by Alex Scarrow
‘Come on, Liam,’ whispered Foster, ‘if you’ve been down here, let us know.’
They searched in silence for a few minutes, carefully sweeping their torches across the walls, the stair handrail, heating pipes running up the side of the doorway, an electrical junction box… even a fire extinguisher, still sitting on its wall mount, but… finding absolutely nothing.
Maddy sighed. ‘Maybe he left a sign but it was scrubbed off, or plastered over, or worn away. It’s been a long time.’ She shook her head, frustrated. ‘Or maybe he didn’t come back this way. And he and Bob stayed in the Washington area. Or…’ The words hung in the silence between them, unsaid.
Or maybe they just died back then.
Sal’s head dropped, her dark fringe flopping down over her eyes. ‘It was a waste of time,’ she muttered. ‘We’re never going to find them.’
‘Maybe Sal’s right.’ Foster nodded. ‘We should probably think about heading back whilst it’s still light outside.’
Her dark eyebrows were locked with a frown as she gazed down at her feet.
‘We could always try again tomorrow morning as soon as the sun comes up,’ continued Foster. ‘We’ll have eight or nine hours of sunlight to look around down here. Actually, Liam may well have left us a clue upstairs in the main hall, for all we know. We’ll have more time tomorrow.’
Maddy reached out and patted Sal’s shoulder. ‘Hey, Sal, Foster’s right. We can try again tomorrow. Don’t cry, it was just a –’
‘I’m not crying,’ she replied, shrugging off her hand and squatting quickly down to the ground. She reached for the floor, her fingers splayed out in the dust, probing a faint groove in the concrete floor.
‘Sal?’
‘Give me your torch,’ she said to Maddy.
‘What is it?’
‘Just give me the torch!’ she snapped.
Maddy passed it to her and watched curiously as the young girl leaned closer to the ground, blowing the dry plaster dust away from the floor. She shone the torch at the small groove etched into the concrete.
‘What is it?’
‘I think it’s letters… letters scratched into the floor.’ Peering closely, she tilted the torch’s beam so that it played obliquely across the faint, worn grooves, throwing them into much sharper relief.
Foster squatted down beside her. ‘What is it, Sal?’
‘An I and an H, it looks like. And I think it’s an… an arrow.’
Maddy dropped down beside them and studied the letters. Then she gasped. ‘That I is an L… see? The foot of the letter’s faint, but it’s there. Can you see it?’
‘My God, yes,’ said Foster.
Sal traced the second letter with her finger. ‘And that H,’ she said, ‘that could be…?’
Maddy grinned. ‘Yes, a B… I’ll be damned. It IS a B. L and B. Liam and Bob.’
‘That’s it!’ said Foster. He pulled himself tiredly to his feet, wincing with the effort, but grinning like a schoolboy. ‘He’s been here! That means –’
‘He has left a message for us. Oh God, Liam!’ yelped Maddy with joy. ‘You’re a star!’
Sal jumped to her feet, her face lit up like a jack-o-lantern. ‘They’re coming home!’ she squealed with delight.
Foster nodded. ‘OK, then,’ he said, hushing them with his hand, ‘the arrow… He’s telling us to go in and we make a left turn.’
They stepped into the basement, turning left and seeing ahead of them a wall of rusting metal brackets and empty shelves.
‘But there’s nothing on the shelves,’ said Maddy.
‘There’ll be another message somewhere,’ said Foster. ‘Check the floor.’
Both girls on hands and knees swept aside the light silt on the floor around the entrance to the basement, probing the ground with their fingers for any more distinct grooves. Foster meanwhile ran his torch slowly up the breeze-block wall to the left of the double doors. Long ago painted a joyless mint green, it was now flaking off in patches where a creeping damp had seeped down from the museum above. His beam picked out a litany of scratches and gouges, endless decades of careless knocks by careless porters wheeling the museum’s heavy exhibits in and out of storage.
