Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

Jeannie was on a cell phone when they walked in. She gave them a small wave and made a face: right with you . Into the phone she said, “Well we’re waiting. Get everything locked up and come and get us.” She hung up without saying good-bye, and turned to the three of them. “Kitchen staff’s gone home. I have pizza slices I can warm up, and drinks.”

Travis considered his reply. The approach he had in mind wouldn’t work well if he jumped right into it.

“Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi,” he said. “Either one’s fine.”

Paige and Bethany both asked for the same. Jeannie stepped into the back room, and the three of them sat at the bar. Travis saw a stack of menus to his left. The cover showed a Paul Bunyan type character wearing a huge belt with three notches carved into it. Travis couldn’t imagine being any less interested in hearing a backstory.

Jeannie returned with the drinks and the check, set them down and got to work squaring things away around the register. Her movements were hurried, anxious.

“I heard of this place a while back,” Travis said.

Jeannie didn’t look up from her work. “Yeah?”

“Guy I used to know told me I should stop by, if I was ever in the area.”

Jeannie said nothing.

Outside, the sedan with the stuffed trunk went past.

“He said he left something of mine in the basement,” Travis continued. “Said someone here would know what I was talking about.”

At last Jeannie glanced up at him.

Travis studied her face for any sign of suspicion. Any hint that she understood the significance of this place’s basement, and that a stranger requesting access to it was probably tied to that significance in some way.

But all she did was knit her eyebrows together. “I think it’s pretty empty down there,” she said. “How long ago was this?”

“Few years,” Travis said.

Jeannie shrugged, thought about it another second and then went back to her straightening, as if that concluded the discussion.

“Can I take a look anyway?” Travis said.

She seemed amused at the request, for some reason. She shrugged again and said, “Knock yourself out,” then reached under the bar out of sight. Travis heard a coffee can slide on wood, and objects clinking against one another. After a moment Jeannie brought out two keys, each on its own ring. The rings had plastic tabs attached to them, labeled simply #1 and #2 . She pushed them across to Travis. “Entrance is outside, around the back.”

With that she returned to the register and ignored them.

Travis traded looks with Paige and Bethany, and then the three of them stood, leaving their drinks. They were almost to the door when Travis stopped and turned back toward Jeannie.

“You ever heard of a man named Ruben Ward?” he said.

She met his gaze.

Travis had seen lots of people play dumb before. They almost always overdid it. Their faces scrunched up. They registered too much confusion. Really, any confusion was too much; it wasn’t confusing to simply hear an unfamiliar name.

Jeannie didn’t look confused. She looked puzzled, which was stranger yet. Travis got the impression that she knew nothing about Ward, but that she’d heard the name. Maybe recently.

After a moment she shook her head. “Can’t help you.”

Travis considered pressing her on the subject, but held back. He turned and led the others out.

They were halfway along the building’s left side, moving down an alley floored with cracked pavement and a few lonely tufts of grass, when it happened.

It started as a sound—or what seemed like a sound. Maybe the frenetic hum of an electrical transformer about to fail, or the snapping, static-like buzz you sometimes heard over a field of grasshoppers on a dry summer day. It rose over the span of a second, seemingly from a source very close to Travis—behind him, he thought at first. He spun to look for it but saw nothing there, and noticed as he moved that the sound’s direction didn’t change at all. It had no direction. It was just everywhere, as if he were hearing it through a set of headphones. He saw Paige and Bethany reacting the same way. They were hearing it too. They looked at him and each other, their eyes narrowing in concern—and then widening.

Because they’d just realized the same thing Travis had.

That it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It wasn’t anything they were picking up with their ears. It was closer than that, somehow—already inside their heads.

It was a thought.

They were hearing it the way they heard their own internal monologue.

All three of them came to a stop, facing one another. None of them spoke. Second by second the sensation intensified, its apparent volume and clarity mounting. Travis felt it becoming almost a physical presence, its insectile quality growing sharper. It felt like bugs swarming inside his skull. The effect began to push him toward nausea. He saw it doing the same to Paige and Bethany. Saw them taking careful breaths to keep their stomachs under control.

And then it was over. The sound was gone as if someone had thrown a switch, and there was only the hush of the town again.

The three of them stood there for a long moment, still not speaking. Just breathing, getting their bearings.

“What the hell’s happening in this place?” Bethany said. It came out as hardly more than a whisper.

Travis thought of the sea withdrawing before the arrival of a tsunami. Of people’s hair standing on end before a lightning strike. Of the supposed panicked behavior of animals in the hours before a major earthquake.

“No idea,” he said, his own voice quieter than he’d intended. He nodded to the back of the building. “Come on.”

Apassageway beneath the Third Notch.

They didn’t even have to enter the basement to see it. It was there in plain view to any stray dog that wandered through the rear lot. Centered on the back wall, one story below the main level, was the arched entry to a corridor beneath the building. A set of concrete stairs descended to it, hugging the cinderblock foundation. A stamped metal sign was bolted to the bricks just shy of the opening:

720 Main St.

Apt. 1

Apt. 2

An orange security light glowed softly, somewhere in the gloom beyond the arch. The floor down there was more concrete, probably from the same pour that’d laid the stairs.

Travis understood Jeannie’s amusement now. He also knew what they would find beneath the restaurant.

Nothing.

Both apartments were long deserted. They’d probably been declared illegal for residential use: each had only a tiny window, tucked up near the ceiling, all but impossible to crawl out through during an emergency.

Each unit’s layout was a mirror image of the other: kitchen and bathroom on one end, balanced by undefined space that served as living, dining, and sleeping quarters. Like a slightly oversized hotel room minus carpeting and a view. Both apartments were empty. Not even boxes of random junk had accumulated—just a few cracked laundry baskets in unit two, nested together and forgotten in a corner.

There was nothing else that could’ve been called a passageway. No hidden tunnel behind either derelict refrigerator—they checked. No mirror on any wall that could swing out on concealed hinges. The corridor itself was the only thing the notebook could’ve been referring to.

“ A passageway beneath the third notch ,” Bethany said. “And the next sentence started with Look for. ” She thought about it. “Look for one of these apartments? It wouldn’t make sense to word it like that. You don’t have to look very hard to find these doors, once you’re in the hallway.”