by Katie Berry
It was drafty in the hallway, and he shivered. Perhaps a guest on this floor had left a window open in one of the suites he had passed. But who would do that tonight? It was definitely not the kind of night to sleep with one’s windows open for fresh air, not with the current sub-zero temperatures outside and all. Vincent had almost convinced himself that that was the case and began mentally reminding himself to check for drafts at the suite’s doors on his way back. And then he suddenly recalled no other guests were booked here on the third floor tonight. Schreck and his gang of sombre suits were the only residents in this part of the hotel.
The corridor seemed so much longer than he remembered. He’d finally made it to the halfway point, but it was taking forever to get there. He figured maybe that was the booze screwing with his perception — it had happened before. A small table with a pair of matching chairs was located halfway along the corridor, for those guests unable to travel its long distances all at once, he supposed. He was almost tempted to use it himself, but because of the two-hundred-dollar tip that Schreck had paid him, he wasn’t about to sit down on the job.
DaCosta looked over his shoulder, checking to see the hallway wasn’t stretching away for miles into the distance at his back like he felt it was. And then he did a double take.
At the opposite end of the corridor, Tommy Dorfman continued to stare back at him like an idiot. His fingers were no longer clasping the railing but now intertwined in the elaborate leaf motif metalwork that made up the outer cage of the open-air, wrought-iron elevator. DaCosta pushed forward past the chair and table, shaking his head in wonder. The barman was one of those people who loved to beat a dead horse and run a gag on far too long.
The cart continued to squeal and squawk as Vincent moved, sounding for all the world like a murder of crows circling high above his head, harbingers portending his forthcoming doom, now and forevermore. He shuddered at the thought, realising he had to stop watching so many Corman-Price flicks at the drive-in movie theatre in Entwistle — his mind was getting carried away with itself.
Vincent pressed his ear to the closed door of the royal suite and listened for a moment. He’d expected to hear a party going on inside the suite after the big boozy delivery Dorfman had just made. But there was no sound at all for some reason. He knocked loudly and called out, “Room service!” After not being bid entry right away, DaCosta turned to look over his shoulder while he waited.
In seconds that seemed to last minutes, he watched Tommy Dorfman turn around and proceed to climb onto the edge of the railing. He stood there, facing Vincent, his back to the three-story drop. What in God’s name was this idiot doing, Vincent wondered? Had he gone insane or just been imbibing in too much of the stuff he pushed in the lounge? He’d never thought Dorfman was an alcoholic. Himself, maybe, but not family man Tommy Dorfman. Perhaps he was strung out on drugs and smoking some of that Mary Jane he’d heard the younger kids on the staff talking about the other day.
Sounding a million miles away, the grandfather clock in the lobby started its twelve o’clock dirge, signalling the beginning of Christmas Day. At his back, the door to the suite whisked open. Vincent snapped his head around to see Max Schreck towering behind him. His bowler hat was still perched at a jaunty angle on his head, but his face contained something else entirely new. A wickedly cruel smile curled his lips, almost spiralling inward at the corners it was so extreme — he was the Grinch made real. The suite behind him lay in blackness. He looked downward at DaCosta, saying, “Why, Vincent! How fabulous to see you! This is absolutely perfect timing. We have so been looking forward to having you! Thank you for being so punctual.” He stepped aside as a pair of pale, bony arms reached out from the darkness behind him and pulled the cart into the darkened room at his back. Schreck ignored this, his undivided attention now on DaCosta.
Vincent smiled weakly and said, distractedly, “Your welcome, sir.” After a slight pause, he added, “Say, Mr. Schreck, was the man that delivered the alcohol to you just a few minutes ago acting strange in any way?”
“What man?” Schreck questioned. He looked over Vincent’s head down the corridor. “Oh, you mean that man? Don’t you worry about him.” Schreck waggled his long fingers dismissively down the hall as if he were waving bye-bye to a small child.
Vincent looked back over his shoulder. He blinked in disbelief. Dorfman was still doing his high-wire act and standing on the railing, but now he was leaning backward out over the lobby’s cavernous space. Tommy’s right hand was white-knuckled from grasping the cage’s ornamental metalwork so tightly. The sharp-cornered leaves in its design cut into his palm and blood flowed freely down his arm. His left hand formed an imaginary gun, and his arm moved slowly and jerkily toward his temple, as if it were insanely heavy, or moving against his will. With a final terrified and imploring look, Tommy Dorfman pulled his hand-gun’s invisible trigger and released his grasp from the wire cage, dropping down out of sight. Moments later, the sickening sound of soft flesh and hard bone meeting cold, Italian marble echoed up from the lobby floor far below.
“Oh my God!” DaCosta said, turning to move back down the lobby to see if he could somehow assist the bartender.
Schreck’s voice rasped behind him, “Oh, I’m so sorry, my boy. God can’t help him now, or you either, for that matter.” Iron hands clamped down onto Vincent’s thin shoulders. He was yanked backward into the darkened room, the door pounding shut in its frame behind him.