Come on, Liam. Talk to us.
The paint covered over some older acts of clumsiness, and was gouged away by newer ones. But none of these marks, Foster guessed, had happened in recent decades. Certainly not since the world ended sometime in the past.
His finger ran over a faint curved groove, an indistinct and incomplete curve that might once have been part of a letter or a number. He traced the curve, dislodging a fine shower of dust, exposing more of it.
C.
Lightly blowing on the wall, more dust curled away in a light cloud, revealing a string of what looked like…
Numbers.
‘I think I’ve got something!’
The girls clambered to their feet and a moment later were standing beside him, peering closely at the faint string of figures scratched into the concrete wall.
‘It looks like… a code of some sort.’
‘C… S… P, then a dash,’ said Sal. ‘Five, three, seven… then another dash… nine, eight, one, zero… then another dash and then five, seven, nine. What does it mean?’
Foster shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We need to know,’ insisted Maddy. She stepped back from the wall, panning her torch around. ‘If that’s Liam again, it’s got to mean something. The answer’s got to be something we can see as we’re standing here, right?’
‘That would make sense,’ replied Foster.
She walked a few yards along the wall, sweeping her torch along the empty shelves. ‘But there’s nothing here,’ she whispered under her breath, frustrated. ‘Nothing.’
Her torch beam lanced up and down the rusting vertical support struts. And then came to rest on a small square tag.
‘Wait a sec.’
She stepped forward, examining it more closely. A small metal frame, attached to the bracket with screws that were now little more than flaking nubs of rust. Contained within the frame, a yellowed strip of damp-stained card, numbers, almost too faint to read, printed on it.
She flicked the torch along to the next vertical strut. Nothing. But the one after had another tag like this. She hurried over to it and found another curled vanilla strip of card with a fading sequence of numbers printed on it.
‘It’s their filing system!’ she called out. ‘Three letters, three numbers, four numbers then three numbers.’
‘That’s right,’ said Foster, shining his torch on the wall.
Foster smiled. He’s telling us which shelf to find.
CHAPTER 77
2001, New York
It took them the better part of an hour to find it. There were quite a few tags with numbers too faded to read, and others where the cardboard insert had long ago fallen out.
But two hundred yards down from the basement entrance, on the opposite wall, on a shelf that required Maddy to climb up to reach, they found the correct tag.
And nothing else.
Maddy wiped dust and sweat from her forehead, and slumped against the metal support. It creaked and groaned softly, dislodging flakes of rust and motes of dust.
‘Nothing here,’ she called down to them. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘There must be something,’ said Sal. More a plea than a comment.
‘It’s bare. Somebody made a clean sweep a long time ago.’
The three sat in defeated silence for a moment, the coarse rasping of their breathing echoing down the empty basement floor, accompanied by the sound of dripping water somewhere far off.
‘We’ll be losing daylight soon,’ said Foster. ‘We’ve done what we can.’
‘I don’t want to be outside in the dark,’ whispered Sal.
‘Then I suggest we leave.’
Maddy nodded. ‘All right.’
She pulled herself up on to her feet and carefully swung one leg over t
he side of the wooden-slat shelf. She reached for the torch, casting a cone of light, thick with swirling, dancing motes of dust, towards the wall. As she did, she noticed within the circle of light on the wall, one particular block of concrete more clearly outlined than the others.
No. Surely not.
‘Wait a moment,’ she said to the others, swinging her leg back on to the shelf. On all fours she crept carefully across the creaking slats of wood, mindful to place her weight where the metal support brackets passed underneath. She reached out for the block and optimistically gave it a nudge. It shifted with a sharp gritty scrape that echoed loudly like the lid of a stone sarcophagus shifting aside.
‘What have you found up there?’ asked Foster. He must have heard.
