by Peter Clines
Veek angled the phone’s light as best she could. They all craned their necks to look.
At the base of the farthest tank was a hole in the wall, just visible between two heaters. Red chips and dust were scattered on the floor where a brick had been shattered. Some of the mortar had come away, too. One of the emerald roaches dashed through the hole and was gone.
“Good eye,” said Veek. “How’d you spot that?”
“I didn’t,” Xela admitted. “I just saw the pieces of brick and thought we might get lucky.”
“Only thing is,” said Nate, “I don’t know how we’re going to look through.” He peered down at the rectangular hole and glanced back at Veek. “I could lower you over the heaters,” he said. “You could lean down and—”
“Nope.” She shook her head. “Bug thing, remember? I’m not putting my hair down with the cockroaches. I’ll never sleep again.”
He looked at Xela. “You up for taking a look?”
She smiled and gestured at Veek’s phone. “Just use the camera. If you can reach the hole you can take a picture through it.”
Veek shook her head. “Does your phone have a flash? It’s a dark room on the other side of the wall.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s no light coming through the hole.”
“I couldn’t reach it, anyway,” said Nate. “Not without crawling over two or three heaters and standing on my head. Maybe if I lay across them and reach down...” He shrugged, “It’s a two-person job, to be safe. And quiet.”
Xela twisted her lip, then smiled. “Wait here.” She dashed down the hall and up the stairs.
Veek sighed.
“What’s the big deal?” asked Nate.
“She’s scatterbrained and she doesn’t take anything seriously. She’s going to get us caught.”
“You don’t know that.”
She snorted and turned her attention back to the double doors.
A moment later Xela tromped back down the stairs. One of her tuxedo smocks hung over her Batman shirt. In one hand was a bright red flashlight. In the other was a mid-range, solid-looking digital camera. “You don’t think there’s anything bad in there, do you?”
“We don’t know what’s in there,” Veek said. “That’s why we want to look.”
“But it’s safe to look, right?”
“No,” said Veek, “it’s incredibly dangerous. I’m almost positive there’s a crossbow on the other side of the wall waiting to shoot anyone in the eye the moment they look through.”
“Bitch,” said Xela. It wasn’t an insult, just a statement. “You hold the flashlight. You hold me,” she said to Nate. “I take the pictures.”
“Works for me.”
Veek shined the flashlight over the heaters. “I’m fine with it.”
Xela squeezed in next to Nate and climbed onto one of the heaters. He held out his arm for balance and she grabbed his wrist. She stepped to the next heater and it rocked under her foot. The noise sounded like a drum in the small room.
“Careful,” said Veek. She flicked the light down briefly to the base of the heater and the shadows in the room went mad.
“Keep the light steady,” snapped Xela. Without letting go of Nate’s arm, she took a quick step to the third water heater. He leaned forward to stay with her. The second heater rumbled to a halt beneath their arms.
“You okay?” asked Nate.
“Fine,” said Xela. “Just fine.” She lowered herself to her knees and then slid onto her ass. She stretched her legs back toward him, setting her sneakers against the wobbly heater. “I think I can lean down from here and get the camera by the hole.”
“Let me shift my grip.” He twisted his arm and they seized each other’s wrist.
“Much better,” she said.
“All set?”
“I think so. Hey,” she said, glancing back at him, “isn’t the boiler room where Freddy Kruger always hung out?”
“Yeah, I think so,” said Nate. “Why would a nubile, young exhibitionist like yourself be worried about that?”
“Bastard.”
“Down you go.”
She leaned to the side and stretched her arm down between the farthest heaters. Her head and shoulders vanished between the tanks. Veek saw a glimpse of blue hair between two of the tanks and shined the light at it.
“Not quite close enough,” Xela called back. “Can you get three or four inches closer?”
Nate forced himself into the gap between the heaters by him. A pipe tugged at his jeans. He leaned forward a little more and let his other leg rise up to balance him.
Xela’s grip loosened and she let her fingers slide from his wrist to his palm. “Got it,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”
There was a faint click and a burst of light came from between the water heaters. There was a faint scrape and a grunt from Xela. Nate felt her shift on his arm. Then there was another click and a more subdued flash. She set the camera off four more times and then her fingers tightened on his. “Up,” she called.
He pulled and she swung back up into view. There were cobwebs in her hair and the tuxedo shirt was streaked with dust and grime. She let Nate guide her back over the wobbly heater and she jumped down next to him.
“Well,” she grinned, “was it good for you, too?”
“You tell me.” He nodded at the camera as they stepped out into the hall.
“Can we see them now?” asked Veek.
“See what?”
Oskar was in the hall, staring at them. His eyes shifted to each of them in turn. They stayed on Veek the longest. After a long moment of silence, he asked, “What were you doing in there?”
Nate tried to think of something, but his mind was blank. He glanced at Veek and saw she was busy returning Oskar’s stare. He raced through ideas again and found the list was pathetically small.
Xela cleared her throat. “I was doing laundry and I saw a rat,” she said. She pointed back into the laundry room with both hands. They were empty.
