A Shade in the Mirror

by Tracey Lander-Garrett

  “I don’t . . . This is very complicated,” Prof. Gannon said.

  “What’s complicated about it?” Derek asked.

  “While we have permission to enter any room on the grounds . . . the fact that Madison—which I presume is not your actual name?” He paused and looked at me and I shrugged, “—had the key to that room—I presume it’s a room down there—may invalidate any material gathered from our entry into that room, or any of the data in the rest of the house. If so, it will make all the data we collect during this study invalid. All of it!”

  “Bummer,” Billy said.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Because every discovery and observation that any of you have made is now suspect. It’s likely that you were acting on previous information and directing the actions of the group either consciously or subconsciously.” He sighed deeply. “Damn. Damn. Damn damn damn damn!”

  Double-quadruple damn. “But I . . .”

  “But nothing, Maddy,” Billy said. “Listen, Doc, I read all about this place online before we even came up here. I read about Adderly and his dead wives, how his body had never been found. I read about how a repairman working in the attic a few years back had a heart attack and died, and how a caretaker died on the same night three years later in a tragic accident that involved a beheading. And speaking of beheadings, some people believe that the Headless Horseman was seen here a couple of times like twenty years ago. I also read that Adderly was a survival nut and had locked himself up in an old root cellar. It’s why I wanted to check the basement first thing. So if anyone has ruined your study by having previous information, it’s me.”

  Now it was my turn to sit there with my mouth open. Zoe was looking at Billy with a mixture of dismay and admiration. Derek gave a nod of respect.

  “Google exists, Doc,” said Billy. “You can’t stop progress.”

  Prof. Gannon looked defeated. “But you signed the release stating you had no former knowledge of the premises,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, before I signed up for this thing, I didn’t. I figured that counted.”

  “I knew . . . that is, I thought I knew there was a piano,” I said. “But that was it. I swear.”

  “What . . . how did you know there’d be a piano?” Zoe asked.

  “According to . . . an unreliable source, the Steinway was loaned out in the early 1990s to two girls who lived in Brooklyn.”

  “Looks like your unreliable source wasn’t as unreliable as you thought,” she said.

  “I guess not.”

  Prof. Gannon sighed heavily. “Well, that’s it, then. There’s no point in going on.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Billy asked. “What about the trapdoor? Don’t you want to know if Adderly is down there?”

  “If he is, don’t you think we should let him rest in peace?” the professor responded.

  “That’s not a good reason not to check. I haven’t seen his ghost at all,” Zoe said. “You’d think I would have if he died under suspicious circumstances. Though I will say that the ghosts of Adderly House are oddly shy, with the exception of Rosalita, of course.”

  “Zoe!” the professor reprimanded.

  “I thought it didn’t matter now,” Zoe said. She winked at me and Billy when the professor turned away. She was on our side.

  Billy spoke up again, “Plus, if I help find him, it might get my name in the paper or something. This is probably my only chance for fifteen seconds of fame. It’s not like I’m going to do anything else exciting with my life.”

  “I’m for checking out the trapdoor,” Derek said, “but not to look for Adderly. I’m curious about what Madison’s key leads to, and I’m pretty sure she is too.”

  “Well, Maddy, how about it?” Billy asked.

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  “I . . . well, I mean, we’ve come this far. I’ve spent all this time trying to convince myself that my memories don’t matter. But I can’t leave here without knowing. Maybe there’s a clue to my identity down there. Maybe I’m related to the old caretaker or someone who built the thing. I don’t know. But not going down there isn’t an option. It just isn’t.”

  The professor was shaking his head and looking at the floor.

  I got up from the chair where I’d been sitting since Derek put me there and went to the professor. “Please, Prof. Gannon? They say it’s a dissociative fugue—you know what that is, don’t you? Maybe my memory needs a jump-start. If there’s some clue to my past down there, I need to see it. Please. I’m begging you.”

  I could feel the tears welling in my eyes as the professor looked up at me and sighed again.

