Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.
Adelle said, “but no, thanks. I don’t need a home away from home. I don’t want dinner, either, even if it is a steak. I’d rather eat at home. So why don’t we do something about getting out of here.”
“We’d all rather eat at home,” Mondor said morosely. “It’s my night to savor my landlady’s vegetarian cuisine. Every Friday she fixes an absolutely remarkable vegetarian meal for the two of us, and then I give her a lesson in bookkeeping. She’s a harpy of a person and an absolute dunce of a bookkeeper, but neither Heifetz, nor Perlman, nor anyone else ever played the violin half as well as she performs in the kitchen. I’ve been looking forward to that meal all day. Instead, I’m stuck with Dolan’s steaks. Heaven to hell in one move, and unless you have a miracle up your sleeve, this is where we’re going to eat.”
“Madam is waiting for me at the top of the stairs. Surely she’ll send someone—” Adelle broke off. Mondor was shaking his head forebodingly.
“Goons saw both of us hit the chutes,” he said. “Almost an hour and a half ago for Dolan and an hour ago for me. If they’d wanted us out, we’d be out. It isn’t as though we’d tumbled into an unknown pit in the middle of a jungle with no witnesses. This is just a sub-basement, and they know exactly where we are. Have a look at the setup. Go ahead. Everything in the place is in threes—three beds, three chairs, three table settings. There’s food for dinner and breakfast for three people. Whoever furnished and supplied this place expected three guests. Go ahead, have a look. Then you tell us whether we’re likely to get home for dinner.”
Adelle got to her feet and looked about her. On one side, the narrow kitchen contained an electric stove, a refrigerator, a sink, and a full complement of cupboards. The blank wall opposite, of the same gray metal she had encountered in the corridors, had four openings.
She squeezed past the table and went to investigate.
Three of the openings led into small rooms that were just deep enough to contain narrow beds. Each bed was made up with sheets, one thin blanket, and a single, miniature pillow. On the wall opposite was a row of hooks. Gray plastic curtains that slid across the openings on rods provided a smidgeon of privacy.
The last of the openings, at the far end of the kitchen, led into a room that contained a toilet and a lavatory. Its entrance was curtained like those of the bedrooms. Beyond the kitchen was a corridor identical to those she had already traveled. She turned. Dolan was getting a can of beer and one of pop from the refrigerator. “Where does this lead to?” she asked.
“More corridors,” he said.
“Alleys,” Mondor corrected sharply.
“Corridors, passageways, call them what you like,” Dolan said. “Mondor thinks we should call them alleys. We’re in the middle of a maze, a fact he and I discovered by trying to find a way out. After we’d explored a series of dead ends and nearly lost ourselves, we decided to have dinner and think the whole thing over.”
Adelle squeezed past the table again and returned to her chair. “And what have you concluded?”
“I’ve concluded that Mondor once took a college course in which mazes were mentioned. He passed it by learning to say ‘alley’ instead of ‘corridor.’ I don’t know what he’s concluded. He hasn’t been his obnoxious self since he got duped by that nonexistent computer.”
“There isn’t any way out,” Mondor said gloomily. “That’s what I’ve concluded. On the side where we landed, the alleys lead directly to this place. The only exit would be through the ceiling, which we have no way of reaching, and we probably couldn’t find the traps if we did. The other side is a labyrinth. There’s no way out there, either.”
“Don’t labyrinths have exits?” Adelle asked.
“Only when the builder wants them to,” Mondor said.
Dolan set his beer can down with a thump. “As our mathematician has already pointed out, we have three bedrooms, three chairs, three everything, with food supplied for three people. Therefore Madam and her goons intend to keep us down here at least until after breakfast tomorrow. Since they’ve already made that decision, and gone to considerable trouble and expense to implement it, Mondor thinks it unlikely that they’d absent-mindedly leave us a running escalator marked ‘Exit.’ He reached that abstruse conclusion all by himself. Aren’t we lucky he can count to three?”
“Crap on your counting!” Mondor exploded. “The moment I realized I’d been dropped into some kind of psychological hell, I knew I’d find Dolan here.”
Adelle got up, squeezed past the table again, and began opening cupboards. A large bowl was filled with foil and paper containers of the type dispensed by airlines and fast-food restaurants. There was coffee, sugar, tea bags, chocolate, powdered non-dairy creamer, salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup, steak sauce. There was a small box of dehydrated potatoes and a foil container of gravy mix—enough of each, she reflected, for about three people. There were three individually boxed servings of breakfast cereal.
In a lower cabinet, behind a roll of paper towels and a plastic container of dish washing detergent, she saw a box of sanitary napkins. Someone certainly was planning on their staying and had thought of everything.
But the scantness of the food seemed puzzling. She turned to examine the contents of the refrigerator. In the freezer compartment, she found a package of mixed vegetables and a fruit pie. Presumably the steaks had been in the meat container, which now held only a pound of bacon. The other items were a quart carton of milk, a dozen eggs, and numerous cans of beer and pop. They had adequate food for dinner and breakfast but virtually nothing for subsequent meals.
In the cabinet under the sink there was an enormous reserve of beer and soft drinks along with more kinds of alcoholic beverages than Adelle had ever seen outside a liquor store.
She entered the end bedroom, the one farthest from the toilet, and hung her coat on one of the hooks. She tossed her purse onto the bed. Then she returned to the kitchen and sat down.
She remarked, “Kevin is right. Someone planned this carefully and invested a lot of time and money on it. Why? What do they want with us?”
Dolan spoke to Mondor. “You’ve been saying there’s something loony or sinister about Z-R Publications. Did you suspect anything like this?”
“Would I have hung around if I did?”
“No,” Dolan agreed. “It was a silly question. Adelle’s was better. What do they want with us? What’s the point? In a sense, all three of us have been kidnapped. Surely they aren’t holding me for ransom. The only money I have is what’s left of the salary they’ve been paying me, and why pay it in the first place if they want it that badly?”
Mondor gestured at their surroundings. “Whoever arranged this setup had an unlimited budget. Even if the sub-basement was part of the original building, installing an automated maze with a fancy complication like that psychological testing room was a huge expense. If they had to dig the basement under another basement without disturbing the building’s foundations and supports, it cost a fortune.”
“I think the sub-basement was part of the original building,” Dolan reflected. “The excavation for it, anyway. It’d be difficult to surreptitiously put a basement under a basement, especially one this big. I mean, what do you do with the dirt? There’d be truck loads and truck loads of it. If Mondor had his pocket calculator, he’d tell us how many cubic yards they’d have to remove. Sooner or later someone would get curious about where it was coming from, and whoever is responsible for this caper certainly didn’t want to arouse anyone’s curiosity. The bartender at Barney’s says there are old rumors about secret rooms and passageways and stairways in this place, so a secret basement is no surprise, but they probably added the maze themselves. I mean—if you’re building a cage to keep kidnap victims in, you don’t hire your work force out of the Yellow Pages or use union labor.”
“The goons?” Mondor suggested.
“Why not? They’re certainly