Spawn of Hell (12 page)

This storage area was used so infrequently that there were cobwebs lining the walls, hanging down from the low ceiling. Shuddering involuntarily, she pushed her way through them—thank goodness the webs were not large—and made her way down to another metal door at the very end of the hall. Unused items and boxes and assorted junk had been stored in this room as long as she had worked here, a good ten years, and if those posters were anywhere, they would be inside.

She opened the door and stepped inside, inhaling the disagreeable, musty odor of the chamber, and made the mistake of walking ahead briskly to the light cord hanging down in the middle of the fair-sized room. She had only a brief glimpse of the metal racks, laden with cartons and stacks of paper, before she felt herself falling into a crumpled section of the flooring. She heard a cracking sound, a splintering noise, and suddenly she was plunging into a dark hole underneath her, dropping through the jagged wood floor and down to an abrupt and painful halt on a mound of moist dirt.

Her ankle was killing her, but she seemed to be all right otherwise. She picked herself up from the ground, brushing dirt off her clothes, and looked around. She couldn’t see much; the only light was the little bit from the corridor above that came down through the same hole she had fallen through. Her body felt sore, especially her rump. The drop was only a few feet, luckily, and she had landed on soft earth. Otherwise, it could have been a lot. worse.

How could this have happened? What could have made the floor fall in like that? It had been cracked open before she’d stepped on it; she was sure of that. Her feet must have just touched the edges of the hole, making the floor directly below give way under her weight. Maybe somebody else had fallen through at some time.

She tried reaching the hanging wood beams above her head, but it was no use. There was nothing down there for her to stand on either, just blackness and more blackness on every side. She wondered how far she could walk before she hit a wall or foundation. The deserted building next door must begin somewhere at this point. The only thing separating it from the store was a very thin alleyway no fat person would ever dare to walk through.

She tried not to panic, keeping her screams for help urgent, but not hysterical. When nothing happened after a few minutes, she figured “the hell with propriety” and began to holler at the top of her lungs. Although the door to the store room was still open, the other door leading into the main part of the cellar was closed. And it was thick.

Ten minutes went by. Her throat was raw and hoarse, and she had begun to notice a sickening odor down in the hole, coming from a distance, coming closer all the time. Or perhaps she was just becoming more aware of it. The only word she could use to describe it would have been
stench.
A real, honest-to-goodness
stench.

Then she heard footsteps. She wiped away the silent tears that had been running down her cheeks for the past few minutes, and began to yell again. “Help me. Help! I’m in the storeroom. Help me!”

She heard a voice, a man’s voice. Roger, the clerk. He probably wasn’t busy and, having noticed her enter the sub-cellar, had come in to see if he could help. “Don’t step in the room,” she warned. “The floor has fallen in. You’ll have to get a ladder.”

He must have heard her, because the footsteps stopped right outside the door. “Paula,” he called. “What happened?”

“The floor. The floor fell in. I fell into a hole in the floor. Be
careful.”

“Holy!” He had obviously peered in and seen the condition of the floor for himself. “How far down are you?”

“About three feet too far, I’m afraid. I must have fallen about eight feet.”

“Are you all right?”

“A little bruised and my ankle hurts, but I think I’ll live.”

“I’ll get a ladder. And some of the fellows. We’ll get you out of there.”

“All right. But hurry, it’s creepy down here. And it smells.”

“Okay. Be right back.”

“And Roger?”

“Yes, Paula?”

“Tell Harry about it. He’ll need to know sometime.”

Harry and Roger and two other clerks were there five minutes later. The whole staff would have been there, Paula suspected, had they not had customers to wait on.

“Jesus Christ!” Harry’s familiar lament. “Are you okay?”

She assured him that she was. “You and your damn sale posters,” she laughed.

“Get out of the way,” someone yelled, “we’re sending a ladder down.”

“No, no,” Harry said. “Get one of the rope ladders. That wooden thing is too heavy. This whole floor is about to go any minute.”

There was another brief delay. And then an unraveling string rope came flying down into the darkness. Paula grabbed for it.

