Keyword Cypher

by E. A. House

  “I’m trying not to tell you,” Chris admitted. “But it doesn’t seem to be working. You can be offended if you want to, I don’t mind.”

  “Actually I am so relieved,” Maddison exclaimed. She was full-on smiling now, which was a good thing, Chris hoped. “You’ve been super nice but kind of weird this whole time. I was starting to think you were secretly a serial killer or a spy for the Russians.”

  “You thought I was a serial killer but you still came with me to explore an empty building in the middle of the night?” Chris asked, suddenly feeling guilty for imagining that Maddison’s dad was a serial killer even if he did still halfway suspect the man of being one. He was going to feel particularly awful if he turned out to be right.

  “It’s eight thirty,” Maddison said, “and I have two cans of mace in my super-dorky backwards fanny pack. And anyway you don’t have a secret agenda. You just have a crush.”

  “Right,” Chris agreed, now feeling even guiltier and very, very trapped. If he came out right now and admitted the truth—Maddison might push him over the railing.

  “And, Chris,” Maddison said, serious but kind at the same time, “I barely know you, and what I do know I really like. But I don’t feel the same way about you that you feel about me.” Which was what Chris had been expecting, in the back of his mind, all along. “So,” Maddison continued, “if it’s okay with you I’d like to be friends? And maybe we’ll be more, in a little while?”

  “I’d like that,” Chris said, resolving to himself that as soon as possible he was going to come clean about the whole secret. Preferably after he and Carrie figured out exactly what was going on, so he could present it to Maddison as a finished indiscretion. And privately agreeing that he really wanted to get to know Maddison a little more. What kind of girl hunted ghosts with scientific precision because her father was a history professor? “Shall we go in search of ghosts?” Chris asked, offering Maddison his arm.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Maddison said, grinning and taking it. “But you’d better have that video camera running at all times in case we meet one.”

  Sadly for the prospective of running screaming into each other’s arms, Chris and Maddison did not come across a full-fledged phantom glowing green and rattling chains.

  “But that’s not very likely anyway,” Maddison said, checking the temperature in the third-floor lounge. “I’d be happy for just a definitely unexplained cold spot, or electrical activity far beyond what you get from power lines, or a little glowing mist.”

  “I’d be happy if we didn’t find anything,” Chris admitted. Watching people look for ghosts on television was one thing, actually looking for them yourself was entirely another. The shadows kept reaching out and grabbing at him, and the idea of glowing mist was not appealing. He’d spent a lot of his childhood in this building, and it had never before seemed so creepy or so full of dark corners from which a ghost or shadow monster might conveniently lunge.

  “Well,” Maddison said, “I’ve been doing this for years and the scariest thing I ever saw was my aunt covered in soap suds and chasing the cat.”

  “Were you looking for that?”

  “Nooo,” Maddison said. “But she was really angry and it looked darn amazing with my night vision goggles.”

  “What about aliens?” Chris asked as another worrying thought occurred to him.

  “I’ve never seen aliens,” Maddison said. “I have heard strange whistling in the woods when we were visiting my grandparents in Washington—which means I could have heard a Sasquatch,” she explained. “But no aliens. Why, have you ever experienced periods of lost time or bizarre dreams?”

  “Uh,” Chris said, thinking that while his dream of Carrie as a mob boss was definitely bizarre it was probably not what Maddison meant. “No.”

  “Then I think you’re fine,” Maddison said. “Now, the Bermuda Triangle or a similar supernatural hotspot, that we might need to worry about.”

  They didn’t find spooky glowing mist on the bottom floor, or the first. They didn’t find any on the second floor, where Aunt Elsie’s office had been and where Carrie was, either. But they did hear a door slam shut.

  Edgewater Archives was a blocky building built for function rather than appearance, more or less resembling a box. There were utilitarian stairwells on both sides of the building and an elevator in the middle by the reception desk, and Maddison and Chris had been taking the stairs for the dual reasons that stairs were a prime ghost location and that elevators were claustrophobic and sketchy at night in deserted buildings. They were halfway down the main hallway of the second floor when the stairwell at the opposite end of the floor slammed shut.

