X:
The File Room
“No,”
Paula said, grabbing Ray by the arm before he had even made a move towards the
doorway.
Suddenly
Hitchcock lighted off Ray’s palm and plunged into the darkness of the hallway,
soaring to the very end, where he descended and settled in front of the far doorframe.
How?
How had the door been opened? If it really had been opened by someone else,
that meant there was someone out there who knew about the Hole and knew the
combination of the door’s lock—maybe the same person who wrote all those awful journal
entries. And if that person had indeed been down here recently, that
means he would’ve seen all the evidence of them living down there—all their
belongings, all the opened packages of food, all their notes on the chalkboard,
all their time-keeping marks on the wall.
Then
why hadn’t he done anything about it?
Ray
looked behind him and scanned the main room. Everything was right where it had
been: his pillow (disorderly pile of old towels) thrown on one end of the sofa,
Hitchcock’s pile of sand in the corner, the bare stick of a mop he’d found at
the dumpster leaned against the wall—everything looked untouched.
Maybe
Ray was overthinking it. Maybe it hadn’t been locked in the first place—just
jammed. That could be it. And in either case, it wouldn’t be the end of the
world for the Hole’s owner to return. It’d be inconvenient having to find a new
place to stay, but that’d probably be the end of the ordeal. He shrugged it
off—in either case, he concluded to himself, it really was no big deal.
“Someone
could be in there,” Paula said in a hushed voice. She stood firmly in place before
the open doorway, arms at her sides, gazing into the darkness.
“Nobody’s
there,” Ray said. He paused for a moment to listen. The hall was silent.
He
took the first step forward into the darkness.
“I
hate you,” Paula growled. She hadn’t moved from the doorway.
“C’mon,
you’ve got flashlight eyes—it won’t be dark once you actually get here. It’s
not scary,” he said while he continued down the hall, but the words as they
escaped him were robotic and detached from a growing sense of uneasiness he
hesitated to admit to himself. As he walked, he kicked up black dust that
flitted about before tiring and settling back on the floor. Here the smell of
burning and some other vague sour scent were stronger than in the main room,
and the air was heavy and stale. The walls were of the same cement as the
previous parts of the chamber, but here they were more crudely shaped, with
lumps and indentations all along the hall. The ceiling hung low, and as he
walked it felt like the corridor shrank and nearly gripped him by the
shoulders.
Finally,
Paula strode through the doorway and caught up to him, more likely from a
desire to not be alone rather than from a desire to explore what was down the
hall. Her steps produced an odd sort of echo in the space that buzzed around
his ears before falling away. About halfway down the hall, there was a door
left just slightly ajar; but first Ray went to the very end, where Hitchcock
was once again frozen before yet another door.
“He
ignored the first door down the hall,” Ray said, puzzled, “and made a beeline
for this one, even though it’s further down.” There was a whole mysterious room
awaiting his exploration, but still Ray bent down and crouched next to his
raven. This time, there was no window through which Ray could see to the other
side of the door—but at the very least, he took note that no light streamed
through under the door, and here, too, all was quiet. It was unmarked by any intentional
engravings or signage, but looked blackened along its bottom edge where it grazed
the dark dust on the floor.
Maybe
it was some deep migratory instinct in the raven—some overpowering drive to
move along some specific route, but the door was in the way of it. Ray forgot
the open door and headed back down the hall to where he came from, then entered
the kitchen. Paula followed closely behind, chastising him as he walked for
being so senseless as to enter the dark hallway.
By
now he had convinced himself that the story truly was only that they had pulled
at the door repeatedly enough for it to become unstuck, and he forced the idea
of an intruder (or rightful owner) having opened the door into a very dark,
very jagged and very small corner in the back of his mind.
“Paula,
I promise you,” he said as he fetched a dented bowl from the cabinet and
filled it with water in the pathetic little sink, “no one has been here,
and no one is here.” Briskly he headed back through the open doorway and
plunged back into the darkness of the hall until he met Hitchcock at the end.
He set the bowl of water gently down beside the bird.
“Nobody’s
touched our stuff,” he continued. “Nobody’s left any notes, or any ‘GET OUT’
signs, and we haven’t seen anyone in the mangroves.” He gazed worrisomely at
Hitchcock for a long moment, and then, figuring there was nothing else he could
do on the matter, turned tentatively towards the door left ajar in the hallway.
Paula tapped her foot
nervously, following closely behind him still. Through the crack between the
door and its frame, Ray could see that the new room was in total darkness. He
pushed the door with the flat of his hand, and with an agonizing creak like a
dying animal, it yielded to him.
