Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(76)
“No,” he said, leading the way. “Unless we feel like hoping and praying that George has been stuck there, and we won’t have to go looking for him after all.”
“There must be a more direct route to the basement,” I observed. I dodged a lone strand of cobweb that dangled from the lightbulb cage at the next landing, and tried to ignore the dirty light and the dusty smell.
“An elevator, shared by the whole building.”
“For three stories and a basement?”
“Modern technology,” his voice echoed up in his wake. “Any excuse for it, I suspect. But if we took the elevator, we might be called upon to explain ourselves to other passengers—or to the fellow who operates it. I don’t know about you, but I would just as soon skip that social nicety.”
He stopped at the bottom, partly to let me catch up and partly because he didn’t want to go any farther. His whole posture shouted his reluctance to proceed: His face had gone red and tight, his breathing shallow, his shoulders squared against whatever awaited us. But he was being brave for me, the dear man. He needn’t have bothered. I’d been in more frightening places, and more frightening positions than this one—standing before a half-dark labyrinth of office furniture, crates, and bookcases.
We took in the scene together, until he felt he’d hesitated long enough and to do so any longer would make him look less manly. “There’s a pathway,” he promised. “Straight back, through here.”
Once again he played tour guide, leading me between tall hedgerows of unneeded items that no one wished to throw away. In some places the passage became tight, and Wolf had to shimmy himself sideways to fit. In other spots, we both were compelled to duck when mop handles and lawn-care tools formed a menacing canopy overhead.
The air felt different down there. It was musty, yes—but that wasn’t the core source of the weirdness. It was dark except for the sparse electric lights, and the place never saw sunlight or felt ventilation, so the smell of old paper and damp was no surprise; but there was something else to it, something cold and almost slimy in its feel . . . like the air left a sheen upon my skin, as if it were fog or a seaside mist.
“Almost there,” he pledged.
“It’s all right. I’m keeping up just fine.”
“Are you . . . do you sense anything . . . unusual?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I was honest. “Yes, but I couldn’t describe it if you held a gun to my head.”
“Fair enough,” he muttered. “I couldn’t, either.”
Eventually the path widened, and we were deposited at a cleared area—a juncture where a series of rooms branched off from the main space, all in a row. They were each numbered, and at least two of them had contents that spilled outside their doorless entryways. Another one appeared empty, and I couldn’t see the rest.
“Six is over here,” directed Wolf. “It looks like George left a light on for us.”
Down on the right, there it was—and yes, there was a pale orange glow that expanded from the doorway. “Are you sure there’s no one else inside . . . ?” I asked, but it was a dumb question. He didn’t know any better than I did, so I called out softly instead: “Hello? Is anybody there?”
No one replied, so we approached the ugly light. I rapped on the doorframe for good measure, and again I asked, “Hello?”
Wolf poked his head around the side. “We’re alone, more or less.”
“Well, it doesn’t feel that way.”
“Yes, I know. Welcome to Storage Room Six.”
I didn’t feel too mightily welcomed, I don’t mind telling you, Emma. That room didn’t welcome; it trapped. I could sense it all the way down to my toes that I was standing in a spider’s parlor. Or no, nothing so nice as a parlor—even one that lures on behalf of an arachnid. This was more like a cell.
It lacked the typical prison trappings of a bucket and a sink, but there was a cot laid out along one wall. The cot had linens upon it that were not folded, but were not dirty, either; and the attendant pillow bore the impression of a man’s head.
(I’ll say it was a man’s head, because there were smudges of hair oil still left upon it.)
“Was George sleeping here?” I wondered aloud.
“His wife didn’t mention that he’d been missing any evenings at home, but then again, she didn’t notice she’d been drugged and abandoned this morning, either. She might have missed a great deal, from not paying attention—or from writing off his more unusual behavior to the stress of the election, and then the Stephenson trial.”
Wolf approached a desk that was covered in cardboard boxes, and I roamed the rest of the smallish space, dragging my fingertips across items small and large, leaving trails in the dust. Boxes were piled as far as the ceiling, and one even leaned a corner against the lightbulb’s cage—giving the whole ceiling an askew appearance. The floor was poured cement, and it was scattered with paper clips and wadded-up balls of paper and little black dots that I was forced to conclude must be mouse droppings. The walls were painted that bland taupe color you used to see on hats; its glossy paint felt damp to the touch.
? ? ?
Standing there, staring at my fingertip—wondering if it was wet or merely cool—I had the most terrible flash of memory: I was standing in my basement at Maplecroft. I was not basking in the glow of a dull caged light, but the brighter gaslamps I’d installed . . . and I was not imagining or wondering at the damp. I knew it like I knew my own breath, my own skin. The walls had always wept down there, too. They were always collecting small rivulets of dew, puddling on the floor.