The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  “Meaning what?”

  “The stairs are enclosed, but there has to be space under there. It’s the only place you can’t see and wouldn’t be likely to look.”

  “Under the stairs,” he repeated. “What made you think of that?”

  “I just did,” she said. As they hurried, she noted that they were passing by one of the cameras, the dark glass and the little blue pinpoint of light recording their movements. Maybe Edward King watched these, maybe he saw this now—Stevie and David together. He would approve. Here Stevie was, doing his bidding. She wasn’t even in control of it anymore.

  Inside of her jacket pocket, she gave the camera the finger.

  Back in Minerva, she and David went right to the stairs, those creaky beasts that would always remind her of Hayes on that first day, when he got her to carry his stuff. On that day, the light poured in through the stained glass. She walked behind him, staring at his muscular calves, covered in light-colored hair, as she hauled a box. He was talking about Hollywood and his show. That was only about two months in the past. Now his death was a memory.

  Tonight, the hall was dark. There were lights, but they did little to illuminate the end of the hall. Maybe this was intentional, she thought—keep the attention off the stairs, make details harder to see. The stairs were a tight coil, and underneath was a curved bit of wood that met up with the wall. She felt the wood, running her hands up and down to feel for any openings. David knocked on it.

  “Sounds kind of hollow,” he said. “I guess I never thought to go and beat on the stairs before.”

  She knocked as well. There was definitely empty space behind. It was entirely possible that there would be nothing at all behind this structure, just dust and air, but her heart was thumping and her brain felt clear.

  While she had a flashlight on her phone, she needed something more. It was time to employ the tactical flashlights that the school issued to every student in case of power outage. She went to her room and got hers. These were no simple cylindrical flashlights that gave you a gentle beam—these were monsters with handles that blinded and confused the enemy and summoned passing planes. Stevie took hers into the hall and switched it on. Suddenly, the end of the hall was flooded in a white light that exposed detail.

  “Hold it,” she said, shoving it into David’s hands.

  Bathed in clinical illumination, the staircase began to offer up its secrets. While the surface appeared smooth, she could just make out the finest trace of a doorway. It had been expertly fitted to be virtually invisible. The 1930s had not anticipated this kind of luminosity.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Holy shit,” David added.

  There was no visible way of opening the door, and the opening was no wider than the edge of a piece of paper, possibly even more narrow. There had to be a catch somewhere, something that would pop it. Stevie felt all along the floor, the walls. Nothing.

  “In movies you pull down a candlestick on the wall,” David said as he set the flashlight on the floor. He took off his two-thousand-dollar coat and bunched it up to make a wedge to prop the light toward the wall.

  “This isn’t a movie. We don’t have a candlestick.”

  David came over to help her feel the wall. He examined the steps, running his fingers under the lip of each one.

  “Why are you fondling the wall?”

  They had not heard Nate return and slink up to them in his wizard robes.

  “Do you really want to know?” Stevie said.

  “Oh God.”

  “Then I’d turn around,” she said. “You won’t like it.”

  “I don’t like anything. What are you doing?”

  “Looking for a tunnel,” she said.

  Nate looked at Stevie with an expression that said, Make this stop happening.

  “It won’t be like last time,” Stevie said. “This is just for research.”

  “So was the last time. You guys . . .”

  “Wait,” David said. “Back up, back up.”

  He motioned Stevie to clear, then took a step back and threw himself against the wood, hard. Nothing. He backed up a step and rubbed his arm.

  “Good one,” Nate said. “Keep doing that.”

  “I thought I felt something,” David said. “Let me . . .”

  He threw himself up against the wood again, letting out a little groan as he made impact.

  “Yeah,” Stevie said. “Maybe . . .”

  One more time. And this time, there was a pop. Just a small pop.

  The panel had shifted, just the tiniest bit, and now there was an opening about a quarter of an inch wide.

  “Cool,” Nate said. “Just slip on through there.”

  “Screwdriver,” Stevie said.

  She did not have one, but Janelle certainly would, and Janelle usually left her door unlocked. It was wrong, of course, to go in, but this was an emergency. Janelle’s room was an expression of its inhabitant—perfectly organized, every bit of space cared for and optimized. The air smelled of perfume and honeysuckle from a scented oil diffuser. Her workstation was by the window. She had repurposed her desk and put all her tools there. After a moment of looking through clippers and more confusing devices, Stevie found a small hammer. That would do.

  She returned to the back of the stairs and wedged the hammer in, first by the small claw end. The passage gave another inch or two, and she put in the end of the hammer handle and used it as a lever. The door did not want to open. Years of nonuse, or possibly a catch she could not see, made it resistant. It groaned in revolt.

  “You’re going to break the stairs,” Nate said.

  “Want me to try?” David asked.

  “No.” Stevie shook out her hands from the pressure of holding the hammer. She went in one more time, putting all her weight on the handle of the hammer.

  Then the back of the stairs swung open, revealing a small dark space.

  “This is a good Halloween,” David said.

