Sometimes, two people just have to be in each other’s lives, for better or for worse, to depend on each other through both love and, occasionally, hate. Even when Kedzie had slept with Sarah’s college sweetheart years ago, Sarah knew she couldn’t stay mad forever, and was still quite glad to see her at the end of their subsequent month of silence, just as she was glad to see her now.
“Jesus Christ, Kedz! You scared us half to death.” Sarah ran up to the elevator gate, unlatched it, grabbed the hand of her friend, and pulled her into the lobby. “Guys, this is my friend Kedzie.”
Al and Janet smiled and said hello. Sam and Vaughn already knew Kedzie quite well, and offered a more colloquial “hey.”
Kedzie smiled back, but her eyes were already darting around the incredible room. “My, my, Sam,” she said. “You didn’t tell me about all this.”
“I didn’t know,” Sam replied. “None of us did. Al here was just peeling back carpet and we found this trap door, and this elevator and, well, we’re still a little in shock ourselves.”
Kedzie walked a few steps more into the great room. She burst into one of her trademark smiles.
“Well, I think this is going to make one hell of a club after all,” she giggled. Then, to Sarah, “I’m sorry I called your boyfriend a loser for buying this dump.”
“You know,” said Sam, “I can still hear you.”
Kedzie flashed him a playful grin. “So show me around, stud.”
Sam and Sarah walked Kedzie through the rooms they had visited, told her about the history of the place they’d uncovered so far, ending at the grand ballroom, with its ancient stash of high-end alcohol. At this, Vaughn ran in to greet them, followed by Janet and Al, and offered Kedzie a shot of scotch, too, to join in the celebration. Kedzie laughed and shook her head politely.
“Now Vaughn, you know I can’t,” she said, patting her belly. “Not with little Sammy Jr. in here.”
“Yeah, I’m going to go with ‘not funny’ on that one,” Sarah responded, with an exaggerated narrowing of her eyes.
“Oh come on,” chirped Kedzie. “It’s a little funny. Besides, I can’t name him after his real dad. You try explaining to a kindergarten teacher why your kid is called ‘Fucking Deadbeat Loser.’”
“Jr.,” added Sam.
They laughed.
“So what are you even doing here,” asked Sarah. “Shouldn’t you still be at work for another five hours?”
Kedzie shrugged. “The guys were going to be in court the whole afternoon, so they let me go early. I went back to the apartment and hung out a bit, but then I remembered you were getting the keys to this place today, and thought I’d swing by. It took me a while to figure out where you had gone, since your cars were here but no one was answering my hellos, but I found the elevator and, well…ta-da!” Kedzie made a theatrical gesture with her arms, as if announcing herself to the stage.
“You got my text, right?” added Sarah.
Kedzie paused for a moment, then grinned. “Of course!”
Sarah frowned. She thought her text had strongly implied not to join them, since then there would be no one left in the outside world who knew where they were. She would have to check how she worded that later. Then again, Kedzie wasn’t one to do as Sarah asked.
“Hang on,” said Janet. “You came by, couldn’t find us, discovered the elevator, and just thought you’d call it up and try pressing ‘1’? That’s pretty reckless, kid.”
Kedzie shrugged. “You only live once.”
“That’s what Janet said,” teased Sam.
“We were just about to explore the second floor, before you arrived,” Al interjected with a touch of impatience.
“Oh! Mind if I tag along?”
“Of course not,” said Sam. He turned to where Vaughn was opening low cabinet doors behind the bar. “Coming, Vaughn?”
Vaughn closed one of the cabinet doors and said he’d be just a second. He had decided to take the extra time afforded by Kedzie’s arrival to do a more thorough inventory of the bar’s stash of liquor, but was surprised to find most of the cabinets empty. In fact, he soon realized that there were only a dozen or so bottles of alcohol in the entire area. Even with the small capacity of the hotel, there should have been hundreds of bottles for guests to choose from. Perhaps the owners had moved inventory out of the hotel when they had to unexpectedly shut down. Vaughn was about to bring up the lack of spirits to Sam, but decided against it, as he had been the one to convince them that opening a bottle would be no big deal.
