by Jack Hunt
“You have got to be kidding.”
I gave him a kick. “Dude, wake up, we need to do this now.”
He was bleary-eyed and looked as if he was not going to be much use to me. I got a glass of water and tossed it in his face. He gasped.
“What the hell, dude?”
“Get with it. I need you to keep watch while I go over.”
“Yeah about that, Alex. This is not a good idea.”
I dashed into the kitchen and started rooting through the drawers for a flashlight. When I found one I banged it on my hand a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t going to die on me and then headed for the back door.
“Now listen up. Keep an eye out for his car. You see him, you let me know immediately.”
I dialed his cell and we opened a line of communication.
“Right, let’s see what this guy is hiding.”
With that I disappeared out into the darkness. A six-foot wooden fence divided our property from his. Initially I was going to take the most logical way in, so I went around to the gate and tried to enter but it was locked. I clambered up until I was on top of the edge.
“Eric, you there?”
I cast nervous eyes around the cul-de-sac.
“Yeah. Hey, some of the ladies still haven’t gone home yet. Perhaps we can—”
“Dude, you are supposed to be watching the road.”
“I am. Shelly Wainwright has those really short shorts on. Damn, she has got one hell of an ass. I wouldn’t mind—”
I pulled the phone away from my ear as I dropped down into my neighbor’s yard. I remained in a crouched position for a few seconds, listening for a dog but there was none. I had visions of me being chased by a Rottweiler or something equally as vicious. Approaching the first window down the side of the house I peered inside but it was dark and the window was locked. I continued around the corner. The light of the moon was all that was illuminating his yard. I saw an old Frisbee that I’d thrown over a couple of years back in the brush. As I came around the back of the house I had an eerie sense that I was being watched. I checked the main patio doors but they were locked too.
Eric’s hushed voice came from my phone. “Alex, are you in yet?”
“No. Nothing is open.”
I continued moving around the property checking each of the windows. All of them were locked. Damn!
“Break a window.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“You want to get in, right?”
“Yeah but—”
“He’ll think it was one of the people from the party.”
I sighed. He must have sensed my reluctance.
“Use your jacket. Place it against the window and hit it with a stone, you’ll barely make a sound.”
As absurd as the idea was, I either did that or called it a night.
I kicked at a stone and it hit a trashcan that was nearby. I ducked out of view as someone came out of his other neighbor’s house. Crouched down in the darkness I waited until they went back in before I took off my jacket and grabbed up a large stone from his yard. I positioned it near the window, close to the handle. I squeezed my eyes shut, reeled back my hand and slammed the rock against my jacket. The clatter of glass as it smashed was no different than if I hadn’t used my jacket.
“Holy crap, I heard that from here,” Eric said before letting out a laugh.
“I thought you said it would be silent.”
“Quiet not silent.”
“It was neither.”
He mumbled about how I must have hit it the wrong way. I didn’t wait another minute. With my heart pounding against my chest, I carefully reached through the hole and unlocked the door. All this time I hadn’t stopped to think if he had an alarm system on the house like ADT.
The door creaked open and I entered a mud room. The wall had several jackets and below that were three pairs of shoes on a rack. Off to the right of that was an umbrella holder.
Inside it smelled like fresh pine as if he had recently cleaned the floors. There was no sound except the ticking of a grandfather clock in the hallway.
“I’m in.”
“Hey, be sure to check the fridge.”
“Why?”
“We are out of beer.”
I rolled my eyes and clenched my jaw. I would have yelled at him but I had no way of knowing if someone was inside. If there was, they probably would have heard me enter. Now I had visions of being shot. I breathed hard placing my back against the wall. My pulse was racing a million miles a minute. There was a light on in the front room but I assumed that was just to deter burglars, like myself. I’d only seen him, no kids or wife. I didn’t think he had any family as after a week I figured I would have seen them by now.
“What do you see?” Eric asked.
“Hold on.”
I fished out the flashlight and clicked it on. A large beam of light lit up the floor below me. I was familiar with the layout of the house only for the fact that all the houses in this area had the same floor plan. The homes were all built by the same builder. It was no different than my own. I entered the kitchen and drifted the light around the dark granite counter. A lone plate and cup were in the sink. A few magazines were on the table. There were no photos on the walls. I moved further into the house towards the room that I had seen him in. I turned the knob but it was locked. I twisted back and forth and shoved my shoulder but it wasn’t opening.
“It’s locked.”
“What?”
“The door to the room I saw him in.”
“He probably has the key on him.”
“You think,” I replied stating the obvious. I got down to eye level with the keyhole and shone my light through. I sighed in frustration and checked the table near the front door to see if he’d left a set of keys on it. There were none.
“He’s got to have a spare somewhere.”
“Or you can pick it.”
“Right, because that’s the first thing they teach you in law enforcement,” I replied sarcastically.
