by Loretta Ross
_____
“We saw this when we were here before. Randy wanted to try to shimmy up it and I had to smack him down. That boy had more sense of adventure than self-preservation sometimes.”
Death’s chest hurt. He didn’t know why—if it was the dank air in his bad lungs, strain from overexertion, crushing disappointment, or the weight of old memories, long forgotten and suddenly too vivid. He felt lightheaded, disconnected from these surreal surroundings. It was as if he were two different versions of himself, the carefree teenager who had explored these caves with his little brother and the worn-down ex-Marine, relying on the woman beside him much more than she probably knew.
“It’s the central support of a freestanding spiral staircase,” Wren said, bemused. “It looks like a spine. Or a giant corkscrew.”
The rusting, rotting iron pole twisted up through a hole in the ceiling, climbing a brick-lined, cylindrical shaft. Here and there, the fin of a stair support remained, though all of the actual steps were gone.
“Why is there a freestanding spiral staircase here? It couldn’t have been a very pleasant way to go in and out. You can see how tight the spiral was and how tiny the steps were. And that shaft it runs through looks positively claustrophobic.”
“This chamber was the Lemp family’s private theater. They had all the stalactites and stalagmites knocked down and replaced them with a stage and fancy decorations made of plaster and wire.” He pointed out a heap of trash in the middle of the floor. “The damp down here hasn’t been kind to it. Anyway, from what I’ve read, the stage was tiny and there was no room backstage for the actors to change costumes between scenes. This staircase was here for them. Any time they had a costume change, they’d have to climb 34 feet to a dressing room on the surface, change as fast as they could, and then climb back down.”
It was two and a half hours into the four-hour window Death had allowed for them to explore and they’d covered the whole of the caverns. It had been a strange journey, here where mankind had trespassed and faltered and gone. Nature was slowly reclaiming its own, but the scars of human interlopers remained.
The floors were mostly paved, worn steps and rusted ladders leading up and down when the elevation changed. The walls were sometimes rock and sometimes masonry. Moldy plaster and the sharp scent of limestone gave the air a musty, aged feel. The only illumination was what they brought in with them, and the circles of their lights fell randomly on stone and old brick and iron; a decaying playground within a living cave.
They’d waded through shallow water where pale little fish swam.Water dripped in the distance somewhere and the high sound of liquid droplets echoed and carried, but the softer sounds of their voices and footfalls died unnaturally in the dank atmosphere.
Death found himself imagining the passages thronged with the lost and disillusioned ghosts of the old brewers, seeking and mourning their erstwhile splendor. Randy passed among them, his gaze distant, his face pale and his eyes as cold and dead as they had been in the autopsy photo.
They found the point nearest the Einstadt Brewery—almost underneath it, in fact—and then again a place where the caverns passed by within a few yards of the Einstadt mansion. They’d marked them on the map and searched the areas thoroughly, but there was nothing in either location to suggest there was or ever had been another passage. Wren lay a small, gloved hand on his right arm.
“Are you okay?”
Death responded by reaching his left hand over to take hers, anchoring himself to her. She was his rock, his light in the darkness, his hope for the future, and his reason to go on. Though he hid it as best he could, Death sometimes suffered from bouts of depression. It would be as if he’d hit a wall, and the depths to which his spirit sank frightened him. He wondered, sometimes, how he’d weathered his losses before he met Wren, and if he’d still be around had she not come into his life when she did.
“Why don’t we rest here a bit?” she suggested. “We’re not that far from the entrance. We’ve got plenty of time to get back and delete your email before Cap shows up with the cavalry.”
The ache in his chest and his difficulty in speaking was telling him he needed to slow down. They found a relatively dry spot on a boulder that had fallen from the wall and snuggled close together. Death dug through his pack and brought out water bottles and protein bars and they ate and drank in silence. By the time the water was gone, he was feeling better. He snuck an arm around Wren’s waist and gave her a squeeze.
