by Brian Harmon
“Okay,” he said softly. “We’ll all go.”
Nicole smiled like a child having just been told she could stay up late.
Brandy simply stared down at the pocket watch, her eyes filled with apprehension.
Chapter 11
Wayne kept a flashlight in his desk drawer in case of a power outage. Now he took this flashlight and stuffed it into his back pocket along with the envelope he’d received two nights earlier. A crazy idea had been slithering around his mind all day, refusing to be unheard. He had eventually been forced to lend an ear to this insane notion, if only to save him from his other infatuation.
“Going out?” Laura asked as he crossed the living room toward the door. She was lying on the couch, watching television as usual. Her eyes followed him as he walked to the door.
“Yeah. Something I have to take care of.”
“Leaving me all alone again?”
“Sorry. You’re big enough to baby-sit yourself.”
“Be back soon?”
“Don’t know. Maybe.” He stepped out of the apartment and hurried down the hall without waiting for a response. He could already feel the relief of just being away from her. The events of that morning had settled like a lead weight in his gut. He kept remembering the way she had gazed at him, piercing him with those eyes. What was it about her that made him want to accept her? There was something powerfully sexy and alluring about her, but she was also as ugly as the snake in Eve’s garden, slimy, dirty and betraying.
He shook away the memory. He didn’t have time to think about her. He focused instead on the letter, tucked safely away in the envelope in his back pocket. In this letter were instructions on how to get inside something called Gilbert House, and that was exactly where he was going this afternoon.
He’d never heard of Gilbert House before reading the letter and had no idea what might lie within its walls. But something in there was worth a thousand dollars to someone, and it was this something that drove him nearly mad with curiosity.
The job was for two nights ago, just hours after the actual delivery of the letter. He didn’t go then. After all, that could be suicide. He didn’t know who delivered the letter. It could have been some sick psychopath with any number of disturbing intentions. A thousand dollars was not worth risking his life.
But the job was past. It was two days later now, and he was not going there to do a job. He was going there to find out what was so special about this Gilbert House that it was worth a thousand dollars.
He passed by his truck, intending to walk. According to the directions in the letter, Gilbert House was not that far from his apartment. He would find it more easily on foot than by car. And he didn’t very much like driving anyway. When he was only four years old, he was nearly killed in an automobile accident. He hadn’t felt comfortable inside a vehicle since, and preferred to go on foot whenever possible. Charlie poked fun at him for his constant insistence on walking to class, even in the rain, accusing him of being too cheap to spend the gas. But Charlie could not possibly understand. His childhood memories were not filled with endless months of hospital rooms and physical therapy.
As long as he could get there on foot, he would always walk, and to get to whatever this place was, he simply had to walk to Redwood Avenue and then head north across the campus to Yawning Street. From there, it would not be far at all. His destination was located somewhere in the woods directly north of H & M Tires. Apparently, Gilbert House did not have a driveway.
As he walked toward Redwood Avenue, still a long way from where he was going, his mind inevitably wandered back to Laura Swiff and their morning encounter.
“I hate being left alone,” she’d told him, creeping closer and closer to him, moving her body almost against him. She gazed up at him, tempting him, daring him, begging him for what he knew she wanted.
Why the hell not? he’d wondered. After all, why should he care? Charlie didn’t seem to see the harm in sleeping with that little blonde, why should he care if Laura didn’t see the harm in sleeping with Charlie’s roommate?
Laura put her hand on his chest and gazed up at him with those powerful eyes. He knew she could feel the way his heart pounded. She could feel his yearning, his desire. She knew that he wanted her. He looked down upon her, studying her soft, round face and parted lips. It was so easy to say yes, so easy to kiss her, to undress her, to feel her naked body against his hands. It was so very easy.
He went back and forth in his mind about what he did. On one hand the very idea was immoral, no matter how he explained it, no matter how he tried to justify it. On the other hand he’d wanted to so very badly. He’d wanted it, and she wanted to give it to him. It had been a long time since he’d held anyone like that. And there was no way to know when he might get the chance again.
He turned onto Redwood without noticing he’d reached it. He could not stop thinking about it.
He watched her as she lowered her head and leaned closer to him. He was finally free of her haunting eyes and he realized suddenly that he missed their weight on him. She was everything he disliked in the opposite sex: loud, vulgar, blunt and unladylike. Yet, in these flaws he found something that fascinated him, something that turned him on more than anyone had ever turned him on before. She wanted not love, not intimacy, but raw, uninhibited sex, and that sent fire through his body.
He looked again at the clock and said, “I’m sorry. I have to meet somebody soon.” With this lie he perhaps saved his soul, but damned his thoughts to ceaselessly wonder about the choice he did not make.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah, I’ve got to get going.”
“Maybe…later…?”
Wayne nodded. “Sure.” He thought when he said this that it was a lie, that there would never be a later, that he’d passed the test, but he realized immediately that he’d only set them up for another round another day. Next time he would not pass the test. Next time he would fuck her, just like they both wanted.
