The Forgotten Room

32

When he stepped back into the forgotten room, Kim Mykolos was standing on a stepladder she’d appropriated from some nearby work space, examining the decorative circle in the ceiling.

“I’d never in a million years have guessed the door to this room would be some kind of gravity-fed elevator,” she told him. “Disguised as a structural column. I have to hand it to old Pamela.”

“Is there some problem between you two?” Logan asked her.

Kim waited a moment before answering. “I didn’t really like the way she interacted with Willard. Early on, anyway, when they were first discussing ideas for revising the wing. I got this feeling that she was the architect, and he was only a computer scientist, and any design suggestions coming from him had to be taken with a huge grain of salt.”

So that’s it? Logan asked himself. Still protective of her old mentor... despite what Carbon’s been insinuating?

“Amazing,” Kim breathed, still examining the circle that formed the base of the elevator.

Logan had to admit that it was. Perhaps, in some way, this was a failure of his own. All this time, he’d been thinking in two dimensions... forgetting that there was also a Z axis to be considered. It had been there all this time, in that dusty room just overhead...

Dust.

Suddenly, a thought hit him — a chilling thought that arrived with a visceral punch.

“Kim,” he said abruptly.

Hearing something in his tone, she turned toward him immediately. “What is it?”

As she descended the stepladder, he scooped up one of the flashlights, tossed the other to her. “Come with me.”

By the yellow beam of the lights, Logan retraced the journey they had just made, up the stairs and through the abandoned rooms of the third floor. It was still fresh in his memory, and the path was relatively easy to retrace. Within five minutes they were back before the door to the storage room. Logan unlocked it again, and — instead of stepping in — probed the room with his light. There, in the center, was the large, decorative column. There, against the far walls, were the old boxes, covered in their mantle of dust.

Now he turned his light to the floor — to the space between the doorway and the column. It was thickly covered in overlapping layers of footprints.

Following his beam, Kim caught her breath. “My God,” she said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

“I’d been so caught up in what Pam was doing, I hadn’t noticed it earlier.”

“What does it mean?”

Logan stepped into the room — to the far left, to avoid the herd path of footsteps — then knelt to examine them. There were a great many; too many to make out any individual prints. One thing he could tell, though — they were fresh.

He stood up again. “Somebody has been this way dozens of times,” he said.

“How recently?”

“Very.”

Now he walked up to the column itself. Reconstructing Pamela’s actions from memory, he opened the two matching doors leading into the elevator itself. His beam swept the circular floor. This, too, was covered with the dust of multiple overlapping footsteps.

“But there’s no dust in the room below,” he said, almost to himself. “Barely a speck.”

“I don’t understand,” Kim said.

In response, Logan stepped inside, then beckoned her to follow. Closing the doors, he undogged the bolt just as Pamela had done, gave the winch a turn, and the mechanism spiraled slowly down into the room beneath.

Logan opened the doors, stepped out, waited for Kim to do the same, then sent the device back up to the floor above. And then he examined the floor. There were faint tracings of dust from their own shoes — but nothing more.

He took in a deep breath. “It seems,” he said, “that this room hasn’t been abandoned for decades, after all. Somebody has been accessing it — very recently, too — apparently on a regular basis.”

“You mean, all these years? Is it possible the room was never forgotten to begin with?”

“No. I believe the room was rediscovered — and not that long ago.”

Kim stopped, taking this in. “Accessed on a regular basis. Do you mean, studying the room, as we’ve been doing? Studying the Machine?”

“Studying it... or using it.” Logan looked around. “Isn’t it surprising, when you think of it, that there are no books anywhere? No papers, files, notes? I’d always assumed the files had been removed; sealed away; or, God forbid, burned when the project was halted. But I’ll bet if we brought a forensic analysis team in here, they’d discover that the paperwork had been taken out quite recently. Removed, with care taken to make the room look spotless, unused. But that same care wasn’t taken with the third-floor entrance — they never guessed we’d find that.” He glanced around — at the worktable, the empty file cabinet, the shelves without books. “There’s only one logical conclusion: somebody, or some group, has begun to resurrect the old, abandoned research. And that same somebody stripped this room of evidence when Strachey and his workmen’s approach threatened to expose its existence.”

