Film Hangers

"You're joking," said Voss.

He did not shout it. He said it flat and cold, in the voice of a man whose patience has run out its last inch of string, and I felt the whole room go tight around me, the brick, the bench, the damp, the hum of the lantern. Rhonda made a small noise in her throat. Behind me my mother drew breath.

I stayed on my knees on the wet floor. I kept my face turned to the door, because I did not trust it to hold still if he saw it.

"There's a line on it," I said. "A thread. Look at the frame."

"I see no thread."

"Hold the lamp lower."

He didn't move. But Rhonda, after a glance at him, bent with the red lantern and tilted it, and the light slid across the iron, and there it was: a fine bright hair running from staple to nail. She went rigid. I heard the lantern's wire handle creak in her fist.

"Oh God," she whispered.

"Fishing line," I said. "Ten pound test, maybe. It goes into the wall. If I push the door, it pulls something. I don't know what." I made myself look up. "She doesn't hang a lock like this on a door she wants opened. She hangs it because she wants a stranger to spend an hour on it."

"Why?"

"Because Grandma said children can't go in there or they'll get lost." I rose to my feet. "A place that makes you lost doesn't need a lock. The lock isn't for me. It's for people like you."

…

He looked at me for a long time.

Then, slowly, as if turning against a weight, he lifted his head and looked at the wall above the bench.

The film hangers hung along their iron bar in a ragged row, thirty or forty of them, each a little spring-loaded clip of rusted steel. They looked like nothing. They looked like the leavings of a thousand drying days, black with chemical stains, crusted in the corners with something gray. The bar that held them was as thick as my wrist and ran the whole width of the wall from corner to corner. At the right-hand end it sank directly into the brick. At the left, where it ought to have been fixed to a bracket, it was not.

It simply ended. And from the end, as a bell-pull hangs from a ceiling, there drooped a loop of old gray cord, frayed to a tuft.

I had seen it a hundred times that night without seeing it. It had hung in the corner of my eye like a smudge on a window.

"Who hangs a drying bar," I said, "with nothing on it?"

No one answered.

"Nobody's dried a picture in here for twenty years." I moved to the bench. The floor sucked at my shoes. "But the rope's clean. Look. Look at the knot. The whole room's black with dust and it's clean."

"Don't touch it," said Rhonda.

"Why not?"

"You don't know what it—"

"No," I said. "I don't."

I put up my hands.

…

The cord was cold and stiff. It had the feel of dead hair, and a faint grease clung to it, and it was damp with sweat before I had even got my fingers round it. My palms were wet. I looked at my hands in the red glow, small, white, the right one wrapped in a stained bandage. A dim thought came up: this is it. If I'm wrong, we die.

I thought of my grandmother's hands, knotted and dry, folding a map along its old creases. I thought of her standing in front of a bar of rusted clips on a Saturday afternoon, with a child tugging at her coat, and not looking up. She never looked at it, I thought. She never once looked at it. She was the only person in the shop who didn't. It is the most dangerous thing in the world, to hide a thing in plain sight; it only works if you never glance at the place.

I was not sure of anything. I was not sure it was a door, or a lever, or a bomb. I only knew two things. I knew that he was running out of patience. And I knew that if I turned and gave him nothing, in the next ten seconds, he would take the knife out of his sleeve and look at my mother.

"Pull it," said Voss. "Pull it, June. Now."

I pulled.

Nothing happened.

I leaned back. I set my heels. The cord ran through my bandage and bit, and the iron bar above me gave a thin dry groan, a long reluctant shriek of metal on stone, as of a drawer that has not been opened since the war. A shower of black dust fell on my face. I shut my eyes, and kept pulling. The groan rose to a scream. It sounded like a thing being born.

Something moved behind the wall.

…

I felt it before I saw it. A shudder went through the brick, up through the floor into my legs. The whole back of the room trembled. Then the plaster behind the bench, which I had thought was solid, cracked down the middle in a long dark line, and the line widened, and a slab of wall the width of a door swung inward on its hidden pivot, grinding, spilling grit.

A slot opened in the dark.

Cold poured out of it. Not the cold of a cellar. This was deeper and drier and older. A breath from a long way down. It smelled of wet earth and stone, and under it, so faint that it might have been a trick of the mind, the thin sweet ghost of smoke.

"There," said Voss.

It was hardly a word. It was a sigh. And for the first time that night, I heard something in his voice that I had not heard in it before. It was naked hunger. It was the sound of a man who has gone twenty years without water, and sees a spring.

