Void

by D Haltinner

  Jack frowned. “No.”

  Audrey shrugged. “Would have fooled me.”

  Jack shook his head. “Are you two ready or what?”

  Audrey looked up to Darren.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Chapter 31

  Jack stopped in front of the steel door and dropped his backpack to the floor, unzipping it and pulling out the sawzall and a pack of blades he must have purchased.

  Darren and Audrey stood side by side behind him, shining their lights down at Jack as he wrestled a blade into the stubborn catch at the end of the reciprocating saw’s end. They had made it this far in silence-in part because of a tension that was growing between Audrey and Jack, and in part because all three of them were keeping their ears clear for any sign of the noise approaching them. They were a ways from the void the sound seemed to originate from yesterday, but none of them seemed to want to take any chances.

  “Do you know how to use that?” Audrey asked.

  Jack slapped the battery into the handle and stood up. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Good, I’d hate to see you lose a finger.”

  Jack grumbled something that Darren couldn’t hear and turned around toward the door. Darren leaned into Audrey and lowered his voice as quiet as he could. “Can't you be a little nice at least?”

  “Sorry,” Audrey said. “He just really annoys me today.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Well, just try to be a little civil.”

  “Fine.”

  Jack spun around. “Can I get a little light over here?”

  Audrey shined her light into Jack’s eyes, forcing him to look away. “Oops, sorry.”

  Darren just shook his head and pointed the light at the lock on the door.

  Jack climbed down to his knees and slid the blade into the crack between the door and steel frame. He had already found that there was nothing blocking the gap on the home made door, so the blade slid into the void without running into anything on either end.

  “You’re going to cut through the latch?” Audrey said.

  “Yeah, I am,” Jack said

  “Don’t they make those out of hardened steel?”

  “That’s why I brought an extra battery. Just in case.”

  Darren looked over at Audrey and frowned.

  She mouthed the word ‘sorry’ and lifted her light to meet Darren’s.

  “Any more questions?” Jack asked, still facing the door.

  “Nope, I’m good,” Audrey said.

  “Good, Great.”

  Darren bent low to Audrey’s ear and whispered to her. “You’re feistier than I thought you could be.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Not at all. It’s kind of entertaining really.”

  Audrey let out a light laugh.

  Jack grumbled something and started the saw. The whine of the electric motor was dulled just as their voices were in the tunnel, but as soon as the blade met the metal of the latch, a sharp screech burst into the air, shooting its way down the tunnel in both directions. The sound never echoed back, but had there been a hatch nearby, anyone standing close to it would have heard the squeal.

  Audrey winced at the noise, but made no attempt to cover her ears. She looked over her shoulder-for what, Darren didn’t know-then let out a silent sigh before glancing at Darren with a smile on her face.

  Darren smiled back.

  The squeal drove straight into Darren’s brain, turning his ear drums into nothing but numb speed bumps. It seemed to be coming from all directions, closing in, tightening its hold.

  Then it stopped.

  A peculiar ringing stayed in place of the sound of the saw, but it wasn’t as loud and seemed to be coming from inside of his head this time. Jack set the saw down beside him, looked at the lock for a moment, and ran his fingers down the crack.

  “Did it work?” Audrey asked.

  Instead of answering, Jack gave the door a push. With a screech even louder than that of the saw, the door swung open on its hinges with enough resistance that Jack’s knuckles turned white as he pushed. As soon as he reached as far as his arm could, the door stopped-only a quarter of the way open-revealing nothing but darkness until Audrey reaimed her light into the crack.

  Jack stepped out of the way before Darren could see anything except formless shadows. He loaded the sawzall into his backpack, zipped it up, and slipped it back over his shoulders. He bent over for his Barney flashlight and Audrey’s light slipped and caught him in the eyes with her beam of light.

  “Oops, sorry,” she said. “Was just trying to help you see.”

  Jack shook his head. “You better knock that off before that light ends up somewhere where it won’t shine.”

  “Okay, that’s enough from you two,” Darren said, keeping his eyes on Audrey. “Let’s all just behave for now, okay?”

  Audrey gave a half smile in reply.

  Jack said nothing, just pushed the steel door open the rest of the way despite the protest of the hinges, and stepped through.

  Audrey followed behind Jack into the room, letting her flashlight pan back and forth across the area in front of them, just below Jack’s eye level. Darren followed close behind her, watching the walls disappear from around them.

  “It’s a room,” Jack said, his light falling on the back wall.

  “What in the world is a room doing down here?” Audrey said.

  “Hell if I know,” Jack said.

  The room appeared to be twenty feet deep and close to thirty across, framed by the same cement walls that lined the tunnels. A pair of wooden tables sat side by side directly ahead of the door, there surfaces covered by books and stacks of papers that were buried under a thick coating of dust. Matching wooden chairs sat in the middle of the room, facing each other, surrounded by a circle of black powder. The far corner housed a long flat surface covered by a thin sheet of fabric, and it took Darren a moment to realize that the thing below the mounds of dust was a bed.