‘Would you believe it? There’s a loose breeze-block… I’m just… just going to pull it –’
She eased it slowly out of the hole in the wall. Heavy, it slipped through her hands, landing on the shelf. She heard a wooden slat crack under its weight, and the entire metal frame rattled and complained loudly.
‘Be careful, Maddy!’ said Sal.
‘I’m OK.’
Oh my God, this has to be it.
She ducked down, thrusting her torch towards the foot-wide hole in the wall, peering into the swirling dusty space beyond. It was a small space, just a cavity between walls littered with fossilized rat droppings and strung with webs. But nestling in the middle of it, unmistakable, was a large leather-bound book.
Oh my God.
Grimacing, she reached in and gently took hold of it, lifting it out through the hole in the wall. She wiped dust from her glasses and shone her torch down on the leather cover.
And grinned. ‘It’s here! I’ve got it!’
She heard both Sal and Foster yelp with excitement.
Pulling the stiff leather cover open, she quickly flipped through the thick pages of the book. ‘What’s the last possible date that Liam and Bob could have come here, do you reckon?’ she asked.
‘With Bob terminating six months after mission inception, – that would make it a couple of days after the window we tried opening in Washington. That would be…’
‘Fifth of March 1957,’ said Sal.
Maddy leafed through the pages, noting the dates left by various guests. There were many from the previous year. But they quickly dried up in the late summer of 1956.
Perhaps the museum was closed then.
She reached the last page and a last entry from a visitor by the name of Jessica Heffenburger. ‘The museum must close today. The enemy is about to take our city. I could cry.’
She scanned the other entries on the page. They all shared the same sentiment: sadness, bitterness and defeat… a broken people seemingly accepting the inevitable. Paying one last visit to their beloved museum.
But then, in a fainter ink, she spotted it: written with a different pen in the gap left between one comment and another, scrawled in the untidy hand of a person writing quickly…
Me and Bob would really like to come home now, please.
Lat: 40°42'42.28"N
Long: 73°57'59.75"W
Time: 18.00, 05-03-1957
She crawled across the slats with the book cradled in her hands and looked down at Foster and Sal standing in the aisle below, both of them staring up at her with expectant expressions.
‘You find anything?’ asked Foster.
She tore the page out of the book, grabbed her torch, swung her legs over the side and jumped down on to the floor, creating a small mushroom cloud of dust.
‘He’s right here!’ she said, flourishing the page in front of her face, then her voice caught and she found her shoulders shaking as adrenaline-fuelled laughter filled the silence of the basement.
‘He freakin’ well did it!’
CHAPTER 78
1957, New York
Bob and Liam took the steps up and found the museum worker, Sam, dutifully standing guard at the top of the stairs, just as they’d asked him to.
‘We’re all done down there,’ said Liam quietly. ‘Thanks for looking out for us.’
‘Look –’ the man eyed them both – ‘you said something about everything changing to how it should be?’
There really wasn’t time for a full explanation, although Liam would have liked to have given the man that for helping them out.
‘Time is going to correct itself.’ Liam smiled. ‘And everything is going to be all right once more. I promise you.’ He reached out and patted Sam’s arm. ‘And guess what?’
‘What?’
‘Sometime in the future, I reckon I’ll be seeing you again, so I will.’
Sam Penney watched them go, scratching his head, dumbfounded, trying to make sense of the nonsensical things the young lad had just said, and beginning to conclude that he must be quite out of his mind, when a guard barked at him to help some of the other workers lift a heavy display case down the hallway to be stacked ready for burning.
Liam and Bob stepped out through the double doors on to the museum’s main entrance floor, busy with workmen in boiler suits toiling under the gaze of stern-faced soldiers. Bob dutifully returned the clipped salute from the guard standing in the main entrance with a barked ‘Heil Kramer’.
Outside, the bonfire had already started and tongues of orange flame chased dancing flakes of ash up into the overcast sky. Liam could feel the searing heat on his face as they made their way down the grand front steps across the forecourt towards the street. Amid the heat-shimmering pile of burning antiquities he spotted the end of the Egyptian sarcophagus sticking out of the pile, the dry wood blackening and paint work, four millennia old, smouldering and peeling off the side.