Oskar’s brows went up. “A what?”
“A rat.”
“There are no rats in our building.”
She shrugged. “I ran upstairs to get you and found Veek and Nate in the lounge.”
“There are no rats in our building,” repeated Oskar.
“There was one,” said Nate. Now that Xela’d planted the seed his brain was working again. “We chased it out of the laundry room and in here.”
Oskar looked at Veek. “And you were chasing this rat, too?”
“No,” she said. “No rats, no bugs. I was just giving moral support.”
“It got away behind the water heaters,” said Nate. “Do you have any traps or anything?”
“We do not haff traps,” said Oskar, “because there are no rats.”
“Well, we saw one,” said Xela. “And if you see one brave one out and about, it means there are ninety-nine cowards in the walls.”
The manager snorted. “I will look for rats,” he said. “If I find any, you will be told. Next time you see one, come find me first.”
“I will,” she said. “I was just, you know, panicking a bit.”
His face wrinkled into a smile. “I understand. I am sorry it scared you.” He gave them each a nod and pushed past to look in the boiler room.
They walked back past the laundry room and headed for the stairwell.
“Where’s the camera?” whispered Nate.
“Wedged in my buttcrack,” said Xela. “I hope he didn’t notice the bulge in the back of my shirt.” They turned the corner at the landing and she yanked the camera out from behind her.
Nate grinned. “Welcome to the Mystery Gang, Daphne.”
Eighteen
Xela’s apartment looked like every clichéd artist’s apartment. Nothing matched, and the furniture gave off a certain vibe Nate was familiar with. It was all secondhand at best, maybe even scavenged from alleys.
Her desk was made from several milk crates and wh
at looked like an old door. An oversized laptop sat on one end. A large lump of clay sat on the other end, half-formed into something that could’ve been either a fertility goddess or a lumpy vase.
She threw herself into a chair in front of the laptop. The camera connected to a USB cable and the computer hummed to life. “Just a sec,” she told them. A progress bar zipped by and she opened a file.
The first picture was dark with a brightly-lit brick on the left side. “I had it positioned bad,” said Xela. “The flash just went off against the wall.”
The second photo was a blur of colors. “Tapped the camera,” she muttered.
The next three seemed workable, although they all showed different details and shadows. She began clicking on different filters and tools. “Give me a minute.”
Veek and Nate turned away and spent a minute looking around. Every wall was covered with photos or paintings of one kind or another. Canvases were stacked up on a wooden chair. An easel near the center of the room held a painting of the Griffith Park Observatory as seen from the roof. Next to the desk was a mattress on the floor, piled high with pillows and blankets. An old-fashioned folding screen with four panels stood next to the wall, like something out of a Wild West bordello. It looked like it had been made from large window shutters.
Nate peeked behind the screen. Just as Xela had said, her bathroom was an open space the size of Nate’s kitchen. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all covered with the blue and white tile. In one corner was the showerhead and controls. In the other was a toilet, sink, and medicine cabinet. It reminded him of a locker room.
Veek was studying the painting of the observatory. There was a photograph of the same view clipped to the edge of the canvas. She pushed her glasses higher on her nose and looked between the two.
“This is the best one,” said Xela. She’d cleaned up one photo and filled the screen with it. “There’s a bit more in some of the others, but this seems to be the best overall.” She leaned back to give them a clear view.
The flash lit up most of the room. Because of the angle, the bottom half the picture was concrete floor. It was rough and unpainted. The bright light highlighted some dust bunnies and cobwebs in the foreground.
The walls were bare brick and mortar with a few horizontal pipes running along them. One of the few vertical pipes ran down into the ground, and there was a stack of what looked like newspapers at the base of it. In the far corner he could see a glimpse of the roof and several thick wooden beams connected to an exposed I-beam. A few coils of thick rope hung on the wall. Something hung at the top edge, and the reflections on it made them all confident it was a bare light bulb peeking into frame.
“So,” said Nate, “all that for a big empty room.”
Veek squinted through her glasses. She reached out to point at the picture. “Do you have a better shot of that rope?”
“Maybe.” Xela switched back to the two other shots. “I haven’t cleaned these up, but if you give me a minute I can try to—”
“There!” Veek jabbed a finger at the monitor. “See that?”
Nate and Xela peered at the image. It was darker than the clean one, and not as sharp. The objects in the background were just shadows, highlights, and reflections. The coils of rope gleamed in the image
“It’s shiny,” said Veek. “It’s not rope, it’s cable.”
“Could be,” Xela said. She skipped to another picture, then back to the clean version. The enhancement and years of dust made the coils look like rope, but there were a few pinpricks of light reflecting off them.
“It is,” said Veek. She looked at Nate. “I’ll bet it’s copper cable.”
“Doesn’t look like copper,” Xela said.
“That’s a big leap,” said Nate.
“Not really. Not if we assume whatever’s in there has something to do with the power mystery.”
Xela turned from the screen. “Power mystery?”
Nate and Veek exchanged a glance. “The building isn’t on the L.A. power grid,” he said.
She blinked. “What?”
