***
“Jan didn’t scare you out of this place yet, I see.” The ever cheerful Derek sat at one of the counters in his subterranean office and used a tiny screwdriver to tinker with a set of glasses. He stopped and slid the glasses onto the bridge of his nose. They were those dark and thick-rimmed Buddy Holly style frames. The other times I had seen the man he had been without glasses and so I assumed he regularly wore contacts. He looked at me with an expression that said, Well what do you think?
“You look pretty hip there pal.” He waved a hand to brush off the comment, stood and walked into the time clock room. That reminded me that I still needed to punch in and I followed him. As we walked I tried to steer the conversation away from what Jan had brought up.
“So,” I redirected, “what have we got going on tonight, just the usual cleaning and garbage removal?” He disappeared into the third room without answering. I punched in and waited. He returned a few moments later with a pair of shovels.
“Not exactly,” he said, handing me one of the shovels. “We’ll get to all the usual stuff later, but for right now we’ve got more important things to do.”
“I take it this means we’re going outside?” Hope began to grow. I wouldn’t mind getting out of the basement and the building. At the very least I figured it could cut down on my chances for unwanted encounters with the restless dead.
“Nope,” he said, bursting my bubble, “we’re actually staying down here. Follow me.” And then we were off tracing yet another path through the seemingly endless corridors. We walked in silence, shovels in hand, two grave diggers in underground catacombs. I thought about asking Derek to draw me a map of the basement sometime but the thought vanished when we rounded the final corner.
We reached a dead end. Where the floor should have been was a concrete shaft which opened onto what appeared to be another level below us. The square hole in the floor was not as wide as the hall itself. There was a ledge all around it about a foot wide. As we neared the opening I could see a ladder attached to the wall leading down. I peered over the edge. It was a good ten feet to the next floor.
“How many floors are there to this place,” I asked incredulous. “Jan told me there was only one basement level. Oh, wait is this where the elevator will go if you press the last button?” I recalled Jan saying something about another level that wasn’t really another level having to do with the heating system.
“No, that’s different and has nothing to do with you. Don’t worry, this isn’t an entire floor either. There isn’t too much beside what you already see. Here, hold onto my shovel while I go down there.” He handed me the shovel and I received it from him never taking my eyes off the hole. A sense of urgency gripped me, a sense that there was something down there waiting for me. Did I even want to find out what it was? It didn’t matter. There was work to do.
When Derek made it to the bottom I lay down on my stomach and handed the two shovels through the opening to him. I got back up and moved to the ladder. I put my foot down a few spaces and placed it on one of the rungs. I moved my arm out and when my hand grasped the top of the ladder I thought I heard something, the faint sound of childish whispers drift up from the floor below. I paused and Derek must have noticed.
“You alright up there? I know you’re not afraid of heights, Tarzan, not after what you pulled the other night.” I looked over my shoulder into his expectant face. There was no malice there, only a hint of impatience. I returned my attention to the ladder and began my descent inching farther and farther away from the open freedom of the outside. A few moments later I was down and Derek handed me one of the shovels. Without another word he was off again and I followed.
We weren’t on the move for very long, however. We turned two corners and stopped again. This time the concrete floor in front of us did not open into another shaft. Instead the floor before of us was broken up exposing earth beneath. As soon as my eyes fell on the spot I heard the sound of whispers again. My head jerked to the corridor behind us which was of course completely empty. I began to look around for signs of what had made the noise.
There was nothing other than what anyone should have expected to see at the scene. Pieces of the broken floor lay piled off to one side, a few bags of cement mix were stacked against the opposite wall waiting for the digging work to be finished, an old man and a young man stood ready to do the work. That was it. Show’s over, nothing to see here folks.
Then the sound of three successive beeps issued from Derek’s hip.
“Oh, for crying out loud, what is it now?” He reached into his pocket and lulled out a pager. He looked at the screen and sighed then he looked up at me. “Alright, I’ll be back a few minutes. I have to go upstairs and see what Jan wants. You okay down here by yourself for a while?” There was no way I was going to be okay by myself down there. But the feeling that there was something down there for me, something that wanted to be found won out against my mounting fear.
“Are there any elevators down here,” I inquired.
“No,” he answered cautiously.
