Stairway to Forever (3 page)

He felt, after so much expended effort, that he had to give one more try to moving the stone before he dug a grave for Tom in another location. He jammed the jagged point of the spade straight down into the interstice between one of the shorter edges and the framing and gingerly levered, not wishing to snap either the oxidized metal or the loose handle.

Slowly . . . ever so slowly, and with a grating of stone upon stone that set his teeth edge to edge, bristled his nape hairs and raised gooseflesh on his arms and legs, the closest edge of the slab rose an inch or two, while the farther end sank an equal distance. When he had raised it still more and so

wedged the spade that, hopefully, the weighty slab of stone could not slam back down on his hands, he worked his fingers down beneath the stone and crouched to put his back and his leg muscles behind the imminent effort.

But, when open it did, the massive slab came up so easily and so suddenly that Fitz almost lost his balance and pitched, face-foremost, down the flight of steep stone stairs that led down into earthy-smelling blackness.

"Now, what in God's name . . .?"

Although apparently never mortared, the stonework that he could easily see was all so smoothly and finely finished and set that he doubted he could have inserted the blade of a penknife between any of them. Seventeenth century or not, surely this construction was not, could not be the work of American Indians.

Colonial, maybe? A root cellar? Or could it be some long-lost and always secret fabrication of that enigmatic, missing Englishman, Mister Dineen? Was this why he had so promptly chased those anthropological or archaeological types off his land? Well, only one way to find out what lay down there in the darkness, and that was to go look.

Upon his return from the house, Fitz had fortified himself with some two ounces of John Jameson and he came equipped with flashlight, the old, well-worn revolver from his tackle box—thinking that such a subterranean haunt would be perfect for snakes—a length of rope, a hatchet and a piece of lumber he had quickly and roughly pointed with the dull, rusted tool. When he had driven the stake into the ground with the back of the spade, he tied one end of the rope to it, looped the rope around the now-upright

slab of stone tightly, then tied it off. It would not do to have the thing suddenly close, trapping him underground, possibly.

After clipping the angle-head flashlight to his belt, Fitz cautiously commenced his descent, bracing himself with a hand on each of the cold, slimy stone walls. He quickly became glad that he had thought to don his sure-grip, canvas-and-rubber tennis shoes, for the steps not only were damp and slippery as the walls, but the treads of them were far too shallow for even his size-nine feet, appearing to have been wrought for feet no larger than those of children . . . and small children, at that.

When the bright beam of light shining from his midriff showed a flat, wetly glistening wall just ahead, he at first thought that he had come to the bottom of the underground structure, but when he reached that point, he realized that he stood on a tiny landing, with the stairs continuing downward to his right.

Fitz now doubted even Colonial construction, for no hard-working Colonial farmer would have exerted the stupendous amount of labor that had gone into making so deep an excavation—all by hand, too, in those days—plus the quarrying of the stones, transporting them here from wherever, and building this . . . whatever it was or had been.

After yet another landing and right-angle turn that sent him in the opposite direction from that at which he had set out, above, Fitz at last reached bottom. Bottom, he quickly discovered, was but a bare, stonewalled, -floored, and -ceilinged chamber. It was rectangular, some six feet high throughout and eight or nine feet long, by perhaps four feet or less in width, with the stairs debouching at the end of one of the longer sides.

The chamber was fashioned of the same fine, smooth, unmortared stonework as the rest of the edifice and it lay completely empty of anything. Recalling how the entry slab, aboveground, had pivoted, Fitz inched along the walls of the chamber, exerting pressure here and there along the edges of the stones, to no slightest avail. Finally, he gave it up. After all, it was getting on toward dark, above-ground, and he still had to bury poor old Tom.

He had ascended but three of the steps, however, when some impulse impelled him to half turn and once more sweep the light over the length of the patently empty stone chamber. At least, that had been what he meant to do. But balanced with one too-large foot on each of two of the shallow, steep and slimy steps, he lost his precarious balance as he turned about and, his arms flailing, pitched face-first toward the hard, granite stones before him!

