The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  They finished, but it wasn’t the same, and this morning, when Emily left for New York City, there had been something in her face that made him wonder if she was unsure about coming back. He wondered if Nellie could sense it, too, because there had been all sorts of glitches, and it had taken longer than Emily expected to get out of the house; even when she was all packed and ready to go, it took several minutes before Nellie opened the front door.

  He realized he was stroking the scar on his hand again, and he forced himself to stop. He was preoccupied, still thinking about Emily and the night before, and as he got into the elevator in the main hall, he wondered if he should just call and check in. He pulled out his phone and then put it in his pocket.

  Wait. Something was . . .

  He’d gone down. Not up. Down.

  The elevator opened to the basement. He didn’t move. Neither did the elevator.

  “Nellie, come on. Take me upstairs, please. I’m going to my office.”

  I’m sorry, Billy. The elevator appears to be nonfunctioning.

  He sighed. Well, it had been good while it lasted. He supposed he was back to trudging up and down the steps until the elevator guy could come out again. How, he wondered, could Shawn spend millions and millions of dollars on construction and still end up with an elevator that didn’t work.

  “Self-diagnose,” he said, stepping out into the hallway.

  He’d never actually been down in this part of the basement. He’d been in the mechanical room with Shawn, but that was in a completely separate part of the cellar. There’d been no reason for him to come down here. This space was really going to be used only by staff. As far as he knew, it was entirely storage. It was still nicely done, however. Shawn could have cut a corner here, opting for bare concrete and industrial fixtures, but it was finished, if more simply, in a similar style to the upstairs. The ceilings were much lower than upstairs, a standard eight feet, but there wasn’t anything to complain about.

  I’m sorry, Billy, but I can’t do that.

  Her voice came from inside the elevator. Maybe she wasn’t wired for down in the cellar?

  He looked around. The stairs from the main entrance didn’t carry down below to where the elevator let him off. He was going to have to figure out where the stairs were down here.

  “What do you mean you can’t self-diagnose?”

  I’m sorry, Billy, but I can’t do that.

  Huh.

  “Okay. Where are the stairs?”

  If Nellie wasn’t wired for the basement, he’d have to find his way through the cellar by himself. The thought gave him a slight panic. The hallway was well lit, however, and he assumed that whatever twists and turns he’d have to take would also be well lit. He would be fine.

  Go to the end of this corridor, pass through the door to your right, pass the first hallway and turn left at the second hallway. The stairs will be the third door on your right.

  “Thanks,” he said. He patted his pocket. He had his phone. Eagle Mansion’s footprint was big enough that if he got turned around, it might take him a while to find the stairs. But he remembered Shawn telling him during their tour at the beginning of November that there were three sets of stairs to get him back upstairs. If he had to, he thought, he could even just call Nellie. She could send him a set of plans for the cellar.

  He started to walk.

  DON’T GET LOST.

  He spun around to look at the elevator. The doors were still open.

  Like an open mouth.

  Were the doors . . . trembling?

  “What?”

  Nothing.

  “Nellie? What did you say?”

  Nothing.

  He was jittery. Imagining things. He just didn’t like being down here. There’d been that time he and Shawn had tried exploring the cellars, and even though they’d found a case of Prohibition-era booze, they’d also gotten lost and spent five or six hours wandering through the maze of tunnels that snaked around under the grounds before they . . . No, that wouldn’t happen. All the tunnels leading out from the house had been blocked off.

  He turned away and took another step.

  GOOD-BYE.

  He spun around again. The doors to the elevator were closed.

  “Nellie?”

  There was no response from Nellie, and he found himself looking up at the lights, as if he expected them to turn off. But the lights stayed on.

  God. He could do with a drink. Just one. He stuck his hand into the pocket of his jeans to finger his two-year coin, but his pocket was empty. He dug harder, and then he pulled his phone out of his other pocket, but that pocket was empty, too. Had he left the coin in another pair of jeans? Had he put it on his dresser? How had he lost another coin?

