by Carolyn Nash
“Come on then. I don’t hear anything. Let’s try again.” He cracked the door and peered out, then pushed the door wide and beckoned me to follow.
We moved silently out into the hall. There was no sign of life the length of the corridor or through the supply room windows. We walked quickly to the doors and pushed them open. A long counter faced us; no one was behind it or in sight down the many long aisles of shelves. Andrew walked over and swung a hinged section of the counter up, ushered me through, and then eased it down and led me back between two of the long shelf units.
On one side of the aisle glassware filled the shelves, floor to ceiling, ranging in size from tiny beakers that would hold no more than a couple of tablespoons, to giant flasks that would hold a couple of gallons. On the other side were large and small, clear and brown bottles of powders and liquids. As we moved quickly past them I saw Glycerin on one dark bottle, Ammonium Hydroxide on a jar of white powder. Dozens of different chemicals lined the shelves.
“Hey, somebody there?” We froze. The voice had come from the left on the other side of a shelf unit filled to the ceiling with small cardboard boxes.
Come on, Andrew’s lips said. I nodded and we ran on our toes toward the back of the room.
“Is somebody there?” The voice was more insistent and had moved toward the front of the room.
We ducked behind a stack of cardboard boxes.
The footsteps stopped. “Fine,” grumbled the voice. “Play games.”
“Come on.” Andrew’s voice was barely audible. We passed back through large crates of equipment, stacks of boxes--some marked Centrifuge Tubes, 25 ml., some Petri Dish, pack of 10, STERILE. Far back behind the boxes, behind the crates, all the way in the back of the enormous room was a large dusty place full of old equipment. A couple of worn-looking incubators sat against the wall. An ancient, door-less Frigidaire stood nearby, its racks empty except for a thin coating of grime. Its door leaned against a monstrous old chest freezer that sat in the far corner of the room.
“The equipment graveyard,” whispered Andrew. “Where all old machinery comes to die. Nobody comes back here. We should be safe.”
I nodded and moved across toward the incubators. A small space had been left open on the cement floor between them and the refrigerator. I waved a hand at the cement, at the cinderblock wall behind it and the enameled metal of the appliances on each side. “This is nice,” I whispered as I sat down. “Cozy. Warm. A throw-rug here, a pillow there, it’ll be beautiful.”
“Wait,” said Andrew. He lifted his flannel shirt, pulled out the pillow stuffed there and handed it to me with a grand sweep of the arm.
I batted my eyes as I lifted up and put it between me and the ice cold cement as I sat down. “You are so gallant.”
“Yes, that’s true.” He eased himself down next to me. He winced as he lowered himself, and he was still breathing a trifle rapidly from our dash up the aisle, but we both ignored it. He looked at his watch. “We’re going to have a hell of a wait,” he said. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”
“Sleep? Are you nuts? I’m wound up so tight I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.”
He looked at me with some exasperation. “Well, I know you haven’t had enough sleep in the last couple of days. And I know for a fact that you didn’t get any sleep last night.”
I looked away. “I got plenty.”
“You couldn’t have. When I went to sleep you were on the other side of the mattress, but when I woke up you were curled up on the floor near the patio doors. Nobody can sleep on the floor and get a good night’s sleep.”
I brushed some dirt off the knee of my jeans. “I can.”
“I don’t know why you didn’t just stay on the mattress.”
Sure you don’t.
“The floor was more comfortable.”
There was a long moment of silence, then Andrew shifted on the cold concrete and grimaced. “Then you should be in seventh heaven, now.”
I reached under me for the pillow. “You want your pot belly back?”
He looked offended. “Would Sir Walter Raleigh take back his coat while the fair damsel was halfway through the mud puddle? I think not.” He looked down at the cement and shifted again. “But give me a couple of hours. I just might be thinking about it then.”
* * * *
“Melanie.”
I stirred, frowned, and moved closer.
