Steve wasn’t sure how to reply. He was still trying to formulate an answer to the boy’s question when Josh spoke again.
“What if Adam’s not dead, either?”
Steve stared at Josh blankly. “Adam? What are you talking about? We were all at his funeral.”
Josh opened his mouth to speak, then realized that no matter what he said, it was going to sound crazy. Even if what Jeff had said was true, who would believe him? From the look on his teacher’s face, Josh could see that Steve Conners wouldn’t, and if Steve didn’t, then probably no one would.
Unless he could figure out some way to prove it.
And if he could, and Adam wasn’t really dead, then maybe Amy wasn’t either, no matter how her note had sounded.
Maybe they’d done something to her.
Maybe the experiment wasn’t really over with after all.
He should have been asleep an hour ago, but Josh was still wide awake, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling in the darkness. Steve Conners had brought him back to the Academy after dinner, and Josh had done his best to concentrate on his homework, but it was one of those nights when no matter how hard he tried to keep his mind on what he was reading, he kept thinking of other things.
Amy.
And Adam.
He kept telling himself there wasn’t anything he could do, but it didn’t help, and finally he’d tossed his books aside and decided to go to bed. But even that didn’t help, and now, with the moon shining brightly in through the window, he didn’t think the glow of his computer screen would show up, even if anyone happened to look up at his window. Slipping out of bed, he pulled his bathrobe on against the chill from the open window, slid his feet into his fur-lined slippers, and sat down at his desk, switching on the monitor of his computer.
He began playing one of his favorite games, an adventure in which he took the part of a wizard, making his way through dungeons and caverns, doing battle with the monsters that appeared out of the darkness with whatever tools came to hand. But as he played the game, his imagination took over, and in his mind the image on the screen became the Academy itself; the maze of caves and dark rooms transmogrified into the corridors of the mansion.
The princess in the game became Amy, and he himself was transformed into a knight in shining armor.
The game went on, but more and more Josh found himself playing the game in his own mind.
What if it was true?
What if Amy wasn’t gone at all?
What if she was still in the house somewhere?
The idea grew in Josh’s mind, until he abandoned the computer altogether, leaving the monitor still glowing with an image of a black-clad villain guarding the gate to a castle perched on a hill.
He went to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out into the corridor. It was empty. Empty, and silent.
He left his room, pulling the door closed behind him so gently that only a soft click was heard as the latch caught.
A click that sounded to Josh like a rifleshot in the silence of the house.
He froze, waiting for one of the other doors to open, already preparing a small white lie to explain his absence from his bed.
No doors opened. No one appeared to challenge him.
He stole silently down the hall to the stairway, and hesitated.
Up, or down?
Not up. If Amy was in the house, they wouldn’t put her on the third floor, where the other kids might hear her.
No, they would put her in the cellar. Maybe tied up.
Maybe even drugged.
His heart began to pound with anticipation as he crept down the broad flight of stairs to the main floor.
In the dimly lit foyer he paused once again. The chandelier’s soft glow barely held the darkness back. In Josh’s imagination, every shadowy corner held something watching him, something lurking, waiting to leap out at him.
He almost lost his nerve, but when he remembered once again the look of stark terror on Amy’s face that afternoon, and imagined the peril she might now be in, his courage flooded back to him. He scuttled across the foyer into the great dining room, barely illuminated by the spill of the weak light from the hall chandelier.
Between it and the kitchen, he knew, were the stairs leading down to the basement.
He came to the door, reached out with a trembling hand, and tried the knob.
As it turned, part of him almost wished it had been locked.
He pushed the basement door open, cringing as its hinges creaked. He stood still in the gloom of the butler’s pantry, staring down into the blackness of the cellar below.
Alight.
There had to be a light somewhere down there.
He reached into the darkness, feeling along the wall inside the basement’s door. His hand touched something that moved, scuttling off into the darkness as Josh jerked his hand away. His skin crawled as he imagined what the creature might have been, and he almost gave up the adventure and returned to the safety of his bed.
A moment later, though, he regained control of his nerves and quickly reached once more into the blackness, sweeping his hand upward, so that his fingers would catch any switch that might be there.
It worked, and a naked light bulb flashed on at the bottom of the stairs. Josh stared at it in shocked amazement for a split second, then quickly stepped through the doorway, pulling the door shut behind him. He was standing on a landing at the top of a steep flight of rickety-looking wooden steps, a rough two-by-four banister offering the only means of steadying himself.
The white light of the naked bulb seemed to be swallowed up by the blackness that spread away from the foot of the staircase. It was all Josh could do to keep himself from turning away and fleeing from the unknown cavern beneath the mansion.
Stupid! he told himself. It’s just a basement, and there’s nothing hiding in it. Amy’s probably not even down here.
But what if she was, and he went back to bed without even looking?
He crept down the stairs, freezing every time one of the steps creaked beneath his feet, listening to the silence until he was sure nothing else had heard him, then moving onward.
At last he came to the concrete floor. Shading his eyes against the glare of the bulb that now hung directly overhead, he peered into the surrounding darkness. His eyes, adjusting to the light, surveyed the old furniture that was stored in the cellar, and the long-closed cartons that were stacked against the wall behind the stairs, cartons whose very contents had probably been forgotten years before.
For a moment he was tempted to open one of them, but then he turned away, intent on exploring the rest of the basement before he lost his nerve. He moved away from the light, ducking his head to avoid the cobwebs that hung from the huge floor joists that supported the mansion above.
The basement was a maze in its own right, partitioned off into various rooms. As he moved along, he found more light switches, and slowly the cavernous space beneath the house began to glow with light, each successive wave of shadows washed away by another of those naked bulbs that made Josh feel newly exposed every time he turned one on.
He found the laundry room, and the enormous furnace that heated the building. A monstrous boiler occupied a room of its own, with pipes leading in all directions to supply hot water to the various bathrooms of the house.
Josh explored each room as he came to it, then moved on, each step taking him farther from the stairs that were the only entrance to the cellar. And with each step, and every unlocked room he came to, his hopes of finding Amy Carlson faded a little further.
Still, he kept going, kept creeping through the shadowy maze.
It was well past midnight when Hildie Kramer left her suite of rooms on the ground floor of the Academy and mounted the stairs, pausing on both the second and third floor landings to be certain that none of the children were prowling around the house. Then she went on up to the fourth floor, and the small anteroom in front of the door to George Engersol’s apartment. Knowing it was empty, she used her own key to let herself in, then relocked the door behind her.