  “What was that?” Chris asked, and then realized that Maddison was jogging lightly and noiselessly down the hall, her long black ponytail bouncing. More alarmed than he would have liked to admit and wanting very much not to be alone in the hallway, he ran as quietly as possible after her, and caught up just as she was noiselessly pushing the door open.

  The stairwell was empty, and when they checked there were no suspicious cold spots or electrical activity. Chris sighed in guilty relief and Maddison sighed in disappointment and kicked lightly at a wedge of wood on the top landing.

  “And sometimes the ghost is actually a doorstop that didn’t hold the door very well,” she said.

  Chris was already a little more alarmed by all this ghost hunting than he was trying to let on. So he decided not to tell Maddison that he thought he’d heard, just as they reached the door at the top of the stairs, the click of the door at the bottom of the stairwell being pushed open. It was most likely his imagination, if it wasn’t his imagination it was probably the wind, and Chris did not want to consider what it might be if it wasn’t the wind.

  “Ah, well,” Maddison continued, turning around and leading the way back up the stairs. “Maybe we’ll get something from the video. In the meantime, we should go help your cousin with the real reason we’re here. Especially since I’m technically supposed to be making sure nobody steals my dad’s paperweight collection.”

  “He has a paperweight collection?” Chris couldn’t help asking. They were taking the stairs two at a time and the nervous prickle at the base of his neck had almost disappeared.

  “Oh, yeah. And it’s all octopuses.”

  “That’s funny, because my Aunt Elsie had a giant paperweight collection that was all sailing ships—whoa.”

  The office looked like an obsessive-compulsive tornado had hit it.

  “Sorry,” Carrie said, from behind the desk she was determinedly dragging away from its long-standing spot by the window, which it had occupied since before Aunt Elsie’s predecessor took the office. “There’s just the tiniest space between the floor and the desk and I can’t find my necklace anywhere. Maddison, I’ll move it back before we leave, I promise,” she added. She glanced around the room. “Er, all of it, that is.” Carrie had pushed everything in the room that could be pushed up against the walls.

  “It’s totally fine,” Maddison said, hurrying over and tucking her EMF meter in her fanny pack as she did. “Here, let me help you with that.”

  Chris stayed where he was, frozen. He’d recognized the note of real hysteria in Carrie’s voice when she’d said that she couldn’t find the necklace, and a terrible thought was sending ice down his spine.

  “You don’t remember where you had it last?” he asked nervously.

  “I thought it must have fallen in one of the desk drawers,” Carrie said, and the worried look she gave him was proof enough. “But I can’t find it anywhere.”

  Chris swallowed in a vain attempt to squash the metallic taste of panic in his mouth. Between the time Carrie had left the necklace in the office on Thursday and the time they came back to “search” for it, someone else had searched the office and taken the necklace, and this was very, very bad.

  “Don’t worry,” Maddison said, innocent of the real situation and trying to reassure Carrie nonetheless. “If it�
��s here we’ll find it.” She gave the desk a final push and with a horrible groan it moved a reluctant couple of feet. “Whoa,” she added. “That’s a weird mark.”

  Chris took a deep breath and fought off the hysterical urge to giggle at what had finally been found under the desk. They may have lost Carrie’s necklace—the only tangible thing Aunt Elsie had given Carrie, and the only thing she had to remember her by—but they had at last found the scorch mark. And Maddison was right. The long-looked-for scorch mark, now discovered under the desk drawers, was indeed weird. It looked as if someone had branded the floor with a four-pointed star.

  “The four points of a compass,” Carrie said to herself, dropping to her knees and rapping on the scorch mark. She’d rallied slightly better than Chris, despite being the one the necklace belonged to. “Hey! This sounds hollow,” she added, convincingly surprised.

  “Points of a compass?” Chris asked, dropping to the floor next to Carrie.

  “Hollow?” Maddison asked. She joined Chris and Carrie. “Well, should we open it?”