“You’re scaring me,” Kim said. “Because...”

“Because you’re wondering if they stopped at just emptying the room,” Logan said grimly. “You’re wondering if they also stopped Strachey.”

Kim did not answer this. She took a seat on the lowest tread of the stepladder and looked down at her hands.

“There’s another possibility,” Logan said after a long silence. “Dr. Strachey himself first discovered this room. He could have begun resurrecting the research himself. Maybe that’s why he dismissed all the workers so summarily — he wanted time alone with it.”

“Unlikely,” Kim said. She was looking up now; looking at Logan directly. “Dr. Strachey was terrible with anything mechanical. He’d have been lost in here. Besides, from what you’ve told me, it seems he’d just discovered the room — or, at least, broken through its wall — before he...” She didn’t finish.

“Yes. I know he wasn’t good at mechanical things. But, Kim, that doesn’t mean he didn’t tinker with the Machine.” And, he thought to himself, become haunted by whatever he accidentally released... until he was driven insane.

The room settled into a tense silence: Kim sitting on the stepladder, Logan leaning against the worktable, gazing off at nothing. Then, suddenly, he pushed himself to his feet. Quickly, he began moving along the walls, probing, prodding.

“What are you doing?” Kim asked.

“I think we’ve been looking for answers the wrong way,” Logan replied as he continued probing at the walls. “We’ve approached this place as if it’s a normal room. But it’s not — and, given its contents, I should have guessed as much. But it took Pam’s discovery to make me realize.”

For a moment, Kim just watched Logan as his fingers moved around the walls, searching for a hidden seam, concealed button, anything that might yield up additional secrets. And then, wordlessly, she joined in, examining first the far wall, then the floor, and then the large central instrument itself.

Moments later, Logan joined in her examination of the Machine. And within a minute, he achieved success: pressing at the polished wood, just below the two manufacturer’s placards, activated a hidden detent. With a click, a narrow, spring-loaded tray slid out into view. It seemed to be lined in lead.

“Kim,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

She came around from the far side of the Machine and knelt beside him. He slid his find back into the closed position — the rectangular lines of its front panel becoming totally obscured by the surrounding wood grain in the process — and then, with a press of his fingers, opened it again.

“Puzzles within puzzles,” Logan murmured.

Inside the compartment were four smaller trays. Two were empty, while the others held identical devices. They were small, with a profusion of wires — some yellow, others brown — and contained three vacuum tubes each. Something about them looked familiar to Logan, but exactly what he couldn’t determine. His headache had returned with a vengeance, and he was having difficulty in both concentrating and in ignoring the music that always seemed to sound in his head when he was near the forgotten room.

“Any idea what their function might be?” he asked.

“No. They appear to be receivers of some kind. But then again, maybe they’re transmitters. The technology is very old.”

Logan stared at the devices. There was something maddeningly familiar about them... and then, quite suddenly, it came to him.

He reared back, almost as if from a galvanic shock. Oh, my God...

Heedless, Kim carefully removed one of the devices — unlike the rest of the room, it was coated in a thin mantle of dust — and peered at it. “One way to find out what it does. Fire up the Machine and see what happens.”

Logan looked at her blankly for a moment before replying. “I’m sorry?”

“Clearly, its function is related to the central machine — otherwise, why would it be stored in here? If we activate the Machine, perhaps I could find a way to connect this device to the field generator or the EVP recorder.”

“No,” Logan said.

Kim stood. “We could speculate and theorize until we’re blue in the face. At some point, we’re going to have to do some actual experimentation. I say, turn it on and let’s observe the result. Otherwise, I’ve got—”

“No!” Logan said. He too was on his feet now, and — as if from far away — he realized he was shouting. “We’re not going to do that!”

An abrupt silence fell over the room. Logan raised a hand, trembling slightly, to his temple. His headache had spiked abruptly.

“I was about to say,” Kim went on, quietly and evenly, “that otherwise, I’ve got work — real work — back in my office.”

Logan took a deep breath. He needed time, time alone, to think this through. “That’s probably a good idea,” he said quietly. “Let’s call it a night.”

Kim replaced the device into its tray and Logan hastily closed the drawer. Then, turning out the lights and closing the tarp behind them, they made their way out of the West Wing in silence.