Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

‘Welcome to one of my favorite hiding places,’ Lucien said.

Taylor blinked the surprise away. ‘Madeleine?’ she yelled out, taking a step to her right.

No reply.

‘Madeleine?’ she yelled again, this time even louder. ‘This is the FBI. Can you hear me?’

She got nothing back.

‘Even if she’s still alive, she won’t be able hear you,’ Lucien said.

Taylor looked at him with fuming eyes. ‘This is bullshit. There’s nobody here.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Lucien questioned.

‘Look at this shithole. This is not a hiding place. How can you hide or keep anyone locked in a place without doors or walls? Where anyone can simply walk in, or out?’

‘Because no one knows this place exists,’ Hunter said, trying to analyze the area surrounding the house. ‘And no one will ever come looking for it out here.’

‘Right again,’ Lucien said, looking at Taylor. ‘Hence the term hidden place.’

‘This is bullshit.’ Taylor couldn’t hide the anger in her voice. ‘You’re telling us that you left Madeleine somewhere in this ghost shell of a house — no windows, no doors, no walls, and she never walked out?’

Lucien’s gaze went to Taylor and right then his eyes looked like dark vials filled with venom.

‘Not somewhere inside it, Agent Taylor.’ He paused and ran his tongue over his bottom lip like a lizard. ‘Buried underneath it.’

Lucien’s words sent fear crawling like a rash across Taylor’s skin. Her now confused gaze immediately returned to what was left of the house, before moving to the soil surrounding it.

‘Well, not exactly buried,’ Lucien clarified. ‘Let me show you.’ He lifted both cuffed hands and pointed toward the north side of the disfigured structure. ‘Through there.’

In a hurry, Hunter and the flashlight took point again. Lucien and Taylor followed.

‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien said, as they started walking, ‘and by friend, I mean the person I got this place from, was a hardcore, old-school patriot. I was told that he had his best years in this house during the USA versus USSR era. You know, “death to all communists” kind of thing. And he really subscribed to that ideology. And there was plenty of talk about a very possible atomic war.’

As soon as they reached the side of the house, Hunter and Taylor understood what Lucien was talking about.

On the ground, halfway along the north wall, they could see a very large, external, thick metal, basement-entry double door. The doors were locked together by a Sargent and Greenleaf military-grade padlock, very similar to the one they’d found in the house in Murphy.

‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien continued, ‘in his paranoia and deep belief that an atomic war was inevitable and imminent, refurbished the whole place, extending and adding a substantial bomb shelter to the original basement.’ He nodded at the padlocked doors. ‘The house might look like an earthquake site, but the shelter has more than lived up to its expectations.’ He indicated the padlock. ‘The key for that is on the keychain.’

Taylor immediately reached for it.

‘Which one,’ she asked urgently, holding up the bunch of keys.

Lucien leaned forward and squinted at them for a second. ‘The sixth one starting from your left.’

Taylor selected the key and reached for the padlock.

Hunter and Lucien waited, and as they did, Hunter’s awkward sensation that something wasn’t quite right came back to him. He looked around him for an instant.

‘What’s at the back of the house?’ he asked.

Lucien studied him for a moment, and then let his gaze move toward the far end of the house.

‘A very badly treated backyard,’ he replied. ‘There’s a large pond as well, which now looks more like a deep pool of mud. Would you like me to give you a tour? I have all the time in the world.’

Click . The padlock came undone. Taylor unhooked it from the doors and threw it away before grabbing one of the handles and pulling it toward her. The door barely moved.

‘Heavy, aren’t they?’ Lucien commented with a smirk. ‘As I’ve said, this isn’t a regular cellar, Agent Taylor. It’s a fallout shelter.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Hunter said.

Taylor stepped back while Hunter first pulled the right door open, then the left one.

They were immediately hit by a breath of warm, stale air. The doors revealed a concrete staircase that took them down a lot deeper than one would’ve imagined. There were at least thirty to forty steps.

‘Deep, isn’t it?’ Lucien said. ‘It’s a well-built shelter.’

Hunter went down first, and they all moved down in a hurry.

At the bottom, they were greeted by another heavy metal door with a very sturdy lock.

‘The seventh key,’ Lucien announced, ‘the one to the right of the one you used on the padlock.’

Taylor moved forward and unlocked the door before pushing it open.

The air inside the dark room beyond it was leaden with dust, and felt even staler, but there was something else in the air, something that both Hunter and Taylor could easily recognize because they’d been around it too many times.

The smell of death.

Sometimes sour, sometimes putrid, sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes nauseating, and most of the time a combination of everything. No one can tell you what death really smells like. Most would say that there’s no specific smell to it, but anyone who’s been around it as many times as Hunter and Taylor had been would recognize in just a fraction of a second, because as soon as you smell it, it chokes your heart and saddens your soul in a way that nothing else does.

As they sensed death, Hunter and Taylor were filled with a disquieting fear, and the same thought exploded inside both of their heads.

We’ve wasted too much time. We’re too late.

Hunter shone the beam of his flashlight into the room and moved it around the place almost frantically.

It was empty.

There was no one there.

Lucien took a healthy deep breath, like a hungry man taking in the aroma of freshly cooked food.

‘Wow, I’ve missed this smell.’

‘Madeleine?’ Taylor called into the room, her gaze chasing after the beam of the flashlight. ‘Madeleine?’

‘It would’ve been very stupid of me if I had left Madeleine locked inside the very first room one comes to in the shelter, wouldn’t it?’ A cryptic smile graced Lucien’s lips.

‘Where is she?’ Taylor asked.

‘There’s a light switch on the wall to the right of the door,’ Lucien told them.

Hunter reached for it.

A feeble yellowish bulb at the center of the ceiling flickered a couple of times, as if in doubt whether it would come on or not. It finally did, and it brought with it an electronic hiss that echoed annoyingly around the room.

They found themselves in a semi-bare room, twenty feet square. Two of the thick, solid concrete walls were adorned by a few handmade bookshelves, all of them loaded with books that were covered by a thick layer of dust. The wall to the left of where they stood had a single steel door set right in the center of it. The door had a dappled gunmetal look to its surface, as though it were meant to draw the eye. Against the wall directly in front of them was a console desk that must’ve been at least fifty or sixty years old, where a multitude of buttons, switches, levers and old-fashioned dial gauges could be found. A switched-off computer monitor hung on the wall just above the console desk. This was definitely the shelter’s main control room.

The floor was simple polished concrete. A plethora of metal and PVC pipes of different diameters crisscrossed the ceiling in all directions, disappearing through the walls. A couple of medium-sized square cardboard and wooden boxes were piled up one on top of the other in one corner of the room. They looked to be supplies.