Читать книгу Ordeal by Terror - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 7

CHAPTER 3

Adelle tried frantically to stop herself, but her elbows banged hollowly on metal and her hands clutched at emptiness. She shot downward, flat on her back and enfolded in darkness, until she skidded to a stop on a smooth cement floor. For a few moments she lay there idiotically worrying about her new pants suit. Then she decided she was fortunate to have worn it. In a dress, she probably would have lost skin.

Something above her head rattled and creaked. There was a faint, prolonged swish; then silence. Staring upward, she saw no crack of light to indicate where the trap had been. She got to her feet and felt about her blindly. A step forward, two steps—her hands encountered an obstacle, a smooth surface of metal that felt cold and gave off a solid whang when she thumped on it. She ran her hands along it, first sideways and then vertically. It was a wall. She turned in the opposite direction, and after four cautious steps she encountered another wall. She stood with her back against it trying to figure out what had happened.

She knew there was no point in calling for help. Madam was two stories above her, and the fact that the lights had been out in the basement meant all of the goons were elsewhere. If one of them had been available, Madam wouldn’t have sent Adelle after the folder.

She seated herself on the hard, cold floor, embraced her knees, and thought furiously. She had been given precise instructions for finding a folder on tires. That meant someone had put the folder in the cabinet—but no one could have done that without stepping on the trap, just as no one could remove it without stepping on the trap.

The top drawer, at least, had seemed empty.

“Something,” she announced to herself, “is decidedly fishy, but the problem is how to get out.”

She cautiously got to her feet. Her first thought was to find out where she was. Since it was too dark to see anything, the Braille system was the only tool available. She turned to her right and edged forward, hands in front of her.

A dim light flickered on. She dropped her hands with a sigh of relief, but as she looked about her, she knew instantly that Mondor’s words “loony” and “sinister” had been understatements. She was in a small room, perhaps six or seven feet square, with gray metal walls and ceiling. The tiny, recessed light at the center of the ceiling was no brighter than a night light, but she noticed at once that the ramp she arrived on had vanished. There was no opening in the walls or ceiling that she could have passed through, and that baffled her completely.

Each wall was in three sections, with braces reinforcing the seams. There was a horizontal reinforcement about six feet from the floor. The ceiling consisted of strips of riveted sheet metal. It was a bare room with a cement floor, but there was one remarkable feature: Above Adelle’s head on three of the walls were incomplete, upside down baseball scoreboards. The inning numbers were in the bottom row instead of on top—white numerals, one through zero placed on square black protrusions about the size of her hand. Above each row of black squares was a row of bulging white squares. When the game started, she thought, the white squares would show the runs scored in each inning, but she had no idea why all three scoreboards had space for only one team.

She abandoned the scoreboards and gave the room another puzzled scrutiny. There was no possible way she could have entered it, but here she was. She must have passed through a wall or the ceiling, but she could see no trace of an opening.

She called out, “Hey! Anyone here?”

Her voice echoed thunderously in the metal room.

Suddenly one white square on each of the scoreboards—the square for the third inning—showed a brightly illuminated numeral three.

As Adelle stood looking bewilderedly from one scoreboard to another, the lighted squares went dark, and the white squares for the sixth inning showed brightly illuminated numeral sixes. They were followed by numeral nines in the ninth inning squares. Then the threes came on again and went out; the sixes, out; the nines, out. Pause. Threes, out; sixes, out; nines, out.

“I can do even better than that,” Adelle announced caustically. “Twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-four.”

The pattern kept repeating: threes, out; sixes, out; nines, out.

She walked over to one wall and looked up at the scoreboard. The numbered black squares in the lower row looked like control buttons similar to those found on many electronic devices. Adelle reached up and punched them in turn as the numerals in the upper row lighted: three, six, nine.

The ceiling light went out. The lighted numerals faded. For a moment she stood blinking in darkness. Then, with a sustained swish, a section of wall below one of the the horizontal supports slowly sank into the floor. Beyond it was a well-lighted passageway the same width as the room, with gray metal walls and a high ceiling of translucent squares that glowed with light. It was an explosion of illumination, and Adelle had to shade her eyes as she sprang through the opening.

She heard another sustained swish. The doorway was closing after her.

When her eyes became adjusted to the flood of light, she looked about her. The metal walls were similar to those of the room she had just emerged from. At the foot of each wall, at regular intervals, steel brackets were bolted to the unpainted cement floor. At longer intervals, grooves on opposite sides of the corridor ran all the way to the top of the walls, and they were connected by inch-wide strips of black rubber or plastic material that crossed the cement floor from one side of the corridor to the other.