  “It’s not like we need your permission anyway, Doc,” said Billy.

  “Fine, we’ll go,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I feel good about this.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took both Derek and Billy to open the trapdoor, which made a strange popping and then sucking sound when it was opened, complete with a whoosh of stale air. The door was extraordinarily heavy, three inches thick of reinforced steel and concrete, and the lock mechanism went all the way through it, with a hole on the back where the sans souci key could be used to lock it from the inside. When shut, the door locked no matter what, and had to be opened with the key either way. I found myself wondering whether it was a safe room or a jail cell.

  A set of very steep concrete stairs led down into the earth and darkness.

  “Who’s going first?” Billy asked, clicking on his flashlight.

  “Professor?” I asked.

  “It’s your key, Madison. You ought to be the first one,” Prof. Gannon said. There was something about his tone that made him sound less than sincere.

  I took a shaky breath. I didn’t really want to be the first person to go down there, but he was right. It was my key. That made it my responsibility. “Sure,” I said, trying to sound confident. I switched on my flashlight and began my descent.

  The stairs were very steep, steep enough that I felt as if I’d fall if I didn’t brace myself against the wall as I descended. At first, the circle of light from my flashlight was very bright and very small from when Billy had last adjusted it, so I twisted the top until the beam was wider, illuminating more of my path. At the bottom of the stairs, there was a wall and a doorway on the left. “There’s a door,” I called back. As I turned, my flashlight caught a smear of something dark along the doorjamb—a brownish-red handprint. Like old blood.

  Keeping my flashlight trained on the handprint, I stepped through the doorway to make room for Billy, who was coming down the steps next. “Whew, these steps are steep—oh, shit! Is that blood?” he asked, catching sight of the stain.

  “Best guess? Yeah.”

  “God, I love this place,” he said, with a huge grin.

  I scanned the area with the flashlight. The room we were in was large and rectangular, with a billiards table in the center, and a white couch, a bar, and empty bookshelves along the walls. Compared to the basement in the house, the air felt curiously dry, and the mildew smell was completely absent. I’d expected cobwebs. There were none.

  The professor came down next, followed by Zoe. Derek brought up the rear, awkwardly crouching in the tight space. Billy excitedly pointed out the handprint to each of them.

  “Ew,” Zoe said.

  Derek held his hand over the print, dwarfing it. “Small hand. A woman’s?”

  “Told you he was a serial killer,” Billy said.

  “I wonder if we shouldn’t contact the authorities,” Prof. Gannon mused.

  “And tell them what? We found an old handprint? Hell, that could be paint for all we know,” Billy said.

  I walked over to take a look at the pool table. “Um, guys?” I said.

  “What is it, Madison?” Derek asked.

  “I don’t think the handprint is paint.”

  “Why not?”

  “Take a look.” I shined my flashlight over the table.

&nb
sp; “How the hell did they even get that thing down here?” Billy asked from the doorway. All four joined me and Billy whistled low. “Damn.”

  An amorphous black stain took up a third of the surface and one of the rails was smashed in. Half a broken pool stick lay on the green felt nearby.

  “Is that blood?” Zoe asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I don’t feel good,” Zoe said. Her face seemed almost greenish in the dim lighting.

  “Are you going to be sick?” the professor asked. Zoe’s eyes were closed and her lips were pressed tightly together. She was breathing deeply through her nose like she was trying not to hyperventilate. “I can handle it,” she said after a few moments, and opened her eyes.

  “Let’s carry on then,” said Prof. Gannon. “Madison, where would you like to go next?” He was definitely being sarcastic.

  A rack of pool cues with one empty slot hung on a nearby wall, and two entryways led from the room, one to our immediate left, the other to the right toward the back of the room, near the bookshelves, past the couch and the bar. “The bar,” I said.

  The long white couch was immaculate, as if it had never been used. The oak bar stood beyond it, holding a bottle of scotch, an empty glass, and a chessboard with the white and black pieces already set up to play. The shelves behind the bar were empty.

