The basement hatch waits open as Maz and Eli walk out of the staff room.
Meg waves her phone from the top of the stone steps.
“Welcome back to the crypt.” The cold sharpness of her voice struggles to soften despite the warm smile she paints on. As she turns to Ron standing behind the till, a “…k…” from her previous greeting echoes up from below, chased by “-k-pt…kpt-” in a loop as if mimicking a clattering skeleton.
The hollow percussion of consonants dies, fading into the basement while Maz swaps her nod for a stare at the floor.
“Oh, what a joy, missed you, you moody lot.” Meg jumps up from the step onto the floorboards and jogs to the counter. She slows her pace to a creeping strut and begins to sweep her hand along the surface, reaching the clipboard, pushing it ahead, and sliding it towards Maz.
Maz takes it with a loose grip without looking at her.
Meg turns to Eli.
“Ah.” She kicks a lidless cardboard box on the floor, sending it scooting his way.
With a huff and half an eye roll, Eli crouches to pick it up. He tucks the box, full of strips of blank labels, under his arm and heads for the basement.
For more weird stuff or decades’ worth of tax records?
Maz lets him pull ahead, eyes fixed on his nape, before her steps hurry to catch up, only to slow down once she closes the gap.
Meg’s boots thump behind them.
“Mind the step and the mould.” The light of her phone torch bobs from the handrail nobody holds to the wall all three of them stay clear of.
“Oh, and of course, don’t forget the ghosts of filing systems past.”
She pulls the hatch shut above their heads.
“I should’ve left it open all morning. This stink is a stubborn one.” Her voice rings out louder with every descending step.
Maz shakes her head, looking up at the ceiling bulb and its yellow glow of defeat.
As enthusiastic as an exhausted firefly, isn’t it? How certain are you that it hasn’t always been swinging?
They arrive at the bottom and fan out. Meg makes a sharp U-turn, propping her phone within a crease on top of the tower of boxes beside the staircase. Maz heads towards the metal shelves near the back wall. Eli ends up next to a mountain of crates by a desk facing Maz.
A low and dry chitter comes from a desk by the side of the stairs. Meg follows the noise and pokes at a box, revealing large spiders beside it that stay motionless.
“Well now, I might just promote these guys to staff.”
Maz shakes her head and continues along the shelves as a stinging chill begins to drift in from the rear wall. She looks up to see nothing but more stonework a short stretch ahead.
She takes one step closer to it. The cold air narrows to a strip that runs from the floor to above her head, as if it understands its own limits. She stands with one foot inside the chill, one foot out.
It’s surely not ‘the rest of the basement’s eerie stone’ kind of cold. How come it’s different here?
“Feel that?” She glances at Eli.
He looks up from a box.
“Feel what?”
She stretches her arm out and reaches back towards him. The air between them remains unchanged as she catches his sleeve to pull him forward.
His arm brushes hers as he steps through the same strip.
“Right. That.” He looks at the cracks in the wall, then around.
“Vent?” As unconvinced as his voice may sound, his hand covers hers anyway.
Meg strides straight through the same patch, a folder in her grip, her torch pointed at the shelves.
“What vent?” She goes past the strip and slides the folder into a row.
“Tell me you found a secret air-con. A damp armpit would smell better than this place.”
Eli watches her as she turns away before he meets Maz’s gaze, his eyebrows rising.
She didn’t feel that?
Maz draws her lips inward over her teeth as if biting off a word.
She didn’t even. Or she’s pretending not to?
After Meg strolls towards the desks by the stairs, Eli steps closer to the wall. His fingers follow the strip of cold through the air until he meets the stone and pushes against it.
Right. The basement doesn’t have a secret room, then. Shame, but what would make this part colder? Something on the other side? I’ll just file it under… ‘interesting architectural whatnot’ and move on. Yeah, right.
Maz watches him watching the wall.
You’re almost sure that it’s not a breeze. Though, if there’s an opening, he’ll notice it.
Eli begins tapping on the bricks, and the narrow cold fades into the basement’s general clammy chill.
“Did I accidentally find the mystery vent’s button?” Neither of them delivers the laugh his words expect.
A box tumbles to the floor behind them. Both their heads snap towards the source of the thud.
Meg stands beside a desk, with one box from the top of a tall pile lying on its side in front of her.
“Collateral damage, right?”
Maz looks at Eli.
