by Brian Harmon
He fought off the urge to turn and run away and began walking toward them instead. “Hey, guys,” he said.
“Hi,” responded the young man.
Wayne eyed him as he approached. This guy appeared to be maybe three or four inches shorter and he tried to convince himself that his size advantage was reason enough to not feel intimidated or anxious. But it was hard to feel at ease in front of strangers in a place like this.
“I hope we’re not trespassing,” said the dark-haired young man, and Wayne felt himself relax just a little at the realization that these were probably not the same people who delivered his letter.
“Not my place.”
“Oh.”
“I was just looking around,” explained Wayne. “Didn’t know anyone was up here.”
“Just us, as far as we know.”
Wayne nodded. He looked up at the graffiti-covered walls, then back at the woods that bordered its front. Out there somewhere was supposedly a cellar door that led into Gilbert House, but from what he could see, Gilbert House wasn’t hard to get into at all.
He was rapidly losing interest in exploring these weird ruins. He considered just telling these people why he was here. If they knew anything about it, he could save himself some trouble. After all, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. If anything, he was merely trying to determine whether someone was up to no good out here.
He decided to throw caution to the wind and said, “Listen, maybe you could help me with something. I got a letter two days ago. I don’t know who from.” He could tell by the look they exchanged that these three people knew something. “Would you happen to know anything about it?”
“We might,” the young man said. He stepped toward him. “What kind of letter was it?”
Wayne pulled the envelope from his back pocket and held it up. “Sort of a job offer.”
Now the young man’s face grew puzzled. “A job offer?”
“Yeah.”
“No idea where it came from?”
“Nope. I was in the library the other day, doing some research. I left the table and when I came back it was just sitting there. Didn’t see anybody.”
The young man nodded. “What did it tell you?”
“It said I should show up that night, which I didn’t. I ain’t stupid. But I am curious.”
“What were you supposed to show up for?”
“Just said to take a look inside Gilbert House.”
The young man glanced at his companions. “Yeah, I got something similar this afternoon.”
Wayne’s gut had been slowly loosening, but now it suddenly tightened again. He’d planned to arrive this afternoon, two days after the job was scheduled, in hopes that nobody would be there when he looked around. Had his absence caused them to reschedule? Had he shown up just in time to interrupt the next tour?
“Mine didn’t say anything about a job, though,” said the young man. “In fact, it didn’t say anything really. It was more of an information packet than a letter.”
“Did yours offer you money?”
“Money?”
“Yeah. Mine said there was a thousand dollars in it for me if I came.”
“A thousand dollars?” exclaimed the blonde.
“Yours didn’t?”
“Why does he get a thousand dollars?” the dark-haired girl asked.
“This is weird,” said the young man, ignoring the girls. He looked as though he was concentrating hard, thinking everything over. “Are you going inside?”
“I was thinking about it.”
“Us too. Look, maybe we should stick together. Safety in numbers.”
“You implying it ain’t safe?”
“Might not be. I’ve noticed that things around here can get a little weird.” He stuck his hand out. “I’m Albert Cross.”
“Wayne Oakley.” He shook the offered hand. He had to reach up to do so since Albert was still standing on the concrete porch. So far, this guy seemed nice enough. And his friends were pretty. That never hurt.
“This is my girlfriend, Brandy Rudman, and our friend, Nicole Smart.”
“Nice to meet you.” Wayne nodded politely to the girls and then turned back to Albert. “Looks like you’ve already been inside. Anything there?”
“Nothing at all. Just dirt floors. We haven’t looked for the cellar door.”
“I thought the cellar door would lead to the basement.”
“I can’t tell that there is a basement.”
Wayne nodded. “So, what do we do?”
Albert turned and gazed out into the woods. “I guess we look for the door.”
Chapter 16
The cellar door wasn’t hard to find, although Albert had a feeling that they never would have seen it if they hadn’t been looking for it. It was a single slab of heavy rusted metal, hinged on one side to a concrete border set into the ground among a tangle of blackberry bushes and small trees. With eighty years of dirt and leaves settled over it, and grass and weeds growing atop it, they might never have found it anyway had it not already stood open.
They could smell the dank, cave-like smell that rose from the hole as soon as they approached it.
“Looks like it goes back toward the building,” Albert observed. “Hard to tell how far, though.”
Wayne bent over the hole and peered in with a flashlight he’d pulled from his back pocket. “Can’t tell. It’s some sort of tunnel.”
Albert looked back at the girls. “Well, are we ready?”
Brandy and Nicole both nodded.
Wayne started down the steps and shined his light ahead. “It goes back quite a ways.” He lifted his head and observed the walls of the building, then down into the tunnel again. “I think it might go all the way under the building, but I can’t really see.”
Albert stepped in behind him and looked into the passage. “You’re right.” He looked at Gilbert House, considering. “Maybe Gilbert wasn’t so stupid after all. I wonder if he hid something under there.”