I shook my head and was about to make my way back out when the flashlight cast across the wall. On the wall was a key rack with two sets of keys. Both of them had around four keys. I grabbed them up and went through trying each of them in the lock. The first set didn’t get me in and the second set didn’t either. I hung them back up and continued running the light over the surfaces of furniture. That’s when I spotted a small white tray on the kitchen counter. Inside of it were a few coins and among those was a key.
Please be it.
I grabbed it up and inserted it. I held my breath as I gave it a turn. Click. The mechanism clicked over and I breathed out a sigh of relief.
“I’m in. How’s it looking?”
“Nothing so far. Though Shelly Wainwright is so wasted. Oh my god, I wish I had stayed over there.”
I barely heard what he said as I was too caught up in looking at what was inside. Initially I went over to the window and glanced up at my room. Yep, there was a clear shot of my bedroom window. He’d seen me. Without a doubt. The room was very little. A small oak desk, a single chair and a library of books stacked neatly on shelves. I walked up and down running the tips of my fingers across the spines.
“You and my father would have got on well,” I muttered. I checked the drawers on the desk but they were empty. It was like a typical office but without a printer, computer or any of the things you might usually see. I adjusted the brightness of the flashlight to a wider beam so I could get a better look of where I was. I approached the wall and tapped it a few times and continued sliding along tapping with my knuckles. It was solid until I reached this one section. I gave it another knock. It sounded hollow.
What do we have here?
I went outside of the room and looked down the hallway. Whatever was behind that wall could have been the space below the stairs. Back inside the room I ran my hand up and down the wall looking for a button or some way of opening. There was nothing. I couldn’t even fi
nd a groove to indicate that he’d built a false wall.
“C’mon,” I muttered as I pressed against the wall thinking that perhaps it went in instead of sideways. That’s when I started looking at the books again. For the most part they were encyclopedias. Thick volumes of history bound together by leather and brass locks. I began pulling at each one, hoping to find some sort of mechanism, unless of course he had some other device that opened it. Perhaps that’s what I saw, the glow of a light from the door? I must have pulled out twenty books before I finally tugged on one and the wall made a sound. It hissed and slid to one side like automatic doors in a mall. Carefully I approached the opening. Three large fluorescent pot lights illuminated a walkway. Either side were shelves. At the far end were clothes on racks. I as I ran my hand over them I noticed some of the styles were modern, others older from the seventies and then there were some that I didn’t even recognize. Completely white, a suit that looked as if it was fashioned from one piece of material. Below on the floor were multiple pairs of shoes. Some dress, others casual. But that alone wasn’t what surprised me. On the shelves were metal containers that looked like they held note pads but this was no paper. It was small stacks of money in different currency. The notes that were in U.S. dollars weren’t all recent. Some of it dated back twenty or forty years.
I glanced back at the clothing. Some of it resembled an era long gone. The shoes and other items of clothing didn’t make sense. In the next metal container, I found multiple passports, each looked different from the next. The only commonality was that the photo inside was the same. He looked the same age.
Harry Castle.
I finally I had a name for the face. Harry had a defined jaw, thick hair on top with grey flecks at the side of his temples. According to his birthdate in each of the passports he was forty-six. How could they have issued these with the same photo and age? It made no sense. But he looked exactly the same.
Hanging on the wall was a high-powered rifle and two Glocks.
If that wasn’t disturbing enough, what I saw next was.
I moved back into the far end of the room. Against it was a corkboard covered in snippets of newspaper filled with information about the next president of the United States. Around the face of Loretta Dempsey was a red circle. Dempsey had just won the November general election and was to be inaugurated as president on January 20. The board had details about the arrival date, location and time of when she would be giving her victory speech.
I was completely mesmerized by what I was seeing. That’s when I heard Eric’s voice. I lifted up the phone.
“Uh, Alex. We have a problem.”
“What is it?” I said continuing to gaze over the material.
“He’s back.”
I felt a jolt of fear send my heart into overdrive. My pulse began racing fast as I frantically placed the passports back into the metal container and repositioned them exactly where they were before. I retraced my steps out of there and pushed the books back into place. The wall slid closed. As I raced out into the hallway, I heard the sound of the garage door lifting as I locked the door. I dashed into the kitchen and placed the key back down and was on my way towards the back door when I realized I didn’t have my phone on me. I had placed it down inside the room when I was putting the passports back.
“Shit!”
Panic overtook me as I knew I didn’t have the time to get back in the room without either being caught on the way out or being found inside. But I couldn’t leave the phone there. I heard the garage door close as I rushed back into the kitchen, grabbed up the key and unlocked the door. By now I could hear the sound of the man coughing in the garage. I returned the key to the tray on the counter and went into the room. I knew the chances of me being discovered were high but as it stood he hadn’t seen me yet.
Inside the room I yanked on the book that unlocked the door. It slid open, the light illuminating the way. Inside I saw my phone. I grabbed it up. Eric was still talking on the other end.
“Alex. Alex. Come in.”
