Everyone paused.
"I don't feel the stairs moving," Rick tried to assure him. "It's just normal settling."
"Sure." Balenger wasn't convinced. He tested the next step.
"I need more light." Cora pulled her flashlight from her belt.
The others drew theirs, also. The shifting rays gave the shadows vitality, making it seem as if guests had just entered their rooms and were closing the doors.
The water stains became more pronounced as Balenger eased higher.
"What's that line William Shatner says at the beginning of every Star Trek episode? 'Space-the final frontier'?" Vinnie asked. "Good old Captain Kirk. But as far as I'm concerned, this is the final frontier. Sometimes, when I explore like this, I feel like I'm on Mars or someplace, discovering things I never thought I'd see."
"Like this?" Cora aimed her flashlight toward the steps above. "What is it? More mold?"
Green tendrils projected from debris on the stairs.
"No way. It's some kind of weed," Rick said. "Can you imagine? During the day, there must be just enough sun coming through the skylight to allow it to grow. The damned things take root anywhere." He looked at Balenger. "We once found dandelions growing from an old carpet near a broken window in a hospital scheduled to be torn down."
The wood creaked again.
Balenger kept his grip on the banister.
"I still don't feel anything shifting," Rick said. "We're fine."
"Sure. Right."
The group reached the fourth level and kept going.
But the professor hesitated. A dark corridor stretched ahead of him. He pressed his hand against a wall, then leaned against it, catching his breath.
"Always test a wall before putting weight against it," Cora warned Balenger. "On one of our expeditions in Buffalo, Rick leaned against one. He went right through. Then part of the ceiling collapsed. If he hadn't been wearing a hard hat-"
15
"Professor?" Vinnie frowned. "Are you okay?"
The overweight man breathed hard. Through glasses fogged with exertion, he waved away their concerns. "All these flights of stairs. I can tell some of you feel it, too."
Balenger raised a hand. "Guilty."
Conklin drew a water bottle from a slot on the side of his knapsack, untwisted the cap, and drank.
"I'll join you," Balenger said, taking a bottle from his knapsack. "To tell the truth, I wish I had some scotch in this."
"By popular demand, I don't touch the stuff anymore," Conklin said.
Cora offered a bag of granola. "Anybody want an hors d'oeuvre?"
Silhouetted by darkness, Rick and Vinnie each took a handful. Balenger heard the crunch of it in their mouths.
The professor swallowed more water, waited, and finally put away his bottle. "Okay, I'm ready."
"You're certain?"
"Absolutely."
"Take a little more time," Vinnie said. "I wonder what the rooms look like." He tested a door, pleased when it opened. As his lights pierced the gloom, he nodded. "This room's got a metal shutter, too."
Balenger walked cautiously over. Stale air drifted past him, carrying a bitter undercurrent. Their scanning lights revealed that the room had a standard layout: a closet on the right, a bathroom on the left, and a bedroom area beyond a short corridor.
Cora glanced into the bathroom. "A marble countertop. The dust makes it difficult to tell, but those fixtures look as if they're-"
"Gold-plated," Conklin said.
"Wow."
There were two small beds, each with four posts and a dusty, floral-patterned bedspread. A Victorian sofa, table, and bureau contrasted with a television set. Apart from cobwebs, grime, and peeling wallpaper, the room presumably remained as it had looked in 1971 or earlier.
Vinnie walked toward the television. "No color-adjustment knobs. It's an old black-and-white. The screen has rounded corners. And look at this phone. The old-fashioned rotary kind. I've seen them in movies, but despite all the buildings we've explored, I've never come across a dial phone until now. Imagine the eternity it took to make a call."
"That metal shutter." Rick pointed. "What's it covering? We're in the core of the building. There must be several rooms between here and the outside. There's no point in having a window. There's nothing to see."
"Actually," the professor said, "Carlisle put a window in every room. Each quadrant of the hotel has an air shaft. At one time, there were flower gardens, shrubs, and trees for guests to look down at. Some rooms next to the shafts even have doors leading onto balconies. The shafts end at the fifth level. The sixth level and the penthouse don't need them because, at the top of the pyramid, they have direct views of the outside."
"Until Carlisle installed the metal shutters," Cora said. "Was the old man so paranoid that he thought rioters would scale the air shafts?"
"The rampage. The fires. The gutted buildings. For him, it must have seemed like the end of the world." Vinnie looked at the professor. "Did he say anything about it in his diary?"
"No. The diary ends in 1968, the year he closed the hotel to guests."
"Three years before he died." Balenger looked around. "No explanation why he stopped writing it or why he closed the hotel?"
"None."
"Maybe life stopped being interesting," Cora said.
"Or maybe it was too interesting," Conklin said. "From the first World War to the Cuban missile crisis, from the Depression to the threat of nuclear annihilation, he'd seen the twentieth century get worse and worse."
"1968. What happened that year?" Balenger asked.
"The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy two months apart."
The group became silent.
"What's on the bed?" Balenger pointed.
"Where? I don't see anything."
"There."
Balenger's lights centered on the first bed and a flat object on the pillows.
A suitcase.
"Why would anybody leave a hotel and not take a suitcase?" Cora wondered.
"Maybe somebody couldn't pay the bill and snuck out. Let's see what's in it." Vinnie set down his flashlight and pressed two levers, one on each side of the suitcase's handle. "Locked."
Balenger unclipped his knife from his pocket. He opened it and pried at one of the locks.
"No," Rick insisted. "We look but don't touch."
"But we've been touching a lot of things."
"'Don't touch' means 'don't damage, don't disturb, don't alter.' This is the equivalent of an archaeological site. We don't change the past."
"But then you'll never know what's in the suitcase," Balenger said.
"I suppose there are worse things I won't ever be able to do."
"If I can open it without breaking it, do you have a problem?"
"Not at all. But I don't see how you can manage it."
Balenger pulled out his ballpoint pen. He unscrewed the top and removed the ink cartridge, along with the spring that controlled the tip's in-and-out movement. Humming to disguise his tension, he put the end of the spring into a keyhole in the suitcase. He pressed, twisted, and heard the latch pop free. He did the same to the other lock, although it took him a little longer.
"Handy skill," Rick said.
"Well, I once did a story about a master locksmith, a guy the police send for when they really need to open something and nobody else can do it. He showed me a few easy tricks."
"The next time I lock myself out of my car, I'll give you a call," Vinnie said.
"So who wants to do the honors?" Balenger asked. "Cora?"