John found himself outside the truck, watching the two men as they moved off. He was convinced the man in the long white coat was the very same man who had accosted Gabriel in the earlier dream of Moreno. The man wearing the glasses was most assuredly the German.
He turned away from the two men and saw Gloria as she read and hummed the same tune she had been listening to earlier in her room. Lonetree could hear the squeaky preteen voice as the beautiful one it would eventually become in just a few short years. Then he saw her stop reading, and her humming trailed away as she looked up and tilted her head to the left and then slowly to the right. Lonetree thought she was frozen, because she sat so still with the exception of her head movements as she seemed to be listening for something. Another tilt of her head in the opposite direction, and then just as quickly back again. She closed the book and then rolled down her window. John heard her start humming again. A few bars and then she would stop and listen. Again, she hummed “It’s All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards and then stopped once more. This time, her head bobbed up and down as she heard what she was listening for.
John’s eyes widened when Gloria opened the door. He turned to see if her father had noticed but instead saw him vanish into the oddly overly large aluminum guard shack on the far side of the mission. He wanted to stop her but was powerless to do so as he realized her father was right: the winery did look like it would fall at any moment. Lonetree even said, “Hey, do what your father said,” but Gloria of course couldn’t hear him. She used her white cane to ease forward across the gravel lot toward the thirteen steps leading to California’s oldest documented winery. Lonetree fell in beside her with unease clouding his thoughts.
Gloria stopped and listened only thirty feet from the crumbling steps of the winery. Again, that tilt of head told Lonetree she had heard something. After a moment, John heard it also. It was at least two men laughing. The sound had an echo to it, and he could hear that it was coming from the large double doors of the ruin. Gloria deftly hurried to the side of the south adobe wall, rapidly swishing her cane side to side, scanning for obstacles. John was surprised just how confident the girl was without sight. John caught up to her and saw that she was leaning against the wall, listening intently. He stayed where he was on the gravel lot.
The left side of the partially restored oaken doorway opened, and two men exited the ruin. They were both army MPs and were armed with M1 carbines slung on their shoulders. One of the men turned and started fumbling for his keys.
“No need,” the second man, a PFC, said as the first looked up at him. “This screwed-up assignment will be officially over in”—the second man looked at his wristwatch and then over toward the guard shack—“hell, it’s probably over with already.”
The first man stopped looking in his pockets and then shrugged. “Can’t say as I feel sorry for that bastard. I hope they deport his sorry ass.”
The two men turned away from the doors and started down the steps.
“Hell, scuttlebutt says the son of a bitch may be tried for war crimes if he gives the bigwigs any grief when they shut him down.”
“Nah, they can’t do that without explaining why he was here under our protection. No, the Nazi bastard will just slip away like all of them generals and such after the war, head to Argentina or someplace like that. That’s where True Detective says they run to.”
“Yeah,” the second said as they slowly moved off. “Bullshit science anyway. The guy was just milkin’ the gov’ment tit.”
Lonetree watched the two men avoid the security shack and move off toward the back of the property and then to the front gate to have a smoke with the guys there. John smiled when he saw how fast Gloria left her hiding spot behind and started tapping her cane along the damaged wall of the winery. She carefully moved up the steps, only stumbling once, and even then Lonetree saw himself trying to help her. She finally made it to the partially collapsed overhang at the top of the thirteen steps, with John eyeing the crumbling structure they now stood under. She stopped before reaching the door and again cocked her head to the left and then right. She turned until she faced the mission and the guard shack, then back again at the ruin. She placed her palm on the left side of the large, sturdy door.
With a deep breath, she depressed the old wooden handle on the door and pulled it open slowly and carefully. She stopped when the dangling lock banged and swayed in its hasp. Lonetree also took a deep breath as she stopped at the threshold and listened. He thought she was going to satisfy some curiosity and then leave the ruin, but his hopes were dashed when she entered the winery. John stepped in before the door closed as if the heavy oak would have crushed him if he didn’t hurry. The dreamwalk was confusing at most, silly in the least. Sometimes, no matter how hard he concentrated, he did things that didn’t make sense. He could not get used to being in someone else’s mind.
The interior of the winery was far worse than the exterior. Fourteen-inch-wide beams of nearly petrified wood had collapsed into the immediate space upon entering. Gloria navigated these beautifully, easing around the fallen roof and its support like a champ.
John took this opportunity to look around the interior. For something so important that it needed U.S. Army personnel to safeguard it, this place was a mess. One item left over from the original winery was a small alcove, in the wall, and inside was the Virgin Mary. The small statue captivated Lonetree, and the image, headless and with only one arm, gave him the creeps. He was glad deep inside his soul that Gloria didn’t have to see it. He didn’t know why that image found purchase in his fears. Gloria was brave, but that one sight alone would chill anyone. The damaged statue symbolized a place that had gone bad, and as John looked around, he knew this was indeed a bad place.
Many a tear has to fall … but it’s all in the game, Gloria sang soft and low. After the first verse, she paused and listened. Lonetree saw the smile slowly come to her lips as she tilted her head to the right and listened, gently swaying to a sound only she could hear.
