Deathbed (Dovetail Cove, 1971) (Dovetail Cove Series)

by Jason McIntyre

  But it must be ten or eleven a.m. by now. I couldn’t see my watch in the dark and couldn’t remember what time I’d gone for coffee with Jamie at the gate. That meant they might have been working on this ‘minor’ spill for five or six hours by now. Maybe it got worse. Maybe they realized how much worse it really was and that’s when they decided on a lockdown.

  It was moments like these I realized that I was really far down on the food chain. Truth was, I didn’t have Clue One about this incident.

  7.

  It was much longer than an hour. I checked my watch a few minutes after we’d heard the broadcast. In part because I got easily bored and sitting in the dark on my tingling ass on the floor of the freight elevator was agonizing, even after a few minutes. And in part because I wanted to see how close to an hour this Frank Moort feller could keep this.

  I didn’t think it would be under an hour. And I was right. I usually am.

  It was quarter to eleven when I’d checked and I didn’t fuss with my torch again after that. It was ten past one the next time I checked.

  And in between, I’m pretty sure I nodded off.

  I dreamed that I’d gotten a call in my little hole-in-the wall office on Seven. It was my old boss back in Kingston and he was offering me my old job back. At the same pay I was making out here on Deus Isle. But I was sick and tired of the Drumheller-drama. It was like one of those awful daytime soap operas. Back and forth. Him doing something nasty to me, me returning the favour.

  I wasn’t sure I had the chops to hold his feet to the fire over the lies he’d told. I had my doubts that it would work as I’d envisioned and getting a chance to slink out and head back to my crew in Kingston was appealing. I was so convinced of my dream’s reality, I took the job right quick, with only a little regret that I’d never become the king of the island as I’d planned.

  But of course, it was a dream. I woke up in the dark, sweating and panting. Ketwood was saying my name, Munn, hey Munn. Over and over again. I rubbed the back of my forearm against my burning-hot face and it came back slick with sweat.

  “What,” I finally said, out of breath as though I’d been marathon-running in that dream. In a way, I had been—dashing to get away from here.

  “Fan’s gone out,” Ketwood said with disembodied voice. “Power’s out all over I bet.”

  I fumbled for my torch and unclicked it from my belt. I turned it on and shone it up, searching for the vent’s mouth in the ceiling. I really was roasting. And I couldn’t feel the push of air I had before. I felt like I was sitting in a pile of my own fetid muck.

  I cocked an ear and strained to hear. Silence.

  I clicked on the walkie. Only static. I clicked and clicked on the trigger. “Moort,” I said into the mic, getting it wet with my own sweaty upper lip. “This is Munn down on Seven. Moort, if you can read me, come in. Come in, Moort.”

  I tried a few times but only got static in return.

  “How’s the kid?” I asked and shone my torch over to the Ketwoods. Both of them had pulled off their shirts. Both men were pasty with farmer tans. Ketwood Senior had a hairy paunch, fine tendrils that looked the same colour as his son’s mop of hair.

  The boy lay fully on his back on the floor of the freight elevator, not moving.

  8.

  We needed to get out. With no ventilation and no power, the elevator was going nowhere. Ketwood said, “He’s breathing but barely.”

  “We can’t sit around and wait for help,” I said. I pondered for a moment. “We can’t go up...” With my torchlight, I showed Ketwood the ceiling’s access hatch next to the motionless ventilation fan. He didn’t say anything, I guess waiting for me to explain. “If we’re in lockdown, my punch card won’t work in any of the doors. We’d be sealed in. Same boat we’re in now.”

  “And if there’s no power down here,” Ketwood said. “You can bet your boots there won’t be any up there. Not yet.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, thinking and letting the light of my torch flow all over the walls as if it would train on a sign that told me exactly what to do. “Wouldn’t even be able to get out of the shaft. Just be hanging there like monkeys. That’d be pretty hard with your boy.”

  “The door locks don’t use power?”

  I shook my head but realized he couldn’t see my gesture. “Nope. Pneumatic or some such. They work, even without power. Or maybe they have their own batteries.”