A single, brown penny loafer lay on its side outside in the hall next to a small white cannister of Binaca spray. After a moment, the heavy door opened a crack. A pallid, emaciated arm crept out and grabbed the loafer and spray. At the same time, another thin arm reached out and placed a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the knob. The door closed once again, this time silently, in keeping with the night.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
December 24th, 2021, 0905 hours
The stairs definitely appeared cleaner on Lively’s second trip to the basement. As Minerva had observed, whatever was going on in this building was working its way up from the basement and accelerating. At the dogleg halfway down, he paused. Something was wrong — at least, more so than usual around here, he mentally corrected himself.
Part of his job with CSIS had consisted of finding out where people hid things. It wasn’t that he was psychic per se — usually, he just got a feeling about things being off sometimes, no doubt thanks to his hidden talents bubbling through to the surface on occasion. And right now, was one of those occasions.
In several buildings over the years, Lively had discovered hidden passages leading to secret rooms where the miscreants often hid the evidence of their surreptitious wrongdoings. But there was something new going on here, and he needed to make sure first. He climbed back up to the top, saying, “Let’s see how you stack up.” Moving slowly back down to the small landing, he counted each stair riser as he went. At the dogleg, he turned the corner and counted the rest of the way down to the basement.
Standing at the bottom of the stairwell, Lively loaded up the calculator app on his cell phone and proceeded to do some math. He shook his head and climbed back up to the small landing, looking at the wall opposite. “It just don’t add up,” he mused aloud, then said to the blank wall, “You have a little secret you want to share with me, don’t you?”
Factoring in the stair riser height and presuming the standard building code of about fourteen feet per story, he realised the number of stairs between the main floor and the basement added up to many more than were needed. While he realised wiring, plumbing and conduits could take a bit of room between floors, it wouldn’t usually take up almost an extra eight feet of floor space. And besides, he had factored that into his calculations already. He was pretty sure this gap between the floors, wasn’t for anything to do with regular building maintenance since most hotels didn’t usually hide entire rooms from view unless there was a reason they didn’t want them found.
The wall appeared normal enough, not look
ing in any way different from most of the other walls in this hotel. But he knew looks could most definitely be deceiving around here. He pressed along the edge of the wall in various spots, trying to find a pressure point to release a latch somewhere, but had little success.
“Hmm, if someone’s arms were full and they wanted to pop into a secret door, maybe a little game of footsie would be in order then?” Lively started tapping the toe of his sneaker along the baseboard where the landing met the wall. With a ‘click’, a small gap appeared in the corner. He pressed on the wall just above the opening and the opposite side revolved outward. “Now that is a nice touch.” Lively pushed forward into the hidden space. At his back, the door completed its revolution and closed, leaving him in blackness.
Without any airflow for such a long period, it smelled stale and heavy with age inside here. In a brilliant flash of light, Lively switched on his mini-LED. A concrete corridor was revealed, which he followed to a particularly strange looking door. At first, he thought it was made of silver, but he could see it was actually brushed aluminum as he got closer. Pulling a small, black, puck-sized case from his bag, he popped it open. The arrow on the compass inside was pointing due north. Considering the length of the corridor at his back, this doorway would have to be just about directly underneath the main doors to the grand ballroom upstairs. He tried the handle, and it opened easily.
Probing the room with his light, Lively said, “Well, this is unexpected but very interesting.” This was so much more than just a hidden maintenance room. It appeared as if an entirely separate level existed between the main floor and the basement. In his experience, most hotels didn’t hide something like this, unless they didn’t want it to be found.
It was as large, if not larger, than the grand ballroom above, but with a much lower ceiling. Everywhere he looked, thick sheets of gleaming aluminum lined the walls and floor, but not in the centre of the room, nor the ceiling above. This room had to have been built when the hotel was constructed, but to what end? Why hide an extra floor like this? He shone the light around and saw several electrical switches to one side of the door, and he flipped them upward. One after the other, bank after bank of overhead lights came on, revealing a vast, windowless room.
In the middle, a depression in the floor revealed what looked to be a satellite receiver dish from back in the eighties, but that was where the similarities ended. This dish was much larger than the ten to sixteen-foot models of that era and had to be at least forty feet across. It sloped downward into the floor about a dozen feet into what could only be described as a collector array of sorts. If someone were to fall into there, they wouldn’t be climbing back out anytime soon, since the sides of the dish looked far too slick to gain any purchase.
The area overtop the dish had a large and ungainly electrical apparatus attached to the ceiling: wires, tubes and relays stuck out this way and that. It looked for all the world like a Universal Pictures set decorator from the 1930s had gone insane while designing it, sticking every imaginable doohickey and gewgaw they could imagine onto the monstrosity. But that wasn’t the most remarkable thing in the room — that would have to be the ceiling. While the ballroom above had a layer of hammered copper on its ceiling worth a pretty penny at current market values, the roof of this hidden room below looked to be just a little bit more valuable than that.
