by Brian Harmon
In the other hallway, Albert was studying the layout of the basement. It wasn’t exactly like the layout above them. There was no large common room, only more claustrophobic living quarters. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he called back to Wayne. “Remember that both doors were open when we came in. If there was something down here it might be gone now.
Wayne did not respond. He stepped into the restroom and looked around. It was surprisingly big, much larger than the other rooms. All the plumbing fixtures and stalls seemed to be present, but otherwise the room was as empty as the others. There were still no lights, and the mirrors were also missing. He walked to the back of the room, peering into each stall and toilet and sink and urinal. But there was nothing here but dry porcelain.
He left the restroom and continued down the dark hallway, still feeling that childish fear nagging at the back of his mind, but determined not to let it show.
The next room was a utility room of some sort, containing the building’s fuse box and boiler. He stood for a moment, contemplating the wastefulness of all this unused equipment simply left here all these years to rot. It was undeniably strange, but somehow he doubted that this was what interested his mystery informant. Albert was right, he realized. Somebody had been down here recently. The thought that he might never know what was so special about this place disappointed him greatly, but by making damn sure there was nothing down here, he would at least have no reason to ever return.
He continued down the hallway, peering into one room after another.
“What do you think about that guy?” Brandy whispered when they were far enough down the hall that her words could not reach Wayne. “Do you trust him?”
Albert shrugged. “I don’t know. He said he got a mysterious envelope. So did we. Maybe he fits in somehow.” He stepped into the next room and swept the empty walls with his light. It was identical to the rest.
“Do you think he had something to do with us getting that envelope?”
“If so, he’s a damn good actor. I get a really strong impression that he doesn’t trust us.”
“But he could be acting, right?” Brandy pushed.
“Of course.” He stepped out into the hallway again and realized that Nicole had lagged behind. She was standing in the doorway to one of the rooms, examining the blank and windowless concrete walls. “Be careful,” he called back to her. “Places like this are perfect for copperheads.”
She did not respond, but he saw her stiffen and knew that she had heard him.
Next to him, Brandy shivered as though suddenly cold. She did not like the idea of finding snakes down here in this darkness, but the true source of this shiver was the thought of another snake, the kind with rattles on their tails, and of how those things down in the temple had sounded a little like that. This place reminded her too much of that place now that she thought about it.
Albert kept moving. A few yards ahead of them, the hallway made a ninety-degree turn to the left, completing the U-shape that he’d observed outside. As he peered down this third hallway, he heard footsteps behind him and the approaching light told him that Nicole had decided not to explore alone anymore, perhaps because her thoughts were now poisoned with the possibility of finding a nest of snakes among the shadows.
The existence of this place was at first surprising, but it grew steadily simpler as they explored. It was actually a fairly mundane structure, when he thought about it. It was understandably claustrophobic, almost prison-like, despite its wide hallways, but other than its unexpected existence, it was hardly anything out of the ordinary. It was just an abandoned and forgotten basement beneath a disguise of false ruins. In fact, it even explained the lack of large trees growing within its walls. Clearly, there wasn’t room in the soil for the deep roots of a full-grown tree.
And yet there was also something very wrong about this place…
On the other side of Gilbert House’s basement, Wayne peered into the last room and then turned and looked back the way he’d come. He was standing at the very end of the hallway with his back to a wall. He could no longer see the other flashlights and as he stared back toward the distant glow of sunlight that drifted down through the cellar door, he felt as though the temperature of his blood had dropped several degrees. There was something ominous about the dark doorways that flanked the way back out of this strange, cave-like place. He shivered at the thought of all those rooms, dark and empty. Despite having examined each one of them personally on his way down, he couldn’t help but imagine things lurking in them, waiting for him to pass by, and he felt a flash of anger with himself for feeling this way. It was only darkness, after all, and he was certainly not afraid of the dark.
He started back up the hallway, retracing his steps. He would catch up with Albert and the girls and see if they’d found anything.
A short distance down the third hallway, Albert’s flashlight fell upon a stack of doors on the floor ahead of them. There were also several boxes of hardware. A little farther ahead, he could see where the doors were missing from their frames.
This was the point at which the construction was interrupted. Albert wondered what happened. Did Gilbert simply fire his entire crew on the spot when he discovered the university was onto him? For that matter, how was it that his crew didn’t tell anybody about the basement? Were they all in on it? Surely Gilbert hadn’t done all this alone. Maybe he took them with him. Maybe they all just dropped what they were doing and left.
The doors and hardware had to be worth something. Yet no one had been down here to remove them, which supported the theory that no one knew the basement existed. At the very least, the university would have wanted to salvage every available penny, he would think.
Albert peered into the first room on the left. This was a shower room, not unlike those in the Cube (yet another reason he’d spent the extra money to live in Lumey, with its semi-private bathrooms).
