by Hamill, Ike
They walked from the woods path to the back of pasture behind the hotel, and Jack stopped when they got in sight of the hotel. Stephen paused and followed Jack’s eyes.
“It’s a big place,” said Jack. “There’s got to be a ton of extra space we haven’t even seen.”
“Do you think it's all crazy puzzles and traps?”
“I think it used to be a hotel way back,” said Jack. “But I think all that stuff was probably stripped out.”
“I wonder if your parents know anyone who stayed here?” pondered Stephen.
“My dad would be more likely to know someone who worked on something, you know, like an electrician or plumber or something,” said Jack.
“We should ask him about it,” said Stephen.
“No way—he would be too suspicious,” replied Jack.
They moved the brush and leaves, uncovering the step ladder and rope ladder and headed up the rocky drainage ditch to the side of hotel. Jack returned down the old grass path and looked for his fishing line trap that he had stretched across the path. He couldn’t find it where he expected to see it, so he backed up towards the hotel, scanning both sides of the path.
Finally, about fifteen feet closer to the hotel than he expected, he found his line cast to one side of the path. He picked up the stick and followed the line to where it should have been tied to the other stick, but he found only a snapped end. Jack glanced back at Stephen who was climbing up the ladder to get on top of the porch roof.
Scouting around, Jack found another stick and tied off the other end. He trotted back down the path and reset it. A sound in the woods grabbed his attention and he looked up.
Everything was still a bit wet from a rain shower that morning. Earlier, Jack had sat on the floor in his room, listening to the rain coming down and waiting for Stephen to wake up so they could return to the hotel. Now that he was finally back at the hotel, the woods distracted him. Across the field, the surrounding forest looked like a wall. The wet trunks of the trees were black and seemed to absorb the weak morning light. Jack backed slowly to the hotel and ascended the ladder to join Stephen.
“Did you see something out there?” asked Stephen.
“Nope—why?” answered Jack.
“No reason, I just thought you were looking at something.”
“Nah, just thinking that I hope it doesn’t rain more. The woods are so wet,” said Jack.
“You want to go first?” asked Stephen.
“Sure,” said Jack.
Stephen held the button for Jack so he could open the hidden door, and then handed the rope-ladder up to him. After he climbed over the edge, Stephen turned around and studied the woods. He heard something out there, like a cough, and he thought that Jack had heard it too. Stephen had also caught a glimpse of Jack surreptitiously resetting his fishing line. He wondered how much he could trust Jack.
Stephen climbed up the step ladder and through the hatch to the rope ladder. Several feet down the vertical passage, he found the secret panel to the vent that Jack had propped open. The transfer was trickier this direction—the ladder kept moving and he couldn’t figure how to push off from the wall.
He heard Jack’s voice from down the passage — “Hey! You coming?”
“Yeah,” called Stephen. “I can’t figure out how to get in the vent.”
“Just jump at it,” said Jack from the dark.
“Yeah, right,” mumbled Stephen. He took off his pack with one hand and shoved it down the vent. Placing one foot against the opposite wall of the shaft, he could push off that foot and slide his torso. He didn't kick hard enough and he found himself half in the vent and half dangling over the edge. Stephen braced his hands against the sides and tried to pull himself forward. His belt caught on the lip and he couldn’t pull himself in. Flailing behind him, his legs didn't reach the other side of the shaft.
Stephen pushed up to wriggle his hips over the lip, but he slipped backwards. He thought about the drop to the room with the anatomical painting. He thought it must be about twenty feet—not enough to kill him unless he landed wrong, but certainly worth a broken leg.
He braced his arms again, but now his muscles heated up and he feared they would start to give out.
“Jack?” Stephen said. “I’ve got a problem here.” He figured it was useless to call—Stephen knew from experience that the vent was too small to turn around in. His left arm began to tremble and his friction-grip was about to slip. Arching his back, he turned his head to see how far back the rope ladder was. Maybe he could grab that on his way down.