“Melanie,” he whispered. He stroked my hair, lifted it back from my face. “Time to wake up.”
But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. I was crouched down in the Safe Place again, near the fireplace, back home, trying to cram back against the bricks, feeling them digging into my back. Something was coming, something loud and dark and horrifying and I was trying to get safe but the Safe Place had no power anymore. The Thing was going to get me and smoothly, seamlessly, I was an adult and there was a party in the room, all the people I knew, Maggie and Maggie’s husband Brian, Chuck and Cheryl, Lance, Mr. Jackson from the bank and they were all talking about me. I still crouched in the corner, but they didn’t appear to see me. Poor Melanie, they were saying. Sad, isn’t it? I wish there was something we could do. I put my hands over my ears; they were fists and I was holding them as tightly as I could but the voices continued. Poor, poor, Melanie. I guess she’ll always be alone. Too bad.
Then, suddenly the voices stopped. I took my hands away. There was no sound. I dared to open my eyes. The people were parting, opening a path. And it was Andrew they were parting for, Andrew who was walking towards me. The pain, the fear dissolved, burned away by a flood of complete and utter joy. He stopped in front of me, took my hands and lifted me from the corner. I began to cry because it was too much to bear. He pulled me to him and held me.
“Melanie, come on now, wake up.”
I opened my eyes. The light was dim, coming now from one emergency light set high on the wall toward the front of the storeroom. I sat on the cement floor, my legs tucked under me, lying against Andrew, my head on his shoulder, his arm around me. I looked at him.
“Hey,” he said softly. He smoothed back my hair. “What is it?”
I blinked and pushed back against the incubator, and his arm dropped away. “Nothing,” I said. “A dream.”
“A bad dream?”
“Yes and no.” I stretched and raked back my hair. “It’s already fading. What time is it?”
“10:30.”
I stood up, stretched again, but stopped abruptly when I saw that Andrew was watching me. I reached back down for the pillow. “You want your stomach back?”
“No need now, I think.” He pushed off from the wall, grimaced and settled back to the floor.
“You want a hand?” I asked.
Andrew looked up. “If you clap I’ll wallop you.”
“Just give me your hand.”
I grabbed his wrist and pulled until he stood beside me. In the dim light he looked pale again and even though he’d wiped off most of the eyeliner, his eyes looked shadowed. “Are you going to be all right?” I asked.
“Yes. I just got stiff sitting on that cold floor. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
“I said I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Who’s arguing?”
He looked around the area, then back to me. “You ready?”
I took a deep breath. “As I’ll ever be.”
“Onward and upward, then.” He headed out into the shadows between the stacks of equipment and crates, toward the front of the storeroom. I took another deep breath and plunged into the shadows after him.
CHAPTER 12
The only sounds came from the squeak of the rubber soles of our shoes and the brush of denim against denim. It echoed loudly across the room. I was wound so tight I half expected the glassware to start vibrating in sympathy. We ducked back through the front counter and Andrew carefully unbolted the front doors. He paused to listen, then nodded and we slipped out and turned to the left down the corridor tow
ard the front of the building. Other than a small penlight Andrew held, the only illumination came from the green exit signs over the outer doors at the end of the hall, a faint security light about halfway down, and the faint reflection from operating lights on some of the equipment in the labs. About fifty feet down on the right was an elevator. We had decided that the noise of an elevator was worth the risk since it would save Andrew having to climb three flights of stairs. But when he pushed the button, the loud clunk as the car started down and a louder grinding whir from the motor made us both jump.
“Maybe we should have taken the stairs after all,” he whispered as he looked to the right and left.
“But your side.”
He looked at me, surprised. “You could have carried me.”
“Dream on, buddy,” I whispered back.
The car arrived with a thump and a loud bell pealed out its arrival. The sound seemed to bounce down the walls of the hall, magnifying as it went. When the doors opened we both leapt in and Andrew quickly pressed the button for the fourth floor.