“So what we’re looking for,” Wayne said, “is down there?”
“I guess so.”
Wayne looked up at him, curious. “Any idea what we’re looking for?”
“No clue.”
“Whatever it is, it’s worth a thousand dollars to somebody.”
“Not to us, apparently,” Nicole said, and Albert could not help but chuckle.
“I wish I knew who gave us these envelopes,” Albert said.
“How’d you get yours?”
“Some girl dropped it off this afternoon. She lives around here somewhere. Said someone just came up and taped it to her bedroom window in the middle of the night. It had my name and address written on it.”
Wayne frowned as he considered this. His envelope didn’t have his name on it. He’d assumed that whoever gave it to him didn’t know who he was. “Do you think when I didn’t show up, they tried you?”
Albert shook his head. “I guess it’s possible, but that doesn’t make much sense.”
“Why doesn’t it?”
“Because why would they try you first if…”
“If what?”
Albert shook his head. This was too confusing. What he was going to say was why would they (or he or she or it or whatever) try Wayne first if they already knew that he had been to the temple? Whoever sent him his envelope obviously knew that he was in possession of Wendell Gilbert’s pocket watch. It stood to reason that the person also knew about the box and the temple. Assuming that both were sent by the same person, why would that person offer Wayne a thousand dollars before sending him the newspaper clippings? “I just don’t get it. All your letter said was that you were supposed to go inside Gilbert House and look around?”
“Yeah, just look. A thousand dollars just to have a look around. I expected there to be something more than a few walls and a scary looking tunnel, though.”
“Yeah, me too. You said it gave you instructions on how to find the cellar door and how to get inside?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah.”
“That’s it?”
Wayne held up his hand and counted off on his fingers, “Have a look around, how to get inside to have a look around, and get a thousand dollars to look around. That was it. That’s why I didn’t come two nights ago. It sounded fishy.”
Albert nodded. He understood completely.
“What does yours say?”
“Nothing to me, specifically. It’s just a bunch of notes, like something out of somebody’s notebook. It just gave a description of Gilbert House and how to get inside. Like I said, it wasn’t a letter. Maybe we should compare the handwriting. See if they were written by the same person.”
“Won’t get much help there,” Wayne said. “Mine was typed.”
“I see.” Albert considered this for a moment. “So it was an actual letter?”
“Yeah. Here.” Wayne removed the envelope from his back pocket and handed it to him. Albert immediately opened it and began to examine it. It was indeed a letter, although informal. There was no greeting or signature. It began, “We don’t know each other, but I need your help,” and then went on to describe the exact location of Gilbert House and its cellar door. Unlike the information in his envelope, this letter actually referred to the place as “Gilbert House.”
“‘If you would be willing to go to this location tonight at seven o’clock, enter the building and look around,’” read Albert aloud, “‘You will be paid one thousand dollars in cash.’”
“That’s all there is,” Wayne said. “Not another word.”
Albert nodded. This was strange. Wayne’s letter was printed from a computer and written so as not to give any details about the writer. But it was very specific, telling him exactly what he should do when and where. On the other hand, the envelope he’d received from Andrea Prophett contained no structure at all. It was a sheet of printer paper, same as this one, but it was just a rough sketch of the building’s layout and a sprawling of notes. With the newspaper clippings, it looked like someone’s homemade file on Gilbert House. But it included that picture of Wendell Gilbert, which connected it straight to him and the box he’d obtained last year. But why? Why not send him a letter like Wayne’s? Even without the thousand dollar offer, he would have come to look around. Why pay someone who hadn’t been to the temple a thousand dollars when a strange sketch and a picture of an old man was all it took to lure him here. He handed the letter back to Wayne and asked, “Have you ever been underground? In any of the tunnels here in Briar Hills?”
Wayne shook his head. His expression told Albert he had no idea what the hell he was talking about. “No. Why would I?”
“Ever go anywhere strange? Do anything…different?”
“Like what?”
Albert sighed. “Never mind.” If he’d experienced anything like he and Brandy went through thirteen months ago, he was sure that Wayne would have understood. He looked down into the tunnel. “Underground again,” he said, and glanced at Brandy.
“Underground again,” she agreed, sounding somewhat less than ecstatic.
Finally, thought Nicole.
Brandy removed the three flashlights from Albert’s backpack and handed one to Nicole. “So who’s going first?” asked Albert.
“I will,” declared Wayne, and he descended the last few steps and walked deeper into the darkness.
“I’ll take the back, then,” said Albert. He turned and held a hand out for Nicole.
“Merci,” she said cheerfully.
He then did the same for Brandy, who thanked him not in French, but instead with a kiss, and then handed him the third flashlight.
Before following after them, Albert took one last look out into the trees. He still couldn’t shake that strange feeling that they were not alone out here.