None of this signified anything at all to her. “So where am I?” she demanded. “And why?”

She thought she heard a subdued murmur of talk coming from somewhere. She called out, “Is anyone here?”

A response echoed along the passageway, faint but understandable. “Is that you, Adelle?” It was Craig Dolan. She called back sarcastically, “No. It’s Dracula’s mother.”

“You could be, at that. Come and join us.”

She walked toward the distant end of the corridor. Before she reached it, she saw an opening on the left that led into an even longer corridor, identical to the other except for length. She called, got another response, and turned. At the end of that corridor she found yet another opening on the left; and, after a short distance, another. A dozen more steps, and she stopped to stare through an opening on her right. She was looking into a narrow kitchen where Dolan and Mondor sat at a small table. Dolan was tilting a can of beer. Mondor, who had his back to her, clutched a can of his own with both hands and leaned forward as though praying over it.

After the long succession of identical blank walls, this was too much detail to take in with one glance. Adelle found herself speechless.

Dolan set his can down, carefully wiped foam from his beard with a paper towel he was using for a napkin, and grinned at her. “So they suckered you, too.”

Mondor spoke gloomily without looking around. “We figured you’d be along. Pull up a chair.” He waved at one that stood against the wall.

Still too astonished to speak, Adelle slumped into it. Suddenly she turned toward the stove and sniffed.

“I’m broiling some steaks,” Dolan explained. “I found a package of three in the refrigerator, which is why we thought someone would be joining us. They look pretty good.”

Whatever the peculiarities of their situation, Dolan seemed expansive, perfectly relaxed, a man who had been caught up in adversity all of his life and took it for granted. He sipped beer again, wiped his beard, and grinned across the table at Mondor.

Mondor had not looked up since Adelle arrived. He remained hunched over the clutched can, lips set in a firm line, hair disheveled, his manner that of a mourner at a funeral he would have preferred not to attend.

Adelle remarked disbelievingly, “The pure food addict and vegetarian is drinking beer and eating steak?”

“When a great mathematician gets bamboozled by a kindergarten trick, it breaks his spirit,” Dolan said, grinning again. Mondor grunted. Dolan went on, “Madam told him the firm had bought a computer for him to use. She invited him to help unpack it. Naturally he couldn’t resist a computer, so he blunderingly galloped to her assistance and fell through the floor. After that brilliant display of stupidity, it wasn’t difficult to convince him that brain cells need meat occasionally to keep their clutches from slipping. Anyway, there aren’t enough vegetables to make up a meal. He drew the line at the beer, though—that’s Red Pop he’s drinking.”

Mondor grunted again and raised his can.

“Stupidity’s the word,” Adelle agreed. “What would Z-R Publications want with another computer when it has him? What bamboozled you?”

“Madam asked me to help a goon unload their panel truck. Reasonable request, considering what she’s been paying me. I carried some boxes down to the basement, put them on a shelf, and suddenly I wasn’t there any more.”

“You should have been suspicious. Madam may be half blind, but the goons aren’t, and they’d know you couldn’t perform manual labor without getting your beard tangled in it. How long ago did this happen?”

“About four o’clock. Mondor took his dive about four-thirty—he says. What time is it now?”

Adelle looked at her watch. “Almost five-thirty.”

“What’s your excuse for being stupid?” Mondor demanded.

“Madam sent me to the basement to get a folder on tires. I marched up to a filing cabinet, opened one of the drawers, and the floor dropped away.”

Dolan nodded gravely and drained his beer can. “Sounds almost reasonable. You couldn’t expect Madam to tiptoe down the basement stairs for a folder, and it wouldn’t have been polite—or politic—to tell the boss to shove it when she asked you to perform a simple errand.”

“Face it,” Mondor said bitterly. “All three of us were conned from the moment we were hired—first by the money they were paying us, second by the stupid work we were pretending to do to earn it, and third by the flimflam they pulled to get us down here. If they’d told you to go look at a computer and help unpack the thing, you’d have gone. My thirty-five dollar calculator is far too sophisticated for the work I’ve been doing, but it didn’t surprise me in the least that a screwy outfit like Z-R Publications would invest in a computer for me.” He raised his can and drank deeply. Then he turned to Adelle. “How long did it take you to solve the psychological test?”

“Psychological test?” she echoed blankly.

“Didn’t they dump you into a room with rows of numbers and response buttons?”

“Oh, that. Is that what it was? I was curious about the buttons, so I pushed three of them, and a door opened.”