A hand shot out of the dark and grabbed his left wrist. Stephen was so surprised that he let go of the wall.
“Give me your other hand!” ordered Jack.
Stephen reached forward and caught Jack’s other hand.
“Pull!” said Jack.
Once he had something to pull against, Stephen could wriggle himself into the vent. He didn't breathe until he had reached safety.
He dug into his bag and got out his flashlight. Jack stared at him when he turned on his light.
“You almost fell,” said Jack.
“Yeah, thanks,” answered Stephen. “How did you know to come back?”
“I just figured.”
“Well good thing for me,” said Stephen.
“For both of us,” said Jack. “It would have been a bitch explaining your disappearance to my mom,” he said.
“Oh, that's your biggest concern? Very funny,” said Stephen.
Jack backed away, down the tight passage. Stephen took a deep breath and waited for his heart to slow before following him. At the next corner, Jack turned and they continued to the ladder.
Back in the room with the red portraits, Jack hardly looked at the paintings. The red lights were still on, and Stephen jumped down from the ladder and turned off his flashlight. He followed Jack over to the wall with the light switch and the door.
“Think it’s a trick?” Stephen asked.
“What, like the door’s wired, or something?” asked Jack. “No, I think it’s just a regular door. I think we finished the puzzles and traps.”
“That would be cool,” replied Stephen.
“I could be wrong, but that last trap was pretty deadly, I mean it could have chopped off my hand. Then right after that we had to trust that next passage not to kill us when the bars started coming down. It’s like he was saying ‘You made it past that, so now you have to trust me,’” Jack said.
“Yeah? So open it,” Stephen said, pointing to the door.
“Okay,” Jack reached forward and turned the handle. He pulled the door open and they saw a long, carpeted hallway. A half-dozen sconces lit the hall and showed them ten doors, five on each side. About halfway down the right wall, a fire-extinguisher hung between two doors.
Mounted on the dark-green wall, next to each door, was a three-digit number. Jack strode down to one-forty-six, the first door on his left.
“Locked,” Jack announced.
“This is really creepy,” said Stephen. “It looks like a normal hotel—like someone could walk out of one of these rooms at any second.”
Jack crossed the hall while Stephen waited from the threshold of the portrait room. Jack checked that door and moved down to check the next. Four doors later he turned and called out to Stephen, “This one is open—come on.”
Stephen looked back to the portrait room. He felt like he was being watched. He stepped into the hallway and shut the door to the portrait room most of the way, but didn’t latch it. He wanted a quick escape route, if he should need it.
Walking down this perfectly normal hallway, it was hard for Stephen to imagine he was still in the same building. Somehow it felt like the hotel waspretending to be normal in this hall, and that made it more sinister. Stephen thought about mentioning this to Jack, but then held back when he saw the look on Jack’s face. His friend appeared enthusiastic about this discovery.
“Ready?” asked Jack.
“I guess
,” said Stephen.
Jack turned the handle and pressed open the door. It was spring-loaded and he had to reach into the dark room to open it all the way. Stephen flipped the switch and overhead lights came on, revealing the room.
The carpet was dark tan, and the walls were papered in a mute pattern of light-green and gold. Red curtains covered the entire far wall. Jack crossed to one of the beds and Stephen caught the door before it closed. He took off Ben's backpack and used it to prop open the door and then followed Jack in.
“Hey!” exclaimed Jack. “The remote is glued to the nightstand.”
Jack pressed the power button and the television on the bureau came to life. It showed channel two with the volume all the way down.
“We've got cable,” laughed Jack. “This is awesome.”
“So does your house,” Stephen said. He poked his head in the bathroom and turned on the light. The bathroom had no dust and looked freshly scrubbed. His curiosity was rising and Stephen indulged it by pulling a towel from the rack and smelling it. He took it out to where Jack sat on one of the beds. “I think someone has been here. Recently,” he said, as he held up the towel.