“Damn, this is not good.” John took a few steps closer to Gloria and almost stumbled as he backed away when she suddenly moved as if she had working eyes. She quickly tapped across the old mud floor and suddenly stopped and listened again. John saw that she was nearing the far wall of falling adobe mud and near a door that looked very much out of place.
All in the wonderful game … that we know … as love.
Lonetree watched as the second verse was sung by one of the more sensitive and beautiful voices he had ever heard outside of his own Jennifer back when Bobby Lee McKinnon would perform through her.
The girl listened intently as her smile grew. She had the look of a child on Christmas morning. She tapped her way toward a steel door which, as John noted a moment before, looked very much out of place. She leaned forward and hit the steel twice with her cane’s tip. The hollow clicking sound returned. Her smile faltered.
“Damn it,” she grumbled as she straightened. “Stairs!”
Lonetree was amazed that she could tell that the door was hiding stairs behind it. He guessed that she could hear a return echo of space that he couldn’t.
Lonetree cursed when Gloria reached out with her hand and took hold of the latch-style handle and pushed down. It opened with ease. She stepped through the threshold until a chill from far below stopped her.
“Thank God, you’re coming to your senses,” he said, trying to be loud.
Once in a while he won’t call … but it’s all … in the game, she sang, somewhat louder than before. It was loud enough that John flinched, thinking that had to have been heard all the way into Moreno.
“I know I left the chorus out, but I forgot where I was,” she called down the darkened stairs.
John saw the light switches on the wall just inside the door but was again helpless to turn them on, and Gloria, bless her, didn’t need them. He also saw that the electrical lines were relatively new. The high-wattage bulbs were encased in that cagelike shell that most government bui
ldings are equipped with for outdoor use, which the old winery most definitely came close to being with all the damage done throughout the nearly two centuries since it had been built.
Gloria was humming the tune as she listened to something only she could hear and understand.
“If you would all sing together, it would be a lot better,” she called down the stairs. To Lonetree’s horror, she actually took a step down, then another, and he again tried to reach out and grab her arm, but his fingers caressed nothing but damp air.
“Damn!” he said loudly, hoping that she would at least get a sense that he did not want her to go down that stairwell. She did just that. She moved fast for someone with no eyesight. John hurriedly followed as he too knew he would not fall, or if he did, he would just open his eyes and he would be safe at the bottom—dreams, he thought, not bad at times.
Gloria reached the bottom of the stairwell and faced another door. This was also new and made of steel. John saw light coming from under the door. The girl tilted her head and was listening to someone, or something, through the door.
“No, I’m alone,” she said, leaning close to the door. She suddenly turned, and John thought for sure she was looking right him. Even in the darkness he could see a slight reflection of himself in her dark glasses, though it could have been just his imagination. Gloria returned her attention to the door once more, and her hand went slowly to the same type of latch as upstairs. John froze. She listened once again. She huffed and then lightly slapped the door with her hand. “I said there is no one with me; I’m all alone. If you would talk one at a time, I could understand you far better.”
Again, she listened. She cursed something John couldn’t hear and then turned the latch and opened the door.
The world once more had light, and Lonetree was never so grateful for it. He never liked the absence of light, but he lived with it because of the line of work he was in. He hated the dark more than anything.
The basement was not the basement that had been dug out by Mexican labor almost two centuries before. Instead of the earthen walls used for ancient wine-making and storage, these were concrete and very much new. John was amazed as he looked around the large room. There were even three or four of the old three-hundred-gallon wine casks used for fermenting purposes in the day. Two of these had collapsed since the days of the monks, but one was still showing an old wooden spigot at its base.
The room was L-shaped, and Gloria started walking toward the bend. Lonetree saw equipment that was old to him but would be considered new to someone in this time period. Large boxlike machines were wired up, and others that looked as if they came from the set of a Universal monster movie from the thirties. All of this sat upon a rubberized flooring used to disburse electricity and provide grounding. Lonetree didn’t like the way this was shaping up at all. Gloria looked as if she knew exactly where she was going, like she had been here before.
Stainless steel tables lined walls that had been reinforced by not only wooden beams but steel. A fire-suppression system had been installed, and there were places where the ceiling had come under intense renovation. John wondered why the federal government would set up shop in this manner.
“I think I’ve known for some time that you were down here,” Gloria said.
She felt her way past four massive steel tanks with warning signs stenciled front and back. These tanks fed into the farthest area of the basement. Gloria seemed to follow these pipelines without even knowing it. John ran his fingers along one of these steel-jacketed lines, and he could see the frozen condensation adhered to the metal. They were carrying something akin to nitrogen or some other mysterious chemical Lonetree didn’t understand. As he moved past the large tanks, he saw the manufacturer’s plate. He pursed his lips as a connection was made.
