Live and Let Shop

by Michael P. Spradlin

  And that was only the beginning. I asked several more students about the Top Floor. Most of them knew about it, but nobody knew anything specific about what it was. From what I could gather, there were maybe ten students in the whole program. They were all in their last year, basically seniors in high school. They kept to themselves and didn’t mix much with the other students, and when they did, they did not discuss Top Floor. Like it was totally off-limits. All I could find out was that some of them occasionally left school for days at a time, allegedly for “off-grounds” study or “seminar work.”

  I didn’t know what to do with this information. I was sure I was on the trail of a conspiracy. A conspiracy of what, I didn’t know, but I felt that there was something out there. It may not be as big a conspiracy as UFOs or who shot Kennedy or who invented liquid soap. But it was right up there. I was yearning to burst into Mr. Kim’s office and shout “Aha!” Except he wasn’t around.

  Pilar refused to be dragged into my investigation no matter how hard I tried to convince her. Even Alex and Brent, whom I confided in at dinner on day three of Mr. Kim’s disappearance, were nonbelievers. They had known Mr. Kim a lot longer than I had, and their faith in him was unshakable. They felt that if he was gone it must be for a good reason, and when he came back he’d tell us what was going on or he wouldn’t if it wasn’t any of our business. God, how I hated their confidence.

  I was most annoyed at Alex, who took great delight in needling me about all this. After I had said my piece, he started to pick at me.

  “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” he said, reaching over to take a cookie from my tray.

  “Hey,” I said. I grabbed for the cookie, but he’d already jammed it into his mouth.

  “Don’t forget to chew,” I said. “And no, I don’t think I’m overreacting. I think you are all underreacting.”

  “Well, I think maybe you haven’t adjusted yet. It’s no secret you don’t like it here, and I think you’re just looking for an excuse to shake things up,” he said.

  “Oh really? May I ask where you get this information?”

  “I hear things,” he said. He took a quick “look but don’t actually look” glance at Pilar when he said it, and her face colored. So the little birdie had been singing.

  “Well, maybe you’re hearing the wrong things and other people should mind their beeswax about what I think or don’t think. Anybody wants to know what I think, I’m happy to tell them.” I tried and failed to keep the anger out of my voice.

  Alex was sitting next to Pilar, and he nudged her with his shoulder. “Did she just say beeswax?” he said.

  “What is your problem?” I asked.

  “I don’t have a problem, but I think you do. Whatever Mr. Kim is doing is none of your concern, and maybe you should just keep your mouth shut.”

  “Hey, take it easy, Alex,” Brent spoke up. “No need to come down like that.”

  “Excuse me, Alex, nobody informed me that you’d been elected king. I must have missed that memo,” I said, giving Brent a look that said I didn’t need him to defend me.

  “Make all the cracks you want. Everybody knows you don’t like it here, and that’s fine. But some of us do like it here, and we don’t need you stirring up trouble. For some of us this is the only place we’ve got. We don’t have a rich family in Beverly Hills to fall back on, so maybe you should mind your own ‘beeswax’ and stop asking so many questions.” Luckily for him, when he said beeswax he didn’t make that little air quotes sign, or I’d have gone straight for his throat.

  “Guys, come on. It’s not worth arguing about. Let’s just drop it,” Pilar said.

  “Fine. Consider it dropped.” I picked up my tray and stormed off. But not before I picked up my last cookie and jammed it into the pile of mashed potatoes on Alex’s tray.

  “Very mature,” I heard him say on my way out. But I also heard Pilar and Brent laughing.

  Later that night, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. After Tae Kwon Do class, Pilar and I were back in our room studying. Pilar could really focus on her books. She had amazing powers of concentration, and she’d sometimes not answer me when I asked her questions or not really pay attention when I talked.

  “Pilar, I’m going for a walk.”

  “Uh-huh,” she mumbled. She was studying her Criminology textbook and taking notes on a yellow legal pad.

  “I won’t be gone long.”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “Orlando Bloom is waiting for me in front of the school. We’re running away together to Vegas to get married.”