  There was nothing else to do, so he started walking again. This time, there was no ghostly voice behind him.

  He took the door to his right and then turned left at the second hallway, and then . . . He couldn’t remember what she’d said. But even if he could have, did he trust her? Which Nellie was it who gave him the directions? Was there another worm in the system? Had Takata buried another virus in there that he’d missed?

  His phone. He’d call Nellie and get directions that way. He’d be able to hear it in her voice, if it was Nellie or if it was whatever he was (imagining) hearing.

  His phone had no signal.

  He put it back in his pocket. There was a set of double doors to his left, and he pushed through those into a small room with a steel door set into the concrete wall. As the double doors closed behind him, he heard them latch. He turned, frantically, but it was too late. They were locked.

  And . . . of course. Shawn Eagle hadn’t just built himself a mansion. He’d built himself a fortress. Bulletproof glass and every wall sandwiching metal between the drywall. Sure, you could break through the doors and the windows and the walls, but only if you had tools and plenty of time to do it. So good luck breaking out of here.

  Nowhere to go but forward.

  He reached for the handle on the steel door. He realized he was whispering under his breath: “Please be unlocked, please be unlocked.”

  It was unlocked.

  He thought he’d scream, but instead, he was laughing.

  It was not an improvement. The door led through to a shadowed, narrow tunnel. The walls were crumbling rock, the floor packed dirt. A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling maybe ten feet in, sending out a pool of light that was just enough to show how much darkness there was, and beyond that, the tunnel curved so he couldn’t see anything other than a dim glow that gave him hope that the tunnel opened up into another room.

  “Great. Bad enough that I’m locked in the basement, but now I’ve got to go into that?”

  He stepped back and tried the double doors again just in case, but they were still locked.

  “Okay, okay. I’m not afraid of the dark,” he said. “I’m not afraid of the dark.” He wasn’t afraid of the dark, was he? He tried saying it again. “I’m not afraid of the dark.” But it seemed like each time he said it, he was more unsure.

  He could call Nellie. Or Shawn or Wendy or Emily. Tell them he’d somehow gotten stuck in the basement of Eagle Mansion. Somebody would come out from Whiskey Run and help him get out of here. He’d just have to sit and wait to be rescued. It wouldn’t be more than an hour. But when he pulled out his cell phone again there was still no signal.

  “Onward and upward,” he said, trying to sound sure of himself as he stuffed the phone back into his pocket. “Am I talking to myself? Yes, I’m talking to myself.”

  The tunnel smelled damp and dusty. There was a part of him that was screaming and expecting to step face-first into a cobweb, but there was nothing. He walked past the bare lightbulb, being careful to look on either side, but there were no doorways, just stone walls. He followed the curving tunnel another dozen paces. The glow came from another bare lightbulb, but it didn’t open into a room in the mansion. Instead, the tunnel split into two.

 
; He shook his head and turned around. This was a terrible idea. All he could think about was getting lost down here. He imagined Emily coming back from New York City three days from now and not knowing where he was. What if Nellie told her he was in the basement and she came down to find him and got lost herself? No. Stupid. He was going to go back and try those double doors again, see if he could bust them open. Maybe not everything in the house was armored, maybe he . . .

  Oh, Jesus. The steel door that he’d gone through to get into the tunnel was closed.

  He’d left it open, hadn’t he?

  He came to it in a blind panic. There was no handle on this side, and through the hair-thin seam, he could see that the door was latched. He threw his shoulder against it, hard, but with growing horror, he realized that the door opened inward. Pushing wouldn’t do a thing.

  There was nothing to do, then, but go deeper into the tunnels.

  At the intersection, where the tunnel split into a Y, he didn’t hesitate, going right. That tunnel curved as well, but at least there was another glow ahead, the promise of another lightbulb. To the left, there was only darkness.