“That’s crazy,” said Jack. “It’s just that nobody has been here to make it dirty.”
“Does your mom leave the guest room made up all the time?” Stephen asked.
“No, she makes it up right before company comes,” answered Jack.
“Yeah, that’s because everything would smell stale if she didn’t.”
“Maybe she’s just lazy and puts stuff off until the last minute,” said Jack.
“I’ve only known your mom a couple of weeks, and even I know that’s not true,” answered Stephen.
Jack thought about that for a second before countering, “Well, maybe the same people hired to replace the money, also keep this room clean.”
“Let’s just hope it’s that simple,” said Stephen. “It seems more like someone knew we were coming.” Stephen sat down on the edge of the other bed and looked through the drawers of the nightstand. He found a pencil, a pen, and a blank notepad. Jack flipped through the channels on the television.
Suddenly, Jack sat up, staring at the TV. Stephen looked up and was shocked by what he saw on the screen—he saw an overhead view of someone strapped down to a reclining chair. They instantly knew they weren’t looking at a regular television show. It looked more like a closed-circuit shot they would see in a convenience store.
“Holy fuck,” Stephen gasped, he glanced at Jack who sat slack-jawed, eyes locked on the video. “That kid is naked. That can’t be cable.”
The boy appeared young—younger than Jack and Stephen, and he was bound to the chair at his wrists, ankles, and around his torso. His painted skin resembled the painting on the wall in the drawing room—he had an anatomical drawing on his skin.
“Nope,” said Jack, “not cable. That’s Gabe Vigue—my neighbor’s kid.”
“What?” Stephen jumped up. “That's the kid who's been missing all this time? He’s still alive—we’ve got to help him.”
“Hold up—not necessarily,” said Jack. “It could just be a tape.”
“Yes, okay, true,” said Stephen. “Let’s go get an adult—one of your parents, or that kid’s dad or something.”
Jack didn’t react to the suggestion at first, then he tore himself away from the video and looked at Stephen. “Wait now. That’s not smart at all.”
“Why not?” Stephen challenged.
“We don’t have any evidence of anything, for one. Except for breaking and entering, we’ve got tons of physical evidence of that,” said Jack. “What are we going to say? We broke into this place for weeks and then saw a blurry overhead shot of a kid on a nineteen-inch TV? Who’s going to believe that?”
“We have to do something, Jack. If that’s the kid, then what if he’s still alive and we don’t help him?”
“That’s what I’m thinking, we’ll try to help him,” Jack reasoned. “Or, if we can come up with a way to prove that he’s here, then we can go get the cops.”
“Alright, but we have to have a deadline,” said Stephen. “I say if we don’t find anything by tomorrow then we have to tell someone.”
“Yeah, okay,” agreed Jack. He leaned over to the remote mounted on the nightstand and changed the channel. He surfed up through the rest of the channels until he looped back around. “Maybe we should watch this for a bit to see if there are any clues.”
“I think that’s a waste of time,” replied Stephen. “How much time do we have before we have to leave?”
“For what?” asked Jack.
“To get back for lunch—your mom said.”
“Oh yeah,” Jack consulted the clock on his phone. “About forty-five minutes.”
“Let’s see what else we can find,” said Stephen.
“Maybe we should split up,” offered Jack.
“No way,” said Stephen.
After switching off the television, Jack stood up and joined Stephen, who headed for the door. Stephen put his hand on the door and then paused. “I want to see something,” he said to Jack. He crossed the typical-looking hotel room again to the curtains on the far wall. They looked like they might hide floor-to-ceiling windows, but when Stephen pulled them aside he revealed a crude brick wall. The mortar was slopped between the bricks and spilled on the carpet in several places.