“We might as well have brought a brass band,” I whispered.
“Nah. The sound of this elevator would have drowned them out.”
The car stopped on the fourth floor with the same loud bell proclaiming our arrival. We both carefully poked our heads out and looked to the left and then the right. The hall duplicated the one downstairs except for the fact that most of the doors had frosted glass inset in them indicating more private labs and fewer classrooms. No lights shone behind any of the glass panels, no sounds of voices, no rumble of centrifuges or clink of glassware came from under the doors. Andrew had warned me that even at 10:30 or 11:00 there might still be a grad student or two around finishing up an experiment, but that it being Tuesday night, it might be less likely, and it appeared we had been lucky.
Andrew turned right toward the front of the building. A security light matching the one downstairs mounted on the wall behind us cast pale, elongated versions of each of us across the linoleum floor and up over the wall. The shadow figures rippled in and out of doorways, over bulletin boards, across fire extinguishers, and gradually dimmed as we approached the light coming through the windows in the front hallway. That light came from streetlamps in the campus quad four floors below. Coming up at an angle, through the ivy framing the windows it cast exaggerated shadows of leaves back down the hall. A gentle breeze outside rustled the leaves and the giant shadows moved eerily across the two of us and over the walls and doorways. Alfred Hitchcock would have loved it; I indisputably did not.
We reached the front hall and turned right toward the lab which lay at the opposite end. Logically, four floors up, in a dark building, no one from outside could possibly see us, but even so, we both hugged the wall opposite the windows, hunched over, sliding in and out of doorways. As we approached the lab suite at the front corner of the building, I could just make out the black lettering on the glass: J.P. Harrison.
Once seen, I couldn’t take my eyes from those letters. They grew larger as we approached, and darker. Four or five years ago J. P. Harrison’s name and face had begun to pop up in magazine articles, and then on an occasional interview show. He was a natural for such forums: intelligent, prone to smiling, glib, and he looked like the grandfather everyone would love to have--jolly, round but not fat, prematurely white-haired. He had a gift for explaining the unexplainable, putting genetic engineering in terms the lay person could understand, taking the fear out of the new discoveries coming out of that rapidly moving field. His appearances in science magazines and Sunday morning interview shows became more frequent, and in the last year or so he had also begun to be seen shaking hands with politicians at fundraisers and standing arm-in-arm with movie stars at global warming rallies. His name, listed among the luminaries supporting a cause, gave whatever crusade it might be validity. He was a celebrity and beginning to be a household name, doing for biology what Carl Sagan had done for physics. Therefore, planning to break into his lab in the middle of the night, though scary, had also been a little bit fun, a little bit exciting.
But his name on the door. In black paint. For the first time since this had all begun, the sight of those letters took him from the two-dimensions of the popular media into the three dimensions of reality. And if he was real, than this situation was real.
I had a sudden urge to stop Andrew, tell him, look, you know? I’ve reconsidered. You were right. I don’t think I want to do this. I’d just as soon go back to the old Pacific Crest Hotel, crawl under the covers, have a good night’s sleep and jump on the old tour bus tomorrow and see Fisherman’s Wharf and Coit Tower and all those other mundane things. So, gee, it’s been great and so long for now.
Instead, I followed Andrew quietly to the door.
“Tape,” he whispered. I fished a roll of masking tape out of my purse. He quickly striped some across the bottom corner of the glass panel, then he handed me the tape and took the hammer. He drove it against the taped glass until I heard it crack. He tapped several more times, then pushed the taped shards of glass inward, reached carefully through, and turned the bolt on the inside of the door.
“Would you look at that,” he whispered. “It worked.”
