Hidden Passages
HIDDEN PASSAGES: A Short Story by Eric Bishop
Kit, Cory, and Morgan had known each other since kindergarten, so they knew when something was bothering one of them. Cory had been staring at the same page of his book for three days now, and that wasn’t right, even for quirky Cory.
It was just an old, green cloth-bound book, so old that the lettering along the spine was almost completely worn away. He had checked it out of the school library a week ago, and he had spent every free moment since then looking through it.
“Cory,” Morgan whispered urgently to him, “you’re going to get into trouble, put it away already.” She sat next to him in geography class and could see him staring at it in his lap. He gave her a dirty look, but he slid it back into his backpack that was sitting under his feet before Mrs. Perkins could turn around.
They all shared the same lunch period, and both Kit and Morgan had had enough of Cory’s strange obsession and planned to speak to him about it at lunch. As they all sat down together, Morgan grabbed the book that Cory had just placed on the table and put it in her purse.
“Hey, give that back,” Cory demanded. “I think I figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” asked Kit as she shook her milk carton.
“The hidden message,” Cory answered back, shoveling a large forkful of meatloaf into his mouth.
The girls just looked at each other and shook their heads. This was typical Cory behavior. He always had to be poked and prodded before he would get to the point. They just stopped eating and sat staring intensely at him until he noticed. This was a tactic that they figured out years ago.
“Okay, okay, jeez,” he responded after finally noticing. “Okay, so, I checked out this old book on birds from the school library to do my book report on Blue Jays for Mrs. Robinson.”
Mrs. Robinson was the meanest English teacher in their junior high school, and her assignments were always really hard. The last essay of the semester was always the toughest because it had to be at least twenty pages long. Only Cory had her this year, but both of the girls had her last year, so they understood what Cory was going through.
“So, I am looking through it for any good pictures and info and stuff, and the entire section on Blue Jays had these weird ass markings. Look,” he showed them after grabbing the book back from Morgan’s purse. “See, only part of some of the words are underlined, and then there are these strange wiggly symbols drawn up and down the margins. Why underline only part of the words? That doesn’t make any sense. And the symbols are also weird. I asked my father about them, and he said that they kind of looked like Freemason symbols.”
“What are Freemasons?” Morgan suddenly asked.
“I think they were like the Founding Fathers, maybe. You know, a bunch of really old guys who wore white wigs and funny clothes or something. So, anyway, why are they in a book about birds? And why the underlined words?”
“So?” both of the girls asked at the same time.
“So, the underlined words are part of a code. Just like in those spy movies.” He finally answered them just as they all finished their lunch.
The girls quickly looked at each other again, but then Cory started explaining how the code worked.
“So look,” he started as they all hovered over the large book, “see how the ‘sta’ in stable and the ‘rt’ in part are underlined a few words later. Put them together and what do you have?”
“Start,” the girls answered in unison.
“Yep. And if you keep going, you find out that a whole secret message is hidden in this chapter.”
“So what does the message say?” they both asked at once.
“Hold on, I have the whole thing written down in my notebook,” he answered as he reached into his back pocket for it. Just then, the end of lunch bell rang. They only had five minutes to get to their next classes. “Crap, I’ll tell you guys during fifth period.”
They had a library class for their fifth period. It was a fun, free elective that they all had together that year. It was something that their junior high school offered to any student who had already registered for all the required classes.
They could have taken a swimming class, a soccer class, a fun cooking class, a film class where you watched old films or even a class where you just played board games. The last class was about learning strategy, but most of the kids took it since there was no homework, and it was fun. However, the trio decided to take the library class instead because they all loved to read.
Their junior high school was progressive in that way, despite its advanced age.
Rosa Parks Jr. High School was located on the north side of Patterson. In fact, its former name was simply Patterson Jr. High School nearly fifty years ago, when it was first converted from the old main high school that was there before the new one was built closer to downtown.
The high school was built in 1920, not long after the First World War, in order to bring higher education to the area. Previously, parents had to either hire a private tutor or send their children across the state in order to give their children an education.
The high school was built in the classical Greco-Roman style that was popular at that time. Columns, pillars and other classical features still adorn many entrances, hallways and classrooms to this day. But only the main building remained out of the half dozen originally built.
The library, like most of the school, had not been refurbished other than a new coat of paint and a refinishing of the wood every ten years or so. The varnish on the library’s original tables was nearly an inch thick, and the few initials carved into some of them were almost unreadable under the thick, time-darkened coating.
“I found out more about the book from Mr. Potter the other day,” Cory started whispering to them as soon as they sat down for attendance. “He said that it was the oldest book in the library, going all the way back to the 1970s, but that the information in it was still correct, so they never replaced it. Besides, he said, it was a special book to the old librarian when he was a student here, and he wanted to keep it for as long as possible for sentimental reasons. He also said that he vaguely remembered rumors involving some missing students and the book, but he couldn’t remember any of the details.”
They waited for Mr. Potter to finish the roll call, then the girls demanded that Cory read them the secret message. The suspense was killing them.
“Okay, okay. It says, ‘Start at the Northwest corner of the observatory and head due North for exactly three hundred meters until you reach a big oak tree at the edge of Copper Woods. Then head due west for another one hundred and fifty meters and you will arrive at your destination.’”
“Observatory, what observatory? And what destination?” Kit asked in confusion.
“That’s all it said. I’ve never heard of an observatory ever being in Patterson,” Cory answered her.
Mr. Potter just happened to be picking up books left on the tables around them and overheard this last statement.
“Oh, the school used to have its own small observatory way back when it was still a high school for night classes. They tore it down a long time ago, though,” he suddenly chimed in.
“Do you know where it was located, Mr. Potter?” Morgan asked him.