Chapter 17
As soon as Albert had vanished into the mysterious hole that must have been Gilbert House’s secret cellar door, Andrea rose shakily to her feet. She’d been sitting too long, reluctant to move for fear of being detected again, and her legs were stiff beneath her. Keeping among the trees, she began to make her way toward the front of the building, moving closer to the cellar door through which Albert and his companions had descended.
She did not know the identity of the man who joined Albert and the girls any more than she knew the identity of the girls, and she’d been too far away to hear any of their conversation, but his presence intrigued her. Was this, perhaps, the mysterious person who left the envelope on her window screen? He was larger than Albert, built sort of like a football player, although from her distance she couldn’t tell if he was more muscle or fat. She also had been unable to get a good look at his face. All she could make out was his short, black hair.
She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the cellar door, fully aware that at any moment Albert or one of his nameless friends could pop his or her head up and take a look around.
She should have just left. She’d already suffered one close call. In fact, despite his ignorant act, it was very probable that Albert knew that she was here. She simply could not fathom how he could have missed her. But what would he have to gain from pretending not to see her?
She stepped out from behind a tree and began to walk toward the next, her mind still contemplating the strange encounter. She’d taken three steps when she realized that she was not alone.
A woman was standing in the woods near the cellar door. She was noticeably older than the others, very skinny, with long black hair and a hardened-looking face. She was staring at the hole into which Albert and the others had descended.
Andrea stood there for a moment, her heart again pounding in her chest. She was in the open, without even a bush to duck behind. The woman was not looking at her, but if she happened to turn and look in her direction there would be no hiding from her. Seeing no other solution, she quickly turned and scurried back to the previous tree.
The woman turned and looked, as though hearing the disturbance, but when Andrea peered back at her from around the tree, she was searching an area of the woods far to her right and showing no sign of having actually seen her.
She was either damned lucky or these people were completely ignoring her. Either way it was starting to freak her out.
With nowhere else to go, she leaned up against the tree and watched the woman who was watching the cellar door.
Chapter 18
The tunnel was about twenty yards in length, the same as the distance between the cellar door and Gilbert House’s nearest wall. At the end of the tunnel stood a heavy wooden door. Like the cellar door behind them, it was already open.
On the other side of the door, the tunnel continued forward well beyond the reach of their flashlights. A short distance ahead, a second passage branched off to the right. Wayne walked to where these two passages met and peered down each. There were doors lining both walls in each direction, most of them standing open.
“Well this looks familiar,” Albert observed. He shined his flashlight up at the ceiling. It was neatly tiled and perfectly ordinary, in spite of the fact that there was nothing above them but dirt and rock. He could almost believe that they were inside an ordinary building.
“It’s laid out like the walls outside,” Nicole realized.
“And we’re directly underneath those walls,” added Albert.
“So Gilbert House does have a basement,” marveled Brandy.
“Disguised,” Albert surmised. “No one would have even bothered looking for it. But why?” He walked to the nearest doorway and peered inside. The room was empty except for a radiator mounted against the outer wall. It contained no windows (obviously) and although there was a box for a light fixture, there was no light installed. The switches and outlets were also missing. The naked wires lay bunched in the open boxes in the walls, still waiting for the electrician after all these decades.
The room itself was the same size as those framed by the naked walls above them, tiny and claustrophobic and only a little smaller than some of the rooms still
in use on the campus.
Albert and the girls were in the hallway to the right, so Wayne walked straight ahead, shining his light into the doorways on his left. “There’re no light fixtures,” he reported.
“It’s not finished,” Albert deduced, looking at the wires that protruded from the box in the ceiling of the little room. He turned and looked up at the ceiling of the hallway. More empty boxes were there.
“Not finished?” asked Wayne. “Or stolen?”
“It doesn’t look like they were ever installed,” Albert replied. “These wires haven’t been stripped yet.”
Wayne replied with an acknowledging grunt, a little embarrassed not to have realized that himself.
“Besides,” added Albert. “I think they’d have ripped out the wiring, too.”
“That’s true,” Wayne agreed. He wondered how much all the copper down here might be worth.
“What do you suppose this place is? …or was?”
“It was supposed to be a college dorm. That’s what Gilbert was paid to build.” He continued down the hallway, farther away from Wayne. Brandy and Nicole remained close behind him.
Thus far, Gilbert House had surprised him. There was much more than just useless concrete walls. But from the looks of things, it did not have much more to offer than what they were seeing now. Gilbert must have been chased out before he could complete whatever he was up to.
But he certainly didn’t spend all that money here… And if he was just planning on stealing the money, why go to all the trouble to build only the basement? What was he up to?
In the adjoining hallway, Wayne peered into the first door on the right and found a restroom. He was less concerned with why this Gilbert guy built the place than why someone wanted them to nose around down here. There had to be something here somewhere. “I wish I knew what we were looking for,” he said, but when he looked back, he saw that the others had gone the other way. He immediately felt a childish anxiousness creep through him. It was silly, but the thought of being alone down here was very unnerving.