Chapter 32
S omewhere in the house a clock chimed softly and Carter glanced at the time on his screen, sighing when he realized it was one in the morning.
It had taken him hours and an exorbitant amount of money to get the original architectural plans for the house.
The firm that had designed it was still in business, but they hadn't digitized their records from before they went online so he'd had to pay for them to find and scan these old drawings.
Luckily they were in good shape and he'd been going over them, but there weren't any hidden passageways or rooms built into the design and he couldn't see any obvious missing space from memory.
It was a good thing Leo had been to the hardware store for the laser because it looked like they were going to have to measure the rooms and see if anything didn't add up.
He was about to close the laptop and go to bed when he heard a creak on the landing upstairs, followed by the very obvious sound of someone descending the stairs.
Rather than call out and risk waking anyone else up, he quietly closed the laptop and headed toward the door.
Out in the lobby, Rix was shuffling slowly across the space, his eyes open but completely vacant.
"You okay?" Carter whispered, but Rix didn't acknowledge him at all, even to glance in his direction.
His movements had none of his usual grace or speed and after a couple of seconds, Carter realized that his brother had to be sleepwalking.
Sliding his phone out of his pocket, he messaged Emerson to come downstairs as quietly as possible, and he set off after Rix to try and figure out where he was headed.
The sleeping man walked into the kitchen, heading straight for the walk-in pantry, opened the door and stepped in. For several long moments he simply stood there, shoulders slumped, breathing deeply, and then he startled and jumped back, crashing into a shelf of canned goods as he flailed about.
"Easy! Easy!" Carter soothed, just as Emerson appeared in pajamas pants at the door. "You were sleepwalking."
“That’s fucking new!” He hissed and looked around, his normal calm facade crumbling. Kendrix was never so pure as when he was awoken from sleep. That was when he allowed himself to be a man, not the thing his father had wrought. “Where the fuck are we?”
“The walk-in pantry,” Emerson said with a frown. “You got a craving for Fruit Loops?”
Kendrix scowled, his mask sliding into place. “I was fucking sleeping, asshole. I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”
Carter was mentally scanning the plans he'd just been looking at and frowned. The space did seem slightly smaller than it had been on the drawing but it was hard to tell. He stepped back and looked at the hallway, trying to figure out the junctions of the rooms.
"This backs onto the understairs cupboard," he said absently.
That would be an easy space to alter without it looking any different on the plans.
"And you could easily shave a foot off the kitchen and the library without it being obvious because of the cabinets and the shelving making it hard to measure.
We can get Leo down here to measure, but I bet if there's a secret room or cache, the door is in there. This has to be the God guiding you."
“What were you dreaming?” Emerson asked.
Rix bared his teeth. “I don’t dream.”
“Be that as it may...” Emerson looked around. “We need the rest of them? Who is sleeping with Pet?”
"No point waking them all up if it's nothing," Carter said, stepping past Rix into the pantry and studying the joints of the walls.
“Well Rix was brought here, so let’s work on the idea that Rix knows?” Emerson said and looked to their friend.
“How the fuck do you propose I do that?”
“I don’t know, maybe calm down and feel?” he asked. “When I found the cache, I was just moving on autopilot...the feeling...” he shook his head. “What do you feel, Rix?”
“Cold,” he said immediately.
“This room isn’t cold,” Emerson said and looked to Carter. “Feel for a draft.”
"There's no basement on the plans," Carter said, tapping the back wall.
"Maybe there's a staircase behind here..
.aha." He pressed a small section of the wall and it sprang forward to reveal a small handle.
"Interesting." He took his phone out again and switched the light on.
"Let's go." With a grin back at the others, he turned the handle and the whole back wall of the pantry swung open into darkness.
“Hold up, Indiana,” Emerson said. “Why are you not feeling cold?” He looked to Rix. “Are you still feeling cold? Clammy? Wet?”
“The fuck?”
Emerson sighed and shook his head. “God influence, speaks in half answers,” he said. “Cold, clammy, Wet... Could be walking into a watery room...”
“No, not clammy, not wet...just cold. And yes, still cold.”
He looked to Carter. “Lead on, Doctor Jones...”
"Your concern for my wellbeing is so touching," Carter teased, giving him a sappy grin. He ducked under Emerson's swat and headed into the darkness, descending some concrete steps that led down in a steep spiral. "Anyone see a light switch?" he asked.
“It wasn’t concern for your wellbeing. Finn would have our nuts if something happened.” He laughed as Rix grumbled behind them.
“I’m not touching anything...”
Emerson laughed. “Is there anything to touch? Carter, shine that over this way,” he said and pointed. “Light switch?”
The light glinted off a chain hanging against the wall and Carter shrugged.
"One way to find out." Before either of the others could stop him, he reached over and pulled the chain.
There was a click and a metallic pinging sound, and then a lightbulb buzzed into luminescence.
"Bingo!" He reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into a large, cold room lined almost entirely in massive stones.
“Root cellar?” Rix asked, standing at the bottom stair.
“Maybe? Though I didn’t know it was here, and there’s no stores here,” Emerson said. “What else do you feel?”