“Then yes, I’ll be fine.” Derek chuckled a little and laid his shovel against the wall. He moved past me and started to go around the corner then stopped.
“Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Take your shovel and start digging. We’re looking for buried treasure. There’s supposed to be a buried electrical conduit down there somewhere. It’s our job to dig it up. Don’t worry about hitting it with your shovel. The power that would be running through it has been shut off. Just start digging. Can you do that for me, Steve?”
“Sure, no problem,” I said and then threw a glance back at the broken earth. When I looked back Derek was gone but I heard his footsteps retreating away as he returned to the ladder. I shrugged this off and walked over to the patch of broken ground. It was only an expanse of dirt with flecks of broken concrete here and there but it held an allure for me, a draw I could not explain.
I put the tip of my shovel in the center of the dirt and placed my foot on the head of the shovel and leaned my weight on it. As it sank into the dirt something happened to me. It was disorienting and at first I was unable to tell what was happening but soon I saw I was moving in near total dark but my legs were not moving. It felt like I was watching a movie that used that hand-held camera technique, only my eyes were the camera. I felt the decisions form for the movements I performed but also understood that it was not really I who made the decisions. They belonged to someone else.
I was in a tunnel and I think I was crawling as fast as I could. I could hear someone or something bigger than I was crawling behind me. It grunted in anger as the distance between us grew longer. That only motivated me to crawl faster.
The tunnel around me was dirt. It looked like it was hand dug. There were no supports to keep the tunnel from collapsing on itself. Small streamers of dirt fell around me, some getting in my face and making it hard for me to see. I do not know how long I had been crawling but it felt like a very long time and I grew very tired. I almost stopped for a rest when behind me the thing that followed me yelled. There were words but I couldn’t make them out. I did, however, recognize the voice. The thing chasing after in the tunnel behind me was the dark man. That was enough to convince me not to stop. With renewed vigor I pressed forward.
Soon I came to an opening and sprang through it. There was a small room through the opening of the dirt tunnel though calling it a room is probably a little generous. The floor space was probably no more that sixty-five square feet and the ceiling of the room was probably only six feet above the ground. In the room there was a small mattress on the floor and an oil lantern giving its weak glow of light to the area. There was also an old beat-up steamer trunk against one wall. My heart jumped into my throat when I realized I was not alone in the room.
He was difficult to see at first because of the darkness in which he easily hid. I might not have noticed him at first were it not for the lightly colored baseball bat in his hand
s. The young black boy I had seen the other night by the elevator stepped into the dim light with the baseball bat raised in front of him. His face was whole. He removed one hand from the handle of the bat and pressed a single finger against his lip and then jerked his thumb in the direction of the entrance to the tunnel. Then he lifted the bat above his head and moved next to the hole and waited. When the dark man stuck his head out of the hole the boy planned to clobber him. I had to give him points for effort if not for creativity.
The boy pointed to the wall behind me. I looked and saw another tunnel was carved there. I looked back at the boy and he motioned for me to get going. I did.
This tunnel was about the size of the other one, maybe a little larger. The man chasing me would be able to move a bit quicker through this tunnel if he made it past the boy with the bat. When he made it past the boy, my mind corrected itself. I knew it as a certainty.
What I witnessed was a replay of the past. I came to realize it was not me who was chased. It was not me who crawled through the tunnels. I watched through the eyes of someone from a long time before.
I was into the tunnel on my hands and knees. I pushed and pressed and made my way into yet another small room. This one was more of a proper room but more like a root cellar in an old house. I moved out of the tunnel too quickly. As my eager feet propelled me forward one caught on something near the mouth of the tunnel and down I went. Something that had been closed in my hand slipped away and fell to the floor alongside of me. I lay on the floor for only a moment and rapidly recovered myself. The floor was dirt and there was a ladder leading up. I got on my hands and knees and began to dig in the ground with one hand. My other hand closed around the something I had dropped, something small and wrapped in dirty cloth.
When the hole was judged deep enough I thrust my hand and its contents into it. Inside the hole there was a small wooden box waiting. This hole had been made before. One hand thrust into the hole and opened the lid of the box. When whatever had been clasped in my hand was deposited in the box in the hole I closed the lid again and then both of my little feminine hands worked to cover it up. I was seeing through the eyes of the little girl.
