Masked (20 page)

I ran from the Cross with my tail
between my legs straight back to my nasty little hovel of a room. Terrified, I spent
the rest of the evening curled up on my bed. Every creak and sound in the room
and building caused my heart to race. I imagined those thick hairy spiders
crawling on the floor and proceeding up to the bed, ready to molest me all over
again with their cold probing limbs.

Sleep didn’t come easily, but at
one point, I finally drifted off and when I did I was back in the hospital room
I’d visited so many times before.

I was talking with the girl on
the bed and looking at the tightly bundled babies. There was a difference now
though from all of the other instances of the dream. The feeling of love for
the newborns and heart ache at knowing I was letting them go was missing. The
scene seemed more distant, like I was a shadow of the player I once was.
Replacing the love and heart ache was a steady thrum of anxiety pounding away
at me as well as terror, unseen, but very present.

Even
though I wasn’t playing my part as rehearsed, the girl carried on as before. “They
are so cute. I can’t believe we made them together,” the girl said.

I looked over towards the foot
of the bed, at the two carts that held the two newborns. On the floor several
of the large spiders circled the carts. I tried to scream, but nothing came
out. The spiders began to crawl up the side of the carts, towards the babies.

 “I’m fine. Sad,” the girl
said with wet eyes.

Couldn’t she see what was
happening? I tried to kick at the spiders as they climbed. Nothing happened. It
was like my foot went right through them.

She continued on. “They’re
ready for it to be over. They don’t understand why I’m sad. They say I should
be glad we found such a nice couple willing to take twin newborns. They’re
right. I know it’s best for the babies, but they’re ours. I’m sad.”

I couldn’t stop them. The girl
couldn’t see them. They were going to hurt my children.

 “Logan and Landon. I’ve
always liked those names.”

The spiders were close to the
top. I tried again, this time swatting at them with my hands. It was no use. I
couldn’t stop them.

There was a knock at the door.
This time the sound was hopeful. It was the nurse, the babies’ new parents.
They’d stop the spiders. Logan and Landon would be safe.

The door opened and the young
couple walked in. They greeted us and went to the babies. They seemed to see
the spiders. They turned to me smiled and then knocked the creatures off like
they were shooing away a fly.

The nurse then came in. She
wasn’t the same round woman from my previous dreams. She was now the blonde girl
I’d followed into that basement. She looked up with a menacing smile and went
to the babies. I wanted to scream out to the adoptive parents, to warn them of
the nurse. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. I just watched as the blonde serpent
took the babies away and the young couple cheerfully followed.

There was the too familiar
feeling of soft thumps on my shoulders and back. I looked over and saw more of
the spiders had landed on me.

With a start, I woke from the
nightmare shaking and covered in sweat.

Whatever had happened in that dark
basement scared the hell out of me. I had no explanation. Nothing I could work
out that made any kind of sense. With all I could do, all the strength I
thought I had, it was way too much for me to handle. My fear had reared its
head in its most basic and naked form and gotten the best of me. I couldn’t
handle it and I lost both the officer and Wally.

I had a duty to protect them and
I ran. Once again, I couldn’t do what was necessary to help those who needed
it. I was a coward who fled instead of being able to do what needed to be done.
I only hoped my abandonment hadn’t gotten them killed yet.

All the weirdness aside, there
had to have been a reason the blonde girl brought Wally into that basement. There
had to be a way out, aside from the stairwell back up into the bar. Officer
Raymond mentioned when the police searched the space weeks before, there was no
other exit. It was possible the blonde girl could have circled back around when
we were distracted and gone back up the stairs, but then why did she go down
there to begin with?

I needed to find them. I didn’t
know if I was already too late, but I had to try. It was my fault officer Raymond
was involved and I couldn’t have more blood on my hands. I had enough.

Once I was awake and fully alert,
my wits under control, I decided to go back and check out the basement again
during the early morning. I knew time was running short to make it too officer Raymond
and Wally before it was too late. Fortunately, the day was overcast, which made
getting back to the bar easy and since it was closed, I jumped in.

I’d expected doing so unnoticed
during the day would have been more difficult than it was. The area the bar was
in bustled with morning foot traffic. However, I was able to find a blind spot
to jump from and once in, I proceeded immediately to the stair well and then
down into the basement.

With the lights on, the basement
area wasn’t as frightening as I recalled it being the night before. Of course
the spectacle of nightmares had added to some of the spaces frightful ambiance.
The room was now much how I envisioned it looking, open with random stacks of
crates and boxes scattered to and fro. The space was large and expansive, but
not efficiently utilized, its use nothing more than a dumping ground for the
old and excess. The blanket of dust over everything showed most of the stuff had
rested where it was for many years.

I carefully made my way around
the entire room. There was no sign of a door or anything to indicate some type
of passage out. There were just boxes and crates and I was at a loss at where
else to look. I kept on looking though.

If there was a way out, it had to
be somewhere along the walls. Surely there wasn’t anything further below the
building. I didn’t rule that out, but it seemed unlikely.

There really wasn’t much blocking
the wall space, only a couple places having obstructions that could possibly
cover something. There was shelving and a few stacks of crates and boxes. Most everything
else was positioned away from the walls.

The shelving didn’t appear to conceal
any type of passage but remembering the basement in Troy, I checked several
times to be sure. There was no mechanism to pull the unit away from the walls
and I was pretty certain nothing was there. The couple of crate stacks against
the walls were just like all of the others scattered throughout the room. All were
pretty large. I tried moving a couple of crates, but they were way too heavy
for someone to move them back and forth for access, especially considering they
had to be moved back into place to conceal the passage.