Mondor turned his chair sideways and regarded her with astonishment. “You were curious about the buttons, so you pushed three of them. In order to get out of there, you had to push the numbers they were flashing in the correct sequence. Didn’t you figure that out?”

“I didn’t figure anything out. I just pushed the buttons under the lighted numbers without thinking.”

Mondor tossed his head back and roared with laughter. “You’ve wrecked their experiment! You’ve utterly demolished it! You’ve shattered all of their scientific calibrations! You were supposed to figure it out!”

“Why?” Adelle asked.

“Good question. The goons probably are asking themselves the same thing. I hope someone will have to sit up all night working out an answer.” He waved a hand. “Have a look around. Get acquainted with your home away from home.”

“Thanks, Adelle said, “but no, thanks. I don’t need a home away from home. I don’t want dinner, either, even if it is a steak. I’d rather eat at home. So why don’t we do something about getting out of here.”

“We’d all rather eat at home,” Mondor said morosely. “It’s my night to savor my landlady’s vegetarian cuisine. Every Friday she fixes an absolutely remarkable vegetarian meal for the two of us, and then I give her a lesson in bookkeeping. She’s a harpy of a person and an absolute dunce of a bookkeeper, but neither Heifetz, nor Perlman, nor anyone else ever played the violin half as well as she performs in the kitchen. I’ve been looking forward to that meal all day. Instead, I’m stuck with Dolan’s steaks. Heaven to hell in one move, and unless you have a miracle up your sleeve, this is where we’re going to eat.”

“Madam is waiting for me at the top of the stairs. Surely she’ll send someone—” Adelle broke off. Mondor was shaking his head forebodingly.

“Goons saw both of us hit the chutes,” he said. “Almost an hour and a half ago for Dolan and an hour ago for me. If they’d wanted us out, we’d be out. It isn’t as though we’d tumbled into an unknown pit in the middle of a jungle with no witnesses. This is just a sub-basement, and they know exactly where we are. Have a look at the setup. Go ahead. Everything in the place is in threes—three beds, three chairs, three table settings. There’s food for dinner and breakfast for three people. Whoever furnished and supplied this place expected three guests. Go ahead, have a look. Then you tell us whether we’re likely to get home for dinner.”

Adelle got to her feet and looked about her. On one side, the narrow kitchen contained an electric stove, a refrigerator, a sink, and a full complement of cupboards. The blank wall opposite, of the same gray metal she had encountered in the corridors, had four openings.

She squeezed past the table and went to investigate.

Three of the openings led into small rooms that were just deep enough to contain narrow beds. Each bed was made up with sheets, one thin blanket, and a single, miniature pillow. On the wall opposite was a row of hooks. Gray plastic curtains that slid across the openings on rods provided a smidgeon of privacy.

The last of the openings, at the far end of the kitchen, led into a room that contained a toilet and a lavatory. Its entrance was curtained like those of the bedrooms. Beyond the kitchen was a corridor identical to those she had already traveled. She turned. Dolan was getting a can of beer and one of pop from the refrigerator. “Where does this lead to?” she asked.

“More corridors,” he said.

“Alleys,” Mondor corrected sharply.

“Corridors, passageways, call them what you like,” Dolan said. “Mondor thinks we should call them alleys. We’re in the middle of a maze, a fact he and I discovered by trying to find a way out. After we’d explored a series of dead ends and nearly lost ourselves, we decided to have dinner and think the whole thing over.”

Adelle squeezed past the table again and returned to her chair. “And what have you concluded?”

“I’ve concluded that Mondor once took a college course in which mazes were mentioned. He passed it by learning to say ‘alley’ instead of ‘corridor.’ I don’t know what he’s concluded. He hasn’t been his obnoxious self since he got duped by that nonexistent computer.”

“There isn’t any way out,” Mondor said gloomily. “That’s what I’ve concluded. On the side where we landed, the alleys lead directly to this place. The only exit would be through the ceiling, which we have no way of reaching, and we probably couldn’t find the traps if we did. The other side is a labyrinth. There’s no way out there, either.”

“Don’t labyrinths have exits?” Adelle asked.

“Only when the builder wants them to,” Mondor said.

Dolan set his beer can down with a thump. “As our mathematician has already pointed out, we have three bedrooms, three chairs, three everything, with food supplied for three people. Therefore Madam and her goons intend to keep us down here at least until after breakfast tomorrow. Since they’ve already made that decision, and gone to considerable trouble and expense to implement it, Mondor thinks it unlikely that they’d absent-mindedly leave us a running escalator marked ‘Exit.’ He reached that abstruse conclusion all by himself. Aren’t we lucky he can count to three?”