  “What is this place?” Darren said.

  Audrey’s light focused on a line of thick candles along the wall at various states of use-all covered in the same thick dust that blanketed all of the other surfaces. “I wish I knew,” she said.

  “It’s been used,” Jack said.

  Darren kicked at the dust covering the floor. It was thicker than it was anywhere else in the tunnel and billowed up into the air in a thick cloud, hanging motionless until it began to drift back down the way it had came. “Not in a long time.”

  “What was it used for?” Audrey asked.

  “I have no idea,” Darren said.

  Jack inched toward the table, clouds of dust hanging around his feet with every step he took. Audrey and Darren followed him to the back wall, all three stopping in a line before the piles of papers and books.

  “Someone sure spent a lot of time down here,” Audrey said. She brushed off the cover of a large book, “Algebra” printed on the cover. “Studied down here too it looks like.”

  Darren looked closer at the book’s cover. “That’s an old book,” he said. “Just look at the printing on the cover, it’s got to be at least fifty years old.”

  Jack turned and scanned the room with his light. “By the looks of the place, no one’s been down here in at least fifty years either.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” Audrey said. She moved the text book out of the way and looked at the papers below it, picking them up one by one and looking at them under her light.

  While Audrey searched the papers on the desk, Darren and Jack wandered over to the chairs facing each other in the middle of the room. There was nothing unusual about the chairs in and of themselves, but why they were positioned facing each other with only enough room to fit a single person’s knees between them was unclear. And why they were surrounded in a circle of black powder made no sense either.

  Jack bent down to the ground in front of the circle o
f powder and pinched a little bit of it between his fingers, lifting it to his nose.

  “Know what it is?” Darren asked.

  Jack took another sniff. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was gun powder.”

  “Gun powder?”

  “That’s what it smells like.”

  Darren shined his light around the black ring. The circle almost seemed perfect, as if whoever laid it took their time to make sure each section of the curve was equal to each other. He didn’t want to take a whiff of the powder himself, but it seemed to have the consistency of gunpowder that he had seen leaking out of firecrackers in the past..

  “Why in the word would they surround the chairs in gunpowder?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t think I could even venture a guess,” Darren said. “Whoever did it must not have needed to ignite it at least.”

  “But why lay it out in the first place?”

  “No idea.”

  Darren followed the circle with his light, trying to see something else that they had missed that might explain the reason for the circle and the chairs, but there was nothing but the seamless line of powder.

  “Hey guys,” Audrey said.

  Darren and Jack both pointed their lights toward her. She was holding a stack of papers in one hand, using the other one to grip the flashlight.

  “What?” Darren said

  “Some of these papers have dates,” she said.

  “Dates? What are they?”

  “They look like math problems to me, but it’s kind of convoluted and all over the place.”

  “What are the dates?” Jack asked.

  “Most of them are in the year 1944,” she said. A few in 1877also.”

  “I don’t even think the city existed in 1877,” Jack said.

  “Maybe as a farm area,” Darren said. “But still. Is there anything else there?” He asked Audrey.

  “Just a bunch of math I can’t make sense of,” she said. “It seems to carry on for sheet after sheet.”

  “Nothing about this room makes sense,” Darren said.

  “You’re telling me,” Jack said. He rose from his crouch, hesitated as he swung his light back to the wooden chairs, then pointed the light toward the bed.

  Darren joined his light with Jack’s and both of them walked toward the bed. There was nothing unusual about it save for the fact it was in this cement room-it was just like any other bed on a cheap wooden frame. The sheets were too coated in dust to be sure, but they appeared to be a simple white cotton set. The top sheet was bunched up against the wall, part of it covering another stack of papers that might have been read while someone had laid here.

  Why anyone would want to have a bed down here was beyond Darren, but he stepped toward it and pulled the blanket off the papers to see what the person who seemed to stay here was reading.

  “Look at this,” Audrey called.

  Darren dropped the sheet back where it was and turned to face Audrey. Jack did the same behind him.

  “What is it?” Darren asked.

  “The answer.”

  “What?”

  Audrey looked toward Darren and Jack, squinting in the light of their flashlights. “All these papers seem to be working on the same problem, and I found the answer.”

  “What is it?”

  “You might want to see it for yourself.”

  Darren and Jack exchanged a glance and walked back toward Audrey.

  “What’s so special about it?” Darren asked when they stopped before her.

  Audrey held up the paper to them.

  Darren shown his light on it, looking at the bottom line of writing.

  “It’s this coming Tuesday’s date,” Audrey said.

  Chapter 32

  “Tuesday?” Darren said. “What do you mean it’s Tuesday’s date?”

  “I mean.” Audrey turned and picked up a stack of papers, spilling the dust off of them in a thick cloud that floated to the floor, and spun back around, holding them up in front of her. “These pages upon pages of mathematical work came to an answer, and that answer is Tuesday. Three days from now.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would that be an answer to a math equation?”