Lively took a penknife from his pocket, then reached up overhead and scraped at the metal in the ceiling for a moment. It was very easy to scratch and gouge. He gave out a low whistle, then said, “Well, well. I think I know what Sinclair did with some of the fortune he pulled out of the Kootenays”. From corner to corner, the ceiling gleamed brilliantly above his head, covered in pure, one-hundred percent gold.
In light of this turn of events, he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the holding company was far more concerned with the whereabouts of this gold rather than the people who had disappeared inside the ballroom. “If they know this gold may be hidden up here, no wonder they’re suddenly anxious to know what happened so they can ‘reopen’ things.”
However, this brought him back to the question of why Sinclair installed all of this gold in a hidden floor inside his hotel in the first place? From everything Lively had seen so far, it was not purely for investment reasons; it looked far too utilitarian for that. There was obviously much, much more to this room than met the eye, especially if one of its more minor features was a billion dollars-worth of gold bullion stuck to its ceiling.
What was this equipment doing down here? Collecting satellite transmissions from outer space? Commercial satellites didn’t even exist when this hotel was constructed in 1946, not coming into existence until the mid-sixties, so he knew that couldn’t be it.
Aluminum was an excellent insulator from electricity. And that seemed to be the idea behind it lining the walls and floor in this room. But the metal inside this dish was different. It looked to be silver, which, quite interestingly, was one of nature’s best conducting metals. He scratched the back of his neck, lost in thought. For some reason, this all reminded him of something from high school science class, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
On the far side of the shining room lay another door, this one also aluminum, and it was unlocked. Massive bundles of cables exited in a conduit over its top. “Well, this looks promising, at least.” A bare, concrete hall lay beyond. Sloping slightly downward, it eventually reached a switchback. Rounding this turn revealed yet another long corridor. “Man, I should have brought my pedometer with me so I could claim mileage.”
Lively paused at the bottom, trying to get his bearings. He figured he must be near the kitchen by now, or perhaps even below it. Despite having eaten only an hour before, his stomach growled mightily at the thought of food, and he flirted with scoring another peanut butter and bacon sandwich while he was in the neighbourhood. And then he sighed. The only problem was, the kitchen was obviously not directly accessible from here, so he’d have to put his rumbling stomach on the back burner for the moment.
The overhead cables passed through an opening in the wall next to another door, thankfully not aluminium this time, but rather stainless steel. It squealed slightly as he opened it and shone his light inside.
“Oh, my Lord.” He had found the control room.
Banks of dials and gauges filled the wall closest to him. In the centre of the room hulked an archaic mainframe computer sporting a decidedly dated reel to reel magnetic tape storage system. Directly ahead, in a low console along the other side of the room, a row of antiquated CRT computer monitors lay shiny and dark. This place had been sealed tightly for many years with no airflow, and a lack of dust was expected, but still, it was eerily clean in here.
Another room lay in darkness beyond this one, barely visible through a large observation window inset in the wall over the monitors. Lively hit a large red button labelled ‘Power Main’, and dim, red lights began to flicker on inside the control room, gradually coming to life after a multi-decade hibernation. At his back, the reel-to-reel magnetic storage of the mainframe computer began to spin, click, and whir. He turned on several CRT displays on the console in front of him. The monitor on the left connected to an EEG, its screen blank. Next to it, the heart rate line of an EKG display currently ran flat. “Doesn’t look like the patient made it, doctor,” he said, smiling at his joke. He flicked another switch, this one labelled, ‘Operating Theatre’. Bright, white lights came alive in the room beyond the viewing window.
His smile was replaced by an expression of shock. As the lights powered up, a man appeared to stare back at Lively from the other side of the glass, a broad grin on his face.
Stepping back several feet, Lively’s heart jumped around in his chest from the sudden jolt of adrenaline. After blinking his eyes rapidly from the brightness as well as surprise, he saw the man in the window was gone. And then it occurred to him that the man he’d seen was not a stranger, after all, but in fact, had been his own reflection once aga
in. However, when he’d seen it this time, he’d hardly recognised it. The other Lively’s expression had been even more bizarre than last night, smiling back at him like the Mad Hatter getting ready for his tea party on the other side of the looking glass.
CHAPTER TWENTY
December 24th, 2021, 0926 hours
After her initial Limey in the lobby, Minerva hadn’t been paying too much attention to the details around her as she’d climbed to the royal suite. But now, she stood at the base of the ornamental staircase leading to the Sinclair’s upper floors and took it all in. Without Lively egging her along, she now had the luxury of some time to further study the amazing details inside this hotel.
Rich, red oak accented by brass and rosewood inlays, accented by and colourful stained glass made it a sight to behold. As Lively had noted, it seemed as if the RMS Titanic had been rebuilt here in the heart of British Columbia’s rugged Coastal Mountain Range, and it now floated amongst a sea of trees instead of rusting on the seafloor of the North Atlantic. Minerva could almost see the ladies in their beautiful ball gowns, holding onto the arms of sharply dressed, handsome men in their tuxedos, as they descended the Sinclair’s main staircase for a lovely evening in the breathtaking grand ballroom below.