The Forgotten Room

31

It was a few minutes after nine the following evening when a figure flitted across the moon-washed greensward that led down from Lux to the ocean. Reaching the deeper shadow of the mansion itself, the figure kept to the darkness of the bushes as it made its way along the rear facade to a small door with a single light beside it. The figure paused a moment, then rapped quietly on the door.

It was opened immediately by Jeremy Logan, who stepped out into the darkness and closed it behind him.

The figure — Pamela Flood — came closer. She held a small leather briefcase in one hand. “Okay. I followed your instructions. Now I feel like an actor in a bad spy film. Just what was it you wouldn’t tell me over the phone?”

“Just this. After thinking about it some more, I realized Olafson would either say no to your presence here, or else announce that he’d have to take it up with the board.”

“I told you, he knows I worked with Strachey. What’s the problem?”

“I didn’t mention it at dinner last night, but there’s been another incident.”

“Incident?”

“Never mind the details, but everyone’s on edge. And Olafson’s a company man. We need to move forward, and I don’t want to waste time wresting permission out of him.”

“They’ll have a record of my passing the security gate. They’ll know I didn’t come in by the main entrance.”

“Only if they compare both sets of records. You’re here on my authorization — if anyone asks, I’ll say we were looking over some blueprints.” Logan opened the door. “Let’s go. If we pass anybody, try to look as if you belong here.”

“Easier said than done.”

Logan led the way down a narrow hallway, around a corner, along a dimly lit gallery, and into the central first-floor corridor. They made their way westward, Pamela clutching her briefcase.

A door opened in the corridor and somebody emerged — Terence McCarty, the linguist who’d told Logan he’d heard voices urging him to walk into the sea. He looked from Logan to Pamela and back again, a puzzled frown coming over his face. But Logan just nodded and continued walking down the passage. He could sense McCarty’s eyes on his back. After a moment, he heard the man’s footsteps, muffled by the carpeting, moving away in the other direction.

After what seemed an eternity, they reached the decorative doors at the end of the corridor. Logan stopped and looked back over his shoulder with what he hoped was a casual gesture. The long hallway was empty. Quickly, he unlocked the doors, ushered Pamela past the velvet ropes and through the doorway into the vestibule beyond.

When Logan closed the doors behind them, darkness immediately descended. He pulled two small flashlights from his pocket, turned one on, and offered the other to Pamela. “Be careful,” he said. “There’s stuff everywhere.”

“I’m an architect, remember? I’m used to construction sites.”

Carefully, Logan led the way down rubble-strewn passages and half-finished chambers to the staircase. Ascending it, he continued along the dim, tunnel-like lateral corridor A. Ahead, a faint glow was now visible.

Logan stopped at the tarp wall with the warning placard. Strong yellow light came through the tear in the rough material.

“Remember,” he said. “You aren’t to speak of this to anyone.”

“Cross my heart.”

Raising the tarp, Logan ushered her through the rude doorway and into the secret room. Kim was there, standing on the far side of the Machine. She looked at them.

“This is Kim Mykolos,” Logan told Pamela. “She was Dr. Strachey’s assistant.”

“We’ve met,” Kim said.

“I’ve told Kim why you’re here,” Logan went on. But Pamela had already stepped inside and was looking around.

“My God,” she murmured after a moment. “What is all this?”

“That’s our problem,” Logan said. “Yours is to find the front door.”

“Right. Right.” She looked around for another moment, as if unable to tear herself away from the bizarre sight. Then she stepped toward the worktable, put her briefcase on it, opened it, and removed some paperwork: old letters, diagrams, and what looked to Logan like a few pencil sketches. Picking up each sheet in turn, Pamela studied it a moment, then glanced around the room, as if to orient herself. The process took about five minutes. Kim looked on silently, arms crossed, an unreadable expression on her face.

Finally, putting the last sheet back on the worktable, Pamela gave the room another careful scrutiny: walls, ceiling, floor, furnishings, equipment. As she did so, a smile slowly formed on her face.

She turned back to her briefcase, pulled out a notepad and a pencil. “We need to go upstairs,” she said, picking up one of the papers.

“Why?” Logan asked, surprised.

“Light the way for me, will you? I won’t have a free hand.” And she pulled something else out of her briefcase: a small device, encased in a protective housing of bright yellow rubber, with a small backlit display and half a dozen buttons.

“What’s that?” Logan asked.

“Laser distance measurer.” And, holding it up, Pamela gestured in the direction of the improvised doorway.

The three made their way along the unfinished hallway, heading in the direction of the staircase. They made slow progress, Pamela stopping several times to measure distances with the handheld device and make notations on her pad. Reaching the staircase at last, they ascended to the third floor. Logan had not been here before and he shone his flashlight around in curiosity. The crews had not yet reached here — at least, the part of the floor not devoted to Delaveaux’s disquieting henge of standing stones — and it was more or less intact. There was no furniture or equipment of any kind — it had obviously been removed in preparation for the renovation — and the old, richly textured wallpaper was frequently defaced by scrawled notations in white marker, no doubt indicating where demolition would take place.