“Crap on your counting!” Mondor exploded. “The moment I realized I’d been dropped into some kind of psychological hell, I knew I’d find Dolan here.”

Adelle got up, squeezed past the table again, and began opening cupboards. A large bowl was filled with foil and paper containers of the type dispensed by airlines and fast-food restaurants. There was coffee, sugar, tea bags, chocolate, powdered non-dairy creamer, salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup, steak sauce. There was a small box of dehydrated potatoes and a foil container of gravy mix—enough of each, she reflected, for about three people. There were three individually boxed servings of breakfast cereal.

In a lower cabinet, behind a roll of paper towels and a plastic container of dish washing detergent, she saw a box of sanitary napkins. Someone certainly was planning on their staying and had thought of everything.

But the scantness of the food seemed puzzling. She turned to examine the contents of the refrigerator. In the freezer compartment, she found a package of mixed vegetables and a fruit pie. Presumably the steaks had been in the meat container, which now held only a pound of bacon. The other items were a quart carton of milk, a dozen eggs, and numerous cans of beer and pop. They had adequate food for dinner and breakfast but virtually nothing for subsequent meals.

In the cabinet under the sink there was an enormous reserve of beer and soft drinks along with more kinds of alcoholic beverages than Adelle had ever seen outside a liquor store.

She entered the end bedroom, the one farthest from the toilet, and hung her coat on one of the hooks. She tossed her purse onto the bed. Then she returned to the kitchen and sat down.

She remarked, “Kevin is right. Someone planned this carefully and invested a lot of time and money on it. Why? What do they want with us?”

Dolan spoke to Mondor. “You’ve been saying there’s something loony or sinister about Z-R Publications. Did you suspect anything like this?”

“Would I have hung around if I did?”

“No,” Dolan agreed. “It was a silly question. Adelle’s was better. What do they want with us? What’s the point? In a sense, all three of us have been kidnapped. Surely they aren’t holding me for ransom. The only money I have is what’s left of the salary they’ve been paying me, and why pay it in the first place if they want it that badly?”

Mondor gestured at their surroundings. “Whoever arranged this setup had an unlimited budget. Even if the sub-basement was part of the original building, installing an automated maze with a fancy complication like that psychological testing room was a huge expense. If they had to dig the basement under another basement without disturbing the building’s foundations and supports, it cost a fortune.”

“I think the sub-basement was part of the original building,” Dolan reflected. “The excavation for it, anyway. It’d be difficult to surreptitiously put a basement under a basement, especially one this big. I mean, what do you do with the dirt? There’d be truck loads and truck loads of it. If Mondor had his pocket calculator, he’d tell us how many cubic yards they’d have to remove. Sooner or later someone would get curious about where it was coming from, and whoever is responsible for this caper certainly didn’t want to arouse anyone’s curiosity. The bartender at Barney’s says there are old rumors about secret rooms and passageways and stairways in this place, so a secret basement is no surprise, but they probably added the maze themselves. I mean—if you’re building a cage to keep kidnap victims in, you don’t hire your work force out of the Yellow Pages or use union labor.”

“The goons?” Mondor suggested.

“Why not? They’re certainly in on it. But it took more than five people to do all this work, and most if not all of it was done long before we were hired. Question. If, for some extremely subtle reason I can’t comprehend, they went to all this trouble just for the three of us, why didn’t they sucker us Adelle’s first day on the job and save the three weeks’ salary they’ve paid us since then? Or—to take a better question—why didn’t they do it my first day, with the typist they had when I came here? Or on Mondor’s first day, with the typist and writer they had then? Was it because this setup wasn’t finished? In that case, why hire anyone at all until they were ready? Nothing about this makes sense.”

“The writer they had when they hired me had been here one week,” Mondor said. “They fired him at the end of his second week and hired another. They hired a word processor when they hired me, and the two of us replaced people they fired. There may have been others before them. Why didn’t they kidnap three of them? You’re right—this makes no sense from any angle. But nothing about Z-R Publications has ever made any sense.”

“I wonder,” Adelle said.

“You wonder what?” Dolan demanded.

“I wonder if this doesn’t make sense. I think Madam’s flea-brained mannerisms were carefully calculated to cover up a frighteningly cold logic, and everything about Z-R Publications has had a purpose.”

“I suppose Madam had a perfectly sensible reason for giving us those ridiculous jobs and paying us inflated wages,” Dolan said.