The expanded group made their way back to the lobby, and approached the elevator.
“Congratulations, by the way,” Janet said, glancing down at Kedzie's belly as they walked, though Kedzie was not yet showing. “I'm sure he or she will be a beautiful baby, even with the father thing.”
“Er, thanks!” Kedzie responded after a pause, perhaps feeling this to be a little too personal a statement from a stranger, but accepting the compliment. ”What about you? Any kids?”
Janet paused for a moment, then smiled sadly. “No,” she said. “No kids. Some great nephews, though.”
The elevator car stood empty before them, as imposing, yet as inviting, as ever.
“Sure we can all fit?” asked Kedzie, as Sam unlatched the gate.
“I hope so,” said Sam. “There aren’t any stairs.”
“What are you talking about,” sneered Al. “You can’t have an elevator without stairs. They’re over there.”
Sam looked to where Al was pointing. There was a simple door on the right side of the room, which Sam had assumed was a second door into the dining area. But the dining area must have been cut a little short, for upon examination, there was indeed an etching of a staircase pattern near the door’s trim. Sam walked over to the door, opened it, and looked up. Sure enough, it was a narrow staircase, at least ten stories high.
“But…there weren’t stairs in the elevator room,” Sam protested. “There weren’t even any doors. There was just the elevator.”
“We must have overlooked them,” reasoned Al.
“No, no.” Sam shook his head. “We would have seen them up there. A door, at least. The walls were paneled, remember? Besides, if there had been stairs, we wouldn’t have risked the elevator.”
Kedzie looked concerned. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘risked’? What’s wrong with the elevator?”
“Nothing’s wrong with the elevator,” insisted Al. “Sam’s just a big ol’ pussy.”
Sam sighed, and closed the door to the stairs.
“Alright,” Sam agreed. “We’ll deal with that later. For now, we travel in style.”
The six visitors boarded the elevator. Sam closed both gates, turned behind him, and pressed the number “2.” He smiled at Sarah, to his side, and then stared ahead through the gate as the lobby vanished beneath them.
It was a tight fit in the old fashioned elevator car, and so Sarah didn’t notice when Kedzie coyly, fleetingly, and purposely brushed her hand against Sam’s ass.
seven
The second floor (or “eleventh sub-basement” as Janet called it) lacked much of the ornate detail and design of the lobby. The floor, ceiling and door moldings were still cut and carved from quality wood, but the walls were drab in color, and the layout pedestrian. It also seemed, at least from the length of the hallway, that this floor had a smaller overall footprint than the lobby, and Sam began to wonder if each floor would get progressively smaller as they traveled upward, like an underground pyramid. This might be normal for an above ground structure, as lower floors would need to be as wide, or wider, than floors above, but in a basement model, such construction made less sense.
“So Al,” Sam began as they exited the car. “As far as we can tell, this hotel was built years after the depot was up and running. Isn’t it difficult to dig a basement—particularly one this deep and wide—with a building already on top?”
“Well,” Al explained, “i
t wasn’t quite as uncommon as you might suppose. Even today, many Victorian homes have basements that were carved out after the fact. The annoying part is having to remove all that dirt and clay.”
“Yes, but those are just eight-foot basements, if that. This would be twelve stories worth of dirt and clay. It would have taken forever.”
“Well, who’s to say it didn’t? For all we know, they started planning this hotel from the moment the depot opened, and took as many years as they needed to.”
The hallway was lit, but dimly. There were additional light fixtures on the wall that were not illuminated, but when they first had passed by the floor on the elevator ride down to the lobby, this floor (and all the others) had been completely dark. Sam reasoned that one of the master switches Al had activated behind the lobby desk must also have activated a basic lighting system for the whole hotel. Sure enough, when he turned back toward the elevator, he saw two wooden push buttons on that wall, positioned so that someone could turn and reach them, even in the dark, after a single step out of the elevator car. Sam walked back, pushed both buttons, and the hallway was fully illuminated.
