Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.
There was indeed something peculiar about a company that lodged itself in such sumptuous surroundings, produced so little, and paid its employees with insane generosity. On the other hand, a new publisher had to expect to make a substantial outlay in order to get its first books into print, and Z-R Publications might be paying ridiculously low rent for the preposterous building it occupied. There couldn’t be much commercial demand for a place like Feinstwaller Manor.
The one totally inexplicable item was their salaries. Adelle could think of no rationalization at all for them. She would have been willing and eager to work for less. So would hundreds of others.
The afternoon passed without further incident. When the grandfather clock in the hallway struck five, Adelle finished the page she was working on, saved her material, and copied it onto a backup disk. She filed the disk, covered her computer, picked up her purse and coat, and glanced around the room to make certain she hadn’t inadvertently moved a chair out of line or committed some other trivial outrage to the pseudo-antique decor.
When she reached the stairway, she saw Goon 1 standing at the far end of the hallway. She called, “Did you want something?” For a moment she thought he was going to speak, but he turned and disappeared into a side hall.
“Oh, well—he works here, too.” she said and shrugged.
At the massive front door, she paused to put on her coat and slip her purse strap over her shoulder. She was reaching for the door knob when she heard Madam’s voice. “Darlink!”
Madam came hurrying toward her on tiptoe. “You look nice today, Darlink. Such a practical thing to wear!”
Adelle murmured her thanks for the fifth or sixth time and wondered if Madam were enthusiastic enough to imitate her. The sight of this odd little woman in a pants suit would be one to cherish.
“I need a folder, Darlink. The one on automobile tires. Would you get it for me? I know it’s after hours, but—”
“Of course,” Adelle said. “Where is it?”
“In the basement. Down the stairs, straight ahead, and there are some black filing cabinets against the far wall. It’s in number two. Second from the left.” Madam paused. “I can’t remember which drawer. Sure you don’t mind? I’ve got to have the figures ready for Add to start on next week. You’re not in a hurry?”
“Not at all. Is the folder labeled, ‘Tires’?”
“‘Tires—Europe,’” Madam said. She sighed. “It’s supposed to be. It ought to be. It’s a folder that was used for something else, so the something else is crossed out and the ‘Tires—Europe’ is on the right hand side of the tab if someone hasn’t messed it up. I’m sure it’ll be easy to find. Second black filing cabinet from the left. ‘Tires—Europe.’”
“I’ll be back in a jiffy,” Adelle promised.
She flipped the light switch and moved quickly down the basement stairs. It was an enormously deep basement, and Adelle didn’t blame Madam not wanting to negotiate the long stairway with her worn heels. The scene at the bottom, with concrete pillars and cement block partitions, looked more like a parking garage than the basement of a mansion. There was nothing else visible in the lighted area except groups of filing cabinets in various colors.
But none of them were black. “Down the stairs and straight ahead” lay beyond the lighted area, and the dimness in that remote part of the enormous room was punctuated only by a single high, small window.
Adelle had been downstairs several times on errands but never to that part of the basement. She paused and looked about her. A metal pipe descended a concrete column and terminated in a box with two switches. The first turned off the lights behind her. She turned them on again and tried the second switch. Lights came on ahead of her, illuminating the basement to its far wall, and against it she saw the row of black four-drawer cabinets.
She walked forward confidently. “Second from the left,” Madam had said. A folder with something crossed out and “Tires—Europe” on the right. If the drawers were full, finding one folder might take time.
They weren’t full. The top drawer of the second cabinet felt empty as she began to pull it open, but she never saw its interior.
The floor dropped from under her. As she fell, she clutched wildly at the handle of the cabinet’s drawer, but her grip had been too loose. It slipped through her fingers, and for an instant she fell into nothingness. Then she landed on a steep incline of smooth metal. Her feet hit first and instantly shot out from under her, and she fell backward with a thud that stunned her. She caught a glimpse of a trap door closing over her head as she slid rapidly down the incline into darkness.
CHAPTER 3
Adelle tried frantically to stop herself, but her elbows banged hollowly on metal and her hands clutched at emptiness. She shot downward, flat on her back and enfolded in darkness, until she skidded to a stop on a smooth cement floor. For a few moments she lay there idiotically worrying about her new pants suit. Then she decided she was fortunate to have worn it. In a dress, she probably would have lost skin.
Something above her head rattled and creaked. There was a faint, prolonged swish; then silence. Staring upward, she saw no crack of light to indicate where the trap had been. She got to her feet and felt about her blindly. A step forward, two steps—her hands encountered an obstacle, a smooth surface of metal that felt cold and gave off a solid whang when she thumped on it. She ran her hands along it, first sideways and then vertically. It was a wall. She turned in the opposite direction, and after four cautious steps she encountered another wall. She stood with her back against it trying to figure out what had happened.
She knew there was no point in calling for help. Madam was two stories above her, and the fact that the lights had been out in the basement meant all of the goons were elsewhere. If one of them had been available, Madam wouldn’t have sent Adelle after the folder.
She seated herself on the hard, cold floor, embraced her knees, and thought furiously. She had been given precise instructions for finding a folder on tires. That meant someone had put the folder in the cabinet—but no one could have done that without stepping on the trap, just as no one could remove it without stepping on the trap.
The top drawer, at least, had seemed empty.
“Something,” she announced to herself, “is decidedly fishy, but the problem is how to get out.”
She cautiously got to her feet. Her first thought was to find out where she was. Since it was too dark to see anything, the Braille system was the only tool available. She turned to her right and edged forward, hands in front of her.
A dim light flickered on. She dropped her hands with a sigh of relief, but as she looked about her, she knew instantly that Mondor’s words “loony” and “sinister” had been understatements. She was in a small room, perhaps six or seven feet square, with gray metal walls and ceiling. The tiny, recessed light at the center of the ceiling was no brighter than a night light, but she noticed at once that the ramp she arrived on had vanished. There was no opening in the walls or ceiling that she could have passed through, and that baffled her completely.
Each wall was in three sections, with braces reinforcing the seams. There was a horizontal reinforcement about six feet from the floor. The ceiling consisted of strips of riveted sheet metal. It was a bare room with a cement floor, but there was one remarkable feature: Above Adelle’s head on three of the walls were incomplete, upside down baseball scoreboards. The inning numbers were in the bottom row instead of on top—white numerals, one through zero placed on square black protrusions about the size of her hand. Above each row of black squares was a row of bulging white squares. When the game started, she thought, the white squares would show the runs scored in each inning, but she had no idea why all three scoreboards had space for only one team.
She abandoned the scoreboards and gave the room another puzzled scrutiny. There was no possible way she could have entered it, but here she was. She must have passed through a wall or the ceiling, but she could see no trace of an opening.
She