John Saul - Shadows

“This is Sergeant Dover, of the Barrington Police Department.”

Hildie’s heart skipped a beat. “Have you found Steven Conners?” she asked, already preparing herself for a carefully tempered expression of grief over the teacher’s death.

“I wish we had,” Dover told her. “It’s about the boy who found his car.”

Hildie’s mind worked quickly. Josh had been acting strangely last night. Had he slipped out of the house during the night? But why? He knew nothing of what was happening in the hidden laboratory. “Josh MacCallum?” she asked.

“The other one. Jeff Aldrich.”

“I see,” Hildie said guardedly, keeping her voice steady, although her sense of apprehension instantly rose. What had happened? Had Jeff told his parents the truth?

“I’m at the boy’s home right now,” Dover went on. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident, and the boy’s here by himself. He asked me to call you.”

“An accident?” Hildie echoed. “What sort of accident?”

“I’m afraid it’s his folks. Their car went off the bridge north of town. Happened about forty-five minutes ago.”

“Dear Lord,” Hildie breathed. “Chet and Jeanette? Are they all right?”

“No, ma’am,” Sergeant Dover replied. “I’m afraid they’re not. That’s why I’m calling you. Neither of them survived.”

Hildie steadied herself against a table as the words sank in, and when she spoke, her voice was trembling. “Ill be there right away,” she said. “Tell Jeff I’m coming.” Without waiting for a reply from the police officer, she hung up the phone, ran a comb through her hair, then left through the door that opened onto the parking lot.

Josh MacCallum was still in bed, but he was wide awake. He’d barely slept at all last night, for he’d kept waking up, thinking about the strange file he’d seen on his computer last night and what it might mean. He’d even dreamed about computers, dreams in which he was back in the strange world he’d seen on the virtual reality screen.

Except that in the dream he wasn’t using the virtual reality program at all. He was actually inside the computer.

But it wasn’t at all like Adam had told him it was. There was no wonderful world waiting for him to explore.

Instead, there was only an infinite labyrinth, a maze that twisted around him, unending corridors that led nowhere. Panic had overwhelmed him, and he’d run through the maze, turning first in one direction, then another, but always ending up exactly back where he’d begun.

It was a trap, a trap from which there was no escape.

He’d tried to scream out, but found no voice, and each time, it was the violent effort of trying to break through that soundless scream that woke him up, sweating and shaking.

Each time he fell back into a restless slumber the dream returned, and each time it was more frightening than the time before.

The last time he’d awakened, the early morning sunlight had brightened his open window, and he’d decided not to go back to sleep at all. Instead he’d reached for the book on his nightstand and begun reading.

Now, though, he heard the sound of a car on the gravel drive outside. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was only a few minutes after six. Curious, he slid out of bed and went to the window.

He was just in time to see Hildie Kramer’s car disappear through the Academy’s gates.

Where had she gone? And for how long?

Josh glanced at the clock again. None of the other kids would be up for at least half an hour. And if Hildie wasn’t in the house …

He made up his mind. If he was really going to go back down into the basement and try to figure out exactly where the second elevator actually was, now was the time to do it

But what if someone caught him? What about the people who worked in the kitchen? He didn’t even know what time they came to work.

Racking his brain as he quickly pulled his clothes on, Josh suddenly had an idea. Pulling his suitcase out from under his bed, he took it with him when he left his room. If anyone stopped him, he’d just say he was taking it downstairs to store it.

Clutching his empty suitcase, he left his room. The hall was as silent as if morning was still hours away, so he scurried down the corridor to the stairs, taking them two at a time as he went down to the ground floor.

It, too, was deserted.

He darted through the dining room to the butler’s pantry, then paused to listen at the kitchen door. He could hear voices murmuring as the cook began preparing breakfast, and he could smell the scent of coffee drifting through the crack around the swinging door.

Silently, he pulled the basement door open, flicked on the fight, then stepped onto the landing at the top of the steep flight of stairs.

He pulled the door closed behind him and breathed a sigh of relief. So far, no one had discovered him.

Carrying the suitcase, he descended the stairs. Somehow, being here for the second time, and knowing it was morning outside, the basement didn’t seem quite so scary. He set the suitcase down, then began making his way toward the place where he’d found the concrete shaft, turning on lights as he went. A moment later he came to it and found another light switch. The whole area around him lit up with the stark brilliance of four naked bulbs.

He circled around the concrete shaft, examining it carefully. The first three sides were nothing more than unbroken concrete faces. The cement was old, and there were places where it had been patched, but other than that there was nothing special about it.

On the fourth face he found something he hadn’t noticed the last time he’d been down here. Coming out of the floor was a plastic pipe, nearly three inches in diameter. The pipe ran straight up the wall of the shaft, broken halfway up by a box whose faceplate was screwed on at each corner. From the box the conduit continued up, disappearing into the basement’s ceiling, except for a single branch that made a right angle leading across the roof of the basement itself.

Josh cocked his head, staring at the pipe. When the house had been built, he knew, plastic hadn’t even been invented yet And anyway, the conduit didn’t look very old. When he studied the floor where the pipe disappeared into the concrete, the cement around the pipe looked new, too.

Could the pipe contain the cables that raised and lowered the elevator? It didn’t seem possible.

He headed back toward the stairs, searching the small storerooms until he found a toolbox. Inside there was a screwdriver, and a minute later Josh was back at the shaft, unscrewing the faceplate of the box that broke the pipe. As he loosened the fourth screw, the plate swung downward, revealing what was inside.

Cables.

But not the kind of heavy cables that would be used to pull an elevator up and down a shaft.

Computer cables.

Josh recognized them at once, their gray plastic coverings as familiar to him as the laces of his tennis shoes. There were at least a dozen of them, packed in so tight that Josh couldn’t even count them all. And all of them went not only up into the building above, but down into someplace beneath the floor.

But he still didn’t know where the machinery that operated the elevator was. As he screwed the faceplate back onto the access box, Josh pictured the house in his mind. The roof of the cupola that was the fourth floor was flat, so it didn’t seem like the machinery that ran the elevator could be up there.

But what if the cables that hauled the car up and down were on pulleys, and came back down through the walls? There was lots of room for machines down here.

He turned away from the shaft, his eyes following the single branch of the cable conduit. Perhaps fifteen feet away the pipe disappeared through a wall made of concrete blocks.