  Derek held his flashlight on the board. “One of the white knights is missing,” he said. “So’s the black queen—oh, wait. There’s the knight.” He pulled a horse-headed chunk of white from among the other white pieces. “It’s broken.”

  “Is that marble?” the professor asked, looking over the set.

  “Seems like,” Derek said, fitting the two chunks together.

  “Here’s the queen,” Billy said, picking up the black piece from the bar near the bottle of scotch. Of course Billy was checking out the scotch. “Huh, that’s weird,” he said.

  “What is?” Zoe asked.

  “Well, the queen was just sitting there, right?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “But the knight was in pieces on the board. All mixed in with the others, not by itself?” Billy said.

  “Yeah,” Derek answered.

  “Well, if you dropped a chess piece and it broke, wouldn’t you throw it out? Or if you wanted to glue it, maybe you’d set it aside, right? But you wouldn’t just toss it back in with the others. And it probably didn’t fall apart on its own. Somebody must have broken it on purpose,” Billy finished.

  “But if that’s marble . . .” the professor mumbled, clearly troubled.

  “Well, maybe someone dropped it and didn’t want anyone to notice it was missing at first?” I offered.

  “I had a marble chess set when I was a child. The pieces were a bit smaller than these, but it was very sturdy,” the professor said. “I dropped a few pieces over the years, and they occasionally chipped, but they didn’t break.”

  “I found some books,” Zoe said, standing by a built-in bookshelf near the empty doorway. “And that looks like a bedroom,” she added, indicating the room beyond.

  “On it,” said Billy, striding through the doorway, brandishing his flashlight.

  “What books did you find?” the professor asked.

  Zoe shined her flashlight along a shelf that was second from the bottom. “Collected Shakespeare, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Complete Works of Poe, the Complete Poems of E.E. Cummings, a . . . fifteen book set of Dickens, Alice in Wonderland, and The Maltese Falcon,” she read.

  “Nothing like a little desert island reading,” Derek quipped.

  “Hey, did you find anything in there?” I yelled to Billy.

  “Nah, nothin’,” Billy said, emerging from the doorway. “Just a bed, some sheets and blankets, an empty night table. Nothing under the bed or the mattress. Hell, I even checked under the drawer in the nightstand in case somebody taped something under it. Nothing. What’d you guys find?”

  “The classics of Western literature,” Derek said.

  “Oh—yeah, duh, of course! This was Adderly’s bunker, guys. I told you: I read that he was some kind of survival nut. He must have planned to stay down here for years!”

  “Yeah, just one problem with that,” Derek said, shining his flashlight along the ceiling from the bar to the entryway that led to the stairs. “No vents. No vents, no air. No air, no survival,” Derek said.

  Unless you’re a vampire.

  “Well, maybe the air vents are elsewhere,” I said.

  “Or maybe they hadn’t been installed yet,” Billy suggested. “I mean, the place wasn’t done—he hadn’t even filled the bookshelves.”

  The professor was opening books, turning a few pages, and closing them, while Zoe held both their flashlights so he could read.

  “Anything interesting?” I asked.

  “The newest book here was printed in 1989,” the professor said. “The oldest in 1904. It’s curious. Very curious.”

  “Are we ready to move on?” I asked.

  “Lead the way.”

  I moved towards the entryway and peeked inside. It was a small empty room with a door in the far wall. Summoning my courage, I walked up to it and turned the knob.

  A faint scent of sawdust wafted through the air as I opened the door. “Hey, check it out,” Billy said, standing in the empty room behind me. His flashlight pointed at the floor, following a trail of dark spots that led to the doorway where I was standing.

  Zoe stood behind Billy. Between our three flashlights bouncing off the light gray floor and white walls and ceiling of the small room, I could see fairly well. Zoe had that same sickly look on her face that she’d had before as she took in what were probably old blood stains.

  “Um . . . I think . . . maybe I should stay back here,” she said.