  Stevie was able to nudge the doorway open a bit more, shine the light in, and reach around. At first she thought she was touching tar, but then she realized that it was about eight years of dust and dirt that had gone sticky and formed into a new and exciting substance. There was no difficulty finding the hatch. It was right there, in the floor, bolted closed. She tested the bolt, expecting to find that it was stuck in place, but it moved and slid open. She took the handle and pulled, revealing an opening about two feet around.

  “This guy really liked crawl spaces,” David said, leaning over her shoulder into the space. “What is that?”

  “It’s a hole,” Stevie said, trying to block the view.

  “It’s got a ladder in it. Is that a tunnel?”

  “Here we go,” Nate said.

  Stevie pushed back and sat on her heels, taking in the view in front of her.

  “How does this keep happening to you?” David said.

  “Because I look,” Stevie replied. “A lot of things happen when you go out and do them on purpose.”

  “Okay, Stevie.” Nate was squatting by her side. “I know this is a thing for you, but for real, Pix will be back and they’re kind of . . . Things are kind of sensitive around here, and you just got back. See what I’m saying?”

  “Look at this,” Stevie said.

  “Yeah, I know, but remember how these things can be unstable? That, is a hole. A small hole. Anything could be down there. There could be wires or something. There could be water.”

  David hung down into the opening with the flashlight.

  “I don’t see any water,” he said. “Or wires.”

  “Seriously,” Nate said.

  Stevie knew he had a point. Also, she had made one other promise—to Larry. No tunneling.

  Still . . .

  “Nate’s right,” she said.

  She sprang up from her crouch and went looking for her phone.

  “We can’t just go in there. Here’s what we do,” Stevie said. “We call Janelle. For sure she has a
little drone with a camera or something and we fly it down there and . . .”

  “Time for hole-diving!” David said, turning himself around so that he was feet first. He started lowering himself down.

  “David!” she said. “Seriously. We don’t . . .”

  “But we will,” he said. “If I don’t come back in ten minutes, avenge me. Or are you coming? You know you want to.”

  Then he started climbing down. Nate shook his head and started to disappear into his robes.

  “It’s cool down here,” David yelled up. “You should come in. There’s . . .”

  He emitted a scream, which caused both Nate and Stevie to leap. Stevie almost threw herself on top of the hole. David peered up and smiled.

  “Kidding. It’s fine,” he said, looking up at her. “You guys are so jumpy.”

  “What if it collapses?” Nate said.

  “Like, suddenly? Just when we’re in it? For no reason?”

  “We could wait for Janelle. . . .”

  “Come on,” David said. “You don’t get chances like this all the time. Come on come on come on come on come on. You can’t resist.”

  Was it the smile? Was it the coat and the suit? The glint in his eye? Or was it just the pure tunnelness of it all? Because he was right. She could not resist.

  “He can’t go alone,” she said to Nate.

  “He can. We could shut the hatch.”

  “Just watch for us?” she said. “I promise, promise, promise we’ll be careful, but I can’t let him go by himself.”

  Nate yanked his beard down to his chest.

  “Why. Do. People. Do. Stupid. Things.”

  “Because we’re stupid,” she said. She tested the top rung with her foot. Nate grabbed her arm—not hard, but enough to get her attention.

  “Hayes didn’t die from the tunnel coming down,” he said. “He died from a gas. You have no idea what’s down there.”

  This gave Stevie a moment’s pause. He was right.

  “But that gas wasn’t in the tunnel before,” Stevie said. “Someone put that dry ice there. The tunnel was fine before. I went in it. Look, we’re just going to . . . go a little bit.”

  “You make it really hard for me,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “But, dragons.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. But will you watch anyway?”

  Nate rubbed a tired hand across his forehead.

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “Yeah, but you’d go even if I didn’t. He’s down there.”

  Stevie wondered what that meant, but there was no time to wonder much. There was a tunnel to explore.

  14

  STEVIE HAD ENTERED A TUNNEL AT ELLINGHAM ACADEMY BEFORE—the famous tunnel. That tunnel was wide as a highway in comparison with this one. This was a crack in the earth, too tight, too low, and much, much too dark. Stevie turned her flashlight straight down, forming a pool that splashed up the walls around her. Unlike the tunnel to the sunken garden, which was made of even brickwork, this was made of rough rock, possibly pieces left over from the mountain demolition. They might not cut you open, Stevie thought, as she tentatively felt along the wall in front of her, but they would rub you raw if you made contact with your bare skin. She couldn’t extend her elbows more than a few inches in either direction, so she hesitantly reached overhead into the dark; the ceiling was only a little more than a hand’s length above her head. And with each step, the walls grew a little closer.

  It was, in a word, unwelcoming. In two words, a mistake.

  Some part of Stevie possessed enough basic self-preservation to know that structural integrity and air quality were important parts of staying alive, and not being in tunnels was an important part of Larry not busting her ass right off the mountain. But some louder, wilder, definitely stupider part of her kept her moving forward.

  And it wasn’t just because David had gone down first, no matter what Nate said.

  Stevie tucked her hands up into the arms of Poirot’s jacket to keep from being cut and numbly felt her way along, taking half-sized steps, and right into David’s back.