  “So...?” Ketwood asked. “What are our options?”

  “We only have one more,” I told him in the dark. I pointed my torch down at the floor. “There’s a hatch in the floor. Once you get past ten, the access panels don’t need punch cards. I guess they made it thinking that if you had clearance for down below, you had clearance for the whole shebang.”

  “Yeah,” Ketwood said. He was rubbing his face like he’d not had sleep in three days and nights. “But then what? We’d be trapped down there. Unless we tunnel to China.”

  “Not China,” I said, getting up to knees with a grunt. I crawled over to the floor hatch and shone my light on the screws to see what type of screwhead they had.

  “There are tunnels down there,” I said. “But they go to the ocean.”

  Of course that’s the screwdriver Ketwood had left in the utility room. “Flathead,” I said.

  9.

  We used an American dime from Ketwood’s leather change purse to open the corner screws in the floor hatch. An immediate rush of air met us when we lifted the panel. But it was no cooler than the air in here. Still, it was a relief. I climbed down first and offered to take the boy when Ketwood handed him down to me.

  The boy groaned when I took him over my shoulder. He was a hefty kid, despite his gangly build. I nearly dropped him but got a solid hold on him. He hung over my shoulder like a wet towel. He was breathing but restless.

  I was holding my flashlight in my mouth and it followed me as I looked up into the hatch. Ketwood was following me down. He took a perch a little above me on the ladder that was bolted to the inside of the elevator shaft. He reached down and took his son’s arms and hoisted him up to keep him at his chest. It looked like no effort for the man who was older than me and in worse shape. I guess you grow into being a father, mentally and physically.

  With my new free hand, I took the torch from my mouth to give my jaw a break. “Follow me down,” I said. “It’s three and a half to Ten. If we can’t get in there, we go to the next.”

  I put my torch back in my mouth and aimed my face downward so I could shine it on each rung of the iron ladder. Wordlessly, Ketwood started down after me. As we went, I grunted against the heat and the effort. I could only imagine how tough it was for Ketwood, hoisting his limp ten-year-old. He didn’t complain, only huffed and puffed heavily above me.

  We didn’t get in at Ten. Nor at Eleven. It was the same story all the way down to the eighteenth floor. The insides of the doors had stencilling in white paint so it was easy to keep track—even if it was disheartening.

  In truth, I didn’t know there were that many levels. My calves and shoulders were screaming by the time we saw ‘19’ stencilled on the green steel door. I let out an exhale of fatigue and defeat.

  Above me, heavily out of breath, Ketwood said, “What now, Munn?” he was more than irritated. I could hear raw anger in his tone.

  I gazed up with my torch in my mouth and saw a gleam in his eyes. His boy still clung to him. Maybe he was ready to let go of the rungs and plummet, crushing me from above. Exasperated, I looked down at my own feet. Below them: more ladder, more elevator shaft.

  What else could I do? I kept descending.

  I got to another steel green door. There were only four of five feet left. This was the very bottom of the shaft, leaving only enough room for the elevator to sit if it was below the bottom floor. This door wasn’t like the ones above. It had a big steel bar. I reached out and jarred it. It went sideways with a clunk and the door yawned inward with a rusted bleat and stopped. “Come on,” I called up
to Ketwood. “I found a way in.”

  10.

  Inside wasn’t nearly as dark. More cool air. And damp. It smelled the same as that salty ocean air when the wind blew strongly from the west above ground.

  I heard the hum of distant machinery. There were more stencils on the walls with long strings of numbers and letters. The ceiling was low and it was raw rock. It looked like it was carved right into the earth and then covered in a thick, cake-like parging, maybe to keep it from caving in. The sides of the corridor were propped with thin steel beams. Behind me, Ketwood came in, pushing the door further open.

  He put his boy down on the damp concrete floor, careful to avoid the puddles. He propped the kid up against the sidewall and plopped down beside him. He eyed the puddles as though he was going to bend down and start lapping them like a hound dog.

