Chapter Thirteen
The Vault
Jack slowly walked toward the vault, imparting footprints in the fine layer of dust and cobwebs that covered the concrete floor. Although the reinforced door could not have been more than thirty feet away, the distance seemed far greater. As he approached, it seemed that time and distance became distorted.
Jack felt his heart steadily increasing in tempo within his chest, and growing louder in his ears. It was a steady, powerful beat… like that of jungle drums.
His hands, he realized, had drawn up toward the center of his body, toward that pounding heart. He let them fall back to his sides, and he felt the fingertips of his right hand brush across the fur of Nibbler’s head. The dog leaned into him, offering his support and uttering a noise of encouragement. Jack scratched behind Nibbler’s ears, and kept going, step by step, one foot before the last.
After what seemed a length of time far too great to have closed such a relatively short distance, Jack finally came face-to-face with the massive door. Upon reaching it, he realized that it was indeed of a stature that deserved the title of vault. It towered above him, wide and imposing. Located in the very center of the door, there was a heavy-duty handle that had been welded in place, along with a huge combination dial.
It seemed to radiate a strange essence, which could not be defined. It was solid steel, but it seemed to also be something beyond its simple construction of metal… as if that which it guarded lent it an intangible aura.
At the center of the vault’s thick door, at eye level, there was a port window. It was round in shape, and the glass was at least an inch thick. It appeared that it might be a thing that had been transplanted from a submarine, designed to withstand tremendous pressure.
The glass was covered with a thick layer of dust, though this coating of grime was disrupted by several smears. Upon closer inspection, it seemed that those smears might have been caused by fingertips, dragged across the surface of the glass… but they appeared to have been created from the inside.
“What do you suppose is in there?” Neil asked.
Jack almost jumped out of his shoes, he was so startled. He turned around, and saw that Neil, Sara, and Maria had followed closely, and that they were now right behind him. They were all enraptured, staring at the great door with interest.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Jack said. He returned his attention to the vault, and he raised a hand to the port window. Wiping his palm this way and that, he cleared as much of the dust away as he could, but a large amount remained on the other side. Edging even closer, he peered into the window, until his nose was almost touching the glass. “I can’t… really… see… much,” he finally reported, after squinting within. “Wait! There’s… there’s something in the corner. I can just barely make it out, by the blue light.”
“Blue light?” Neil asked. He exchanged a dubious glance with Sara and Maria. “Umm… what blue light is this, exactly?”
“Come on, guys!” Jack said. He pressed closer to the window still, until his nose was squashed against the glass. “I know you can see it. And I’m telling you, there’s something in the corner. Come take a look at this.”
Jack moved to one side, and Neil quickly took his place, stepping up to the vault door.
“Hey, you’re right! There is some kind of a blue light in here,” Neil confirmed. “Say, what do you suppose that big thing in the corner is?”
“That’s what I was wondering myself,” Jack said. “Any ideas?”
“Well, what’s it look like?” Maria asked. She and her sister were cramming ever closer, trying to get a glimpse into the vault, while Nibbler meandered about everybody’s knees.
“I dunno… it’s covered with a white sheet, whatever it is. Just looks like a real big shape. Huge, as a matter of fact. Could be… anything…” Jack said slowly, but his voice became softer as he spoke, until it had drifted off to an almost inaudible level.
His mind was wandering back to the night before, when he and Neil had spied on the manor from the safety of the forest. As they had lain in cover, surveying the monkeyshines that were ongoing in Lefty’s manor, they had seen strange things. And they had also heard strange things.
It would have been awfully difficult to forget what he had heard, Jack thought. It’s alive, a voice had called from the basement, amid mad cackles of laughter. And he had wondered, what exactly? What’s alive? And that voice he had heard, that exuberant declaration, had been projected from this very basement, had it not?
Jack began to wonder if perhaps the thing that he was gazing upon at this very moment was the subject in question. Perhaps this was the thing that was alive. Or, at the very least, that had been alive the night before.
After all, did the sheet in the vault not look as though it had been draped over a vaguely human form of some kind? If he applied his mind to examining the shrouded shape, Jack could imagine that it was perhaps a head and shoulders, with a tall body beneath it. In fact, it could have quite easily been a figure, as opposed to a random shape of zero consequence.
As he pondered these possibilities, Jack saw a troubling thing… the sheet-covered form moved. It was not much of a movement… perhaps a small, jerky motion to one side, no more than a few inches.
But before Jack could so much as cry out in alarm, he was bumped to the side, and his line of sight was broken. Maria had edged even closer to the window, and she had nudged him aside as she tried to peer within the vault.
“Hey!” Jack cried. “I think I saw it move!”
“What?” Maria asked, as she looked inside. “You saw what move, exactly? I don’t see anything in there.”
“It’s right in the corner,” Jack said. He pushed back to the window, so that he and Maria were both peering within the vault. “It’s right… wait.”
“What?”
“It was right there…”
“Well, where is it now?”
“Um… I don’t see it.”
“Let me have a gander at this thing,” Sara said, as she and Neil crowded behind Jack and Maria.
“Yeah, I want to see,” Neil said. “It moved, you say? That’s pretty odd, don’t you think?”
The four of them squirmed and wiggled, trying to peer into the vault. It was understandable, therefore, that they were startled (and even a bit scared… though none of them would later admit it), when the door to the vault shuddered with a terrible amount of noise and vibration.
Thoom!
Something had impacted it with terrific force from the other side. As one, the Beans leaped back, with a collective gasp.
Nibbler, too, skittered backward on all fours, while uttering a shocked, “Woof!” The claws of his paws clattered and clicked upon the cement of the basement floor, as he made his swift, backpedaling retreat.
“Gobstoppers!” Neil exclaimed. He felt his heart pounding within his chest, at what was surely an imprudent speed. “What was that?”
“I don’t know about this,” Sara said. “It seems like we might be in over our heads here…”
Her voice trailed off, as the fluorescent lighting above began to flicker, in a fashion that could only be described as unsettling, given the current circumstances. Had the electrical system been disrupted by that horrific boom of impact, originating from the interior of the vault?
They once more jumped about, as a computer printer on the far side of the laboratory sprang to life. It noisily produced several sheets of paper, inked with numbers and figures.
Before the Beans could contemplate this, a nearby stereo clicked, warbled a bit, and finally turned on at what must have been close to full volume. It blasted forth funky, groove-riddled tunes.
“What is going on around here?” Maria shouted over the music.
“Electrical system must be on the fritz!” Sara exclaimed. “It’s probably overloaded by all this hi-tech stuff down here, trying to draw power at the same time!”
There came a terrific commotion from the interior of the vau
lt, as if the thing within was reacting to the sound of the music.
Thoom! …Thoom! …Thoom!
The fluorescent lights flickered on and off, as the Beans collectively held their breath, their eyes glued to the ceiling above them. Each of them had the same thought, racing through their minds: Don’t go out, don’t go out, don’t go out.
And it was then, of course, that the lights went out, and the basement that housed Lefty’s laboratory went dark.
“Ooh!” Neil exclaimed into the inky blackness. Ever the optimist, he asked his friends, “This should make things interesting, don’t you think?”