The observer stepped toward the testing tower, but kept glancing toward the LeSabre, imagining Eva’s smile where the shaded car roof allowed no such reassurance. He was struck by how little they had conversed that evening, and how there was less talk as they went on. It was never in his heart to lead, but always to acquiesce and submit. Now he was out in front of her, looking first to stars, which were better seen than earlier, and then to the heavy exterior door.
The unlit observation post was scanned from the bottom of the helical stairs, leaving the plotter to trouble over the switch plate: Light that would aid his ascent would alert others to his presence in the building. For similar reasons, the operational elevator was avoided. The terrain was treacherous, but a lack of depth perception mitigated any acrophobia about the steep steps; the same darkness offered cover for invading the main office.
Following his successful foray for a flashlight, a figure startled him in a facing doorway.
“You must be Liam.”
The thief was caught, but it was too late to conceal the stolen item. He fumbled to concoct an excuse.
“I’m Jonah Tourner,” announced the man.
Liam, juggling the flashlight, clasped the extended hand. He assessed his counterpart’s brawny built in complement to the hewed extremity. A pair of sunglasses spoke to the man’s blind state in an unlit building.
The trespasser need not concern himself with hiding his plunder since it was not seen. Nor need he dwell on the fact that he had snuck into the tower without the assistance of illumination, although the light plate on the wall should read like Braille to sightless but attentive fingers: Were the toggle switch flipped in one direction here, it would counteract the orientation of the one at the bottom of the stairs. A blind man could not know whether the lights were off or on unless the previous observer told him; and there was no previous observer to tell him.
Liam proclaimed guilefully, “I came by to see if next week’s work schedule has been posted.”
“It has not been posted,” answered Jonah. “But it is fortuitous you came by. I have a phone message for you.”
The visitor puzzled at this information, but realized any facial expression was unavailing in the situation.
The light was not good enough to read, but surely Jonah felt the tremor in the fellow observer’s hand when he laid the message in it.
Liam, regardless, felt advantage where the balance of his expressions could not be evaluated, and it was less a matter of invisibility than feeling no obligation to continue in polite niceties when he grunted, insincerely, “It was good to meet you,” and bolted down the steps before another question could be put to him.
On clearing the last stair tread, a glance was spared for the upper landing. If Jonah’s other sensory faculties were not deficient, then he perhaps knew how many tapping steps it took to cover the distance from door to door. He was not spied lingering at the rail, at any rate.
The flashlight was turned lastly on the crumpled note; and it was unwise to have crumpled it: Indentations amid the creases produced evidence of crabbed handwriting, but the ink pen used to make the cursive characters was dried out. A blind person would not know this, and so the message was not recoverable.
The schemer returned to the parking lot but did not see Eva. A wind mewled at his back, leading him to spot his fair-haired accomplice under a stand of trees, from where she signaled him.
In failing moonlight, the two pushed along the path, and had not penetrated far into it before Howard’s serpentine braid of yellow tape greeted them.
The Koreans’ village was outlined in all its inglorious peculiarity.
The flashlight was employed sparingly, but Eva’s youthful eyes were faster adapting to the dim environs than his. He was in danger of losing sight of her if he did not adopt her boldness.
Creaking boards bade them welcome, and unfinished stairs marked the way to the second floor. His foot caught the edge of a hole past the doorway of 1136, which sent him tripping into the French bed and ejecting its occupants. Mannequin limbs, snared in lingerie straps, gonged like dull bells before falling through an incomplete section of the floor.
Many shadows lay between the window and the tower window; one was presumably Jonah’s. Barring sentient powers, the blind observer would not detect the commandeered flashlight. The bright beam flourished over bare furnishings to find Eva standing at a closet, which she had too nimbly negotiated obstacles to reach.
“What are you doing?“ He asked with a twinge of umbrage in his voice.
“I have found a better coat to wear,“ she replied.
His light swiped the sleeve of the Korean greatcoat wrapped around her, glinting off a brass button. He sprang forward with horror—his spasmodic light flickered over every inch of the room, but his co-conspirator had vanished without a cry.
“Eva!” he yelled, and tipped his lamp toward the floor.
Only the precipice claiming the mannequins lay between her last known position and the bedstead.
In his panic, he searched the pit, but the torch slipped from his sweaty grip. A force—perhaps an arm buried in a black cowl—reached up from below to snatch it away.
“Eva?“ he whimpered timorously.
A thump occurred, but too late to establish a causal relation to the dropped flashlight. Liam lowered his hand into the hollow and swirled it through a trail of dust and what light remained. A picture emerged in the silting, and the source of illumination was reconcilable to the one he seconds before supplied. The flashlight had not simply, advantageously, landed on a dresser below, but it rested perpendicularly to a bed: A set of bare legs placed someone prone on its mattress. The body’s orientation was more in the way of a staged mannequin that someone who tumbled, with failing, into a hole, but Liam was convinced that this was an unconscious Eva.
He retreated to the plaintive door. Wind made a wheezing calamity of clapboards and nickel-plated nails, yet he was mindful of hazards, though less disposed to announce his presence. A lower room matched its predecessor in every respect, even down to missing posed lovers on the bed. In clearing mannequins off one bedstead, Liam inadvertently created a chain reaction among the others.
A peek past the bedpost revealed a hole in the floor identical to the one over it. However, the glowing bed in its scope did not appear appreciably closer for the distance covered. The legs illuminated on it were doubtless the same, but there was no sight of the evicted mannequins from either of the two intervening floors.
Irrespective of the figure’s precise location, the rescuer judged the drop to extend no more than eight feet, and as no stairs led to this basement, he braved the ragged ledge.
The plunge was straight down—further than he estimated. His legs buckled on the thin mattress below, and before he was able to right himself, a sliding panel in the ceiling cut off his point of entry.
No one was on the bed where he indignantly landed. A mirror, or similar trickery, had been used to show him a room identical to this one, except in regard of a decoy body on a bed. The chute through which he descended had redirected his path.
The dresser had gone dark in the confusion—perhaps he jostled it in the fall and dislodged the flashlight. Groping among pieces of broken mannequins in the floor did not produce the crucial asset, however.
A vein in Liam’s neck throbbed and twitched. He looked to where his panting ran, which was not far. Straightaway he was on his knees circling inside, what could only be, a metal enclosure. There was no obvious door, although a second narrow panel revealed a pair of Asian eyes peering in on him.
“Settle in for long trip, round eye,” the guard grunted in mangled English, tossing in a juice box and wrapper of cheddar cheese crackers before slamming the sliding panel shut.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.