  “I wouldn’t call it exactly fresh,” he said, panting. “But it’s air. And it’s cooler than up there. Nice work.” A compliment. From a guy like Ketwood to a guy like me. Wonders never cease, I thought, but didn’t say a thing.

  I went a little further down the tunnel and realized where the light was coming from. Around a little bend up ahead, I saw a small bulb in the ceiling. I wondered if the distant hum I heard was a separate power source: maybe a generator, or something running off some batteries of some sort. Again, I was struck by how much of a small fish I was in the grand scheme of things. It made me feel insignificant. The fact that I’d only heard about today’s incident when the hourly-wage workers did—by walkie!—started to make me angry. But I used my little trick. I waited. And, in a moment or two, I overpowered my unreasonable anger. I needed to get out of this. And then I could use reasonable force to make my unhappiness known to Drumheller.

  I looked back. Young Sean Ketwood was sitting more or less upright, blinking and looking around. He needed water, and, hell, it might come down to drinking water from the floor puddles—but for now, he looked a bit better. Though, in truth it was hard to tell in this light.

  “Dad?” he asked.

  “Yuh,” his dad said. He was pulling at the corners of the kid’s eyes and looking into them, tilting the boy’s head to see if he could get more light aimed at it, maybe see if he could ascertain the kid’s colour or if his pupils were dilated. Hell, I didn’t know. But he looked like he was checking the kid over.

  “Are we gonna get out of here?”

  Ketwood laughed a little, a huffy thing. “Course we are. Munn here, he knows this place like the back of his hand.” He looked up at me and I gave a bit of a nod and a smile that confirmed Sam Ketwood was not full of shit.

  I turned ahead and looked down the dimly lit tunnel, listening to the drip-drip-drip of some distant leak. I could hear the hum a little louder too. Yeah, I knew these tunnels like the back of my hand. That was a rich piece of cake.

  I got my walkie out and thumbed the trigger. I turned up the volume a bit and listened to the static. “You rest a minute,” I said back to the Ketwoods. “I’m just going to go up a ways and then I’ll come right back.”

  Ketwood gave me a nod and turned his attention back to the boy, who looked fit enough now. Either that or he was tired of getting the once-over from his pop.

  I headed around the bend and was welcomed by a bit more cool air and a bit more light. I could see a few bulbs hanging from the ceiling now. Lengths of extension cord ran between them like a daisy-chain. When I was pretty sure I was out of sight from the electrician and his boy, I brought the walkie up to my face. I started going through the channels, pausing on each one and triggering to send out a few words.

  “Distress call. This is Facilities Manager Munn. Can anyone hear me?”

  I said this a half-dozen times on six different channels—the ones we always used in our day-to-day. I tried the one that the train guy, Franklin Moort, had broadcast on but I got nothing there.

  I walked a little farther and did another half-dozen channels with the same drill.

  Then I turned and headed back towards the Ketwoods. On the way, I did a second run-through of all the channels again.

  Channel eight got me some broken static. I paused there and tried my spiel again. Broken static came back to me and I held the walkie up in the air, closer to the low ceiling, hoping for a clean signal. Surprisingly, that got me better reception and I started to make out choppy, broken words. I started running back towards the Ketwoods and the doorway where we’d come in from the elevator shaft. As I got closer, the choppiness subsided and I could make out real words.

  It was a man. Not Franklin Moort. But it was someone responding to me and repeating the same phrase over again. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was saying, but I could make out one phrase he kept repeating: “Doctor Drumheller.”

  Part V

  The Wizard

  1971

  1.

  “You know,” Gran said, startling her granddaughter. “I used to work in the old power plant…”

  Farrah had been reading aloud from the black book and found herself up on the soft bed beside Gran, listening to the old woman’s shallow breath whenever she took the odd pause. The story they’d uncovered had intrigued them both. It had offered much more than Farrah had ever imagined when she’d kicked the black tin off her bed and dismissed it as having belonged to some sailor who liked tobacco.