The door opened to a room
the size of a closet, and Ray was hit with a blast of musty air that smelled of
decaying paper. Lining every wall were large metal file cabinets. They glowed
softly as Paula peered into the door, reflecting the faint orange light that
escaped her glasses.
“Would you turn on a
light or something?” Paula hissed. “I can’t see like you can.”
To his right, there was,
as it turned out, a light switch, which he flicked on to illuminate harsh
fluorescent lights overhead.
“…Oh,” she said,
shoulders lowering from their tense stiffness. “It’s kind of boring.”
“Storage room, I guess,”
Ray said. “Worth a look, anyway.”
He picked the bottom
drawer of one of the filing cabinets and sat down next to it, pulling it open
with a creak. Inside, it was crammed with papers and manila folders and files, and
everything was separated by dividers into chunks. He pulled out the first paper
of the first section and held it up so that he and Paula could read.
“Are you sure we should
be looking through this?” she said.
He snorted. “If we were
worried about messing with someone’s stuff, we’ve done way too much damage for
anything more to matter.”
Paula crouched next to him (carefully avoiding any part of her clothing touching the black dust on the floor), hands folded neatly on her thighs, and peered at the paper. At the top-left of the page was a low-resolution picture of a middle-aged man. He had black hair that covered his ears and a dark circle beard, and a blank, unreadable expression that somehow still struck Ray as intense. To the side of the picture were a few lines of identifying information. His name was listed as Gary Holbrook.
“I wonder if that’s the
writer,” Paula said.
Ray set the paper down on
the dust-ridden floor and rifled through more files. He pulled out the first
paper of the next section.
“I don’t think so. Look,
this is a totally different person. Could be this guy too.”
This page was of the same format, depicting a woman with blonde hair that cascaded in thick, beautiful waves, and large blue eyes that gazed at the camera severely. She was showing the first signs of entering middle age, but had all the signs of careful attention to her maintenance of a youthful appearance. Her name was Susana Alfonso. The first paper in the next section detailed yet another person, a man with unruly brown and grey hair and wireframe glasses, listed as Francesco Calabretta. He had a long, uneven nose, and a funny sort of guilty twist in his lips. His face was slim, and his eyes looked tired.
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Ray scratched the back of
his neck. “Okay, so backtracking more on the this-is-someone’s-house theory. These
look like employees.” He tossed the papers behind him and dove back into rifling
through the cabinet.
“Eh-eh-eh!” Paula interrupted,
lifting her hand in disbelief. “What are you doing?” She snatched the discarded
pages off the ground and shoved them back into Ray’s hands. “Either we finish
reading them, or you put them back in the cabinet where you found them.
If we’re to go through someone’s things, we do it methodically.”
Ray gave a shoddy attempt
at putting the first page back at the end of the file cabinet, but the cabinet
was so crammed with papers that it refused to enter without warping and folding
over itself. He ignored the deformation and forced the paper down like someone trying
to shove clothes into an overpacked suitcase.
Paula looked like she
might explode. She snatched the paper back out from the cabinet and waved the
crumpled page in front of Ray’s face. “This? This is putting it back properly
in its place?”
She shook her head,
irritated, as she surveyed the paper. It was the page about the man with the
wireframe glasses and messy hair. She held it up closer to the light to get a
better view of the text. Suddenly there was a bright flash where Paula’s
fingertips pinched the corner of the paper, and there was a smell of smoke.
“Paula!”
Ray
slammed the paper onto the floor and smothered the tiny flame with the bottom
of his awful pink flip-flop. He raised his eyes to meet her luminous gaze and
furrowed his brow. “Was that…involuntary?”
Paula’s
hand was still frozen mid-air, where it had been holding the corner of the
paper.
“Yeah,”
she choked out.
“That
was fire,” Ray said slowly. “Like an actual flame.”
Paula
shrunk into herself. “I didn’t know I could do that,” she said quietly. She
eyed Ray. “Sorry.”
“No,
you don’t have to apologize, just—be careful. I guess.”
A thorny silence wedged
itself between them.
Ray ran a hand through
his hair. “How is that even possible…? I mean, I guess that applies to just the
heating thing too, but straight-up fire is, like… I don’t know. That’s a
step up.”
Paula excused herself,
saying she was tired, and rose to leave the room. Ray felt oddly guilty. He
took the singed paper in his hands, brushing off the blackened and brittle
corner and letting the ashy pieces fall to the floor. He gazed at the man in
the photograph.
