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.”
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.