PASSE-PARTOUT: Book One, Chapter 9
From the rooftop at twilight, the Vault is dark red brick, with no windows and a single drainage pipe that leads down from the top of the Vault down past the edge of our roof to the ground. I look it over and look at Jamey.
“Do you see any other way up than that?” I ask, gesturing towards the drain.
“No.” Jamey’s brow creases. “No, I don’t.” She pauses, “you know, that pipe is the last way down that would be by any imagination considered safe. We can’t go back the way we came, and I don’t much care for frogging of the side of the roof to the ground. And, I don’t know if the gun is still up there waiting for us.”
“I agree on all points, but we’ve come all this way. I think it would be a waste of material to just leave. If you want to stay out here, I’ll go in by myself.”
Jamey shakes her head, “No. Whither thou goest.”
I try to smile, and we pad as far out as we dare before looking over the sightline at our “host’s” window.
The window is vacant.
We both burst into a run towards the pipe and Jamey shimmies up first. The pipe is held to the wall by large rungs but does not feel sturdy. I try to hold the pipe steady. When she gets to the top, she holds the pipe steady for me as well. I can tell by my substantially slower climb that she’s in much better shape than I’ve been in a while.
When I finally arrive at the roof, we both hit the rooftop and wait for a couple of minutes, trying to get a read of the landscape and trying to find a way into the building. There is no upright door.
“There must be a hatch somewhere,” I whisper. “I’ll try to get to the other side of the roof and see what’s there.” The twilight doesn’t help as the roof, already coated with pitch, camouflages anything not viewed from the right angle. I crawl to the opposite corner from the pipe, and I see it: a small hatch just large enough for a relatively thin person to squeeze through.
There will be no obese maintenance workers allowed on the roof.
I signal Jamey and as she makes her way to me, I keep an eye on the Host’s roof, looking for a shimmer of metal, a light. I didn’t see a face, but the bastard yelled enough, so I figure he wouldn’t be sitting in silence.
The latch is secured by a lever, but no lock. This gives me peace.
Surely there’s nothing too bad in there. They don’t bother locking all the entrances.
Then comes the feeling of “famous last words,”
Stop thinking so much and just go. You’ll psyche yourself into freezing. Just go.
I open the hatch and notice the marked darkness beyond, but Jamey has already started to push me. “Go, go…we’re just sitting out here.”
“It’s dark.”
“So am I. Go.”
I hold onto the lip of the hatch and lower myself into the black. I let go and hit a floor not more than two feet below me. I move aside, and Jamey falls in right after.
“Do you have your phone?” I ask.
“Justasec.”
In a moment, a flash of white lights up the surroundings. The floors are of blackened wood planks which are tightly fitted together. A slip of paper could not fit between. As we walk, I notice that the floor is not black, but is almost entirely covered with black lines. I stop Jamey and motion to her to come closer to the floor with her phone. I move my fingers across the wood. The lines are scratched into the surface…no, not scratched—burned. And the scratches aren’t random, some are curved, some are stick-straight, some merge and then diverge with other scratches. There’s some kind of purpose. I look closely at one of the lines, taking Jamey’s phone and zooming its camera as far as it will let me. I see that the lines are actually symbols, slanted here, compressed there, written in a fine script. At first blush, there was disorder, but with patience came an immaculate order.
I look up at Jamey. She’s looking at the floor, then looking out at the dark horizons around the globe of light shed by the phone.
“I would like to stay here longer,” she whispers, “but we don’t have the time. We’ve got to move, Paul.” She places her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. She’s afraid. I don’t blame her. If it weren’t for the script distracting me, I would be right there with her.
“OK Yeah, let’s go.”
She raises the phone above her head. Its light only illuminates a few feet ahead of us, so we must walk into the black unaided. A dozen steps along, we come to a wall. More scratch-script and we follow the wall, hoping to find a door out. The wall is immense, straight, and seemingly unending.
This room must take up the entire floor. Where is that door?
Every so often, we pause, try to hold our breaths in order to listen for those extraneous squeaks that might be another Host holding another gun. And, as hard as we stare into the darkness down the edge of the wall, there’s nothing. No mice, no rot, nothing except for a layer of dust that’s settled into the script. You could press your palm onto the script and, Silly Putty-like, pull up a mirror image in dust and sand. And that’s when it hits you. The building doesn’t smell old—no mold, no decay—but it smells stale, as if the air in here hasn’t moved in a very, very long time.