“R. D. Hadley Container Company—Los Angeles, California. Manufactured 11/19/1948.” John saw the welded-on plate and raised his brows. “More than likely a division of Hadley Corp Gauge and Meter Company of Moreno, California.” John knew the links in the chain were coming together, and he wondered what affairs of business Hadley Sr. had with the federal government that had to be guarded by armed military personnel. He was startled out of his thoughts when the girl spoke once more, seemingly to no one—no one he could hear, at any rate.
“Was it you singing in the night?” she asked as she rounded the corner and stopped, her hand with the cane tapping out a spot that seemed to be clear. “They were wonderful! I couldn’t understand them, but they used to lull me to sleep most every night. I thought it was my inner voice singing. You harmonize better with your songs. More so than mine, I guess, because you don’t know them as well.”
John eased around the bend in the L-shaped room and found Gloria standing in front of a large steel boxlike structure that dwarfed her. Spotlights shone on its shiny surface and reflected back on Gloria’s upturned face. It reminded him of a neighborhood bank vault; there were vents and sliding portals for viewing inside the box. It stood at over fourteen feet in height and at least twelve in width. Electric motors were installed every few feet around its bottom and circulating fans at its top. The strange lines from the tanks ended atop and looked to feed two large steel tanks there. It looked as if they left those tanks and then lines spiderwebbed across its top, bottom, and sides. The lines appeared welded to its frame. He leaned in and read, LINES UNDER PRESSURE.
“What in the hell is this?” John asked himself as he stepped past Gloria and placed a hand over the cold exterior. At least he was assuming it was cold because of the dripping of melted ice from the lines that were fed by the mysterious tanks. More feed lines running through from the tanks were directed right down into the top of the enclosure. He could make out the words EMERGENCY VENT LINE—DANGER stenciled on the tanks.
“My father says that I hear things that others can’t,” Gloria said as if she were answering an unheard question from someone. Without knowing it, she had heard John. Her own words were directed at the large vaultlike containment box. “I guess because I’m blind, my other senses are more acute than others with sight. I learned that in health class at school.”
Lonetree tilted his head like Gloria did when she was straining to hear something. It was a habit he hadn’t known he picked up by watching her.
“Yes, school. Did you go to school?”
John froze at sounds seemingly coming from the interior of the steel vault. He couldn’t place the words, but he could hear something for the first time. For a reason he couldn’t understand, the sound was filled with a kind of sorrow that he hadn’t heard since he was a child, when he used to listen to the old folks on the reservation talk of better days from their pasts. This was like that. The sounds were almost foreign in nature, but Gloria seemed to have no trouble hearing or understanding them.
“That’s so sad,” she said as she stepped closer to the giant vault. “All of you?”
For a dream, John realized he had never once been this apprehensive. Even while in the mind of a killer and reliving a murder, no matter how gruesome, in the old days of law enforcement, he had never felt he was in danger. While inside a basement of an old ruin, he found that he was terrified of what was with Gloria, even while behind at least four inches of solid steel.
“Why would someone do that to you?”
Lonetree stepped back as the vault shook on its concrete block foundation. Dust filtered in from the newly installed rafters over their heads, and for a moment Lonetree thought the entire winery would come down around their ears.
“I am so sorry for you.” Gloria moved to the vault’s front by tapping her way past steel tables and machines John couldn’t recognize. “Can you get out of there? Do you need help? Maybe I can tell my father and he can help get you out. He’s a good—”
This time, the response was unmistakable. The vault’s door actually pushed outward. It popped three small steel rivets, and then the room became silent as the steel relaxed. A small warning bell dinged from somewhere, and Lonetre
e froze as he heard those very same lines he had been examining vibrate as they were filled with a chemical. The lines had been flushed and charged, and two little red lights came on at the topmost tanks that fed directly into the vault from above. All of this seemed to be an automated reaction to the assault on the vault’s door. John stepped back.
“What in the hell did you people bring back?” he asked himself.
“I said no one was with me. Why do you keep asking that?” Gloria said as she placed a hand on the cold steel of the door and pressed. Then she turned, and again her dark glasses settled right on the spot where John stood staring at her. “No, no one.” She gently and lovingly moved her small hand over the steel. “Yes, I can come back. For a blind girl, I can get around better than people think, but that’s our secret. I can tell you like secrets.” A sad look came to the girl’s face as she lowered her hand. “Sometimes, secrets are all that I have, besides my daddy.”
Again, there was a loud thump of what could only be described as anger from inside the vault. Gloria placed her hand on the door and pressed once more, and the vibe inside the basement changed as whatever was trapped in the steel cage calmed.
“I’ll bring books to read to you,” she said, and then her face was a mask of excitement. “I can also bring you music. I got a battery-powered record player for Christmas last year. I have all the best records. The guys down at K-Rave give me all their duplicates.” Again, she tilted her head as she listened. “K-Rave is a radio station. They play all the cool stuff. Bobby Vee, Roy Orbison. They are even starting to play some of the new beach stuff. Freekin’ Rowdy Rhoads is even beginning to like the new music. He’ll never admit he’s still in mourning for Buddy Holly.”
In the Still of the Night--The Supernaturals II Page 24