His body tensed against the pain that was sure to be imminently inflicted upon his flesh and bone, his eyes tight-shut to hopefully protect them, Fitz instead felt his body land jarringly enough, but on a flat, warm and relatively soft surface. Gasping, he opened his eyes to see, bare millimeters from his face, what looked like nothing so much as sand—sand that his nostrils told him strongly emitted the clean, salt tang of the sea.

"Oh, Christ!" He relaxed his arms and sank back down to lie supine, certain now that he was hallucinating as a result of a head injury and that his broken body actually still lay crumpled against the wall of that empty stone room at the foot of those treacherous stairs. He wondered if anyone would find him before he died of exposure or thirst or shock.

"Damn, my legs are cold," he groaned to himself.

"Oh, my God, don't tell me Tve broken my back? If I have, I hope I do die before anybody finds me!"

He would much prefer to die here, like this, alone, unseen and unheard, unshriven, even, than to be seriously injured, as little Kath had been in the terrible automobile accident that had claimed her mother's life. For all that the medical people had at last admitted to him that the girl's brain was irrevocably dead, still had they kept her mindless, wasted body there for long months, kept alive—if such could be dignified by that term—only by bottles and tubes and machines. And all the while, the horrendous costs of these doctors and bottles and tubes and machines had been taking away from Fitz every cent and possession he had acquired in thirty years. He thought as he lay there that a relatively quick, so-far painless death would be far preferable than to be subjected to such a perverse atrocity of medical science.

When the greedy doctors and the even greedier hospital had taken and absorbed the last of Fitz's medical insurance and Janet's life insurance, the house, the furniture and every valuable personal possession, the savings account in toto, the cash value of Fitz's own life insurance policies and the last sums he could borrow from the company credit union, he had gone to visit Kath, late one night and very drunk. After sitting for he never knew just how long, listening and watching while the liquids dripped from the bottles into the tubes and the hellish machines rhythmically did their unnatural tasks of giving a semblance of life to a corpse, he had arisen, wedged the door shut and given his daughter the last gift he could give her—a quick and decent death, letting her long-tortured body join her brain.

Because his personal car had been almost new and an appropriately expensive model, sale of it had brought him just about enough money to pay the lawyer whose expertise had gotten him free of all the many charges that had been filed against him. He had been adjudged not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. But that same judgment had also cost him his job, his twenty-four years of long and faithful work for the firm notwithstanding. Not fired, of course; just retired on medical disability, complete with testimonial dinner, gold watch and pension.

However, with the credit union deducting a hefty chunk of the pension each month, it had been necessary for Fitz to find another job, not an easy task for a fifty-three-y ear-old sales executive, he quickly discovered, especially for one just publicly tried for the highly publicized murder of his own daughter.

Employment in his old line was completely out of the question. None of his former competitors—some of whom had been endeavoring to lure him into their operations for years—would now even consider him for any position and they were quite blunt about refusing. Even the mercenary, bloodsucking placement agencies had been most cool toward him, when once they had found out just who he was. At last, in his financial desperation, he had applied to and been accepted by a door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales outfit, but on a straight-commission basis, of course.

Once he had secured a job of sorts, he had borrowed enough at an exorbitant rate of interest from a small loan company to pay two months' rent and a security deposit on the bungalow and to make a down payment on an aged coupe. He had now been selling vacuum cleaners for above two years. It was hard work and not a very dignified form of selling, but then Fitz had always been a superlative sales-

man, possessed of an intuitive ability to sense just the proper approaches and closes in a given situation, so he was earning a fair income. But a cripple would be unable to do the job, he knew, no matter how good a salesman, yet another good reason to wish for quick death now.

Something warm and wet plopped down upon his raised cheek. His exploring fingers encountered a thick, viscous substance and brought it to where his eyes could see it.

