We went very slowly, because I tested each step to make sure the darkness did not conceal a pitfall. Concentrating on each inch of progress, I was still aware of the deep, brooding silence the small noises we made did not so much disturb as accentuate. No one spoke, not even Kay except once when she complained that Helen was squeezing her hand so tightly it hurt.
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 40