There were boxes of light fixtures lying on the floor, and a galvanized bucket filled with switch and outlet covers. Half of the lights were installed in this room. A six-foot ladder was standing in the middle of the floor, directly beneath a naked light fixture with no cover.
Why wouldn’t the electrician have put the cover on before quitting? Did Gilbert just walk into this room and fire him on the spot?
“Do you think this stuff is what someone was interested in?” asked Nicole, pointing with her flashlight at the supplies. “Is that why they wanted us to come down here?”
“I doubt it,” replied Albert. “This stuff is all from nineteen twenty-seven. I don’t imagine the entire lot would be worth a thousand dollars. Besides, I don’t see why anybody would to go to all this trouble. Why not just come down here and get it?”
“Find anything?” Wayne’s voice drifted to them from the previous hallway.
“Some supplies,” Albert replied, “but I don’t think it’s what we’re looking for.” He turned and started down the hallway again as Wayne turned the corner behind them.
“What I want to know,” said Nicole in a hushed voice, “is what this place has to do with the temple.”
“I don’t know,” Albert replied. “Maybe nothing. This place is strange, but it’s not really that strange.”
Nicole nodded. He was right. It was weird, but it wasn’t unimaginable. It was just a basement without a building on top of it. There were probably hundreds of places like this, places nobody knew about, places nobody really cared about. So far, she could not see any real connection between Gilbert House and Albert and Brandy’s Temple of the Blind.
“But…”
Brandy and Nicole both looked at Albert. “But what?” asked Brandy.
Albert glanced back at the shower room doorway, through which Wayne’s light was glowing. He’d gone in to poke around the equipment stored there. “Isn’t it odd that there aren’t spider webs everywhere?”
Both Brandy and Nicole turned around and shined their lights across the empty ceiling and walls. He was right. The
floors and walls weren’t as clean and pristine as the stone in the temple, but there appeared to be not a single spider in this place.
“There are no bugs at all. And this should be a perfect place for rats, too. And bats. Just about anything nocturnal, really. But there’s nothing.”
Brandy’s eyes lifted to the ceiling. She hadn’t even considered the idea of finding bats down here, but it did seem like a perfect place for them, now that he mentioned it. And she hated bats.
“Well the door probably hasn’t been open too long,” suggested Nicole. “Maybe it was closed too tight for anything to get in.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’d buy that for rats and raccoons and even bats, but I really doubt if that cellar door could keep out bugs.”
“Well what does it mean, then?” asked Brandy.
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “Maybe we’ll find out.” He turned and started forward again, farther down the hallway and farther from the cellar door behind them. “What I do know is that the temple didn’t have any spiders either.”
Albert peered into each of the rooms as he passed them. The light fixtures were all installed in here, as were the switches and outlets. Clearly, the electrician had been working in the opposite direction as the carpenter who was hanging the doors and neither ever finished his work.
“Hey, what’s that?” asked Nicole.
Albert had already seen it. Something was in the darkness up ahead. A few more steps revealed a large stack of cinderblocks standing against the wall. A little farther down, more were stacked against the opposite wall, narrowing the passage considerably. They moved closer, their flashlights piercing the looming darkness between the bricks, until they reached the end of the hallway, where a door materialized from the shadows.
Albert approached the door, his flashlight gliding across every surface, meticulously searching the scene. These bricks had been moved recently. He could see where the last few had been dragged across the concrete floor, as if whoever moved them had grown tired by the time he reached the bottom of the stack. Albert studied these marks, mentally tracing the origin points of each of those bricks. It wasn’t a difficult task. It was fairly obvious that this was once a neatly stacked wall. But it was the whole of the picture that bothered him. There were enough bricks here to build a wall large enough to completely block this hallway at least four times, and this four-brick-deep wall had been built right up against this door.
Whoever beat them into Gilbert House’s basement had found an imposing barrier waiting for them at this far corner, and that person (or persons) had meticulously moved each brick by hand in order to discover the hidden door behind it. Therefore, whatever well-guarded secret must have lain behind that door certainly had already been discovered.
But Albert wasn’t thinking about missed treasures. His thoughts kept traveling back to the temple and the secrets that could never be taken from its dark chambers. He did not immediately think of amazing riches when he saw the lengths to which someone went to seal this door, but of unspeakable horrors meant to remain locked inside.
But this was not the Temple of the Blind. This was Gilbert House. They were still on university soil.
“This was all stacked in front of the door, wasn’t it?” asked Brandy.
Albert nodded. “Someone already moved them. And they didn’t put them back when they were done.”
“So they took whatever was here?” Nicole asked.
“Or there was nothing here to take,” Albert replied. “They certainly didn’t feel the need to barricade it back in when they left.” He reached out and touched the doorknob, but then withdrew his hands as something caught his attention. “Look at these scratches.”
There were dents and scars in the otherwise smooth surface of the door, all of them along the edge where it opened. “It looks like someone tried to force it open from the inside.”
“Oh my god!” exclaimed Brandy. “Do you think someone was locked in there?”