Al had arrived at a door marked “Maintenance,” stopping to listen to a muffled mechanical whir on the other side. Al smiled to Sam, then to Janet, nodding for her to retrieve the appropriate key. She fumbled in her purse for a bit, and found the appropriate key on the ring, handed it to Al, and waited as he unlocked and opened the door.
The six visitors entered the room, each surprised at the volume—and quantity—of the machines. Al had been right about the water wheel, but even he was surprised at the sheer size of the contraption. At the far wall, there was a large cutout directly into the clay, with a six-foot-wide water wheel spinning along by the power of a visible stream of flowing underground water. Attached to this wheel, and all through the room, was a series of tubes, some copper and some glass, to other components along the other three walls. Most of these large components were unlabeled, though one was marked “heat,” and it too had a visible flow of water coming down from the ceiling, passing through it, and exiting out the side to join the other pipes. Al inspected this box for a few moments, then smiled and turned to Sam.
“Steam heat,” he shouted over the machinery. “This must have been pretty cutting-edge at the time. I’m guessing we’re going to find both radiators and forced-air duct work on the higher levels.”
Vaughn was fascinated by three large metal discs, about five feet each in diameter, each embedded vertically about six inches deep into the nearby wall. They seemed to be made out of a variety of flattened, smaller discs in a concentric circle pattern down to a black hole in each center. Vaughn laughed as he realized why they reminded him of.
“Hey, Sam, check it out. LPs!”
Sam laughed as well. They did indeed look like large steel-plated vinyl records.
“What do they do?” asked Kedzie.
“Nothing, I guess,” shrugged Vaughn. “They just look cool.”
“Oh,” said Kedzie with a smirk. “Kinda like you.”
Al had walked over to examine the discs as well. Eventually, he nodded, shot a knowing smile to the rest of the group, and activated a large mechanical lever near the farthest metal plate. At first, nothing happened, except a dull rumble hardly audible over the other noise in the room. But then Sam began to feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and the room acquired a subtle, subsonic vibration. A few seconds later, and with a speed that startled everyone, including Al, all three discs were quickly covered, then uncovered, by thin metal sheets from the top, acting as three hidden guillotines. Sam thought the effect was like staring into the circle of a very large cigar cutter, with a very large blade, and a very fast operator aiming for the cleanest possible cut. Seven seconds later, it happened again, and kept happening in regular intervals, each time just as unsettling as the time before.
“What the hell are those things,” demanded Sarah. “Giant cheese slicers?”
Vaughn was getting out his cell phone, preparing to snap a picture. “They’re sweet as hell, is what they are,” he decided.
Al spoke up, and called to Vaughn over the noise. “Hey, unless that thing’s all plastic or aluminum, you might want to be caref—”
But it was too late. Though standing more than ten feet away from the nearest silver “album,” Vaughn felt the phone slip out from his fingers, as if being yanked by an invisible hand. The phone flew across the room like a dart, striking the metal disc and breaking in two, both pieces sticking hard to the metal surface like glue.
“My phone!”
Within two seconds, right on schedule, the sharp guillotines snapped down and shattered the phone into a thousand pieces—some of which, the little plastic parts, flew off in all directions into the room, while others, metallic parts, re-adhered themselves to the circle.
“Dude, what the hell?” shouted Vaughn to Al.
“It’s some sort of magnetic generator,” Al shouted back. “Look at the water pipes around it. I’m guessing it’s helping to boost the power of the magnetic mineral springs, or maybe getting power from them.”
Another seven-second slice, on schedule.
Vaughn was still pissed. “Then what’s with the fucking blades?’
“Maybe it’s transmitting the charge back to the other side,” Al answered. “Or re-calibrating.”
Sam was growing irritated. “Could you just turn the damn thing off, Al?”