Rix frowned. “Nothing.”
“So we are either in the right place or the wrong. Though I doubt He Who Sleeps would play hot and cold with us.”
"I'm wondering if this is some sort of secondary cover in case someone stumbled onto this room," Carter said thoughtfully, peering around. Going back to the stairs, he poked around a bit and then whooped triumphantly. "Yes!"
There was another click and then the grinding of heavy machinery as whole sections of the floor slid away and islands of shelves began rising out of the ground.
"Holy shit!" Carter breathed. "We've hit the motherlode.
Even if the Elders tried to clean this place out, they'd never have discovered this. "
“My father...” Emerson said as he stood back with Rix. “Where the fuck did he get these books?”
"No idea," Carter said cheerfully, studying the nearest bank of books. "Some of these are old! Look at this!"
Rix walked past them and went to a farther side of the stacks.
“What?” Emerson looked to Carter.
"The Origins of He Who Sleeps," Carter said gleefully.
"The priests would give their nutsacks to get their hands on this!
" He paused. "Unless... Do you reckon your dad might have stolen these from the temple?
Or that the priests maybe gave them to him for safe-keeping during whatever happened all those years ago? "
“Either is possible,” he said with a frown. “Rix, what are you doing?”
Rix turned to them with a book in hand. “Rites and Observances,” he said as he opened it. “And they are not the rites we learned. Like at all.” He looked up. “The feminine...” He slumped then and went to his knees, gasping.
“Rix...” Emerson said as his friend shook his head, as if shaking off cobwebbing. “You okay?”
“What the fuck?” Rix frowned. “That felt weird.”
"The God is maybe still connected with you." Carter put the book down and went across to Rix. "Damn...you're looking pretty pale there, brother. Maybe it's time to wrap this up and go find the others."
Rix frowned. “I think I need a drink...”
“Water is just up the stairs,” Emerson said.
“No, an actual drink, being puppeteered about is not my idea of a good time.”
"Drunkenness is an altered state of consciousness," Carter smirked, helping Rix to his feet. "I'd stick to the OJ, buddy."
“I didn’t say get drunk...have you ever known me to get drunk?” Rix argued with him as he helped him up the stairs.
"Alcohol is a drug," Carter said seriously. "If you're feeling under the influence now, I promise that a shot of tequila isn't going to help."
“Not under the influence, more like someone was moving my body against my will.”
"That doesn't sound like a lot of fun," Carter admitted, turning off the lights as they headed back up the stairs.
"On second thoughts, maybe we shouldn't go and wake everyone up right now.
It's almost two in the morning. Maybe we should all just go to bed and come back to this bright and early.
Those books aren't going anywhere and we know where they are now. What do you think, Em?"
“I think we have been flying blind for three years,” Emerson offered as they hefted Rix up the last stairs.
“And I think we have a limited amount of time,” he sighed and threw himself into the chair closest to him.
“We have what...a week ‘til Thanksgiving.
..and then three ‘til we need to be in the Balkans for the festivities? What amounts to a month to figure out how to keep her safe...how to keep us all safe and bring Him back to His glory.”
"I know, but there's no point in burning ourselves out by working every hour in creation," Carter told him. "You'll be better able to assess all this when you've had a few hours of sleep. You were up most of last night, too. You're no good to us or Petra when you're half dead from exhaustion."
“He’s right,” Rix said. “We only have so long left here, Car, at the house. Our lives are calling Monday morning, and after that...aside from this asshole who can be playboy of the year and just research everything, the rest of us have jobs, jobs we need to go to to keep up appearances.” He looked to their friend. “Easton is on his frayed edges...”
"What about a compromise?" Carter suggested. "We box it all up tomorrow and ship it to the city so we can go over it in our downtime. Hell, I can stay behind on Monday and hire a van and drive it down myself if necessary. I can put the bike in the back with the boxes."
“I don’t think we should bring it outta this house,” Emerson said.
“He went through a lot of trouble to hide it from them...” He shook his head.
“And if we succeed we can’t let them fall into the wrong hands.
We still don’t know who we can trust, aside from ourselves.
Go...go to bed. We found the stash. Tomorrow we spend as much time as we can to read and go from there.
” He looked to Rix. “Aspirin. It’s what helped me after my little tête-à-tête with Him.
I will go crawl into bed with her, sleep a few hours so Carter doesn’t lose his shit.
I’ll set my alarm for four hours, and then I’m up and working on this. ”
"Okay." Carter was relieved. He understood the urgency, was feeling it himself, but they both looked dead on their feet.
At least they were all here and could split up the search between them.
If it came down to it, they could take photos of the pages instead of trying to read everything and take the digital copies.
A promise of four hours sleep was good enough.
Waving them off up the stairs, he went to his room where Brutus was sprawled across most of the bed, despite knowing full well he wasn't supposed to be on there.
Still, Carter couldn't fault him. The mattress was incredible.
With a rueful grin, he stripped off, pushed the dog aside enough to actually get under the covers, and settled in for what would be a very short rest.