“Maybe there was a shit ton of black mold in the crawl space and we’re both lying on the floor hallucinating,” said Simon.
“Pretty consistent hallucination.”
“I mean, assuming you’re actually seeing this and I’m not hallucinating you.”
“If we’re both hallucinating, then we might as well keep going,” I said, stepping forward.
Another twenty or thirty feet on and the corridor opened up suddenly.
I stopped in the doorway, slowly playing my light across the room.
It was circular. It was at least forty feet across. The walls were concrete, scraped and marked with graffiti. The floor was also concrete, but a thin layer of grit and watermarks made wavy lines across it, as if it had flooded sometime in the past.
And there was just no damn way that it was in the Wonder Museum.
CHAPTER 5
“I’m being very calm about this,” I said to Simon. “I want you to notice that.”
“Consider it noticed.”
“You’re being very calm, too.”
“I’m getting really invested in the black-mold thing.”
“This can’t possibly be over the coffee shop, can it?”
“I mean, it’s got to be. Right?”
“You just said a minute ago that you didn’t think it was.”
“Yeah, but then you changed your answer, so now I have to change mine.”
I inched out into the room. The floor crackled underfoot, not in a concrete-collapsing way, but in a multitude-of-twigs-and-small-pebbles way.
“Looks like water got in,” I said.
“Yup.”
“Have to find it and put some buckets out. It might flood the main building.” Part of my mind had seized on the fact that I was responsible for taking care of the building and was not going to let that go, even if the building had a completely impossible set of hallways and a room in it.
Simon did not answer me, probably because he was reading the graffiti on the wall, or trying.
“You know this language?”
I looked. I didn’t. Parts of it looked familiar, but not all of it. “Dunno. Cyrillic, maybe?”
“Soooo… Russian moonshiners?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Because it makes no sense?”
“Take it up with the black mold. I’m just a hallucination, remember?”
“Yeah, okay.” He flashed his light on the ceiling. “Grating up there.”
I looked up at it. Fifteen feet up, rusted nearly through. Looked like an air vent of some sort. Presumably that was where the water got in, but I couldn’t see anything but darkness through it. “Huh.”
It had to lead to the roof of the building. Or, at least, it had to if we were still pretending that this was physically possible. Simon’s black-mold theory was starting to gain some ground.
“There’s a door over there,” he said. I had to shine my light on him in the darkness to see where he was pointing. Opposite the hallway
We walked over to the door. The crunching under our feet sounded incredibly loud in the silence.
The door was metal. It looked industrial, all rust and flaked paint. It had several heavy bolts on it, but they’d rusted into a solid mass of oxidized iron.
“Where do you think it goes?” I whispered.
“No idea,” Simon whispered back. I don’t know why we’d lowered our voices. It just seemed like a good idea.
“Should open over the street, shouldn’t it?”
“Carrot, we should be standing over the street right now. We’re way past where the building ought to end.”
I bit my lip. He wasn’t wrong. “Do you think we can open it?”
He looked at me. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, there’s a hallway that can’t exist and a giant locked door at the end. Do you want to get eaten by monsters or open a portal to hell or whatever?”
“It’s not a giant door,” I whispered back. “It’s a perfectly ordinary door.”
“With like fifty dead bolts!”
“…Three. Three dead bolts.”
He looked at me. He looked at the door. He said, “Come on, let’s go back to the coffee shop and I’ll make us Irish coffees and we’ll discuss this like people who don’t die in the first five minutes of a horror movie.”
I yielded to the logic of this.
We backed out of the room. Somehow the darkness hadn’t been quite so bad when we didn’t know the door was there. Simon kept his light on the door, which was good. I’m not saying that I thought it might open if we weren’t watching it, but…
Hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.
We turned back down the corridor with the hole and I let out a shriek to wake the dead. Eyes were looking back at me, glittering flat green in the light.
Simon jumped back, his shoulder hitting me, and I fell against the concrete wall, adrenaline screaming through my veins.
“Myyeh?” said the owner of the eyes.
“Christ—fuck—it’s the cat,” said Simon.
“Dammit, Beau, you nearly gave me a heart attack.” I scooped him up, still light-headed from the shock. He permitted this indignity but dug his claws into my T-shirt just far enough to let me know that further liberties would result in significant bodily harm.
“Myeh!”
“I thought we were gonna get eaten by brain goblins or something,” said Simon.
“What’re brain goblins?”
“No idea. That’s just what I thought when I saw the eyes. ‘Oh, shit, it’s brain goblins.’ ”
“It’s my fault.” I stepped back into the museum and set Beau down. “Should have closed up the hole. Let’s move something in front of this so the cat doesn’t get into it again. Or the tourists, for that matter.”
This was easier said than done. I wound up tacking a batik tapestry over it. It belled out toward me, as if air was coming out of the hole. Well, that wasn’t so strange. Clearly, water was coming through into the one room through the vent. I went and found a poster of Elvis with a cardboard backing and hung it over the tapestry, which helped some. I didn’t want tourists getting lost in the hallway.
We went down to the silent coffee shop and Simon started a pot of coffee and pulled whipped cream out from the minifridge under the espresso machine.
“You thinking black magic or aliens?” asked Simon, while the coffee brewed.
“We could flip a coin,” I said, because the alternative was to scream at him to shut up, that there was nothing there and none of it had happened. This seemed excessive and Simon did not deserve to get yelled at.
He took out a coin. “Heads for aliens, tails for black magic.”
“Why does it have to be black magic? Can’t it be neutral magic? Magic with no significant moral imperative?”
Simon rolled his eyes, caught the coin in midair, and slapped it on his wrist. “Good news, it’s aliens.”
“Shouldn’t we have flipped for black mold first?”
“The coin gets mad if you ask it too many questions.”
“Ugh. Don’t you have a better source of divination?”