  “’Kay.” She didn’t even look up. She was lost in her studies.

  I left the room and headed back down the hallway toward Mr. Kim’s office.

  Most everyone had settled in for the night and I didn’t pass anyone on my way. About halfway there, I stopped because I thought I heard someone behind me, but when I looked, no one was there. I turned back and started forward, but I had to stop again, because I felt for sure that someone was watching me. I looked around more carefully, but there was still no one in sight. Then I could have sworn I heard a door click shut. It was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. But there was definitely a noise. I walked back up the hallway and looked at all the doors that I passed. They were all closed. I had goose bumps by then. This whole school just gave me the creeps.

  My search didn’t turn up anyone, but I still had a feeling I was being watched. Maybe it was Mrs. Marquardt. What would I do if she caught me in Mr. Kim’s office? Well, I had come this far. I wasn’t going to turn back now. I’d just have to stay alert and be ready with a good story if someone caught me.

  When I got to the hallway leading to Mr. Kim’s office, I stopped and peered around the corner. I didn’t want to barge in on someone like I almost did last time. It was deserted, so I scampered down to his office door and listened. No sounds from his or Mrs. Marquardt’s office. I tried the door. As usual, it was unlocked.

  From the dim light of the hallway I could see that all of the blinds were closed. I flipped on the light and looked around the office. No Mr. Kim anywhere.

  Where to start? The pad of paper was still on his desk. I crossed to it and checked all of the drawers again. Still completely empty. So he hadn’t been gone on an emergency trip to Staples.

  The only other things in the office were the file cabinets and a bookcase along the wall to the left of the desk. I tried the first drawer on the file cabinet. Strangely, it was locked. That was weird. All the time I’d been at this school, I’d yet to see anyone lock anything, and the only other locked door in the whole school led to the Top Floor. But in Mr. Kim’s unlocked office, the filing cabinet was locked.

  Well, I guess some things have to be private. Like school records and stuff. Or maybe Mr. Kim kept all of his office supplies locked up in the cabinet. Maybe Mrs. Marquardt was a klepto and he had to keep the pencils from disappearing. That must be it. Maybe there was a key around here somewhere.

  I went to the bookcase. It was divided into two sections. The top two shelves on each section had books on them. The bottom two shelves held little mementos and plaques and trophies and stuff. I scanned the books, getting a sense of Mr. Kim’s reading tastes. Lots of books on martial arts. The Art of War. The Way of the Samurai. The Bushido. Some books on psychology and child development. Plus The Great Gatsby. The Grapes of Wrath. The Hunt for Red October. A criminology textbook. Interesting. Sadly, no book with a title like “Where to Look When I’m Missing” or “Obvious Clue Here!”

  I looked at the little statues and plaques. Many were little carvings of martial arts figures. A plaque from a Philadelphia charity. A signed picture of Jackie Chan and Mr. Kim that said “To the Best Martial Artist I Know, Your Friend, Jackie Chan.” Jackie Chan! Holy cow! Mr. Kim knew Jackie Chan? The picture was of Jackie and Mr. Kim in their do baks in front of a banner that said “Kick-a-thon for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.” Must have been some fund-raising tournament or something. Jackie Chan. Wow.<
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  The next photo was in a metal frame, and it was pretty small. I had to stoop down to look at it, and I saw it was a picture of Mr. Kim and some other guy that I didn’t recognize. Mr. Kim was much younger in the picture, and they both were wearing some kind of uniform. The other guy appeared to be a little older than Mr. Kim. He was very handsome, tall with jet-black hair and blue eyes that you could call steely.

  I wanted to get a closer look at Mr. Kim when he was younger, so I reached to pick up the picture frame. But when I grabbed it, it flipped forward and lay facedown on the shelf. I saw it was attached to the shelf with a little hinged spring. Then I heard a little hiss, like steam escaping from a pipe, and then the other section of the bookshelf swung out away from the wall. When it finished moving, and the hissing sound faded and my heart stopped hammering in my chest, I saw that behind the bookcase, just like in the movies or a Batman cartoon, was a stairway leading down into the darkness. I stood at the top of the stairs looking down, wondering what to do. But I’d answered one of my questions. At least now I knew how Mr. Kim had disappeared.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Does This Place Have Cable?