Through the tunnel I heard the noise of the man yell in pain and anger. Then I heard the boy scream. My eyes fell on the hole in the wall and I waited.
Then I was back, standing on the head of the shovel in the basement of Spectra. I hadn’t moved and I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. I thought it might have been mere seconds and it might have been hours. After I thought about it for a little bit I ruled out the possibility of the incident lasting hours. Surely Derek would have returned to find me standing motionless above my work and tried to snap me out of it and failing that would have gotten help. It must have only been a few minutes which meant I should carry on with my work and start digging.
I lifted a shovel full of dirt out of the ground and laid it aside. As I began to repeat this process my mind returned to the vision and I started to examine it from as many angles as I could conceive of. In every case my thoughts strayed away from the chase through the tunnels, the boy with the bat and the details of the room. I kept finding myself wondering what it was the girl had closed in her fist that she had buried in the ground.
All the while the hole in front of me grew deeper. I had anticipated hitting the conduit only a few inches below the surface but when my attention had fully returned to the physical work of digging I discovered a gap in the earth about four feet in diameter and two and a half feet down at its deepest point. I pondered this and how some mysteries also seemed to grow in the search. I stood then contemplating whether I should continue digging or if I should stop and wait for Derek to return. Eventually I decided adding at least two more feet to the depth of the project were in order before coming to a halt.
I jumped into the hole and plunged the tip into the dirt again. After only a few more shovels full of dirt I hit something solid. I began to poke around the object searching out the limits of its dimensions. I soon discovered it was not a tube or wire as I had expected. It was not the conduit. It was a smallish object and as I dug past one side of it to get underneath it so I could pull it out easier I hit something else solid. This, I discovered after a few more minutes of working, was the conduit. But what was the other thing?
I knew it could only have been what had drawn me to stay in the lowest level of Spectra by myself. It had been what pulled me there. Forgetting about mining the conduit I worked to free the small object from its earthen prison.
Finally I pulled it out and set it on the edge of the hole which was now about three feet deep. It was a small wooden box. It was the same box from the vision. My heart started to beat faster as my hands reached for the lid of the box. I slowly tipped the top open and looked inside. Resting on the bottom was something only a few inches long and wrapped in a dirty piece of a rag. I pulled it out and unfolded the rag letting the object rest in my left hand.
In the center of my palm rested a tarnished gray piece of metal: it was a skeleton key. My eyes traced its every detail. It was a very plain but old looking thing and I wondered what it might open. I sat entirely transfixed by the little thing. Then I heard footsteps approaching. I began to panic. Derek would turn the corner any second and find me with the key. I knew with a stark certainty I could not let the key fall out of my possession so I thrust it into one of my pockets. I picked up the box and closed the lid but before I could even consider hiding it Derek appeared in the hallway.
“What do you have there?” I looked up at him and knew the cleverest story I could manufacture would be worthless. It would be easier for me if I could put him on the defensive.
“Buried treasure, I guess. It’s just an empty box. I found it while I was digging. Do you have any idea what it was doing down there?”
“No,” he said seeming not to care. “Did you find the conduit?” A wave of relief washed over me as he showed no interest in what I had found. His line of interest gave me an excuse to set the box aside and move the attention elsewhere. We moved back to dealing with the conduit which consumed another two hours. Then we were ready to return back to the regular basement level to start our routine of cleaning and emptying garbage in the offices.
“Hey Derek, I was wondering if it would be okay if I kept the box?” I didn’t know if the box was important but I thought I should probably try to keep it just in case it was.
“What,” he asked, confused. Then I hefted the box and he seemed to recall it finally. That was good for me, I thought. If he placed little enough value on it to forget about it then I would more likely end up taking the thing home. “What do you want with that old thing?”
“I just like old stuff like this,” I said. He seemed to think about it. He looked at the box and then skeptically at me.
“Sure,” he said at last. “Just an old wood box, I guess. Go ahead.”
I tucked the box under my arm as we grabbed our shovels and then we began our trek back to the rest of the night’s work. But my mind turned again and again to the key hidden in my pocket. I wondered what secrets it would unlock. But most of all I wondered if they would be secrets I wanted to uncover in the first place.
A Ghost of Fire Page 28