  He walked forward, letting his left hand drag along the stones on the wall. His cowboy boots were muffled against the packed dirt. He’d gone probably forty, fifty feet, maybe more, since walking through the steel door. Was he still under the mansion or was he out under the lawn now? This was, clearly, one of the old tunnels that should have been inaccessible, but that didn’t mean he was under the lawn, did it?

  He stopped. The tunnel dead-ended at a stone wall. The lightbulb was harsh and unforgiving, and Billy had the sudden unfounded fear that it was about to burn out. He hurried to turn around and went back to the fork. He stopped in front of the left-side tunnel. The dark was screaming at him.

  He took a step into the darkness. Another. He could feel his breath starting to get away from him. He couldn’t move. What was out there? What was waiting for him?

  The phone. Oh, sweet lord, his cell phone! He pulled it out and turned on the flash to use as a flashlight. It wasn’t as bright as he might have wanted, but it was enough to take the edge out of the darkness. The tunnel ran straight and true for close to twenty feet, and then it turned a hard left. There was nothing to do but keep going. He kept dragging his hand across the crumbling rock wall, as if he might fall over without that to balance him. The edge of the light from his phone showed a solid wall in front of him, with another hard left turn. He started to turn, but then he stopped. He felt cool air coming from his right even though it was a solid . . .

  No. There. He ran the light from the cell phone up and down where the wall ended, and there were some clear gaps in the rocks. He could feel a draft moving through them. A surge of hope went through him, knocking away the terrors for at least a moment: that had to mean a way out. He was sure of it. He pushed against the rocks with his free hand. There was a bit of give. He leaned into the wall, hard, and again, there was the sensation of movement. He bounced against the wall with his shoulder. Again. Again. Five times, ten times, and then, with no warning, the rocks gave way and he found himself stumbling and tumbling. The cell phone fell out of his hand and skittered away, but mercifully, it landed with the flash up so he wasn’t left in darkness.

  Or, maybe not so mercifully. He couldn’t stop himself from screaming.

  There were two chains bolted to the wall, both of them just high enough to clear the metal bed frame and the thin mattress. The chains were long enough that the person to whom they were attached could have gotten off the bed and moved a few feet at most.

  He knew the chains were intended for a person, because they were still attached to what was left of . . . her. It had been a woman. Her torso was down to the bone, her rib cage making terrible shadows, but from her waist down, there was still flesh, turned to something approaching leather. She had long hair, but her face was, thankfully, turned away from him. One of her legs had been taken to the bone, too, below the knee.

  Billy took all of it in with one glance, and then his screaming turned to vomiting as he realized that her bone showed from the flesh having been gnawed away by rats.

  “Oh, God!”

  He scrambled across the floor, grabbing his cell phone and stumbling back to his feet. He turned the flashlight on the woman again, better prepared, and this time he neither screamed nor vomited, though he wanted to do both.

  How long had she been down here? How long would it have taken for her to mummify like this, for her body to sink into itself, the flesh that was left shrinking and tightening?

  She was naked, so he couldn’t take any clues from her clothing, but the bed frame looked old. Simple iron bolted together to make a platform for the sagging mattress. The metal was rusted. It looked old enough to have been there from those first years that the mansion was in business, he thought, and he jumped back to the conversation he had with the bartender at Ruffle’s.

  Women chained up to sell to the guests. You could kill one for enough money.

  He stood up straight. It was cool down here, almost cold, and maybe that was why she hadn’t rotted away. Despite that, he was sweating, and he wiped at his forehead. As he did, the light from the cell phone caught something that wasn’t rock wall. Wood. A wooden door. He reached.

  “Please, please.”

  It was slightly ajar in the frame. He pulled, but the wood was warped, and he had to stuff the cell phone in his pocket and pull with both hands. The darkness was unbearable with his eyes open, so he closed them. There was almost no difference. He pulled hard, and the wood shrieked as the door came open.