Stephen caught Jack again at the door and they headed into the hallway. They tried each door, Jack taking the right-hand of the hall and Stephen taking the left. All the doors were locked until they got to the end. Jack’s last door was open. Instead of a number next to the frame, this one said “Vending” and showed an illustration of a glass filled with ice cubes. The door opened out and Jack pulled the handle revealing a small room with several machines, fluorescent lights, and a tile floor.
“Now what?” said Stephen, walking past Jack into the vending room. Jack followed him in and let the door close behind them. “Wait! The door.” yelled Stephen. It was too late, the door closed behind Jack.
“What?” said Jack. He backed up a step and opened the door a crack. “It’s fine—it didn’t lock or anything,” he said.
“Okay—I just want to be careful,” said Stephen.
Together, they looked at the machines. The small room contained an ice machine, a soda machine, and a machine that dispensed snacks, gum, and candy. The soda and candy machines were lit up and the ice machine hummed softly. Jack pressed the lever on the ice machine and a small handful dropped into the basin below the dispenser. Pressing a button on the soda machine caused the display to light up with “1.50” for a few seconds.
“Expensive,” Jack said.
“So, dead end?” asked Stephen.
“Look at the floor,” said Jack.
Black, parallel scuff marks marred the floor in front of the soda machine. Stephen dropped to the floor and pressed the side of his face to the tile so he could see under the machine.
“Help me pull,” he said to Jack. Stephen sat up, braced his feet against the snack machine, and pulled on the bottom of the soda machine. Jack pulled from the left side, about halfway up. The machine slid across the tile: it stood on plastic pads.
When they pulled the soda machine out past the faces of the other machines, they found a large hole in the dusty wall behind.
“Pull a little more,” said Stephen. Jack stood on the left side of the machine and Stephen on the right. They pulled until the machine hit the far wall, but that only gave them ten inches of clearance. Jack squeezed through the gap and then Stephen followed him from his side. The dust on the floor showed a path of many footprints—back and forth through the grime. The wall had an egg-shaped hole, about four-feet high.
They had to pull out their flashlights again.
Jack stepped through the hole first. He found himself in a dirty passage inside the walls. He shone his light around and took in his surroundings.
“It’s like a secret passage,” said Jack. “Alm
ost like the attic space.”
Stephen ducked through the opening and agreed, “Yeah, just like it.”
The passage led off to the right and then turned right.
“We must be behind one of the other rooms,” said Jack.
Light came through a small hole on his right, about shoulder level. Jack crouched down and looked through it.
“What is it, another hotel room?” asked Stephen.
“Yeah, but it’s got a bunch of books in it,” Jack replied.
“Let me see,” said Stephen.
Jack stepped aside and Stephen put his eye up to the hole. It looked like the mirror of the room they had been in before, but from the back. At the far end he saw the inside of a hotel door. The room still had beds, but bookcases took up every other section of wall. About half of the shelves contained hardcover books and the other half had journals.
“I wonder why the light is on,” whispered Stephen. “Do you think someone is in there?”
“Where? In the bathroom?” asked Jack. “You can see the bathroom door is open and it doesn’t look like there’s a light on in there.”
“Shhh. Yeah, but maybe someone is hiding below this hole,” Stephen pointed down to the wall in front of him.
“Nah,” said Jack. “Let’s see where this goes.”
Stephen turned away reluctantly. If he pulled his eye away, he thought he might see someone looking back at him, so he backed up very slowly.
“Come on,” Jack called from up ahead. Stephen rushed to catch up and get back in the protective bubble of Jack’s confidence.
The next ray of light came from the left side. Jack smiled as he looked through the hole.
“Well, what is it?” asked Stephen.
“You look, but I think it’s the room we saw in the video,” answered Jack, excited.
“Really?” Stephen asked. He approached the hole cautiously, not sure he wanted to see what was inside.
Jack was right, it did look a lot like the room from the video: the tile, and the blue counters with white cabinets behind. But he didn't see a chair or a boy, and those things dominated his memory of the video.
“Could be, but it’s hard to say,” said Stephen.