Their progress was even slower here, as Pamela took frequent readings with the measuring device and labored over her notepad. Glancing at the pad, Logan saw that the architect had made remarkably careful sketches of both the second and third floor, and that she now seemed at pains to accurately overlay the third floor onto the second. Kim watched the proceedings from a few paces back. She had not said a word, and Logan sensed — for what reason he did not know — that there was some tension between the two women.

They had made their way across a landing, down a short passage, through two large chambers stripped of all furnishings, and into a larger hallway, before Pamela finally came to a stop. “There,” she said, pointing to a door on the right.

Logan tried it. The door was locked.

A moment of consternation passed before he thought to try the key that unlocked the main doors to the West Wing. It turned in the lock, and he opened the door.

Beyond, the shadow of his flashlight revealed what had once evidently been a storeroom. There were no windows, since the room was situated well within the massing of the wing, and a few old boxes sat in a far corner, covered in dust. In the very center of the room — bizarrely — stood one of the large, marble Solomonic columns, with the familiar corkscrew pattern, that were an omnipresent feature in the architecture of Lux. It must, Logan realized, be a load-bearing structure, and tucking it away within a storage room was as good a way as any of concealing it.

Now Pamela slipped the notepad and distance measurer into a pocket, removed her flashlight, and approached the column. She examined it closely, then placed both hands on it, pressing here, feeling there. After several moments, there was an audible click.

Pamela turned toward Logan. “Your front door.”

He looked at her in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Ecce signum.” And, raising her hands toward the column again, she opened it the same way someone might open an armoire.

“Tu es mira,” Logan murmured in turn, shining his flashlight toward the column in astonishment.

It was not — as he’d expected — a load-bearing member that stretched from foundation to roof. Nor was it made of marble. Instead, it appeared to be of metal, its exterior painted to resemble marble. Its two curved, full-height doors, hinges cleverly disguised, opened onto a hollow vertical cylinder with a round floor and a large wheel, such as one might find on the hatch of a naval vessel, set into the rear wall.

Pamela broke the moment of paralysis by stepping inside, shining her flashlight around, then motioning for the other two to approach.

Logan did so, stepping a little gingerly into the hollow column. A moment later, Kim did the same. There was barely room for all three.

Grasping small metal knobs on the insides of the two curved doors, Pamela pulled them tightly shut. The space became a closed cylinder again. Then she undogged a retaining bolt on the winch and gave it a turn.

An odd feeling came over Logan. And then he realized what was happening: the “column” was descending through the floor in a gentle, spiral motion.

“It operates by weight,” Pamela explained.

Sixty seconds later, their descent was stopped by a gentle bump. Pamela opened the doors again to reveal the brilliant white light of the forgotten room. She stepped out, Logan and Kim following.

The column had come to rest in the empty section of the room between the Machine and the back wall, close to where roman numerals had been etched into the floor. Pamela shut the doors again and pressed an almost invisible button on the column’s flank. It began to ascend again, spiraling back up into the ceiling. Watching it, Logan realized that, in this case, the spiral design of the column was not just decorative; it operated in the manner of a corkscrew, working its way back up into the third-floor storeroom. When it stopped, it was flush with the ceiling: reduced to nothing more than the round disc with decorative chasing that Logan had always assumed covered a hole left over from a previously installed chandelier.

He stared at the ceiling for a minute. Then he turned to Pamela. “You must have known about this in advance,” he said. “You can’t have figured it all out just now.”

Pamela laughed. “You’re right.”

“Well, then why the hell didn’t you say something?”

“Because I wasn’t sure. I came across plans for just such a device among my great-grandfather’s papers. But they weren’t filed with the Dark Gables documents, so I had no way of knowing whether or not it was Delaveaux who implemented them. That’s why I needed to see this wing — and this room — to be sure.”

“So how do we bring it back down again?” Kim asked.

“I don’t know,” Pamela told her. “No doubt there’s a retractor, hidden away somewhere around here, probably spring-loaded as it winds down into the room.”

Logan looked back again at the ceiling. He shook his head. To think that the answer had been there, all this time, literally right above their heads. Just another puzzle of the forgotten room.

“Amazing,” he said. “Thank you. Pam, you’ve just earned yourself the best dinner in Newport.”

“We already had the best dinner,” she replied. “Joe’s, remember?”

“The most expensive dinner, then.” And he squeezed her hand. Kim, he noted, was watching them silently.

“Come on,” he told Pamela, motioning toward her briefcase. “Get your things together and I’ll see you to your car.”