“You wanna make out?”
She giggled, an incongruously bright sound in the oppressive atmosphere, and the cave warped it and tossed it back as a creepy, demented echo. “It is a terribly romantic spot,” she agreed, “but I don’t think I’d want to get naked down here. It feels too much like the walls are watching us.”
“The walls,” he said, “or something creeping along the walls. Low to the floor, maybe, and invisible in the darkness.”
She half shrieked and buried her face in his chest and Death laughed. “I have got to find a Tunnel of Love to take you through!”
“Very funny, Smart Guy! I think, if you don’t mind, I’m ready to leave now.”
They stuffed their wrappers and empty water bottles back in Death’s backpack and headed for the entrance they’d used. Death was almost back to the top of the long steps that led to the octagonal room when he realized Wren was no longer following him. He turned back and found her frozen on the stairs, her gaze fixed on a point beyond and above his left shoulder.
“Oh, that’s cute,” he said. “You’re trying to make me think there’s a monster or something creeping up behind me. It won’t work, you know. I have nerves of steel.” His voice was steady, but, in reality, he was fighting not to spin around and reach for the gun that wasn’t at his hip.
“What?” She blinked. “Oh, no. No, I wasn’t. That would have been funny, though. No, Death. Look! There’s an opening in the wall behind you.”
He turned and looked where she was pointing. On the right wall, not quite 90 degrees from the entrance, an arched doorway built of brick broke the surface of the stone about five feet above floor level. A natural stone outcropping had hidden it from them as they entered. Even now, he wouldn’t have noticed it had Wren not pointed it out. “I stumbled a little,” she said, “and my light just happened to hit it.”
They climbed the last few stairs and crossed to the opening. Holes in the walls dripped red-orange streaks where iron bolts had rusted away. The passage had worked-stone walls, a paved floor, and a brick ceiling.
“There must have been steps here,” Death said. “Probably somebody stole them for scrap.” He shone his light into the tunnel. On the back wall, directly across from the opening, something had once been painted in bright colors. Most of the picture had worn and flaked away, but you could still see a few details, changes in the wall’s pigmentation, scabs of paint clinging here and there. He picked out what might have been part of an ornate capitol “E,” the curve of an “S,” and a “dt” at the end.
“Do you see what I see?” he asked. “Does that say what I think it says?”
“I think it says ‘Einstadt’,” Wren said at once. “I think it was their logo.”
_____
The boulder was heavy, but Death had gone out into the gully—it was raining lightly again, he reported—and brought back a stout tree limb to serve as a lever. They brought a smaller rock over for a fulcrum, wedged the end of the limb under the side of the boulder, and Wren clung to the lever and dangled her whole body weight from the end. Death added his not-inconsiderable muscle to the effort and the large rock rolled across the paved floor and came to rest against the wall under the Einstadt doorway.
Wren climbed up first, then turned back to help her Marine. He was winded from the effort. She had already been worried about him. There was a faint wheeze to his breathing and she couldn’t tell if his pallor was real or a product of the odd lighting. Finding this doorway had mentally and emotionally recharged hi
m, but he was still physically exhausted. She was afraid the combination didn’t bode well.
The passage they had found was paved, with worked-stone walls and brick arches every ten feet or so supporting the ceiling. There was nothing natural about this tunnel. Every inch of it had been dug out by man. “Why would they have a tunnel leading all the way over here?” she asked, as much to slow Death down a little as because she was curious.
“I don’t know. And it looks like it was a fairly elaborate doorway into the octagonal room. I wouldn’t think you’d paint a fancy logo on the wall if no one was going to see it but the hired help. Hell,” he shrugged, “maybe I was wrong about that being a service entrance. It seems really inaccessible to me, but maybe back in the 1920s, before it got all overgrown, it was more obvious.”
“We can research it after we’re done here. We can look online and there’s probably a library somewhere that’ll be open tomorrow. Heck, even the Rives County Library is open on Saturday until five.”
