He rechecked the rooms he had explored before, even the upper levels, but as he ascended the humming diminished. On the ground floor once more, he did his best to track the sound and stood at last at the mouth of a tight corridor in pitch blackness. He cursed that he had no flashlight, no matches. But that sound… the more he stood listening to it, the more certain he became that it originated from somewhere at the other end of that inky hallway. In the end, he decided to venture down its throat, careful to shuffle along the midline of the corridor. He didn’t want to trip on some debris and come into contact with the walls, which even though he couldn’t see them were no doubt brimming with the ubiquitous graffiti.
At one point he stopped to glance behind him, and the mouth of the tunnel was a small pale rectangle. How much further did this hallway go?
But the more he moved ahead, the louder that humming became. Now it sounded more like a rumbling, such as that of a distant train passing through the night.
When the end of the tunnel came, he stepped into a large room without fluorescent lights, but a subdued blue glow entered through a row of large windows close beside him. He heard the delicate tick of icy snowflakes spitting against the panes, like the gentle scratching of ghostly children. But still, that humming rumble. He crossed the room, following the sound through a doorway in the far wall. Here, he came upon a stairwell — a flight of steps ascending, and another that descended to a basement level. The sound came from the latter.
Leaning over the handrail, he saw a feeble illumination at the foot of the cement stairs. He started down, and with each step the unbroken rumbling grew more pronounced. It was unmistakably the thrumming of machinery. Was this finally some of the machinery that had once been used in this place, if it had been a factory? Or was it a boiler room to provide the heat… a generator to supply the electricity?
At the bottom of the stairs, sure enough he entered a basement with pipes both thick and thin running along the low ceiling, supported by brackets and bound with greasy cobwebs. Spaced here and there, a few bare bulbs glowed. Their light glistened in reflection on the graffiti-painted brick walls, and in scattered puddles where water had dripped from spots where the pipes were bandaged like weeping wounds.
Down yet another tunnel-like hallway he followed the mechanical chugging, now a deep rapid throb like a titanic heartbeat that he felt vibrate up through his soles and disperse throughout his nervous system. Louder… louder… until he arrived at the source.
It was a doorway in the brick, covered with a barred gate. The bars were freshly painted, and he knew the gate had been added at the same time as the bars over the windows. He gave it a useless tug, having already spotted the chain and heavy padlock that secured the metal door in place.
Beyond the bars, the room was in darkness and thus he couldn’t determine its size, couldn’t guess at the appearance and hence the function of the machinery, or how extensive it was. All he could see from here was a constellation of scattered glowing buttons in a variety of colors — green, red, amber, blue, but their light was not enough to illuminate their surroundings. Set further back in the room, he was sure he saw a few pale blue computer monitors. Computers! Might he use one of them to send emails to summon help?
He tried to break the chain with his copper pipe, wedging it between the coils and pulling on it like a lever, but the links were too thick. He couldn’t fit the straight end of the pipe into the U-shaped shackle of the padlock, either. At last, in frustration, he hammered at the padlock using the pipe as a club. He only produced loud clanks and, once, a few spitting sparks. Exhausted as much psychologically as he was physically, he stumbled back from the gate, sucking at air, his throat and mouth feeling coated with sand, licking his parched lips.
He realized he needed to rest, to get his head together. Refreshed, he might gain fresh perspective, devise another plan. He needed water — food if he dared — and most of all, he was anxious to check in on 3. Surely she must have awakened by now. Finding him absent, might she even be looking for him? Despite her changed demeanor, he longed for her companionship. And so, he turned away from the mysterious machines behind the barred door, to find his way back to the storage room. To find his way to 3.
Some hours earlier, sitting nude as a newborn infant on the former banquet hall chair in the center of the room where they had made their new camp, 3 had spoken aloud in a one-sided discourse.
“It doesn’t matter anymore about Seth… if I can’t be sure of his love, then he was never important. It’s time to move on. And there’s no taking back what that priest did to me, our good old Father Ryan. After all, he’s dead now, so it’s all in the past. And my Mom… yes, it’s hard, but she knew how much I love her, and I’ll always have my memories — like watching One Life to Live in the hospital with her.
“We can’t walk around with open bleeding wounds, can we? If we’re ever going to get it together, and realize our full potential, we have to get on with our lives. No… we have to make a new life for ourselves. A better life.
She smiled. “This is a fresh start. I’m a phoenix.”
Then she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, still smiling, waiting for 2 to come join her.
When 2 climbed the stairs out of the basement, he found the ground level’s floor had been covered in graffiti. So had the ceiling.
“No,” he said in disbelief. “Oh my God, no.”
At first he was reluctant to set foot upon it. Might the paint be all there was, with nothing solid behind it? Not coating the floor, but in place of the floor? Might he fall straight through and plunge endlessly through fathomless space? Endlessly through some unknown dimension? But what choice did he have, if he wanted to get back to 3?
And so he started forward warily at first, step by step, as if crossing the melting ice of a frozen lake. But it was solid beneath his feet, solid as ever, and so he quickened his pace until he was running, huffing, running…
His transfigured environment disoriented him with its sameness. It became harder to distinguish ceiling from wall from floor, as if indeed he were moving through the depths of space. But eventually, after a number of wrong turns, he reached the base camp building — or wing, if the complex were all one vast structure — and when he entered the banquet hall saw that even here, the graffiti had spread to the floor. It covered the flat areas of the ceiling but had not affected its exposed metal beams and joists.
The PVC pipe running down the wall from a hole in the ceiling had not been affected, nor the bucket positioned beneath it, and as they were both white they stood out more distinctly than usual against their backgrounds. He rushed to the bucket, thinking he might risk eating one of those cereal bars because they were sealed in factory packaging. He even entertained the mad idea of smearing the cereal bar’s raspberry filling on a wall, for want of paint — using it to write his name. Not the number 2, but his name. In an expression of defiance. In a declaration of identity.
When he looked into the bucket, he saw only one envelope of pills, and one stapled lunch bag, but he never even touched them, for something else caught his attention. He reached in and picked it up, befuddled and marveling and suspicious and elated all at once.
It was a single key linked to an emerald green plastic tag, like a hotel key. A number was printed on the plastic tag in metallic gold: 11.