Al complied, pulling the large lever down, disengaging the circuit. The deep, bass hum and whir began to power down, and the three large circles were just decorative wall art once again. In a few moments, some of the little remaining pieces of Vaughn’s destroyed cell phone began to slide down the surface of the LP’s as well, as the magnets began to lose their power.
“I really liked that phone,” Vaughn pouted.
Janet, who had observed the whole scene in silent wonder, gasped aloud when she turned to Kedzie.
“Oh! Dear, you’re bleeding!”
Kedzie followed Janet’s gaze down to her shirt, near her navel. There was a small but growing blood stain on her white blouse. She lifted up the shirt to get a better look, and saw that a sliver of gray plastic must have shot out like shrapnel during the destruction of Vaughn’s cell, pieced her shirt, and had embedded its sharp point into her abdomen. She pulled the piece out with her fingernails and tossed it on the floor.
“Yuck,” she said, frowning.
“Are you okay?” Janet seemed disproportionately concerned, considering the superficial nature of the wound.
“I’m fine,” laughed Kedzie. “Really. I didn’t even feel it.” She was pushing her hand against the small wound to stop the bleeding, but the existing blood on her shirt popped against the white fabric like a crime scene.
“What about the baby? Is the baby okay?”
“The baby is fine,” Kedzie snapped.
Sam and Sarah exchanged a puzzled glance. Janet’s panic seemed unwarranted. Sarah thought of a way of diffusing the tension.
“Hey Janet,” Sarah said. “You have the keys. Let’s go across the hall to housekeeping and see if we can’t find a couple of clean towels for Kedzie here, okay?”
Janet agreed, and the two left. After an awkward silence, Vaughn spoke up.
“Well, it’s silly to just wait here. We all should go. We haven’t seen that room, either.” Vaughn turned again toward the evil metal circles on the wall. “Besides,” he frowned, “this place is giving me the creeps.”
They all nodded, and Vaughn and Al, being closest to the door, left first. But Sam pulled Kedzie back for a moment, before joining the others in the hallway.
“Kedz,” he said with delicacy. “You’re okay, right?”
Kedzie smiled. “I’m fine, Sam.”
Sam paused. “And…you’re sure it’s not…”
Again, Kedzie smiled, this time less brightly. “I’m sure. I was already two weeks along then—I ju
st didn’t know it yet. I think that’s why my hormones were so out of control.” She rested her right hand on his hip, and looked up at him. “Believe me, I wish it was yours.”
“You don’t mean that. Sarah’s your best friend.”
“And your fiancée,” she replied, with just a hint of disdain, or maybe jealousy. “But I’d be a lot prouder to carry your child than the real asshole’s. It just didn’t work out that way.”
It wasn’t the first time she had made this comment, but Sam was touched by it, though no less uneasy at the thought. With different timing, their one moment of weakness could have ended with him losing Sarah forever, destroying a 15-year friendship between two best friends, and requiring him, for life, to help support a child he would always know came from an unfaithful, drunken one night stand. Was it selfish to think “thank God the baby isn’t mine?”
“Hey, she’s not my fiancée,” he said, with a pang of guilt, for he understood his motivation behind the comment. Even now, Sam couldn’t tell if he genuinely felt ashamed, or if he just felt he should feel ashamed. Somehow, after the fact, he had deluded himself into the idea that he, as a man, was entitled to one last “lap around the bar” before his circumscription was made official through jewelry. He even found a way to justify the betrayal as an act of nobility, to get things out of his system before it was too late, to assure that he wouldn’t cheat on Sarah “for real” when they were married. The rationalization was so complete that he almost felt pride.
A month later, he had purchased the ring. He had it with him today, planning a beautiful proposal in the center of the hollowed out train station once everyone else had left. When he shared the idea of this plan, his mom had been worried it would seem narcissistic, and suggested that his proposal should be all about her, not all about him. But in his mind, he felt this would be a romantic act, showing Sarah he was combining his loves and interests and futures together. He supposed, however, that’s just what a narcissist would think.
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