“What is it?” Shepler asked.
Tom didn’t answer immediately. He brushed an open patch in the thin layer of snow on the floor. Delicately he probed the crunchy mixture of frozen air and water.
“There’s no broken glass here,” he said, speaking half to himself.
“What?”
“There’s no glass on the inside. We’ve had a break-out, not a break-in.”
“You sure, Riley?” Shepler asked, sniffing and wiping his hand on his sleeve. The basement was quite cold compared to the plant floor above. Tom stood, brushing off his knees, and examined the window further. His frown intensified. “This is too small.”
“What’s too small?”
“The hole. It’s too small for a man to squeeze through. Only a kid could do it. Only a small kid.”
“Well, so what? So we had a kid in the plant and he hid for a while and then broke his way out.”
Still frowning, Tom climbed back over the bottling machine and rejoined Shepler in the aisle-way. He took a good hard look around, playing the beam of the flashlight in a circle around them. The probing light revealed festoons of cobwebs and leaning stacks of forgotten office furniture, heavy machinery, newspapers and wire. A lone black rat dropped off the back of a typing chair and scrabbled back into the rolling hills of crates against the far wall. It was an industrial graveyard.
Shepler snatched up a half-crushed coke can from the pre-Coke Classic days and even the pre-diet days and tossed it at the scurrying rat. He missed badly.
“That’s odd,” muttered Tom, looking after the rat as it disappeared in a loose mound of junk.
“Sure is,” said Shepler, “I don’t usually miss that bad.”
“No. I mean the rat. That’s the first one I’ve seen down here. Would’ve expected a few more.”
Shepler snorted. “And you’re complainin’?”
Tom shook his head. Another small mystery. They were beginning to pile up and he didn’t like that. “Anyway, we’ve found where kid broke out, but what about where the kid got in?”
Shepler looked at him and sighed. The sigh turned into a hacking cough that shook his hunching body. He cleared his throat, then hawked and spat into a nearby carton. “I suppose we should search the place for it,” he admitted grudgingly. With Tom and his flashlight in the lead, they carefully made their way further back into the basement. When they got near the back wall the going became more difficult. They soon found spaces between towering piles of cartons and heavy old-fashioned machinery that they could not easily squeeze past.
“This is bullshit,” Shepler complained while trying to pull his shirt loose from a protruding segment of pipe. His elbows jostled a pryamid of boxes and sent a 7up bottle that had been left on top of them down to the cement floor with a crash. Shards of clear green glass sprayed a set of metal bookshelves, clattering and tinkling.
“Look, you stay here and guide me,” suggested Tom. “I want to have a look at what is behind that boiler over there.” He gestured toward the west wall with his flashlight.
“Sure,” Shepler muttered, continuing to tug at his shirt and sweat. When he had freed himself, he sat down with a grunt onto a crate and lit up another cigarette. He sucked on it heavily, wheezed and blew out a gust of smoke with a satisfied sigh.
Tom frowned and considered reminding him of the dangers involved in smoking around old equipment, but then reconsidered. It wasn’t worth it, Shepler would only glare at him with those half-shut piggy eyes of his and continue smoking anyway. He turned to pick his way toward the boiler.
As he came closer he became more sure, and when he finally crested a pile of worn out machinery he was certain. Yes, there was something behind the boiler, some kind of opening. An alcove in the basement wall, perhaps. His flashlight showed the opening as just a black patch in the wall behind the boiler. You could only see it from a certain angle. Tom stood up straighter and shined his light back the way he had come. He gauged it to be 200 yards back to the stairs in the other room. You couldn’t even begin to see that far. The basement was piled clear to the ceiling with junk. He wondered how they had gotten through fire inspections all these years. He suspected pay-offs or brother-in-laws. It was always one or the other.
He turned and made his way around the boiler to shine his light into the blackness behind it. What he saw there made him gasp and draw back.
“What did’ja find?” asked Shepler. Tom smiled at the quaver in his voice.
But the hole behind the boiler made his smile slide away to nothing. It was more than an alcove. It was a room. A forgotten room at the back of this ancient graveyard of brewery junk.
“Found some kind of room back here,” he said back over his shoulder. His voice was hushed. Unlike the stacks and piles of trash in the main room of the basement, this room was nearly empty of debris. A freezing hand tickled his stomach and gave a playful squeeze. How long had it been since anyone had been back here? Twenty years? Since the war? Before that? He knew that the building had been around for a long time and had been a warehouse before it had been a brewery and had been a chemical plant originally, about a million years ago.
He leaned in through the narrow crack between the boiler and the basement wall to get a better look. He saw something. He saw something glitter like eyes then disappear-and then he was falling.
The stack of rotting paper he had been standing on gave way and he half-fell, half-slid into the chamber behind the dead boiler. His flashlight struck the cement floor and everything when black. Only splotchy after-images crawled across his vision like purple slugs. He groped for his flashlight, found it and shook it in desperation. Nothing.
Suddenly, he was afraid. He was caught up by a black fear near to panic. His mouth dried and his heart pounded like a revving engine before a race. He had not felt such fear since his childhood and it was like an old enemy, an old bully, long since left and forgotten, but now returned to taunt him again. It giggled and capered in his mind for a few moments, free to have its way with him, to do its worst. He thought about his heart, whether it could take this kind of shock and that brought on yet another pounding flight of panic.
And then the lights came back on. His flashlight blazed into life again and he swung it around him, eyes wide, mouth open and panting. He gripped the flashlight like a pistol, holding it up in both hands. He found himself sitting on a damp floor in a large room. Alone. There were no eyes. Nothing.
“Tom!” he heard Shepler calling to him. “Tom! What the hell are you doing back there? Where’d you go, man?” Shepler’s voice was girlishly high. He fell into another hacking, coughing fit.
Tom played his powerful beam around the room. There was little to see. A pile of old magazines and a few dozen old pop bottles. Near the opening sat a legless chair, looking old and helpless, like a cripple begging at the city gate.
Then he found a coffee can and a carton of Lucky Strikes. He knew the brand. It was Shepler’s. He never smoked anything else.
He heaved a big sigh. He had discovered Shepler’s hideout. His secret smoking den. It did stink, now that he thought about it, like cigarettes down here. The smell of stale butts was overpowering.
“Okay, Shepler. I found your stash back here.”
“What are you talking about?” came the answer, muffled.
“Cut the shit. Why didn’t you just tell me this was your hideout? Don’t tell me it was anyone else, either. These are your brand.”
There was silence for a few long seconds. Tom approached the magazine pile and took one off the top. He read the faded date on the cover: May, 1916. It all but crumbled to dust at his touch. Rotted by the dampness, he thought. He noticed that it was damp down here, and remembered that this side of the brewery was closest to the lake. Water seeped through the ground to make the walls sweat.