  Ordinarily, I don’t think of myself as the bravest person in the world. I don’t like dark places. I don’t like scary movies. Weird stuff kind of creeps me out. As I stood there I thought, Don’t do it, Rachel. Don’t go down there. Who knows what you will find. I was giving myself smart advice. I knew what I should do is go back to my room and either forget the whole thing or get Pilar and see if we could sneak over to Brent and Alex’s room and get them to come with us. And maybe Mr. Quinn. And Mr. Torres from Tae Kwon Do. And Mr. Elliot from gym. He was tough. Unlike, say, me.

  But it was me I was dealing with, so there was no way I was going to forget it. Going to get Pilar would be smart, but I might be seen on the way out or back and then we’d be busted. You never knew where Mrs. Marquardt or one of the other resident faculty members was going to pop up. And if I told Mr. Quinn or somebody, they might not let me go with them and then I’d never know what was going on. That would be worse than any of the other options.

  In the few seconds it took me to think all of this, the bookcase/secret passageway solved the problem for me, because the hissing sound started again, and it began to close. I jumped through the doorway and onto the top step of the stairway as the wall closed up behind me—as I said before, despite not exercising before I got to Blackthorn, I was always pretty quick on my feet.

  When the wall closed behind me I thought I would freak, because it was pitch black. But right as I was about to scream, lights came on automatically and I swallowed the scream in my throat.

  The stairway wasn’t like a stairway in an office building or hotel that twisted around and went back and forth. This one went straight down. A long way straight down. All I could think of was a mine shaft or those steps that people have to walk down when a roller coaster breaks at the very top.

  Well. What to do. I looked at the walls to either side of me. On my left there was a little red button with a sign above it that said “Exit.” That must get me out. And since I’d gone this far….

  I started down the steps. After about ten minutes and what must have been the equivalent of ten or twelve flights of stairs, I finally reached the bottom. I found an archway that led through to a short hallway with a gray steel door at the end of it. I walked up to the door and listened. I couldn’t hear anything at all except the faint hum of the lights. Now I was a little bit scared. What if there was someone waiting for me on the other side? What if I went through the door and it locked and I couldn’t get back out? Maybe I should go back to my room. I looked over my shoulder at the long stairway and decided I didn’t really feel like climbing it so soon. So I tried the doorknob. Guess what? It wasn’t locked.

  When I walked through the door, I knew in an instant that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. It took a while for my mind to comprehend what I was seeing. For a minute I thought I had stepped into the freaking Batcave.

  The room was huge. As large as an airplane hangar, maybe bigger. Considering that I had to be at least ten stories underground, if not more, that was amazing in itself. But it was what was in the room that really had me freaked.

  On the wall immediately to my left was a bank of computers. To call them state of the art wouldn’t even do it, because the monitors and consoles weren’t like anything you could buy at Radio Shack. The monitors were built into the wall and all had lithium-liquid silicon screens. I considered myself something of a computer geek, but what I knew about these screens was that there were only supposed to be a couple of prototypes in the world. There were six separate workstations where the keyboards were all set up with the latest in infrared mouse technology and the disk ports were smaller than anything I’d seen, so they must not use CD, MP3, or even digital fiber-optic relays. I couldn’t believe it. Talk about me wanting Internet access in my room. This place practically was the Internet.

  There was so much to see that I almost didn’t know where to look first. Across the aisle from the computer stations were what looked like a bunch of highly sophisticated fax machines. A couple of them had telephones attached to them and little signs that said stuff about satellite uplinks. Next to the aisle with the computers and the fax machines was another aisle with a long counter, that had all kinds of lab equipment on it, like microscopes and centrifuges and other stuff so high tech that I couldn’t even imagine what it was for.

  On the wall to my right was a very large wooden fixture that held a huge variety of martial arts weapons. Swords, sais, staffs, ninja stars, and a variety of other mysterious things that looked deadly. It looked like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle had exploded on the wall. There was some serious stuff hanging there.