Now he could not help but wonder how it could have been, how things might have happened if he’d chosen the other road. A part of him wished like hell that he had chosen that other road. A part of him could not forget those eyes, those lips, the warmth of her hand against him. That part of him wondered when they’d get their second chance, when they would do what they were forbidden. The other part of him, the better part of him, felt relieved at his strength, at the guilt that he was spared, but that part seemed smaller, less stubborn, and he wondered if that made him a lesser man.
Wayne continued up Redwood, lost in contemplation and completely unaware of what awaited him ahead.
Chapter 12
“Is this it?” Brandy sounded skeptical, and Albert could see why. It was hardly the nightmarish setting they were imagining.
He had parked on the street near H & M Tires, which was backed up against a wooded hill. The information given to him in the envelope revealed that Gilbert House was located here, directly north of the tire shop.
They crossed the empty parking lot and ventured into the trees. About two hundred yards into the forest, at the top of the hill, they came across what remained of an old, concrete structure. But it could hardly be described as a building.
What stood of Gilbert House was little more than a set of tall concrete walls. For more than eighty years, it had been sitting here, slowly crumbling to dust as nature reclaimed it, but most of these walls were still intact after all this time, if badly weathered and mostly covered in crude graffiti. At the center of the nearest side of the building, there stood a large concrete slab with steps ascending from a thicket of brush. This, Albert assumed, was Gilbert House’s front door.
It would have been a huge building, easily the length and width of Lumey Hall, where he lived when he and Brandy first met. He had little doubt that the building’s height would have been equally impressive had it ever been completed.
“That girl said there wasn’t much left of it,” Albert explained. He turned in a s
low circle, searching the woods that surrounded them. If not for the traffic noise from the nearby roads, he could almost believe that they were deep in the wilderness, far from civilization, rather than just a short walk from a busy street. The dense forest completely blocked the view of any surrounding structures. “She said her house isn’t far from here, either, but I’m not sure where.”
The three of them had come prepared for a hike, wearing comfortable shoes and blue jeans. Albert wore his familiar green backpack. Inside were three flashlights, some extra batteries, the manila envelope, a tube of sidewalk chalk, a first-aid kit and, of course, the box. Brandy was also carrying a backpack this time. Not knowing how long they would be gone, she’d stuffed three light jackets, some candy bars and three cans of soda into it before leaving the apartment. On their last adventure, they were forced to swim through frigid water, which, in addition to nearly freezing them to death, ruined many of the items in her purse. This time, she had removed only what she was willing to lose and slipped it into the small, outer pocket of her backpack. She’d also grabbed two swimsuits from her drawer (one for herself and one for Nicole) and a pair of trunks for Albert. Just in case.
But surely they wouldn’t face anything like that in this place. In fact, as she looked around, Brandy couldn’t imagine what they would do here at all. There didn’t seem to be anything.
Albert began to walk around, weaving through the thick brush, stepping over broken beer bottles and discarded aluminum cans. At some point, the driveway that led to Gilbert House had grown over and disappeared, but not before some of the locals turned the area into a makeshift dump. There were piles of rusted cans and broken bottles, old tires swallowed by leaves and weeds, discarded broken appliances and furniture that were slowly melting into the environment as the flora enveloped them. There was a television with a shattered screen from which sprouted a hearty fern. A pine sapling reached up through the broken door of an old microwave. A car door lay half-covered in soil, a tangle of thorns rising up through its window. The skeletal remains of an old couch could be seen jutting up from behind a fallen tree. From a tangle of briars near the front steps protruded an old, rusted dryer and the remains of a mattress and box springs. The steps themselves were carpeted with shards of shattered glass, as though someone had meticulously sought out every beer bottle and jar that remained intact and dashed them to pieces against the concrete.
As he circled around to the back, he began to get a feel for what Gilbert House might have looked like had it ever been completed. The building itself was U-shaped, and wrapped around what would have been a spacious courtyard in back, but was now little more than a thicket of thorny brush and small trees. The only door to be seen was atop the steps at the front of the building. There were no other openings to indicate doors or windows anywhere else in any of the other walls. Here and there, a portion of a wall had collapsed beneath the oppressive weight of time and the elements, but that was all.
Nicole followed after him. “But I thought you said we were going inside. Isn’t that what the paper in the envelope said?”
Albert turned and glanced back at her. “It said something—” He stopped suddenly as something caught his eye in the woods behind them.
“What?”
Albert stared off into the trees for a moment. He thought he saw something. But now… “Nothing,” he said. He began to walk again, but he continued to stare back toward that part of the woods, still watching. “The paper in the envelope says there’s some kind of—”
Without finishing, he turned and walked back toward the woods where his attention had been drawn. There was something…
“What is it?” Brandy asked as she and Nicole watched him hurry away.