“Shall I come down and help you get up?” Harry called.

“No,” she said, pulling herself onto the bottom rung. “I can make it.”

“Watch out for the sharp ends of the broken wood,” Harry cautioned.

“I will.”

She was pulled up and out into the corridor a few moments later. “Boy, am I glad to be out of there. It
stinks!”

She raced upstairs to take a Valium.

“Hand me that light,” Harry instructed. “I’m going to take a look around.” He climbed down carefully into the dark hole below, followed gingerly by Roger. Harry told the other two men to stay put just in case.

“What could have caused this?” Roger asked. He was a bearded man of thirty-five, with a protruding pot belly and dark blue eyes. “It looks as if something
pushed
the floor upwards.”

He was right. Harry looked up and saw that most of the cracked wood was pointing upwards, except for the pieces which had swung down when Paula crashed through. “That’s odd. Come on. Let’s look around.”

This troubled Harry. Troubled him more than he let on. He hoped the whole structure of his building, his store, his
life,
had not somehow been damaged beyond repair. They walked to the right. “We should hit the foundation of the Forester Building soon,” he said. The Forester Building, so called because it had been built by the prominent Forester family in the early 1900s, was the abandoned building next door.

They both shined their flashlights into the blackness before them.

“Look,” Roger cried. “The wall’s been eaten away. Must have collapsed.” They were walking through a hole in the bottom wall of the Forester Building, apparently entering a kind of sub-basement. Only it wasn’t a sub-basement any longer, assuming it ever had been.

“I didn’t know the Forester Building had such a deep cellar, did you?” Harry asked.

Roger shook his head. “It seems to be a
cave
instead. I wonder how big this is.”

It was becoming more apparent that they were walking in some sort of huge cavern, stretching out ahead of them endlessly, although they could see the rocky sides of the enclosure at the far edges of their lights. The cavern was about fifteen feet across, eight feet high. There was no telling how long it might be. And Paula had been right; the odor was horrible and getting worse.

Roger began to shine his light all over, up and down, trying to figure out if the space was natural or man-made. He finally shined it straight up, almost as an afterthought, and let out with a low whistle. “Mr. London. Take a look! It’s unbelievable!”

The light revealed
several floors
above them; it looked like a shaft had been ripped right out of the building—a shaft going from cellar to attic. At this point, the ceiling of the cavern did not exist. The light shined through the tattered, torn remnants of each floor above, clear up to the undisturbed roof of the Forester Building. The shaft was shaped in a rough circle, approximately ten feet in circumference.

“It looks like somebody dropped a safe down from the attic and it smashed through every floor,” Roger said.

It did look that way. Several safes. Large ones.

“How come the floors collapsed in only one end of the building?” Harry wondered out loud. “Everything seems intact elsewhere. Besides, this building was being used only six months ago. Don’t tell me this could have happened in so short a time.”

“Maybe there was an explosion,” Roger offered.

“An explosion that we didn’t hear next door?”

“It could have happened at night.”

Harry ignored the remark and pointed upward to the spot illuminated by his flashlight. “Look at the wood here. It hasn’t been smashed upward like in the storage room. It hasn’t been smashed downwards, either. It looks as if it’s simply crumpled up and fell apart.”

“Could termites do that?” Roger asked.

“Why would they concentrate only in one area? Why not the whole house? Besides, that’s almost a perfect circle!”

“We don’t know about the upper floors,” Roger said. “They might be in a similar state on the other side of the building.”

Harry shrugged. “You’ve got a point. Let’s get out of here. I want to go next door and take a look around.”

“A look around the store?”

Harry laughed. “Confusing, isn’t it? I should have said that I want to take a look upstairs. In the Forester Building.”

Roger didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. From the look on his face Harry could tell that his portly employee wouldn’t have stayed down there in that odorous pit any longer if he’d offered to triple his salary.