I suddenly realized I could
probably move the stacks against the wall fairly easily if I needed to gain
access to a passage hidden behind them. I wasn’t thinking about it the right
way. Had I just forgotten what I saw in Idaho only a few weeks back? I’d seen
others with the same abilities as me. I hadn’t considered someone else might
also have the strength to move the stacks.

With that realization, I went to
the closest stack of crates against the wall. It was compiled of several
smaller boxes forming a pile lacking in architectural soundness. When I tried to
move a group of them, I had to jump back to avoid the falling avalanche of
boxes. It took only a few minutes to clear away the fallen boxes and see there was
no hidden passage.

The second stack was made up of
larger crates piled three high and two deep. I wasn’t sure how heavy they were,
but was fairly certain I could pull them all back from the wall as one unit.
With my left shoulder against the wall, I put my fingers behind the back crate
ready to pull. Before I did, I felt a cool breeze caress my fingers.

With only minimal effort, I pulled
on the crate closest to the wall. The whole stack moved as one unit. Once I had
the stack pulled three feet from the wall, the exit was revealed.

The rough hole was approximately
four feet high and maybe two wide. It looked like it was made with a sledge
hammer and brute force. The hole revealed the wall was made of brick covered in
a thick layer of plaster. Jagged, broken edges of the brick, framed the concealed
access point. Fastened on the back of the crate stack was a metal handle, like
you might see on a barn door, so that once you stepped through, you could pull
the stack back into place.

Cold air blew in from the
darkness beyond the hole and a scent I could only describe as
all things old
surrounded me. With a sigh and a deep breath, I hesitantly stepped through the
hole into a world of darkness.

I hoped I was prepared for
whatever might lie ahead. I was armed with two 9mm and a small knife. The two
guns were strapped on under my jacket, each in a shoulder holster, and the
knife was strapped on above my ankle. I also had a small LED flashlight, which would
put off just enough light to make my way around, but not alert anyone of my
presence within a reasonable distance and of course the PTD was strapped on and
ready, not that it had been very effective the night before.

I really had no idea what I was getting
myself into. Was I just following a serial killer or was she something more?
Based on the weight of those crates, it was now safe to assume she did have at
least some enhanced abilities. Not every young petite blonde girl in the world
could have moved that stack back and forth. What I didn’t know was what the
extent of those abilities was. Could what happened last night somehow be a product
of those abilities? I shivered at the thought, not sure how well I would handle
an experience like that again.

The light from the basement revealed
some sort of underground passage. Fallen rubble, pieces of stone and brick, and
broken wood scattered the ground everywhere. The outer side of the basement
wall showed the facade of an old building. There was an old door space filled
in with brick, where the hole was now punched through back into the building. I
could also see spaces where windows once were on both sides of the old door, also
filled in with brick.

When I first arrived in Seattle,
I’d done some research online about the city and particularly the area where
the disappearances occurred. I remembered reading some interesting material on Seattle
in the late 1800’s.

Apparently in 1889, there was a huge
fire that destroyed thirty plus city blocks. The structures in Seattle at that
time were mostly wooden, which further fueled the fire’s destruction. After the
fire, the city’s leaders ordered all rebuilding would use stone or brick to
insure against a similar disaster in the future. They also decided to use the
destruction as an excuse to re-grade the streets one to two stories higher than
they had been. The Pioneer Square area was originally built mostly on filled-in
tidelands and as a consequence, it often flooded. The new street level was to help
prevent future flooding as well as help ensure gravity-assisted flush toilets didn't
back up during high tide into nearby Elliot Bay.

In order to re-grade the streets,
the builders used concrete walls to first line the streets. This formed narrow
alleyways between the walls and the buildings on either side of the street, and
a wide alley where the street was. The city’s naturally steep hillsides were
used to run a series of sluices into these wide alleys, which carried material
to fill in the space. This effectively raised the streets to the desired new
level, generally twelve feet higher than they were before, though in some
places it was nearly thirty feet.

The article said at first,
pedestrians climbed ladders to go between the street-level down to the
sidewalks in front of the building entrances. Eventually, brick archways were
constructed next to the road surface, above the submerged sidewalks and skylights
with small panes of clear glass, were installed.

Once the new sidewalks were
complete at the street level, building owners moved their businesses to the new
ground floor. Some merchants continued to carry on business for a while in the
lowest floors of buildings that survived the fire and pedestrians continued to
use the underground sidewalks lit by the glass cubes embedded in the street-level
sidewalk above.

In the early 1900’s, the city condemned
the underground area for fear of the spread of the bubonic plague. The
basements and underground tunnels were left to deteriorate or were used as
storage. In some cases, they became illegal flophouses for the homeless, gambling
halls, centers for prostitution and opium dens.

Most of the underground area was still
condemned. Only a small portion had been restored and made safe and accessible
to the general public on guided tours. I actually wanted to take the tour
before I left Seattle. The history behind it interested me. It seemed I’d stumbled
upon a condemned portion of the underground area and was going on the
self-guided tour.

I had two choices, right or left.
Shining the dim light at the ground, I crouched closer to see if I could find
any trace of what direction they might have traveled. There were footprints disrupting
the thick layer of dust on both sides of the tunnel entrance. I followed the
prints to my left but they faded after just a few feet, so I turned around to
follow the prints in the other direction. They went further into the tunnel.