“It looks like we’re getting our electricity from somewhere else,” said Nate. “We just don’t know where.”
“Somewhere in there,” said Veek.
“Except,” countered Nate, “there’s nothing in there.”
“We can’t see half the room,” she said. “There could be a ton of stuff in there just out of frame.”
“Something that could power a building?”
Veek glared at him. “Whose side are you on?”
Nate put up a hand. “I just want the facts. No jumping to conclusions.”
“Hold on,” said Xela. She flicked back and forth between a few of the lesser photos again and came back to the clean one. “Look at those shadows.”
Veek leaned in. “What about them?”
She traced the shadows the pipes had cast when the flash went off. “They’re too big. Too wide.”
Nate tried to pull some hidden meaning from the photo. “What do you mean, too wide?”
“If the pipes were on the wall,” Xela explained, “they’d cast narrow shadows. Not much wider than the pipes themselves, because there wouldn’t be much distance for them to spread. We probably wouldn’t even be able to see them.”
“They’re not on the wall,” said Veek. “They’re out in the middle of the room.”
“Yep,” said Xela. “Those aren’t water pipes.”
Nate thought of optical illusions, and how the whole perspective of a picture would switch once you knew the trick to it. “It’s a railing,” he said. “The safety railing around a staircase.”
He and Veek exchanged a glance.
“One going down below the basement,” said Veek.
Nineteen
Xela had to go back to throw her laundry in the dryer and said she’d check on Oskar. Nate and Veek stood in the hall by the stairwell.
“Finding out there’s a sub-basement’s good,” said Nate, “but her bathroom was interesting, too.”
Veek gave him a look. “Why? She have something naughty drying in there?”
“It’s set up like a locker room,” he said. “She told me the other day but I didn’t think she was serious.”
“So?”
“So every single apartment I’ve seen in this building has a different layout. I mean, seriously different.”
She smirked. “You have no idea.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She walked past him to the stairwell and set her hand on the ornate banister. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if I can show you another oddity of the Kavach Building.”
They walked downstairs. Veek stopped at 13, across from the padlocked 14, and rapped a few times. Nate shuffled through the tenants he’d met and tried to remember who lived there.
As it turned out, the woman who answered the door was no one he knew, but he did recognize her. She was the curvy half of the couple he’d seen walking in and out of the building a few times. Up close he could see a light sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. “Hey, Veek,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Favor to ask you.” She cocked her head back at him. “This is Nate. He moved into twenty-eight a few months ago. Do you mind if he takes a look at your place?”
The woman smiled. “Of course not.” She held out her hand to Nate. “I’m Debbie. I’ve seen you a couple of times.”
He shook the hand. “Nate. I’ve seen you, too. You and your...boyfriend?”
“Husband,” she said. “Clive. He’s at a job right now but he should be back in a few hours.” The smile never cracked. She reminded Nate of a teacher he’d had way back in second or third grade.
She stepped aside and let Veek enter the apartment. Debbie glanced back at him. “Would you guys like a drink or something? We’ve got milk, water, orange juice.”
He walked in and looked up.
And up.
“I’ve got half a pot of coffee,” Debbie added, “but I cou
ld make some fresh stuff. Or I’ve got tea if you like. The water’s already on.”
The brick wall across from him was at least twenty feet tall. It had two of the huge windows his apartment had, and then two more a yard or so above them. Then his eyes came off the bricks and windows and found the chandelier. It was a forest of long crystal shards, a hundred icicles in concentric rings. A brass chain bolted it to the hardwood ceiling.
And now Nate saw the rest of the apartment. The ceiling and walls were rich, dark hardwood. They looked like the floors but without a century of wear and tear on them. He looked closer and saw each one was a single plank, floor to ceiling. It was like being in the private library of a mansion, or maybe a castle.
“Wow,” he said.
“Yep,” said Debbie. “We get that a lot.”
“You guys did all this yourself?”
She smiled again. “No. Clive’s a wonderful carpenter, don’t get me wrong, but it was like this when we moved in. He made the loft, though, and our table and chairs.”
Nate looked up again and tried not to get distracted. In the corner opposite the windows was a platform, maybe ten feet on a side. It stood on tall legs of doubled-up two-by-fours. He could see a railing at the top. The whole thing was as high as the next floor, and a staircase ran alongside it. “That’s apartment twenty-three,” he said. “There’s no door because there’s no apartment.”
“You’re a fast one,” said Veek.
“Why the hell do you have a cathedral ceiling?”
Debbie shrugged. “Like I said, it was like this when we moved in.”
“No, I mean...I mean why would anyone do this? Why put a two-story room in the middle of an apartment building?” He looked at Veek. “Maybe we should put the cellar on hold for a while.”
“What? Seriously?”
Debbie stepped back from the kitchen area. “What’s so special about the cellar?”
They sat at the table and told her about the photos and the railing. Debbie made tea for herself and poured them both water from a Brita filter on the counter. She reminded Nate of every cute mom in old black-and-white television shows. Debbie was a modern day June Cleaver, with her manners and smiles and cheerful hosting duties.