“We’ll… Let’s just get this over with.”
Eli nods, and they both move away. He takes a side route to return to the desks, and after a brief scuttle but before he can turn, his knee hits something sturdy. The unexpected impact forces him to twist sideways and face the back wall again as a whispered ‘ouch’ escapes him. He leans forward, head dipped, slapping the stone in an attempt to keep from falling into whatever he has bumped.
A bone-grey enamel sink, bolted straight into the stone at his knee level, reflects his stare.
“Congrats.” He straightens.
“We’ve unlocked the basement level sink boss.”
“That makes it official.” Meg brings the torch closer to herself and swings it upwards to point at the bat wing tattoo beneath her jaw. Her laughter breaks free, the light making her eyes turn into a pair of dark sockets filled with shadows.
“We’re in a horror game.” She carries on laughing as she shines the torch at a desk ahead of her.
From above, Ron’s muffled voice seeps through, followed by the neat clicks of his footsteps overhead. The hatch creaks twice as it opens and closes. The scrape of his shoes on the stone approaches.
“Thought you’d probably need something warm before you staged a walkout.” He comes down carrying a tray of mugs in both hands.
“How are we getting on?”
Maz tips her chin at the sink.
Ron places the tray on the least dusty desk and plods with wary steps towards the sink. He leans over the tap, his brows furrowing as he examines its coating of something smoother and whiter than a limescale crust.
“So you’re telling me that you could have made your own coffee?” He turns the tap on.
It judders with a whine, eager to screech deep in everyone’s ears. The tap spits out red, blue, and green splotches before it begins to stream. The liquid flows into the sink, carrying all the colours of a rainbow, running in distinct stripes for each shade, smelling of what could be rust or rot. He twists it shut at once.
“That’s not supposed to be here.” He returns to the tray.
“No, I mean, don’t touch that. It’s… misbehaving. Just like the shop’s bell.”
Meg picks up a mug and blows the steam off its surface.
“Ha, a pinch of misbehaving shouldn’t hurt, right?” Her grip on the ceramic handle keeps tightening until her thumb on it squeaks.
Ron shoots her a look that wrinkles his forehead before he hands a mug to Eli, then one to Maz.
Maz takes a sip.
‘Not supposed to be’? Nope. Stop it. Like Ron ever said anything straight. Don’t think about the sink.
Eli places his mug down on the desk in front of him.
What makes the tap upstairs different from this, then?
Maz puts her coffee next to Eli’s and turns to a crate. A shadow wanders on the wall behind it, bearing no relation to how any shadow of a person should move at all. It slides side to side across the stone, its tall, warping band thinking about having a shape.
“Eli,” she whispers.
He follows her stare, and the shadow stretches, taking a form that resembles a doorway.
That… What? That’s not… The light didn’t move. Nobody’s moving anything either.
Meg swings the torch. The beam fractures the shape into three figures. Maz’s silhouette stands in the middle, flanked by those cast by the stacks of boxes and the stair’s edge. All logical and expected.
“Relax, weirdos.” Meg shakes her torch at the wall.
“You’ve both picked this moment to become jumpier than the basement’s leggy lurkers.”
Eli’s eyes follow the phone light.
“Something was moving there, though.”
“Only thing moving down here willy-nilly is you two, and possibly the mould.”
“Come on, you can’t have not seen–”
“Ah, ah, ah. That’s enough of that.”
Meg returns her phone to the fold mark on the box so the torch keeps its aim on the wall. Her hand reaches behind her, towards the corner of her notebook peeking out of her back pocket, and stays hovering over it.
As Ron heads for the stairs, he lifts the hand he used on the tap to his nose, but a quick sniff rushes him to drop it and wipe it on his apron. He glances at Meg and makes his way up to the shop floor.
Eli retrieves his untouched coffee and turns to the sink. He tips the coffee down it. The more he pours, the less the pipes cooperate, as the drain lets the muddy brown drink build up until it hides the drain from view.
The gathered coffee begins to change colour. A strip of red reveals itself right in the centre of the sink puddle before the slices of blue and green join in. The colours split into stripes of different shades until the whole thing has the full range of a rainbow. The liquid inside swirls. It carries on whirling faster and faster, then in the other direction, and at last goes down the drain. An echo of a drop travels back up, as if the last drip has fallen onto a sharper stone underneath.
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