“You okay?” Dave asked.
She said, “Yes,” but he knew she was not so he replied, “We won’t be in here too long,” and she said nothing else.
They kept moving forward into the yellowed gloom. A tarnished trumpet lay on the warped floor. Gideon has left the building, Olivia thought. That almost made her laugh, but there was too much sadness in this ruin, too much expectation and promise gone and lost. She dared not let herself think about what might have happened to many of the students, parents and teachers. Some of them might have been among the Gray Men…if not here, then somewhere else.
“This,” Dave said, “must be the place.”
He had stopped in the hallway just ahead of her. On either side of rows of lockers was a door marked library with a cracked glass inset. “Let’s take a look,” Dave told her, but before he opened the door he slid the .357 Magnum revolver out of his belt holster and clicked off the safety.
Olivia followed him in, and left the door open behind them.
It was a pretty mess. A complete disaster. The windows were broken out and the rain and wind had swept in and all the standing shelves had gone over. Everything was scattered and drenched. Yellow and green mold grew in patches on the walls and the floor, and both the visitors knew not to touch that. There was a sickly-sweet odor in the air, a vile miasma of corruption. Part of the ceiling had collapsed and wires and pipes were hanging down. On the floor the books were everywhere, locked together by dampness and mold.
They stood looking at the room in silence.
“Jeez,” Dave finally said. He frowned and wished he had a cigarette. “I guess none of the bastards like to read, huh?”
Now that did strike Olivia. She laughed, a pure and hearty laugh, and Dave liked the sound of it. He gave a tight, passing smile and shrugged. The light was bad in here. He didn’t like the idea of getting on his knees in that muck and weird mold and hunting for road maps. The place looked like somebody had turned it upside down and shaken it a few times. He thought they needed a shovel to go through all this, or at least rubber gloves. He cursed himself for not thinking of that. But they were here now, so where to begin?
Good question.
He began to try to move books aside with his foot, and this worked okay at first but at the lower level things had turned gluey and were stuck to the floor. Some of the books looked to have nearly melted away, and there was no telling what they once had been. He saw nothing of maps or road atlases, and he asked himself how would he know any if he saw them in this wet mess?
“Would this do?” Olivia had placed her foot on a battered world globe that lay on the floor.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know.” Dave heard a note of resignation in his voice. “Even if we found maps, I don’t know what we’d be looking for. Christ…this didn’t exactly turn out like I thought it would.” He kicked some melted books aside. “Stupid, I guess.”
“Not stupid,” said Olivia. “Hopeful.”
“Yeah. Well…maybe that’s as stupid as you can get these days.”
Olivia began moving the fragments and wet skeletons of books aside with her booted foot as well. So much for the ideas and intellect of men, she thought. She uncovered some blue-bound Hardy Boys mysteries, and at that she almost teared up again. Stay strong, she told herself. Easy to say, tough to do. “I’ve known you long enough,” she said, “to know you’re the kind of man who doesn’t believe in…let’s say…miracles. But this boy has changed your mind? Dave, if this is even a real place, it could be anywhere. And why? What’s telling him to go there?”
“He’s a weird kid,” was all Dave could offer, as he continued to search through the sodden mess.
“Yes, I get that. But sometimes…you know…dreams are just dreams. I’ve had plenty of bad ones. Sure you have too.”
“Yeah,” Dave said. He looked at Olivia in the dim yellow light. “I know it’s crazy. I know being here, doing this, is crazy. But still…you know Ethan is right. JayDee does too. We can’t hang on much longer. We’re going to have to move…find some other place, if we want to stay alive.”
“You think the White Mansion is that place?”
“Hell if I know, but Panther Ridge is about done.” He took his dirty baseball cap off, wiped the small beads of sweat from his forehead and then put the cap back on. “Ethan is different, Olivia. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. But he’s helped us so far…I believe that. Call me stupid or crazy or whatever you like, but I’m here…that’s all I know.”
She had no answer for any of that. She saw the librarian’s office and the check-out counter across the room. A rack of DVD movies had fallen over and plastic cracked under her feet as she approached the counter. In all this chaos a small metal statue of a football player stood upright on the countertop, holding a little paper American flag in one fist and a football cradled in the other arm like a beloved child.
With Olivia’s next forward step, the floor beneath her suddenly sagged. There was a thick wet sound of something rotted giving way. She cried out as her right leg went through the floor. She thought she was going all the way through into the basement and she nearly let go of her rifle to grab at the tiles around her but then she stopped, just the one leg dangling down into darkness.
Dave was there at her side in an instant, helping her up. “Easy, easy,” he said. “You okay? Hurt your leg?”
“Bumped my knee pretty good. That’s about it. Watch the floor, it bites.”
“Yeah, I see.” Dave peered into the hole but could really see nothing but dark. Water dripped down there and from the basement rose an acrid, musty odor as if from a diseased garden of poison mushrooms. “Careful.”
“You too. Hey,” she said, having seen something of interest. “There’s a file cabinet behind the counter. Worth opening up.”
“Right. Come on, stay with me.”
They went around behind the check-out counter to the file cabinet, which appeared to have survived undamaged through whatever storm had raged in here. Dave opened the top drawer to find what appeared to be a couple of years’ worth of school newspapers, the Gazette. The second drawer held boxes of supplies like pencils, pens, rubber bands, gem clips and the like. The third drawer was mostly empty except for a few pads of printer paper, and the fourth and last drawer held two mousetraps.
“More drawers behind the check-out counter,” Olivia noted, and she found herself limping over there because she really had taken a hard shot to the knee. Thing’s going to swell up on me, she thought. Magnifico! Just what she needed, to have to hobble around for a few days like an old grandmother.
She opened the top drawer behind the counter and found another supply of pens, notepads, paper clips and someone’s stash of several flavors of Orbit gum. The next drawer held a thick red-and-gold yearbook The Mountaineer from the past year, a couple of old cell phones that must have been confiscated on The Day, and…nearly hidden under the yearbook was something else. She lifted The Mountaineer out and saw the cover of a highway twisting through a pine forest. It was a Rand-McNally United States Road Atlas, three years old. A dead roach had been smashed flat between The Mountaineer and McNally. “Here!” Olivia said, as she took the road atlas out. A librarian’s stern command was written across the cover in red Sharpie: Not To Leave This Room.
“Got what you need,” she told Dave, with not just a little measure of triumph.