Death chuckled a little at that but didn’t answer. His laugh sounded heavy and the wheeze in his breathing was worse. Wren tugged at his arm to stop him and pulled the backpack away from him. “Sorry, sweetheart. You need something?” he asked.
“Yeah. I need to carry this for awhile and you need to slow down. Here,” she took a bottle of water from the pack and offered it to him. “Drink a little of this and get your breath back. We’re not doing a marathon. Did you want to get out the compass and range finder and map this?”
He paused to take a drink and leaned against the wall, letting his breathing even out. “Nah. We can on the way out, if it looks like we need to, but so far there aren’t any offshoots. I just want to see where this leads us. This is a well-built tunnel, did you notice? It’s not wet, for one thing, even though it’s raining outside. That tells me there probably aren’t any open exits to the outside.”
“I’d noticed it was drier up here,” Wren said. “I hadn’t thought about what that meant, though.”
When Death was recovered to Wren’s satisfaction, they went on. The tunnel ran in a straight line, heading southeast. After some twenty minutes of walking they came to a T. The tunnel they intersected was built in the same manner as the one they had been following. To the right, it disappeared into darkness beyond the reach of their headlamps. To the left, it went only ten or fifteen feet before ending at the remains of a steel door in a concrete wall.
The rusted and barely legible “Keep Out” sign on the wall was no longer necessary. The ceiling beyond had fallen and the passage that direction was filled with rubble and impassible.
“Take that as a reminder,” Death said. “We need to step lightly and keep an eye out for any place that looks unstable. This is well-built, but it’s still man-made and probably a lot less secure than the caves below.”
Walking more gingerly, they followed the path to the right. It led on for about a hundred yards and ended in another doorway. A rusted door lay to one side, another sign visible on it. This one said, “Authorized personnel only.” Beyond the door the passage became a landing where two staircases met. The one coming in from the right was wide and broad and made of concrete. The rise was shallow and a ramp almost as wide as the steps climbed beside it.
“A freight entrance,” Wren surmised. “They brought cases of beer this way on dollies to go down to the biergartens, or whatever else was going on down in the caves.”
The other staircase was narrower and steeper, built of intricately laid brick with wrought-iron railings still attached to the walls on either side. It was still wide enough for them to climb side-by-side. Holding hands, they followed it up slowly. With ten or fifteen steps left to go, they could see the way was blocked. The staircase’s exit had been covered over by a square of ancient plywood.
twelve
“Take your time and just call out if you see anybody who looks familiar.”
Death turned the big pages slowly. “Not seeing him so far.”
He and Wren had come into the police station at the request of the detective investigating the attempted convenience store robbery. “I know it’s Saturday morning,” he’d said apologetically. “Crime fighters don’t get weekends, I’m afraid.”
Wren, sitting beside Death and peeking over his shoulder, took a sip of coffee from a cardboard cup and shuddered. “I always thought it was a joke about cops and bad coffee.”
The middle-aged detective sitting across the desk from them grinned at her good-naturedly. “I wish it was, believe me!” He fiddled with his own coffee in a ceramic mug with a cartoon cop on it. “So, I gotta ask, you’re Lieutenant Bogart’s kid, aren’t you?”
Death glanced up, gave him a faint grin. “That’d be me.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“Did you know Dad?”
“Not personally, no, but I’ve heard stories. Your mustard-as-a-weapon thing makes a lot more sense now.” He turned his attention to Wren. “You know, his dad took out a fleeing gunman with a horseshoe once.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. How’d he do that?”
Death grinned to himself but let the detective tell the story. “Guy had been stalking his ex-wife.”