As we walk, just beyond the clarity of the light, we both see it: a door—a closed door. The absence of light gives us no warning, no relief. Jamey holds her breath and grasps the old brass doorknob and turns. It gives, and she pulls it towards her. As it moves past the doorjamb, it gives a sharp crack, its wood having accustomed itself to the shape of its sleep. It sounds like 2x4 snapping in half. I crush my eyelids closed and listen. I open an eye and see nothing. Jamey has doused the light on her phone and we both stand in the darkness. I hear her breathe, but she doesn’t move. Neither do I. We wait for it. The dragging steps outside ourselves. The skitter of claws up the arm. All those things in books that you wait for—that you know is coming, but you just can’t see when. Or where.
Jamey brings up the light again, this time muted by her hand and, slowly, so slowly, drags her hand into the air. The floor outside the room is clean. No marks. It is wood covered in dust, but just like all the other floors of all the other buildings we climbed through.
The floor is a landing. There is a long, single, unturned flight of narrow, shallow steps. As we begin the descent, I realize that these are stairs where a ladder should be, the angle of descent is almost vertical. Each step gives a little bit with my weight. And, after the first twenty or so steps, the walls end, so does our handrail. To either side is a blackened chasm, with the lighted motes of dust floating in midair being the only one of us not trembling.
I whisper to Jamey: “Stop. Can you hand me the phone?” She finds my hand and places the box into it. I raise the phone in the air and let a little brightness of light move into the vacuum. I see walls, but they are far away. It feels like a warehouse. The floor is four floors below us. I seem to remember that the building is only five stories tall.
“Is that the ground floor down there?” I ask.
“I hope so. Have you noticed that the stairs are only attached to rails? There’s nothing else between us and air but wood.”
I nod my head, acting like I already know, but my knees weaken at new information. My feet feel like they’re tied to the ground and one missed step will push me into the air—or throw me down the steps.
When we reach the bottom, I can breathe again. The ground feels good. Every bit of my legs is tense, so we wait a moment to collect ourselves. I take the phone and shine it on the floor. There are more scratches, but these are of a different style. Perhaps a different artist? They are softer, less deeply grooved into the wood. The lines are still composed of a script. But even the script is different, though only slightly, like seeing a sign in Cyrillic from afar and thinking that words are capitalized Roman letters.
I have a feeling that the room has the same dimensions as the upper floor, only taller. Having not heard any other movement, I motion to Jamey to lift the light into the air, so we can see it. She hesitates for a moment, and I gesture with both hands palms up, like there were lifting a box. She finally agrees and brings the phone up to the top of her arm’s length, shining the light in a circle about the room. The room is covered. There is script everywhere. There is a thicker layer of dust in some places, other lines are still burnt-black with only a fine coat to soften them.
I look at Jamey: “If this is the ground floor, then where is the vault door?”
We look about the perimeter of the space. There, in the faintest and farthest wall, is the metal door. We walk to it and see that there is no lock latch, no knob.
Shit.
Jamey then points out to me several welds along the space between the door and the jamb.
“If the door isn’t to be opened, then why the door? There’s a lock on the outside, welds on the inside. It’s never meant to be used?” I say.
“Or,” Jamey whispers, “it’s to be used only once. These welds were made on the inside. Did they close and go up through the roof?”
I shake my head. This means that we are going to have to go up that fucking stairway again. Through the roof…again. Going to have to rappel down the spout in front of the Host. And not get shot. And not fall.
I think Jamey has also come to the same conclusion and we both look back at the staircase. “Nuh-uh. I’m not going back that way,” she says, scanning the walls, the ceiling. “We are going to find another way out. There’s got to be another door. Not everyone in this building goes the way we did. A door, another hatch, something around here…”
Jamey’s sudden pause stops me cold.
She whispers, “Look.”
I turn and notice another stairway towards the back of the room, leading down. “You asked for a way out of here. I think that would be an answer, yes?” Jamey closes her eyes, bites her lip, and sighs “Yes.”
It’s narrower than the first flight, just as shallow, just as steep, with no handrail on either side for good measure?
Do these people just have supernatural balance and no acrophobia?
I take the lead on this flight and we both descend into the darkness. I am holding the muted phone light and we climb down a group of about a dozen steps. There is no longer any sight of the portal to the floor above. The floor below is again hidden in darkness. I stop to catch my breath, steady my legs and Jamey stops. She grabs my shoulder and whispers a terse “Shh!”
I strain to hear something, but, in the wash of dark around us, somewhere below us, is the sound of scraping, scratching, and of someone muttering into the air.