"Gaaagh!" Hastily, he drew his fouled fingers through the warm sand, then fumbled his bandanna from around his neck to clean his face of what looked like and distinctly smelled like fishy-stinking bird lime. He looked up when his ears registered an avian scream. There, wheeling in a blue and cloudless sky, was the probable source of the pale-greenish dung—a large white seagull. That bird and the stinking mess now clotting his old, faded bandanna were, if truly hallucinatory, the most thoroughly vivid hallucinations of which he had ever heard.

Deciding, finally, to get it over with, face facts and see if he could determine just how serious were his injuries, Fitz first examined his face and head, finding no single lump, bump, broken skin or even mild pain . . . except in his hands. Scrutiny of them revealed blisters on each palm, apparently broken by contact with the abrasive sand and now stinging with the salty sweat from his face.

But his feet and legs still felt cold. Without yet trying to roll over and thus possibly compound any spinal injury, he gingerly moved his legs and feet. They felt to be moving normally, with no dearth of sensation, though they still felt cold. So he rolled over very slowly and . . .

His legs and feet were gonel They ended cleanly at

mid-thigh, as if they had both been thrust through roundish holes in a sheet of plywood. Beyond, where his reeling senses told him that his legs and feet should be, lay only undisturbed sand and a bleached, almost-buried log.

Suddenly, his entire body was gone cold—cold and clammy and bathed in icy sweat, while his nape hairs prickled erect. His wide, incredulous gaze fixed upon that space, that preternaturally empty space, which should have contained the feet and legs of Alfred O'Brien Fitzgilbert II, he brought up his shaking right hand to solemnly sign himself, mumbling the while half-forgotten childhood prayers.

"Oh, Holy Mother of God," he at last stuttered, "Wh . . . what's hap . . . happened to m . . . me?"

Then, with absolutely no sensation of transition from the hot, sunny sand-world to the dank, dark crypt, he was sitting upon the wet stones of the floor, the beam of light from the shattered lens of his flashlight picking out his legs and his two feet—one now bare and one, shod—and the first couple of shallow stairs.

He half-turned to look back whence he had come and gasped. His right arm, beneath the clenched fist of which he still could feel the hot, gritty sand, ended a bit below the elbow as cleanly as had his legs when he had lain in that other place, seeming to be immured within one of the solid-looking, greyish stones of the wall.

"Now, wait just a damned minute!" he exclaimed aloud. "That's behind me, God damn it. I shouldn't be able to see it without the flashlight. ,,

Not until he had reached out, secured the now-battered flashlight and switched it off could he recognize the source of the other, dim, diffuse light. The radiance was emitted by the very square of stonework in which he more or less sat. So very dim was it that it quickly became clear to him how he had missed noticing it at all during his earlier exploration of the room; his bright, white flashlight's beam had blinded him to the lesser light source.

Those stones that shone with light were arranged in a rectangle that began a foot or so from the nearest corner of the room. That rectangle was, he estimated roughly, about five feet high and four feet wide, its lowest point at or so close as to not matter to the floor and its highest point some foot below the stones of the ceiling. Only a child or a midget would be able to walk through it upright. Anyone else would have to at least duck his head, himself included, in order to pass through the wall.

"What the hell am I thinking about?" Fitz demanded of himself. "Here I sit, rationally considering how best and easiest to do something that is utterly impossible by every law of physics of which I ever heard. It's all completely impossible; none of it can be happening."

His mind whirled when he consciously tried to reason out the events of the last few minutes, so he resolutely shoved reason onto a back burner, for the nonce.

Now, if he could so easily and effortlessly return to the stone crypt, then why not have a better and longer look at the warm, inviting beach beyond the wall? Nothing to lose by doing so.

When he was once more fully shod, Fitz drew himself backward, into the sun-drenched sandiness again, finding that his legs and his feet came just as easily as did the rest of him. But just before his toes had fully cleared the . . . the . . . the whatever it was, he pulled the scarred flashlight from its place at his belt and jammed it down into the soft sand to mark the invisible portal. Exploring was one thing, he felt; getting lost from his world of normality was another thing, entirely.