  “I—the four points make me think of the four points of a compass,” Carrie explained. “I don’t know why. And I don’t think it could hurt anything if we pulled the board up and saw if there was anything inside. Especially if we inform the proper authorities after we do.”

  And so saying, Carrie dug her fingernails into the crack between the scorched board and the next and tugged. There was a creak and groan from the wood, and then with a puff of dust and stale air the floorboard came up. Inside was a small hollow, hacked into the insulation and wreathed with wires and bracketed by two pipes. Nestled inside the hollow was a wooden box about half the size of a regular shoe box.

  “Careful!” Carrie hissed as Chris gently reached down and tugged it out. She was clutching the floorboard to her chest protectively. “There might be exposed wires or—”

  “Nah,” Maddison said, “don’t worry about that, I left my EMF meter on. No electricity or ghosts.”

  “Got it,” Chris said, blowing insulation dust off the lid and then scrubbing the rest off on his pants. Without the dusty covering, the box proved to be a warm, reddish wood, trimmed on the corners with brass and embellished on the top with an etched brass plate depicting a Spanish galleon in full sail on a rough sea. The initials E.K. were inserted cleverly into the billows in the storm clouds.

  Maddison traced the initials with a finger. “Somehow I think this belongs to your family.”

  “E.K.,” Chris said. “Aunt Elsie, what are you trying to tell us?”

  “Always be on the lookout for secret compartments?” Maddison suggested. “Carrie, this is awesome but I’m not seeing your necklace anywhere.”

  “I know,” Carrie said. “I’m absolutely certain that I had it when I walked in here last week, and I could have sworn that I lost it in here while I was helping Chris carry boxes, but I’ve searched every inch of this office and it’s just not here.”

  “Maybe somebody found it later and turned it in to the lost and found?” Chris suggested.

  “I checked with the front desk about that before I asked the professor if we could search the office,” Carrie said. “As of last Friday there hadn’t been a necklace matching that description turned in.”

  “Checked your pockets?” Maddison asked a bit desperately.

  “Yup.”

  “Checked this box?”

  “Can’t,” Chris said, flicking ineffectually at the lid. “It seems to be locked.” Which was a whole new problem to deal with, because Aunt Elsie hadn’t left them a key.

  “I can ask my dad to check the box of archive papers for a necklace,” Maddison offered, “in case it got mixed in with them, or—unless you don’t want me to?”

  “No, Maddison, that would be great,” Carrie said. “You really don’t even have to do that much, if it isn’t here then it might just be lost forever.” She sighed. “I think we should probably put the desk back where it was, and you should check your dad’s boxes for the sake of thoroughness.”

  “Right,” Maddison said. “It is getting pretty late, and I wanted to be home in time to see my dad before he goes to bed.”

  MOVING THE DESK BACK AND TIDYING THE THINGS Carrie had shifted took barely five minutes, and then they were locking up the office and tiptoeing down the stairs, Carrie tucking the box in her shoulder bag as they went. There shouldn’t have been a need to tiptoe, but it was late, and Chris, at least, was beginning to feel drained as the adrenaline from chasing ghosts and actually losing the necklace and then finally finding the box faded.

  Even Maddison—who presumably had had a much less stressful evening than Chris or Carrie because the stakes were so much lower for her—looked a little beat. Her customary bounce was so subdued it hardly made her ponytail sway. And the eerie feeling that they weren’t alone had returned tenfold.

  “Lucky you found that box, though,” Maddison said as they trooped tiredly down the stairs. “Otherwise it might have been hidden away forever.”

  “Aunt Elsie liked doing stuff like that,” Chris offered. They were crossing the front lobby, and their footsteps echoed loudly in the higher-ceilinged room. Maddison was glancing surreptitiously at her EMF meter. “She loved puzzles too, all kinds of codes—I’ll bet there’s some complicated code needed to open the lock on that box.”

  “Or you could just gently take it apart at the seams and then put it back together,” Maddison suggested.