We stepped through the door quickly and Andrew shut it behind us soundlessly. The layout of Harrison’s lab in many ways matched Andrew’s, and I wondered if subconsciously he’d patterned it after his one-time mentor. We’d walked into the main lab, with the same center island lab counter with crawl spaces and storage drawers beneath it. More workbenches lined the walls. Two doors opened off the right side of the room, one door off the center, back wall. On either side of this door, fume hoods stood, low light from within reflecting off glassware and flasks of chemicals inside and sending watery light out into the room.
There were half a dozen places along both the island counter and the side counters where grad students had pushed paraphernalia aside to clear a work space. Each had its own personal stock of tools and glassware and a stool placed in front. Andrew walked around the end of the island and started down the other side. He stopped about halfway down at one of the work spaces, reached up and ran his hand lightly along the edge of the bookshelf over the bench.
“I spent four years here,” he whispered. “This was my bench.”
I looked over my shoulder at the front door. “Andrew?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Not the best time for a stroll down Memory Lane.”
He walked toward the door in the back wall. J.P. Harrison was again written on the door, this time etched on a brass plaque mounted below the inset glass. Below the brass plaque was a smaller, discreet sign with one word: Private.
“Not for long, buddy boy.” This time he didn’t bother with the tape. He swung the hammer and smashed the inset glass.
I flinched, and looked back at the front door, but there were no cries of alarm, no thundering footsteps coming up the hallway. “You want to warn me when you’re going to do something like that?” I asked.
“Sorry.”
I pressed a hand over my heart. “You’ll be sorrier when you have to call the paramedics to come haul away my poor lifeless body.”
Andrew didn’t smile, just reached through, turned the inside knob and pulled the door open. The office was much larger than any that I’d seen at the University back home, and much neater. It had been formed by walling off the entire back end of the main lab room. The wall opposite was entirely of glass and provided a spectacular view of the lights of San Francisco.
Andrew crunched across the broken glass and closed the blinds over that view. “Mel, shut the door, will you?”
“What for? You smashed the glass.”
“There’s a shade. Pull it down.”
He switched on the desk lamp. The office wasn’t just neat, it looked like it had been put in order using a level and a carpenter’s square. Everything was perfectly in place. The bookshelves were clean and tidy with each book upright and--I squinted up at them--in alph
abetical order. Filing cabinets stood on each side of the desk and along one wall; all the doors were neatly closed and had nothing, not even a speck of dust, on top. A pristine blotter lay on the immaculate desk, carefully squared below a well-polished marble and gold pen and pencil set. No family photos sat on the polished oak, no open journals lay face down. No reprints slid off piles stacked on chairs. No photos from presentations overflowed boxes. There were, however, dozens of framed photographs on the walls. I stepped over to see them more closely. The first was of J.P. Harrison standing next to a well-known state senator, the next, J.P. with his arm around one of the lead characters of a television series that was filmed in San Francisco, below that J.P. at what looked like a gallery opening surrounded by people whose faces I recognized but whose names I either never knew or had forgotten. Above the desk were more recent photos, some I recognized from newspapers and magazines, all of them posed shots with more famous celebrities than those on the side walls.
Andrew also looked at the photos. “I used to think that was J.P.’s one fault, his one vice,” he said slowly. “Needing to see his picture splashed across magazines and web pages.”
Oh Pot? Kettle wants a word with you.
Andrew looked at my face. “Hey, I never liked having my picture printed everywhere.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“It was just because I was dating Caren.”
“Right.”
“Caren’s a very nice girl. Lots of fun.”
“Okay.”
“Whatever,” he said. “I never asked to be in those magazines.”
I shrugged, but I was also trying to keep my own sudden moment of revelation from showing. He wouldn’t have been in those magazines if people like me didn’t buy them.
It was at that moment, the two of us standing in the light cast by the desk lamp, when the star shine blinked out. Here in front of me was not Dr. Andrew Richards, tuxedo-clad man about town, wounded hero, adventurer, and sex symbol. Instead, there was a man in a too-big brown flannel shirt, smudges on his face from the amateur disguise I’d tried to apply, lines of weariness and stress around his eyes.