Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

He stopped me in front of the row of cabinets at the back of the conference room. Manipulating some mechanisms in the small gap between the cabinets and the side wall, he caused an upper portion of one of the cabinets to swing open on invisible hinges, like the top half of a three-foot-thick Dutch door. Behind it, instead of unpainted wall, there was a man-sized hole revealing a huge vertical air shaft, a remnant of the old building’s original heating system. A wave of hot stale air poured over us, a bottled up memento of the past week’s hellish weather.

“Climb up.”

“How? That’s a four-foot threshold.”

He kicked over a chair, as I’d hoped he might. I positioned it against the lower cabinet, let a surreptitious drop of blood hit the seat, and immediately put my shoe on it as I stepped up. I put my knee on the edge of the square opening, smeared a tiny bit of blood where it could be seen once the secret door was shut again, and crawled halfway in.

He had climbed up behind me to keep me going, not taking time to look around at the trail I’d left behind. “Keep moving.”

“It’s hard to see.” That part was true. Beyond the hole at the end of the three-foot tunnel, it was just a dim void with an odd, empty resonance to it.

“Put your leg over and reach down. You’ll find the bottom; it’s even with the floor.”

I did as instructed. As soon as I gained solid footing, I turned to see if I could catch him off guard, but he was already next to me, having closed the cabinet behind us and leapt down in one easy, practiced movement. Again, I felt the gun’s hard nose nuzzle my spine.

“Straight ahead, there’s a ladder.”

The air was suffocating, as bad as the heat wave of the past week-worse in the total blackness surrounding us. There was a rancid odor of decay, and of something akin to old, moldy wool. My bloody hand located the rungs of a ladder.

“Start climbing, and don’t try to hit me with your heels. I’ll be out of the way.”

The thought had crossed my mind, along with dozens of others. I had seen situations like this in the movies, and I, along with everyone else, had been critical of the hero for not being more aggressive. After all, I’d always reasoned, you’re dead anyway, why not fight for your life?

The problem with all that, I now knew, was that you didn’t really believe you were dead anyway. Despite what he’d told me, I knew there had to be a way out of this; it became too irrational otherwise. I started climbing.

“Where’s this lead?” I asked.

“Up.”

We’d been trained about hostage situations, about creating a bond with the kidnapper, making it harder for him to kill someone who was hell-bent on becoming a friend. But I knew it wouldn’t work on Buddy.

“How far up?”

“You’ll know.”

I had no feeling of my surroundings. I might as well have been climbing into the night sky above a boiling cauldron, swathed in its cloying, invisible steam. I tried focusing on something more tangible. I knew I was climbing one of the four air shafts; there were no other available empty spaces in the building. During the remodeling, there’d been some discussion about taking over the hundred-year-old shafts to create more floor space, since their original purpose had been replaced by modern, less cumbersome technology. But the engineers had vetoed the idea-something about structural integrity. The shafts had stayed.

“You do this during the remodeling? Cover your noise with the carpenters?”

There was no answer. Despite his warning, I tried kicking back with my heels a couple of times, but all I hit was air. I was sweating profusely, not only from the heat, but from the exercise. I felt I’d been climbing a half-mile straight up.

Suddenly, I ran out of rungs. My hand reached up in what was becoming an automatic grasp, closed on nothing, and threw me completely off balance. My foot, in midair, hesitated, missed its placement, and rattled by several rungs as I almost fell backwards into the darkness, arrested only by my throbbing left hand. I heard Buddy grunt below as he ducked to avoid my swinging, kicking feet.

I latched back on and rested, panting hard.

“Reach the top?” Buddy’s voice was· sarcastic.

“What the hell was that? You gonna drop me into a goddamn black pit?”

“I have something better in mind for you. Know where we are?”

I looked around, feeling aimlessly for something solid with one outstretched arm. “The attic?”

“Yeah, the bat cave. That’s what we call it in maintenance. Climb to the top, take one step forward, and freeze. It’s not all floor, so don’t get fancy.”

I stepped off the ladder, but then immediately turned and waited, all my energy directed at sensing when Buddy would come even with the floor so I could kick back at his head.

Instead, I heard his voice slightly off to one side and level with me. “Waiting to send me back down the hard way?”

I had no idea how he’d done it. He seemed totally oblivious to the pitch black of our surroundings. Indeed, everything about him had metamorphosed, including his slightly hesitant, boyish speech. A tingling spread across the nape of my neck-a small reminder of panic awaiting.

There was a scraping sound, and abruptly a dim shaft of murky light sliced into the void, outlining the large square hole before me, the top of not one, but two ladders, and the dim perception of a room the size of a closet. Buddy’s shadow stood by the side of the narrow door he’d opened, the gun in his hand shining dully.

“Step right this way.” The gun waved in invitation.

I edged around the shaft hole and stepped through the door. I was on a narrow catwalk, suspended from cables that disappeared into the gloom overhead. Beneath me was a grid work of floor joists and support beams, the square gaps between them filled with musty, dark snowdrifts of rock-wool insulation. I looked to the sides. Nearby I could make out the forty-five-degree slope of a couple of immense rafter beams, along with another catwalk angling off into the dark. The air was almost literally suffocating, rich with the stench of bat dung, rotten wood, and damp insulation, fragments of which I’d smelled at the bottom of the shaft.

“Go down to the end, turn left, and keep going to the platform.”

I reached out tentatively to steady myself. Each catwalk had but one handrail, also made of cable. The other side was left free, presumably to make it easier for workmen to lower ladders to the joists ten feet below. It was a practical idea, but not great for one’s sense of balance. At best, the catwalks were two feet wide. In my present state of mind, a tightrope was no wider.

I followed Buddy’s directions, my earlier thoughts of leaving a trail long gone. The length of the climb, the darkness, the near-unbearable heat had all combined to make the attic as alien to me as the far side of the moon. Only a few dozen feet below, the night-shift policemen were loitering around the coffee machine, or chatting with the dispatcher. Ron Klesczewski was probably hard at work, awkwardly poised over his paperwork, having totally missed my feeble message. Up here, suspended between a pitched roof I couldn’t perceive and a floor that looked like a wood-strewn, blackened sea, I felt utterly abandoned.

The platform he’d mentioned was two steps up from the catwalk and about six feet square. There were no handrails at all here, the area serving as a junction for four catwalks, one branching off from each side. A single chair stood before me, placed near one edge, overlooking the entire attic’s only source of light: a dim, dirt-covered skylight that hung over the building’s top-floor corridor. In the days before electricity, this skylight had matched a similar window cut into the roof above, allowing Mother Nature to illuminate at least a portion of the building’s interior. The outer skylight had long ago been sealed over, leaving its quaint and functionless mate to gather dust. I stepped up onto the platform and looked down onto the grimy glass rectangle, noticing, outlined against the dim glimmer coming from the corridor’s fire-safety lighting, the stiff and tiny body of a sparrow.