The workers stood in a pitifully sad group watching the exhibits burn. Beyond the forecourt, on the street, citizens were gathering, sombrely witnessing the valuable relics of history and their national heritage disappear in a column of acrid smoke.
On the skyline, Liam noticed the pall of other plumes of smoke drifting up into the cold winter sky, and guessed that across the city books were burning, priceless paintings were burning, historical documents, journals and records were all burning, pulled from public libraries and private galleries. He imagined the very same spectacle being duplicated in America’s other main cities in the next few days. And duplicated across the cities of Kramer’s Reich over the next few weeks. History being wiped clean, purged wholesale from the face of the earth.
He felt physically sick.
They stepped on to the street, pushing past silent faces filled with hatred as they glared at his and Bob’s black uniforms.
Liam was relieved to see the Kübelwagen still parked up outside and no soldiers standing around it on the lookout for the culprits who’d stolen it.
Bob climbed in quickly and turned on the engine.
‘Do you think they’ll find our message?’ asked Liam as he settled into the passenger’s seat and Bob eased the vehicle through the crowd back on to the street. ‘I mean, we’ve hidden it away pretty good… maybe too good.’
‘We will know this in approximately seventy-nine minutes.’
They proceeded south down an orderly Central Park West, on one side of them the city’s park, all winter-bare trees and drab ochre grass, on the other endless office blocks and traffic nudging forward between red traffic lights. It started to rain. Joyless greasy drops spattered against the windscreen and soaked dispirited, plodding pedestrians outside.
Liam truly wouldn’t be sorry to leave this drab brow-beaten world behind.
We’re on our way home now… hopefully.
He wondered what the archway looked like, who might be occupying it here in 1957, if indeed anyone was. More to the point – he wondered what the girls and Foster were up to right now.
CHAPTER 79
2001, New York
Foster noticed them as they jogged quickly down the steps outside the front entrance, not just a couple of dozen of them peering curiously from the dark interiors of gutted bu
ildings… but a hundred or more of them.
Fresh meat… the word’s spreading.
‘Oh God!’ uttered Sal. ‘There’s so many.’
Maddy grabbed her hand protectively. ‘Foster, fire your gun.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think the noise will scare them now.’
‘But maybe these are ones who don’t know your gun kills.’
‘Oh, they know all right… otherwise I’m sure they’d already be on us.’
The street leading south, Central Park West, was thick with them… like some bizarre silent rally. To their left was what was once Central Park, now nothing more than a dust bowl dotted with the charcoal skeletons of scorched tree trunks, or the frazzled stumps of long-dead bushes. If the devil was given a say in how a city park should be landscaped, Foster imagined he would go with something like this.
It was wide open terrain, though. Nothing for the creatures to hide behind or jump out from. Far better than picking their way along some narrow street strewn with rusted vehicles.
‘We should cut across the park,’ he said. ‘Then we’re on the east side. It’s a short way through to the Hudson River.’ They could then follow the river down to the bridge. The riverside boulevard was broad all the way down to the Williamsburg Bridge and they’d only need to keep an eye out for anything coming at them from their right.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, leading the way down the last of the steps, across the forecourt, through twisted and collapsed iron railings over an intersection all but hidden by the tangle of rusted carcasses of abandoned cars.
The late-afternoon sun poked through dirty brown clouds as they pushed their way through the fossilized remains of a decorative hedgerow and into Central Park.
‘They’re following,’ said Sal, her voice trembling.
Foster glanced back over his shoulder to see the creatures moving together as a giant pack, hundreds of them shifting across Central Park West, and climbing railings, squeezing through dead hedges to enter the park in their wake.
‘OK, they’re following, but at least they’re keeping a distance.’