Albert crossed into the woods and waded through the thorny brush to a spot several yards from the edge of the clearing. He stopped and gazed out into the forest around him. For a moment he stood there, searching the strange feeling that had drawn him here. There was something odd about the area, something in the air, in the environment that surrounded what remained of the structure. He placed one hand on the tree next to him and squinted into the shadows of the autumn foliage. His attention had been drawn by something, but he could not say just what. A sound? A movement? Whatever it was, he saw or heard it twice, but he could not quite grasp what it was. His eyes and ears told him that it was nothing, but he sensed somehow that they were wrong. He felt as though he was being watched, and yet, strangely enough, it felt as though the woods around him were as empty as a vacuum. He searched the surrounding area, then lowered his eyes to his feet and scanned the ground around him, as though whatever he was looking for was very small and he was simply missing it. Then, almost without thinking, he snapped his head up and searched the branches overhead. Nothing.
He found himself remembering the night he found the steam tunnel entrance. He’d felt something like this that night as well, as though some unseen presence were watching him, willing him to act, secretly guiding him toward some unknown destination. He lowered his eyes to the brush at his feet and the leaf-strewn forest floor before him. Had he really heard or seen anything? Or was his sudden impulse to come over here triggered by something else?
Suddenly, he felt vulnerable. A cold chill ran up his back and another impulse coursed through him. He turned and stared back into the clearing. Gilbert House was there, just as he’d seen it before, an eerie set of crumbling concrete walls. He stared at it, confused. Although he knew those walls were there, although he’d just been looking at them, studying them, he felt almost surprised that they should still be standing there. But what had he expected to see when he turned around? What else would be there?
“What’s wrong?” Brandy asked.
Albert noticed that she was holding Nicole’s hand. He had scared her. He had scared them both. “Nothing. Just…” He shook his head. “I think I’m imagining things.”
But Brandy was not comforted. Why should she have been? In the past, Albert’s intuition had saved their lives. He was amazing, a modern day Sherlock Holmes, she sometimes called him. If he thought he saw or heard something in those woods, then there was a good chance he wasn’t imagining it.
Albert walked back to where the girls stood. He slipped off his backpack and removed the envelope. Before he was drawn to the empty woods, Nicole had asked him about going inside. “This says there’s an entrance of some kind in the woods about twenty yards from the building’s right front corner.”
“Over there?” Nicole motioned back the way they came.
“Yeah. But I want to look around first.” He looked over the paper again, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. It was not a letter. The paper was simply a scribbling of notes with a rough sketch of Gilbert House’s floor plan. Around the edges of the paper were arrows and notes describing the distance and direction to Briar Hills University’s campus, H & M Tires, the small, nearby town of Amicson and Straight Creek Road, which ran through these woods to the west. Scribbled in the bottom left corner of the page, next to a small square, was a brief description of a “cellar door.” Below this, the words “ONLY KNOWN ENTRANCE” were circled heavily.
He tucked the paper back into the envelope and the envelope into the backpack. “Come on.”
The three of them moved on, past the courtyard. There were no steps back here. In fact, there was nothing at all to indicate that there was even supposed to be more doors in these blank walls.
“So we’re supposed to go in the cellar?” Brandy asked.
“I thought it meant the basement,” explained Albert, “but this place doesn’t look like it has one. Besides, what kind of basement has a door twenty yards from the house?”
“What’s the difference between a cellar and a basement?” asked Nicole.
“My grandma’s house has a basement under it and she also has a cellar in the back yard,” explained Brandy. “She keeps all her canning in the cellar.”
“Both of my grandmas have those too,” Albert agreed. “S
torm cellars. That’s what I always think of when I hear the word ‘cellar.’ A basement is what you have under your house. But people might use the word interchangeably in different parts of the world. I’m not sure. The information from the envelope specifically calls it a ‘cellar door’ and points to a spot well away from the walls of the building, so I assumed it was some kind of storm cellar.”
“Then it’s not really Gilbert House we’re trying to get into,” Nicole surmised.
“That’s my guess.”
“Then what is it?” asked Brandy.
Albert shrugged. “Some kind of shelter, maybe?”
“Could it be a tunnel? Like the ones under the campus?”
“Could be,” Albert replied. “Maybe even the same tunnels. This is technically a part of the campus too.”
They turned the corner and walked around the last side of the building. Here, Albert stopped. “Got cooler,” he observed, and something about this bothered him. He looked up over the wall at the evening sun, already sinking but far from gone. There was a slight breeze, but that had been there before.
Nicole hugged herself. Her arms had broken out in gooseflesh. “I don’t think I like it here.”
“Come on.” As the three of them turned the last corner of the building and were approaching the front door, about to complete their circle, Albert found himself staring out into the woods again. He still felt that something was not quite right, something he could not grasp. He did not stop this time, but watched the trees as he walked. It still felt as if someone was watching them.
He was still searching the woods when the warmth came back to him. He stopped and looked up at the walls of Gilbert House and was again stricken with that strange feeling, as though he expected something else to be there instead.