“Nasty piece of work,” Death interjected. “I don’t know why women get involved with creeps like that in the first place, but—”
“She had a restraining order against him, but he showed up anyway and forced his way into the house. She ran out the back and into a park across the street. He was chasing her, holding the gun but not firing it, when this guy’s dad shows up. The lieutenant wanted to take him down as quickly as possible, before he did shoot somebody, but the park was crowded and he didn’t want to fire his own weapon if he could avoid it. He was chasing along, just a few yards behind the guy, and the chase led through a game of horseshoes, so he snatched up a horseshoe and nailed the guy with it. Three-point ringer, right to the head.”
“Dad was big on improvising,” Death said.
“And it seems he passed it along to you. Hey, listen, I wanted to tell you I was really sorry to hear about your brother last year.”
“Thanks.” Not really wanting to have this conversation again, Death changed the subject. “So, were you able to trace this guy’s gun?”
“It was a dead end. Registered to a woman named Elena Vasquez, a night manager at a fast-food joint. Reported stolen the night before your little adventure. Someone broke into her car when it was in the back parking lot where she worked, stole the gun and her stereo and a twenty dollar bill she kept hidden in the console. No witnesses, no cameras in the area, no fingerprints but her and her sister-in-law.”
_____
The Grey house had an honest-to-God elevator.
It was an old-fashioned affair, an elaborate, gilded cage no more than four feet square but tall enough to allow for a miniature chandelier to hang from the ceiling. The floor was polished hardwood parquet and the walls of the elevator shaft had been painted a rich, dark red. Ceramic buttons, yellowed with age, were set in a polished brass plate beside the door. S, G, 2, 3, 4.
Since he’d started spitting out the pills, Andrew’s level of lucidity had improved daily. Paranoia kept him from revealing that to Alaina or the doctor, or even to the maid. A little voice in his head pointed out to him that paranoia could be a side effect of not taking his medicine, and even be a part of the reason he needed it. To that, another voice replied that, if he were being drugged unnecessarily, paranoia was probably a reasonable response.
Affecting a harmless, bumbling demeanor, he was using his improved balance and stamina to explore the house. The first thing he’d determined was that it was a fire trap. There were two staircases—an elaborate grand stair that coiled down to come out in the foyer and a narrow, steep servants’ stair that led to the kitchen—but they rose within a few feet of one another. A fire in that part of the house would cut them both off, and he’d seen no sign of fire escapes, though the old building had been retrofitted with a very good fire-suppr
ession system.
Leaning heavily on his cane, Andrew hobbled into the elevator and eased the cage door closed behind him. He still tired easily. Propping himself on the wall next to the control panel, he chose button number four first. The cage glided up, the shaft wall sliding past a few inches from his shoulder, slowly passed an opening into an enormous, elaborate ballroom and came to a stop in a narrow hall.
He opened the door and looked both ways, but didn’t step out. The room across from the elevator stood ajar. It was a tiny, spartan bedroom. The mattress on the twin bed was bare, the mirror above the plain little dresser speckled with age.
Servants’ quarters, he thought, for live-in servants they no longer had. A heavy coating of dust on the floor testified that this part of the house was not in use. It was cramped and stark, with the ceiling only inches above his six-foot frame and the walls at either end of the hallway slanting to follow the gables. He ducked back into the elevator and considered the control panel again.
He knew now what was on three—a ballroom—and he’d spent what seemed like forever confined to two. “G” was undoubtedly the ground floor, where he was apt to be intercepted and sent back up to bed. That left “S,” which he was guessing stood for “sub-basement” or “subterranean” or “sub-something.”
“Let’s see what’s in the basement,” he said to himself and punched the button.
Alaina was in the parlor on the ground floor, watching TV, doing her nails, and talking on her phone. He could see her through the open doorway, off to his left, as the elevator cage descended. He held his breath, but she didn’t look up and notice him. The light dimmed as he dropped lower and he sighed and wondered where he could get a flashlight, reasoning that the basement would be dark.
It was in deep shadow when he came to a stop, but there were windows along the top of the wall, long, horizontal slits heavily fortified with burglar bars. He could see the lower branches of shrubbery through them, but they let in enough light that the blackness wasn’t absolute.