  “Well, yeah,” Chris agreed, “but where’s the fun in that?” He paused at the front door to lock up, Carrie shifting uneasily from foot to foot. “And anyway,” Chris continued, more to chase away the prickle on the back of his neck than anything else, “Aunt Elsie likely gave the key to someone in the family a long time ago, disguised as a letter or a movie ticket or a bottle of grape soda . . . ”

  “I’m still annoyed at you for that spilled bottle of grape soda,” Carrie said.

  “It’s a long story,” Chris admitted to Maddison, who looked like she wanted to ask but was afraid she’d regret it. “And Carrie might kill you if I told you.”

  “It was a white dress, Chris,” Carrie said, leading the way to the parking lot. She unlocked the car when they were still a few feet out, and it somehow seemed a necessary precaution. “A new white dress.”

  “I said I was sorry!” The streetlight they had parked under was, by some piece of cosmic irony, the only one that was out, and Chris kicked it as he passed it. The creeping feeling of eyes on the back of his neck wasn’t going away, and it felt like an insult for the streetlight to stand there, tall and proud and not doing its job.

  It was nearly midnight, and the night had cooled as the stars peeked out and a warm wind blew in. The parking lot was almost empty—there was a nondescript gray car parked near the entrance to the dentist’s office—and the working streetlights bathed it in dirty yellow light. This did nothing for Chris’s strange feeling of creeping dread, which did not go away as they pulled out of the parking lot and he almost ran a red light. Actually, Chris probably shouldn’t have been driving while feeling this unsettled, but the family rule was that if Carrie drove one way, Chris drove back.

  “Is something wrong?” Carrie asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Chris admitted. “But the hairs on the back of my neck have been standing up all night.”

  There was a foreboding moment of silence while Carrie and Maddison exchanged a worried look. And, Chris wondered to himself, how had they developed shared worried looks already? But more to the point, why had they not included him in the development?

  “Now that you mention it . . . ” Carrie said. “There’s been this prickle on my scalp all night.”

  “Me too,” Maddison said.

  Chris didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.

  “Did you guys bring a ghost home?” Carrie asked, only half joking.

  “No,” Maddison said. “It doesn’t work that way. Ghosts are generally tied to one place, and that place is usually whe
re they died—and although I never look up the history of a place before I go ghost hunting, it’s pretty unlikely anyone ever died horribly in the Archive. And anyway, the place was quiet as the grave.” She winced at her own choice of words. “I mean, we didn’t see or detect a thing. Um. Unless—”

  “Unless what?” Carrie asked.

  “We might have heard a ghost,” Chris offered. “We heard that door slam, remember?”

  “Do ghosts slam doors?” Carrie asked.

  “Sometimes,” Maddison said. “But there was no evidence to suggest it wasn’t the door jamb coming loose.”

  “Except,” Carrie said slowly, “that Chris and I know the janitor at the Archive and Mr. Fitzgerald hammers those things in so tightly it takes three people to pry them out sometimes. The door might swing loose, but it would be a pretty odd coincidence.”

  “See, this is why I usually investigate first and then look up the history of the place,” Maddison said. “No preconceived notions of what’s supposed to happen. It just doesn’t usually end up verifying a ghost.”

  “So, now I’m thinking we really did almost catch a ghost,” Chris said. “And tonight just got a whole lot scarier, somehow.”

  “What if,” Maddison started, then she bit her lip and stopped.

  “What if what?” Carrie asked.

  “What if it wasn’t a ghost?” Maddison said slowly. “Isn’t someone watching you supposed to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up—Chris, move!!”

  The next few moments were forever a blur in Chris’s mind. He’d taken a driver’s education class, and been properly unimpressed by the instructor’s insistence that crashes happen in seconds and when you least expect them, and now, well. He knew that he registered, on some level, that there was a car about to crash into him, and that he acted on panicked instinct he hadn’t known he had, but how long it took and, for example, who screamed and who didn’t, all got lost in a moment of white noise and then his brain decided he didn’t need the memory.