  “That’s you, right?” he said. “I’m afraid of monsters. Also, it stinks down here.”

  This was true. There was a low-lying funk in the air.

  “The drone would work better,” she said. “You know, if that’s a leaking gas line or something.”

  “Did you just say leaking gas line?” Nate said from above.

  “Smells more like ass than gas,” David replied. “Tight, dark, smelly. This tunnel has it all! Five out of five stars.”

  “It’s really okay to leave him to die,” Nate said. Then, perhaps remembering that someone actually had died the last time they went into the tunnel, he went silent.

  The space felt like it was getting smaller, and she wondered if they might get to some point where they actually got stuck, like people who dove into caves and their hoses caught on rock and they never got out, except this wasn’t underwater. This was almost worse.

  “Now this is a Halloween,” David said. Stevie could only see a bit of the back of his shirt. She kept one hand in the middle of his back as a way of maintaining pace. Now that they had proven there was a tunnel under Minerva, it was unclear to Stevie how far they had to go in this exercise. But if she knew anything about David, it was that he was going to find the other end of this passage, and if the other end was at the Great House, that was a good distance away.

  So they went farther into the dark, step by step.

  “So,” David said, his voice low, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we just need to clean the slate.”

  Stevie hesitated for a moment, losing contact with the back of his shirt.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Maybe I should give you everything so there’s nothing left for you to snoop for. Do you want to know about me? About my dad? Do you want to know the whole deal?”

  Now? Now he was doing this? In some death crack under the ground?

  But it made sense, in a way. It was dark. They couldn’t see each other. No one could hear them—not even Nate, who was too far away at this point. This was as private as you could get, and they were invisible to each other.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “I don’t tell people my dad is Edward King because he’s Edward King. But I also don’t tell people because it’s pathetic. It’s like every other dumb divorce story. But here goes.”

  Stevie wasn’t sure if the sudden airlessness in the tunnel was her imagination. Probably.

  “My mom was a concierge at a swanky resort in Marin,” David began. “She did things like set up the wine-tasting weekends and the spa experiences and golf trips. Edward King went to some event there, some fundraising thing, and he and Becky locked eyes. This was before he was a big deal. He wasn’t a senator yet, just some local politician on the rise. My mom is very pretty. And Edward King is rich. It’s not that Becky is just after money, it’s more that she doesn’t get that money doesn’t make you smart. She thinks people who have it are . . . maybe not better, but more complete, or something. I don’t think she’s worked out that you can be rich and have done nothing to deserve it. Which is weird, because she dealt with rich people for a living and should have known that’s not true. She’s not stupid, but she has some issues. You don’t get together with Edward King if you feel great about yourself. It’s not a solid emotional choice.”

  He paused, and Stevie wondered what was happening. She could not see his face, or really even his back. But she could tell that the caustic tone in his voice was forced. He was talking into the dark because it was easier, because he could not be seen while he revealed himself. Even though nothing physical was happening, this was the most intimate they had ever been.

  “No,” she said into the beating pause.

  “No,” he agreed. “It’s really not. They got married pretty quickly in some shady, private ce
remony in a judge’s office and I came out seven months later. Eddie put Becky and me in his house in Harrisburg and went off to DC to continue his career. And that was the end of the romance. I was the result of the most consequential bang Eddie ever had. Captain Personal Responsibility paid the bills. I never really remember him being around much. Maybe at Christmas. He pulled us out to use us as props at a few things, but then that stopped. Becky was bitter and had nothing to do, so she started drinking. One time when I was maybe nine I heard water running. I was playing on my Xbox, but I always listened. When you live with an alcoholic, you have to listen a lot. The water was running way too long. I went upstairs and the carpet in the hallway was all wet and there was water coming out from under the bathroom door. Becky went in there with a bottle of Chablis and passed out. She was red all over—the water was turned all the way up on the hot side. I had to pull her out, then shower her in cool water because of the burns. She didn’t wake up. So I called Eddie. I got his assistant, who told me to call 911. So the ambulance came. She was okay in the end—just drunk, minor burns. Eddie called me later that night and basically told me off for calling him and letting his assistant know about what was going on with my mom. I should have handled it. That was the night I decided that Edward King could fuck off, forever. That was one of the things I liked about you right away—you also know that Edward King should fuck off, forever. It’s a good quality to have.”

  She noticed that he had slowed his pace. She kept her hand on his back and pressed in a bit, assuring him of her presence.

  “When I was ten, Becky got pregnant with a magic baby. It wasn’t Eddie’s. I mean, I don’t want to brag, but I can count to nine. And Eddie was not around nine months before my sister, Allison, was born. Her dad is probably this guy in the state legislature who went to Becky’s gym. He came around the house a few times. I never remembered his name, so I just called him Chad. To his face. Right after Allison was born, Chad left the state legislature, and then the state. One does not simply sleep with Edward King’s wife. Then Eddie and Becky got a nice quiet divorce.”

  “How did people not know about this?” Stevie said. “That he was married before?”