Harry called the Chief of Police and explained the situation. Chief Joe Walters was a heavy-set, punctual sort who stumbled about with a dumb expression on his roundish, balding countenance that belied his continued efficiency. “The Forester Building, hmmm?” he repeated over the phone. “That’s been vacant for months now. Belongs to the township. I’ll get the keys and bring ‘em over and we’ll have a look inside.”

“Good!” Harry hung up and got himself a glass of water from the cooler outside his office door. He knew Joe would arrive within minutes, ever on time. He checked in to see how Paula was doing. She was on the phone in her office, but hung up when she saw Harry. He sensed that she didn’t want him to know that she’d been ringing Jeffrey again. It might make her seem too possessive in his eyes. Clinging. He didn’t know. But ever since she’d been rescued from the hole in the storage room floor, it was as if some horrible thought had seized her mind in a merciless grip, had seized it and refused to let go. She was more tense and nervous than ever.

Harry remembered that on the day of Jeffrey’s departure, he had asked the mail if he knew where the sales posters were—the same ones Paula had been trying to find downstairs—and Jeffrey had said that he would look for them before he left. Harry had assumed that he had simply forgotten all about it in the excitement over his trip. But now he wondered. Had Jeffrey also gone down to the storage room, fallen into the hole below? He had not seen any sign of him; if he’d been injured or killed the body would have been discovered immediately. Still, Harry couldn’t help but worry.

He knew that Paula’s thoughts were focused in the same direction. She couldn’t keep herself from calling Jeffrey’s number, over and over, until he answered, until she heard that cheerful voice of his, heard some excuse, some reason for his not coming to work that she’d gladly forgive and accept and understand. Harry wondered if a woman would ever again feel that way about Harry London.

“Chief Walters will be here any minute,” he told Paula. “We’re going to look around next door. See what we can discover.”

“Creepy, isn’t it?” she said. “That big abyss in the cellar. I wonder what could have caused it?”

“That’s what I keep asking myself. Well, we’ll find out. Want to come have a look?”

“I’ll pass. I have to check up on my trainees. I’ve ignored them practically all afternoon.”

“Not many customers anyway,” he laughed. “Maybe this hole of ours will improve business.”

“You could always put up signs and charge them for a look-see.” She brushed her hair into place and added:

“Speaking of signs, I never did get those sale posters for you.”

“Forget about it. I’ll have one of the high school boys make up some new ones. They’re not worth a broken neck.” He came closer and took her hand in his own, squeezed it gently, affectionately. “I’m sorry . . . about down there. I should have gone myself.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m fine.”

He nodded, squeezed her hand again, then dropped it and stepped outside. Joe Walters was walking towards his office through the aisle packed with tennis equipment.

Walters was a man of few words, and the formalities were dispatched with swiftly. Harry called Roger, and the three of them went outside and walked up the steps of the Forester Building. It was getting hotter outside and a stale breeze blew low in the air.

“Who was renting this place last?” Harry queried as Walters fiddled with a huge set of keys of different shapes and sizes. One long silver job was shaped like a naked woman, but Harry didn’t ask where it had come from.

“Some corporation. It’ll be listed in the Hall of Records somewhere if you’re interested,” the Police Chief grumbled. He finally found the right key and inserted it in the lock. “They wanted to use this for research and storage. I think they had a few small labs built on the premises.” The door swung open. Immediately Harry and Roger recognized the stench that came from within, the same odor they had smelled earlier in the cellar. Joe had not had occasion to encounter the smell, so he recoiled even more than his companions did. “Yuuch. We must have something dead in here.”

“What did they need the laboratories for?” Harry asked as they stepped inside the foyer. Directly ahead was a thick double door made of wood. To their right was a wooden staircase which led to the upper floors. The chipped white walls had not been painted in years. This outer chamber was very bright, lit by sunlight coming in through the skylight, the only window that had not been boarded up. The foyer stuck out from the rest of the building and did not support anything heavier than the air immediately above it.

Walters opened the inner door and the odor got stronger. “I don’t know,” he finally said in response to Harry’s question. “But it better not have been to make explosives.” The three of them stepped into a corridor that ran through the back of the building; several rooms led off from it.