“Of course she did. Just because we don’t know what it was doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.”

Dolan turned to Mondor. “We’re fortunate to have such a brilliant Researcher/Word Processor. Now listen carefully, and she’ll explain what we’re doing down here.”

“Obviously Madam wanted people who met certain requirements,” Adelle said impatiently. “She kept hiring and firing until she found them, and she didn’t sucker us my first day on the job because she wanted to make certain I was the person—all three of us were the persons—who met her requirements. Now she’s certain, and here we are. What other reason could there be? As for what the requirements were, and why they put us down here—I wouldn’t want to solve all the problems and leave you two sitting there with your brilliant minds running in neutral.”

Dolan sipped his beer and carefully preened his beard. Mondor hunched over his can of pop and let his hair flop forward again.

“Touche’,” Dolan said finally. “The girl has a point. They kept trying different combinations of people until they got the three they wanted, and we were the lucky winners. They paid us inflated wages to make certain we’d stick around, no matter how imbecilic the jobs seemed, until they were sure they had the right combination.”

He again sipped beer. “What a devastating development this is! I was stupidly thinking they valued me for my writing talent. Before I came to Ann Arbor, I always avoided jobs involving writing, and I refused to write anything at all merely for money. Just once, when I needed cash desperately, I managed to convince myself that an integrity as noble as mine could survive the sale of a few stories to the crassly commercial fiction markets. It was as though an ugly, frigid woman were to decide that turning a trick or two in a time of dire financial necessity wouldn’t make her a whore. The fiction markets’ lack of interest in my virtue was total, whether I was willing to prostitute myself or not.”

“So how did you justify prostituting yourself with Z-R Publications?” Mondor asked.

“My motives were pure. I only intended to work long enough to earn the money I needed to drive back to Chicago. The job was a revelation. I found to my surprise that with very little effort I can turn out expository prose that’s a model of clarity. I don’t even have to put my mind in gear to do it. I was afraid it would sap my creative energy, but I’ve been able to work evenings on my novel and fatten my bank balance during the day. This is the first time I’ve ever held a job for four consecutive weeks. Now it’s gone. So are those huge paychecks. Regardless of what happens, I’m sure none of us will ever work for Z-R Publications again.” He shrugged resignedly. “What were we talking about?”

“Why they chose us,” Adelle said. “I know one of their requirements. They wanted three people who didn’t like each other. Look how Madam tiptoed around trying to stir up trouble between us with her malicious gossip.”

“Right on,” Dolan agreed. “Would you like some beer?”

“No, thanks,” Adelle said. “Beer short circuits the brain’s power supply, and you’re the horrible example that proves it. I’ll stick to pop.”

“Assorted flavors in the refrigerator,” Dolan said, gesturing. “Help yourself. I’m a firm believer in Women’s Lib. Did you notice the reserve stock under the sink? Along with the wine, scotch, bourbon, vodka, gin, and several liqueurs? They didn’t leave us much food, but they certainly provided for drowning our sorrows.”

Adelle went to the refrigerator. Dolan got up and turned on the oven light to inspect the steaks. As Adelle opened her can of cola, he said to her, “How about making like a domestic female and adding something to our dinner?”

She stared at him—not from resentment, since he was broiling the steaks, but because the situation was so unreal. She should have been home by this time even if traffic was unusually heavy. She probably wouldn’t have felt like cooking—she usually didn’t. Right now she would be putting a frozen TV dinner or pizza in the microwave. Then bath, book, and bed. Instead, she had this.

She sipped her pop for a moment. Then she went to the refrigerator, and from the freezer compartment she took the package of frozen vegetables and the pie. The pie she put into the oven in its aluminum container. She searched for cooking utensils, found a saucepan, and measured water into it for the vegetables. After looking through the cupboards again, she announced the menu.

“Steak, mixed vegetables, synthetic mashed potatoes with synthetic gravy, blueberry pie for desert. With instant coffee, tea, or cocoa. If either of you prefers creamer with your coffee, that’s synthetic, too. Or you can have fresh milk.”

Dolan was back at the table sipping beer. “It falls a bit short of being a feast,” he observed, “but it could be much worse.”

“It probably will be before they’re through with us,” Mondor said gloomily.

“Thanks for those cheerful words,” Adelle told him. “As a reward—if we’re really stuck here—you can get breakfast.”

“You’ll be sorry,” Mondor said. He tilted his chair back, held his can of pop in front of him, gazed at it through his drooping hair as though it were a crystal ball, and directed a question at the universe. “Just what the devil are they trying to do?”