"There. There it is. Found it." He laughed. It was a young man's laugh, short and breathless, and it startled me more than the dark. "Twenty-one years. Twenty-one years. And a child with a piece of string."

He took a step toward the slot. He dropped the handkerchief.

And from inside the wall, from the black throat of the passage, came a sound.

…

It was a very small sound.

It was the crunch of a pebble breaking under a heel. A soft dry grit, as of someone shifting his weight in the dark. It came again, nearer. Then a long scrape, a boot-sole dragged on stone, and then a silence so thick I could hear the blood in my ears.

Voss had stopped with one foot raised.

"There's someone down there," said Rhonda, in a thin crazy voice. "Mr. Voss. There's someone in there."

"Quiet."

"I didn't— I never— You said it was empty—"

"Quiet!"

She backed away from the slot. She backed straight into the bench, and a tray rattled and fell, and she gave a little whimper and pressed herself against the brick, her arms wrapped around her body, her eyes wide as saucers over the mask. The lantern swung wildly in her hand. The red light went crazy over the walls, over the wet black trays, over the white flash of Voss's face, turning to look. And for the space of two heartbeats, no one was looking at my mother.

She hit him.

…

I have thought about this moment for a long time.

I think what I admire most is that she did not think. She had been bound and gagged and numbed and dragged, and her right arm hung dead at her side, and she must have been so tired she could hardly stand. But she saw the opening. She was a mother, and she had spent thirteen years watching a small child for the instant when its attention strayed, and she knew an opening when it came.

She put her left shoulder into his wrist.

It was a clumsy blow. It was the blow of a woman who has never hit anything in her life. But she put her whole weight behind it, and she caught him on the inside of the forearm just as he turned, and the knife that had been sliding from his sleeve went flying out of his hand. It rang on the floor. It skittered into the drain.

Voss grunted. He staggered. And my mother cried, in a voice I'd never heard, "June! Run!"

I didn't run.

I flung myself at her. I got my arms round her waist, and she was heavy and slack and shaking, and I dragged her sideways, away from him, toward the doorway and the curtain. One step. Two. Her feet tangled with mine. Her legs, still half numb, gave way beneath her, and she sagged like a sack of flour, and I strained and heaved and could not hold.

A hand closed on her hair.

…

I saw it happen. I saw the big pale fingers wind themselves in my mother's loose hair, thick and tight as a rope, and the head jerk back, and her throat go white in the lamp. She made a sound I will never forget. Voss's face rose over her shoulder, huge and wet and quite calm.

"That," he said, "was very silly."

I let go of her.

I don't know why. I think I had one clear idea in my head, and it overrode everything else. I turned, and I seized the nearest thing on the bench, a big split plastic tub, a gallon, I guess, half full of some black sludge that had been standing there since before I was born. I got my hands under it. I swung it up with a scream, with the whole of my body, and hurled its contents at his face.

The black came out in a rope.

It wasn't liquid. It had dried, half dried, to a stinking tar, and it hit him in a great clot from the shoulder to the chest, and spattered his coat, his throat, the wall behind him. It stank of vinegar and rot and old pennies. The camera on his belly took half of it. He gave a roar of disgust and let go of my mother's hair and flung up his arms, clawing at his sleeve, his coat, wiping at his skin as if it burned.

"Run!" my mother screamed again.

And I turned, and I saw the shape of his boot.

It came out of the red like a piston. It caught me in the ribs. I felt something crack, and the room went white and then red and then upside down, and I went through the air with my arms flung out. I struck the bench. Trays burst under my back. Bottles fell, one after another, in a hail of glass.

I lay in the wreck with my cheek on the floor.

The floor was wet. It smelled of tar. I tasted blood. My ears rang, and through the ringing I heard a woman screaming, and a man's feet crossing the boards, slow, deliberate, coming back. I tried to push up. My arms wouldn't work. I turned my head on the cold slimy boards, and I saw the black slot in the wall, the secret way.

Something was coming out of it.

I smelled it first.

It rolled out of the dark ahead of whatever it belonged to, soft and thick and horribly sweet, a smell like a ripe fruit left too long in a warm room. Sugar. Rot. Something sour beneath the sugar, a sticky oily tang, as of a peel gone bad in a coat pocket. I had smelled it once before, on a stairwell, in the black, with a hand over my mouth.

Rotten orange candy.