  Beyond it was another small room, another bed with another set of chains in the wall, but no body this time. There was another wooden door with a heavy bar across it, but when he lifted the bar, it opened easily. He stepped out and realized he was in another tunnel. He looked left and then right, but his cell phone’s light showed him the same thing in either direction: dirt floors and straight rock walls as far as the light would go. Which wasn’t far.

  He was so disoriented that he wasn’t sure it mattered, but he chose to go right. He counted his steps to keep calm. Ten. Twenty. Forty. By the time he hit seventy, he was starting to panic and decided that if he didn’t come to anything by one hundred, he would turn around and go the other direction. But at eighty-two, there was a door set into the side of the hallway. It was warmer here, he noticed, and the air felt almost damp. The door was wood again, and it was latched from the other side. The wood was rotten, however. It splintered after two good kicks.

  Oh, sweet relief! Light! Not much light, but there were stone stairs and at the top, although he couldn’t tell what was waiting, it wasn’t darkness. He went up the stairs quickly and found himself standing in a small building. There was a faint smell of smoke and clear signs that there had been a fire here in the past, but Billy didn’t care. There were windows letting in the late-afternoon light, and he was at ground level! He could see Eagle Mansion looming through the windows. He hurried across the small building to the door and almost started to cry when it opened at the turn of the knob. He realized he’d been bracing himself for it to be locked. He stepped outside, into the winter air, and he was crying now.

  He put his hands up to his face and then threw them down. Carefully now, still crying, he looked closely at his left hand. There, he could see one: a thin black wire surfacing through the scar.

  He couldn’t stop himself now. He started gasping, sobbing. He didn’t even try to be quiet; there was nobody to hear him anyway.

  THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

  Emily thought seriously about just ditching everything. Instead of going back to Eagle Mansion, she could just hail a taxi, head to the airport, and catch a flight to Chicago. She could ride out the winter with her sister. Billy could finish up his work in that creepy house without her, and once he was all done, they’d reconnect somewhere she didn’t feel like she was being watched all the time. Living w
ith Nellie was great, except for when it wasn’t. When it wasn’t, it felt like living in a haunted house.

  The problem with going to live with Beth was . . . Beth. She would never, ever believe that Emily’s ditching Whiskey Run hadn’t been about Billy. No matter what she said, no matter what happened going forward, if Emily ran away, it would irreparably reopen the rift between Beth and Billy. Going to Chicago was as good as saying she was going to have to give up on one of them: her sister or Billy.

  But the other issue was that even if she somehow did manage to explain to Beth why she had left, her sister was going to think she was crazy.

  She could just imagine the conversation:

  She’s constantly watching me.

  She’s a computer, right? She’s not alive.

  And I think she’s jealous.

  Emily, it’s a computer program.

  You don’t understand, she’s there. You can feel her presence. It’s like she wants to be inside me. I’m afraid I’m going to wake up one day and be trapped in there forever.

  What, you think the place is haunted? And you thought it was a good idea to invite me and my family for Christmas?

  Yeah, Emily thought, that conversation would go swimmingly. Maybe once Beth and Rothko and the kids had spent a few days in Eagle Mansion Beth would get it, but right now, there was no way to explain what it felt like. No way to get Beth to understand that sense of unease that Emily felt, why it was that the idea of going back to Whiskey Run left her feeling panicked. Which meant, panicked or not, there was no choice for Emily but to go back. So, in the end, after spending three nights at the Gramercy Park Hotel compliments of the munificent Mr. Eagle—or maybe just Wendy—Emily loaded up her Christmas presents in the back of the Honda Pilot and returned to Whiskey Run.

  And once she was in the mansion, it somehow felt worse. Like Nellie knew she’d been thinking about fleeing. As if Nellie could see inside her, could read her thoughts, could—

  I think the girls will like their presents.

  “Me, too,” Emily said. She swallowed hard. Nellie’s voice sounded . . . forced? She tried to keep her own voice light and happy. Just conversation. “I wasn’t sure what to get Rothko, though. He’s impossible because absolutely everything makes him happy.”