“I sure hope not,” Albert replied.
“You don’t think there’s a body behind it, do you?” asked Nicole.
“If so,” said Albert, “then somebody else has already found it. Whoever was here before us moved all these bricks and looked inside.”
Brandy hugged herself fiercely against a chill. “Oh god…” she sighed.
Albert saw the light brighten from behind him and realized that Wayne had finished his survey of the shower room. “Did you find something?” he called.
“I think so,” Albert confirmed.
Wayne hurried down the hallway toward them. “What is it?”
“Hopefully nothing,” whispered Nicole.
Albert took a deep breath and grasped the doorknob. After hesitating another moment, he pulled the door open and braced himself for whatever horrors might await him beyond.
There was no rotting corpse. But he did not have a chance to be thankful. He shined his light through the doorway and was struck so profoundly by what he saw that he could hardly think anything at all. It defied everything he knew to be true.
Brandy leaned in next to him, also bracing herself against the nightmarish vision of human cruelty she had prepared herself to see, but when she saw what was there, the tenseness left her at once. “What the fuck?”
“That’s not possible,” said Nicole as she peered in over Albert’s shoulder. Immediately her eyes were drawn upward. “Not possible,” she repeated.
“It must be a trick,” Brandy agreed. “An optical illusion?”
Albert shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What?” Wayne was trying to see around them, but could not. “What did you find?”
Albert took a step forward, through the doorway. “Wayne, what do you make of this?”
Wayne pushed his way between Brandy and Nicole, trying to get a good look at what had captured their attention. His expression fell into utter disbelief in an instant. It was simply too far beyond comprehension. “Stairs?” he stammered. He looked at Albert. “Where can they go?”
“Nowhere,” exclaimed Albert. He walked up to the steps and shined his light up into the stairwell above him. “It’s impossible. These can’t go up to the ruins above us. There’s nowhere for it to go up there.”
Wayne stepped up beside him and stared into the shadows above.
“Even taking into account the slope of the hill that Gilbert House is built on…” Albert began, “…and any possible misconception about how far underground we’ve gone… Even cleverly concealing a room somehow in the walls of the ruins above us…” He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to focus his mind. “…you can’t possibly hide…” He shook his head and pointed his flashlight up the stairwell again. “I mean how far up does that go?”
“At least five stories,” Wayne replied.
“Five stories,” Albert repeated.
“Where the fuck does it go?” Nicole asked.
Albert lowered the flashlight and focused it on the first landing above them. There was another cinderblock wall there, not unlike the one that must have stood on the other side of the basement door. He climbed the steps toward it, studying it. Unlike the other wall, this one could not be taken down by hand. It was assembled with mortar, and in what appeared to have been a hell of a hurry. The bricks were not straight. The mortar was unevenly applied. And when it was finished, it looked as if the builder had taken the remaining mortar and smeared handfuls of it across the surface. Thick globs of it were dried on the landing.
“What’s up with that?” Wayne asked, gesturing at the wall at which Albert was staring.
Albert did not know, but he thought of the cinderblocks that had been blocking the doorway into the basement and could not help but feel that this was all very wrong somehow.
He looked up into the darkness above. “Let’s see what’s on the first floor.”
Chapter 19
The first floor landing opened into a long hallway identical to the one below it in the basement. Every fiber o
f his being told Albert that there was absolutely no way this could exist, there simply wasn’t any room for it. Perhaps if there was only this one floor, he could somehow convince himself that it was a very clever optical illusion, but there were at least four more levels just like this one above him. And yet here he stood.
The temple, he thought. Remember the temple. Impossible things had been in the temple, things he never would have believed if he hadn’t experienced them for himself.
He took a deep breath and reevaluated his situation. Not everything about this was senseless. It answered the question of what happened to the money Wendell Gilbert was given to build the dormitory: He clearly spent every penny of it, perhaps more. It also proved that there was something special about Gilbert House, something beyond the existence of an empty basement beneath the ruins, something that might easily interest someone with a thousand dollars to give away. Most of all, however, it suggested a connection of some sort between Gilbert House and the Temple of the Blind, even if that connection was nothing more than the fact that both were beyond comprehension. After all, the statues inside the sex room had also been “impossible” when he and Brandy first encountered them. The creepy, sewer-dwelling man with no eyes could only have been science fiction except that Albert had personally accepted a gift of gold from his cold, bony hands.
Even this small fragment of logic was enough to help him gather his wits and focus on the task before him.
He stepped into the first hallway of Gilbert House’s first floor, probing the darkness with his light. Unlike those below them, this hallway had been finished. Each doorway was fitted with a door. Its walls were nicely trimmed and painted a soft, creamy shade of either white or pale yellow (it was impossible to tell which with just his flashlight, which cast a rather yellowish light). The floor here was tiled, as opposed to the stark concrete floors of the basement, and all of the lighting was installed.