  Farrah was surprised Gran was awake. She’d mostly lain silently with her eyes closed, usually a signal to children that they should stay quiet. But tonight was a time for throwing out old ways, for ignoring the rules.

  “I thought you were sleeping,” Farrah said, putting the book face down on her chest and turning her head to look over at Gran.

  Gran smiled a little. “Just resting my eyes, child,” she said. It was something her dad said whenever Farrah caught him nodding off in his big chair after dinner. This was mostly back when Mom was still at home. Now, there was always something to do and Dad lived like a possessed man. Always cooking or cleaning something. Always preparing to head back to the office and pore over his files. He hadn’t been able to tackle the floor piles Mom had built up over the years, but the basics like the surfaces of tables and chairs had been handled. Were handled, ten times a day, compulsively. Doug Birkhead had even gotten into the act of a weekly vacuuming regimen. Maybe it was his military days coming back to him. Or, maybe it was busy-work to force a feeling of progress. No matter how tall the stack of files seemed. No matter how far away his wife was.

  “It’s interesting,” Farrah said of the journal’s contents. “Isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Gran said, out of breath. She reached out and smoothed the cover of the book as if to confirm it was a real thing.

  “And you worked there? I had no idea. You never told me. Did you know him? This Munn guy who wrote it?”

  “Naw, love,” Gran said. “I worked for a cleaning company. We mostly did the little hotels and bed-and-breakfast places up Neckline way. But once in a while, we got a short contract to do the offices and common rooms at the plant—”

  Gran swallowed hard, but looked like she was just interrupting herself for a needed rest to her voice, even though she wanted to say more.

  “I never went down in those tunnels, but I heard about them. We all heard stories, y’see. Never heard the tales about the old king and his hunting grounds and all the plans he had—that stuff is new to me. You learn something new every day, now don’t you, deary?”

  Farrah nodded but otherwise kept quiet. She wanted Gran to keep talking. She liked how lucid and aware Gran was right now and didn’t want to tamp it down.

  “I never did tell you, child,” Gran said. “That I worked there. But…something to remember, Farrah—everyone has a story. Everyone. Even your ol’ Granny. Keep that in your back pocket. Every single man, woman, child and beast has a tale behind them.” She took a sallow, wheezing breath. “And, quite often, there’s a fight in that tale. And you, me and the bedpost, we might not know a darn thing about that fight.

  “So the stori
es said the tunnels were built in war time...but that some of them were even older than that. Who knows? Maybe the king used them to smuggle in those hussies of his. That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?” She smiled and gave Farrah a wink.

  Farrah let out the tiniest giggle. She knew what a hussy was—though not specifically, just that there were a couple girls downtown who entertained the working boys from the docks or the fishing boats. They were, she knew, not the sort of women with whom her mom, say, would associate. But they were always nice to Farrah. One of them, she might even say, was friendly to Farrah.

  “All kinds of tall tales about the power plant,” Gran went on. “I remember them now, just on account of you reading this out loud. Reminds me. And, a’course, all those tall tales come back to you when you’re bent over, vacuuming cigarette ash from the carpet under some manager’s desk and emptying his butts into the garbage…and suddenly the vacuum goes dead and you’re wondering why that is—and in a power plant of all things.

  “You didn’t flick it off. But someone did. And then you remember the tall tales about those underground tunnels and talk of all those experiments down in those lower levels. Apparently—and this might be the tallest of them—there was this scientist, the head of all of them. And he was managing things. He was doing experiments on the brain. But he was using monkeys and such. Dogs and rats. Even a lion, someone said. Not real people brains, mind you. That wouldn’t be right. Not even back then.

  “His name, it mighta been Drumheller, can’t rightly remember, deary. But there was a bunch. Them stories, they said there were docs doing tests on different kinds of warfare too. Chemical. Electrical. Psychological. All kinds of things.

  “But it was the monkey stories that I thought of when I was cleaning the offices in the middle of the night. I half expected to head over to the wall plug and see some big brute of a monkey, all messed up from that doctor’s experiments—and he’d spit at me through his fangs, having just unplugged my vacuum.