  Audrey held out the papers, offering them to Darren. “Look for yourself.”

  “I believe you, but I don’t understand what it means.”

  “Neither do I,” Jack said.

  “I don’t know what it means, but someone spent a long time on this gobbledy-gook and decided that there’s some sort of importance about this Tuesday.”

  “There’s nothing on any of that saying what it’s all about?” Jack said.

  “No, there’s not."

  “There has to be some sort of explanation,” Jack said. “Can't you figure it out from the initial problem?”

  “Why don’t you look if you are so smart,” Audrey said, pushing the pages into Jack’s hand. “It’s full of Greek symbols I’ve never been taught in school.”

  Jack took the pages and shined his light down at them, sifting through the stack until he found the beginning of the problem. “Well, it starts out with another date,” he said. “It looks like whoever did this was using another date in some equation that I can’t make any sense of.” He looked up at Audrey. “Either.”

  Audrey rolled her eyes.

  “The initial date is in 1944 though,” Jack said.

  Audrey’s eyes shot open in surprise. “He can read!”

  Jack ignored her remark. Or at least pretended to.

  “Sixty seven years ago?” Darren said. “Could that have been written that long ago?”

  “November twelfth to be exact.”

  Darren frowned. “Why does that sound familiar?”

  Audrey’s hand fell across Darren’s back. “I know.”

  Darren looked up at the glare of the flashlight in Audrey’s eyes. “What is it?”

  “That was the date those students went missing.”

  Darren’s mouth opened wide. “Oh my God.”

  “What the hell are you two talking about?” Jack asked.

  Audrey recanted the contents of the newspaper article to Jack, sparing most of the mundane details.

  “Six went missing?” Jack asked.

  “That’s what I said,” Audrey said.

  Jack looked from Audrey to Darren and back to Audrey again.

  “We didn’t think it was related to the tunnel at all,” Darren said.

  “Well, I’d say it’s a good bet that it’s related.”

  “Yeah, well until that came up, there was nothing to connect the two.”

  Jack sighed and flipped through the pages, then set them onto the desk, creating a thick cloud of dust around them. “You think it was one of those six that spent all that time down here?”

  “If those papers were really written in forty-four, I’d say yeah, it probably was.”

  “They were last seen in the area of the theatre,” Audrey said. “That’s pretty close to where we are now.”

  “What would it mean if this room was a clubhouse of theirs?” Darren said. “Because I’m still confused. None of it makes any sense.”

  “What would six students in nineteen forty four have to do with this tunnel?” Audrey said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I for one intend to figure that out,” Jack said. “There’s got to be more down here in these concrete tunnels than we know about.”

  “Like that void?” Audrey said. “And that noise that came after us?”

  “There’s still a whole nother turn we haven’t taken yet.”

  “You think we’ll find more answers?” Darren said. “Because each time I hear one of you two say that, I end up with twice as many questions.”

  “There’s an answer for every question,” Jack said. “We just have to look harder.”

  “I wonder how hard Troy looked?” Darren said. “Because I don’t want to end up like him.”

  “No one will know we were here.”

>   “I hope so.”

  Jack looked over the other items on the desk. “Was there anything else here that might give us some ideas?”

  “I haven’t read through the other pile over there,” Audrey said, pointing to another stack against the wall. “But there’s nothing in the rest of this beside that same math problem.”

  “Someone put a lot of time into that,” Darren said.

  “A lot.”

  “Maybe too much.”

  “I doubt they thought that.”

  Jack reached to the slim stack of papers and shook off the dust covering it. He held it out in front of himself with one hand and illuminated it with his Barney light, squinting at the surface.

  “What’s it say?” Darren asked.

  Jack squinted harder, bringing it closer to his face. “It’s too faded, I can’t make it out.”

  Darren moved beside Jack and added his light. “Does that help?”

  Jack sighed and shook his head. “I can't make out a thing.”

  “Just take it with us,” Audrey said. “I can enhance it enough to read it.”

  “I don’t know…” Jack said, still trying to see. “It’s pretty far gone.”

  “I said I can do it.”

  Jack threw up his hands, the papers rustling in his grip as a chunk tore away from the bottom page and floated down to the table. “Fine, jeez. We’ll let the expert handle it.”

  “Come on, calm down,” Darren said.

  “She’s done nothing but attack me all day!”

  A smirk came to Audrey’s face. She was enjoying this a bit more that she probably should be.

  “Both of you take it down a notch,” Darren said. “You got along fine yesterday, so why can’t you do that today?”

  “I don’t have any idea what her problem is!” Jack said.

  Darren looked over to Audrey. He didn’t expect her to say anything, but he at least hoped she would agree to relax a bit.

  “I’ll play nice,” she said, staring at Jack with a smirk still in place.

  Jack shook his head and looked back at the table.

  “Let’s all just behave and find some answers,” Darren said. “This whole situation is already bad enough, and we don’t need to start fighting with each other. Okay?”