  “Why? I thought you saw ghosts all the time,” Billy said.

  “I do, and that’s exactly why I don’t want to go in there,” Zoe replied, “and neither would you if you’d seen some of the things that I’ve seen.”

  “What have you seen?” Billy asked eagerly.

  “Really, Billy?” I asked. “Can you try to focus on the task at hand?”

  Derek entered the room with a crooked grin on his face, I think because I was giving Billy a hard time. The professor was behind Derek, looking apprehensive. “We should contact the police,” he murmured. “The blood . . .”

  “No body, no crime, Doc,” Billy said. He nudged me with his elbow. “Go on, Maddy.”

  I looked at each of their faces. The professor seemed concerned and Derek still amused. Zoe looked better than she had. “You okay, Zoe?”

  “Yeah. I’ll survive,” she said with a bit of an embarrassed smile. “I really don’t like the sight of blood. At all.”

  Billy was bursting at the seams. “You want to go first?” I asked.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” he said, and led the way.

  There were unfinished and partially finished wooden frames for walls throughout the room, with exposed wires inside the frames at the edges of the room and hanging down from the ceiling. Several pieces of drywall were stacked in one corner. It seemed as though the long rectangular room would have been segmented into two. Billy used his flashlight to follow the dark spots on the floor for a few feet, but stopped suddenly. “They just stop here,” he said.

  “That’s a little weird,” I said.

  “What’s that?” he asked, his flashlight catching a thin, dark object on the floor. It appeared to be the other half of the pool stick we’d found on the billiards table, one end stained a deep brown.

  “Uck,” I said. “Zoe, don’t look.”

  Our group moved through the first partial room to the second, through the skeleton of a doorway, and there, in the corner, in a sitting position on the floor, was the man himself.

  Or what was left of him.

  Grayish hair hung in wispy swirls on top of leathery skin stretched over the skull. The nose and eyes were sunken, with the eyes thankfull
y closed over protuberant cheekbones. The lips and gums had receded from the teeth in a hideous grin. An over-sized black suit jacket and white shirt, open at the collar, with white cuffs at the wrists, ended in claw-like hands. The shriveled skin covering them was like old parchment paper. The suit had probably fit once, before he wasted away. Skinny legs in black pants ended in shiny black shoes.

  Everyone was silent a moment, possibly in shock.

  I found myself looking at the teeth, scanning for fangs. There were none. I sighed in relief—it had been a silly thought after all. Practically hysterical. But not the funny kind of hysterical. The crazy kind.

  Then I heard Zoe say, “Oh” behind me, then there was an intake of breath, and a flurry of movement as Derek caught her.

  She seemed to have fainted.

  “Shit,” he said, struggling to hold her upright. “Zoe?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Zoe?” Prof. Gannon asked. Her head lolled against Derek’s chest. Prof. Gannon checked her pulse quickly and didn’t seem to like what he found. “We need to bring her back upstairs. Now. Derek, can you manage?”

  “I can get her to the stairs, but I’ll probably need help getting her up them,” Derek said, and scooped Zoe up in his arms, one hand beneath her back, the other behind her knees.

  They were leaving the room when Prof. Gannon stopped and looked back at me and Billy. Neither of us had moved.

  “Well, that’s it, then,” he said with an impatient gesture. “Come on.”

  I was frozen to the spot.

  “We’ll be along in a sec, Doc,” Billy said.

  The professor stood there staring at us a moment and then a shout from Derek tore him away with a curse.

  “You okay, Maddy?” Billy asked.

  Sure, I wanted to say. I wanted to say I was fine. But something, somewhere inside me, was not fine. Something awful had happened, some part of me seemed to say. My stomach hurt. I felt a light sweat breakout on my forehead. My vision seemed oddly clear, but a little fuzzy around the edges. Was I going to faint too? No. I closed my eyes a moment and bit the insides of my cheeks. The pain sharpened me up.

  I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I had to know.