“I’m here. But I can’t get out.”
“What?”
“I’m stuck in the room.”
I closed the door and heard footsteps outside. He was back in the house. His boots thumped slowly along the hardwood floor. They stopped at the door and for a second I thought he had heard me. Had he spotted something? Standing in the dark I breathed out hard and heard his feet move again, this time towards the kitchen. There was nowhere to hide except under the oak desk where the front panel would have kept me out of view. I squeezed myself beneath it and pulled the chair in just as the key went into the lock. With my eyes closed, squashed beneath the desk, I saw the door open. Inwardly I berated myself. This was the worst idea ever. A vision of him finding me was at the forefront of my mind. I heard him stop again.
Had he seen me?
Could he hear me breathing?
Chapter 6
From beneath the desk I could just make out his shoes. He’d been standing there for at least ten seconds before he moved. I expected him to pull out the chair and drag me out but it never happened. He disappeared out of view and I heard the wall open up. Rustling could be heard as if he was going through his belongings, then his shoes came back into view. I heard him place something down on top of the desk, then he stepped back. That’s when I felt it. It was a like a surge of power emanating through the desk itself. I felt as if I was as light as air. A pale blue glow became so bright I had to close my eyes. Then as quickly as it started it was gone. I took another look below the gap and saw that he was no longer there. He hadn’t opened the door. He was just gone. Not wasting another second I pushed out the chair and untangled myself from the pretzel position. I didn’t even stop to see what he’d placed on the table. Fear was the only thing pushing through my mind as I swung the door open and bolted out of that house. I leapt over the fence with all the agility of an Olympic athlete and double-timed into the house. Eric must have seen me from my bedroom as I nearly knocked him over when I burst into the house. I slammed the door behind me and took a moment to calm my nerves.
“What happened?”
My breathing was heavy. I could barely string two words together. Every thought going through my mind in that moment was ludicrous.
“So?” Eric asked again as I rose to my feet and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen. He stared at me while I caught my breath.
“Hang on.”
I was panting hard. My eyes went from window to window. I half expected my neighbor to show up at the door.
“You are shaking,” Eric said, noting that my hands were trembling. I had never felt so frightened in my life. It wasn’t the thought of being dragged away by police that had unnerved me, it was that my mind couldn’t process what I had seen.
I gasped after taking a big drink. “I’m telling you something is very wrong with that guy.”
“How so?” Then he raised a finger. “Hold that thought. I need a beer.”
Eric dived into the fridge and pulled out a can. He cracked it open and took a swig. There in the kitchen I brought him up to speed on what I had witnessed. At first he laughed and made jokes about the guy probably being a Martian but when I didn’t change my story, he got this dead serious look on his face.
“You aren’t joking, are you?”
“No. He disappeared Eric. Vanished. One second he was in the same room as me, the next he was gone.”
“Did you record it?”
“No, I was stuck under a desk. But I did get some snapshots of what was in his secret room.” I pulled out my phone and showed him the images of the next president and the passports.
“Okay, that borders on creepy.” He took a swig of his drink. “So what do you think we are dealing with here? Assassination? A terrorist attack? Aliens?”
I ran the water and scooped some of it in my hand and tossed it through my hair. I felt like I was burning up.
“I don’t know.”
“We need to tell th
e police.”
I chuckled. “Right, because they are really going to understand why I broke into my neighbor’s house.”
“They’ll understand. You have proof.”
“Yeah, proof of breaking and entering. Don’t be stupid. For all we know he’s a collector. Maybe he collects old things and sells them on eBay. Or has some weird obsession with the next president. It is all circumstantial. They won’t do shit.”
“So call it in anonymously. With all the crap that’s going on in the world, they’ll have to check it out.”
I agreed.
“So let’s do it,” he said handing me back my phone.
“What, use my phone? Eric, some days I think you have a few loose screws rattling around in that skull of yours.”
“Caller ID blocking, dickhead,” he replied.
Right then a bright yellow light swept by the window.
“Shoot! That’ll be my mother. We’ll do this tomorrow. First thing. You might want to get going.”
“Dude, I’ve had way too much to drink to drive back. I’m going to crash here if that’s okay with you?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No,” he said before wandering off into the living room and flicking the TV on. That was just like him. I drop some major life-changing information on him that could potentially place both of our lives in jeopardy and he’s more interested in watching some late night rerun.
The door opened and a gust of wind blew in.
“So how did it go tonight?”
“How did what go?”
My mother tossed her keys on the counter and laid her bag down. “What did you get up to?” It was then she looked at me and saw the cut on my lip. She immediately went into mothering mode.
“How did that happen?”
She turned my jaw from side to side to check for any further bruising.
“It was that dick, Kyle,” Eric said from the living room. She turned around realizing that he was there.
“Eric!”
“Sorry, Laura.”
“It’s Mrs. Flynn.”
He corrected himself. “Mrs. Flynn.” Then raised his beer.