  And that was only what I could see from the doorway. I walked farther into the room and tried to take it all in. In the middle of the room there was a large conference table with a four-sided video monitor in the middle. On the far side of the room were several vehicles parked along the wall near what looked like a big garage door. There were a couple of gray sedans. There were also a Ferrari, a Harley-Davidson motor-cycle, and a panel van that said “Henderson’s Dry Cleaning. We Deliver” on the side of it.

  Mr. Kim had his very own secret hideout! What the heck was going on here? Who was this guy and what was he doing with all this stuff underneath a school for kids? There didn’t seem to be any cameras or hidden microphones or anything, so it didn’t look like this was a way of spying on the students. Or was it? Could this be how Mr. Kim always seemed to know what was going on? I walked all around the room looking at everything, up and down each aisle and in each cubicle and nook and cranny, and I didn’t see any closed-circuit camera monitors. I’d never noticed any cameras around the school either, come to think of it.

  Also, this place had an “official” feel to it, almost like it was set up for a specific purpose that had only a little to do with the school and a lot to do with something else. Time to intensify my search. Whatever this place was, it was no ordinary boarding school. It was a setup or a front for something. I didn’t know what yet, but I was sure I was right.

  I went back to the computers and sat down at one that had the desktop page showing. It wasn’t password locked, probably because no one expected anyone else to use it. Mr. Chapman would have freaked at the thought. I clicked on Internet Explorer and got into a search engine. I typed in “Mr. Jonathon Kim” and “Blackthorn Academy.” I got one match, and it was for the school’s website. A great place to learn and grow and blah, blah, blah.

  I typed in just “Jonathon Kim” and got fourteen matches. One was the school’s website again, and none of the others were the Mr. Kim I was looking for.

  I typed in “Book of Seraphim” and got a bunch of listings, but the one that caught my eye was an AP story that said: “Valuable Book Stolen from Washington D.C. Gallery.” Holy guacamole! Apparently the night after we’d visited the gallery, it had been broken into by someone
sophisticated enough to bypass the alarms and steal the book. The story said it was the only item taken, probably because it was the most valuable. The police had no leads yet. Okay, this was news. Wow. Shows you the total news-blackout state here at Blackthorn Academy.

  Things were starting to come together. The FBI agents must have come to see Mr. Kim because we had been at the gallery the day before a priceless artifact was stolen. That’s why I’d heard the one agent say the word “Seraphim.” Did they think someone from the school had something to do with it? All I knew was I didn’t do it, although I’m sure Judge Kerrigan would pin it on me if she could. It didn’t seem likely that anyone here had anything to do with the theft. Maybe the FBI was just being thorough and wanted to know if the students had noticed anybody casing the joint. That must be it. Sure.

  Then I typed in “Mithras,” and I have to say that I got more than I bargained for. There were about thirty sites devoted to Mithras. I clicked one of them and read through some of the postings, giving myself a quick education. The upshot of what I learned was that Mithras is an ancient god, prominent in several Middle Eastern cultures. In most religions he was considered to be a God of Darkness and the Afterlife. Mithras was banished to the underworld for sacrificing a bull, which was the symbol of life. He frequently returned to try to take over the world, and he was said to be able to change from bull to human form at will. Hey! Just like the guy in the weird dream I had. What a coincidence. Of all the freaky things for my subconscious mind to come up with. And again, that word “Mithras” started to nag at me. I didn’t know jack about ancient mythology, but that word still seemed familiar somehow.

  I also read that Mithras became very popular with the soldiers of the Roman army just about the time that the Roman Empire was declining. Many of the soldiers formed their own cults and built temples to Mithras. They had all these weird ceremonies where they purified themselves and made sacrifices, believing that Mithras would make them invincible and restore the empire to its past glory. This spread through the legions of the Roman army very rapidly for a short time, but then the empire fell and the cult sort of died out. Now all that was left were a few temples and some artifacts from archaeological digs in the Middle East.