“No, but they used to keep the plans for those old buildings at the firehouse. Maybe they still have them there,” he answered.
“Thanks, Mr. Potter,” they all quietly called out. He just waved his hand weakly at his side as he returned to his desk with a handful of books.
After school, they all rode their bikes over to the fire station, where Morgan’s father had been the Fire Chief for the last ten years. He was in his office when they arrived.
“Hey, kids, what’s up?” the Chief asked.
“Papa, Mr. Potter said that you might have a diagram of the old junior high school way back when it was still the high school,” Morgan said to her father.
He thought about it for a second. “Yes, actually, there used to be a framed drawing of it hanging on the wall. Hold on a second,” he answered as he got up and searched his large closet. They heard him moving things around for a few minutes, then… “Here it is, found it.”
He came out with an ancient, yellow, faded, two-foot-by-two-foot framed drawing of the old high school campus. It showed the main building and the now-gone six small outer buildings that formed an arch around the sides and back, with two buildings per side. There was a theater/lyceum, a music/concert hall, a gymnasium, an arboretum, a trades building and finally the small observatory that they were looking for.
Cory took out the wax paper he was using for his report, placed a sheet over the drawing, and traced out all the details on it, including the measurements of the buildings and the distances between them.
“You know, kids, they used to have a copy like this of every single public building in town, along with drawings of their interiors just in case a major fire broke out and we had to know where everything was,” the Chief started to lecture them as Cory made his tracing. “Back in those old days, sometimes they had to dynamite a bunch of buildings in order to stop an out-of-control fire…”
“Thanks, Papa. We have to go now, love you,” Morgan interrupted, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek as they started back to the school.
“Oh, okay now, bye, kids,” the Chief answered, sounding a bit disappointed. The Chief liked to talk a lot and would have kept telling about the history of firefighting for at least another twenty minutes nonstop if they let him.
They stopped by Kit’s house and grabbed a tape measure from her garage. It wasn’t going to be long enough, but they could always just mark spots and remeasure over and over until they got the correct distance.
They rode back to school, took out the etching and started measuring where the observatory had been long ago. Cory had borrowed a small, foldable shovel from Kit when they were at her house and was planning to dig into the soil to check if they were at the correct corner of the observatory by finding its old foundation. Unfortunately, the area had been paved over a long time ago and was now just a corner of the parking lot.
They marked the spot where they thought it was located with an old can of black paint that was almost empty and left over from when Kit’s father repainted the bottom of his old grill. Then they started over and remeasured the distance again just to be sure. They ended up less than a foot apart, and they were satisfied enough with the measurement to move on.
They then started measuring the path from the observatory to the secret destination. It took almost twice as long since many more total measurements had to be taken. The tape measure was short compared to the long distance described in the mysterious message.
Eventually, they came to the stump of a long-dead oak tree. It looked like it had ripped about two or three feet from the ground. It must have died and been blown down by a very strong storm decades ago. Even the remains were worn down or eaten away, with one entire side level with the ground.
The next part was going to be much harder, since the direction indicated led them deep into Copper Woods, which was public land. However, the city had never had any money to maintain it, so it had reverted to a wild forest. Almost a hundred years ago, the area was a public park, and an amusement park was located on the far side, just off the lake.
The kids found some old, dead thick branches and started to slowly hack at the thick underbrush and vines that ran between the trees. Almost half an hour later, they reached a small open clearing and, in the middle of it, to their surprise, found a small cabin that was still nearly intact despite a huge gaping hole in the roof.
Two short, rusty chains hung above the door, and remnants of a small wooden sign lay directly below them. The door had long ago fallen back onto the cabin floor with small fragments still hanging onto the frozen hinges.
“What do you think it was?” Kit asked the others as they slowly crossed the porch.
“I don’t know,” answered Morgan. “It could have been like a ranger station or maybe a rest station for that old park that used to be here. It kind of looks like one of those buildings on the State nature trail with those small rectangular windows near the ceiling.”
“Oh yeah…” Kit started to reply when Cory suddenly cried out.
“Hey, look, guys, a hidden staircase,” he cried out, pointing to a large hole in the floor where an old metal stove had fallen through a long time ago. The black pipe that ran through the ceiling was mostly intact, but the stove itself had tumbled down the now-revealed stone steps, with its broken-off small steel door just barely in sight, a half-dozen steps down.
“Look, guys,” Morgan said as they all slowly approached the hole, testing the floor as they walked across it. “It’s the same markings as in the book.”
Just in front of where the stove had sat, a row of strange, tiny symbols was etched into the floor. And an arched groove was dug into the floor just behind that.
“I get it now,” said Cory. “The symbols marked where the secret entrance was located. It looks like you just swung the stove against the wall to reveal the stairs. How cool! Come on, guys.”
Cory was already going down the stone staircase before the girls could object.
“But how are we going to see…” Kit started to ask, but Cory had already taken out three flashlights and was handing two of them to the girls while he had the third tucked under his arm. They weren’t really surprised.
One of Cory’s funny quirks was talking about what to do if some imaginary disaster happened. He had exit and survival strategies already worked out, no matter what the disaster was, from massive floods to meteors falling out of the sky or even a world-ending zombie apocalypse. After handing the flashlights off to the girls, he switched his on.
“Come on, guys! What are you waiting for?” Cory called out behind him.
They went down the staircase and around the old, rusted-out carcass of the stove that was wedged in the corner as the stairs turned left less than a dozen steps down. There were only about ten more steps to go, and they then entered a cobweb-filled, stone-walled corridor like you would find in an ancient Egyptian pyramid.
They used the flashlights to break through the webbing, which was old and had mostly turned to a fine powder as soon as they touched it. The spiders that had made them died off a long time ago. It was really stuffy down there, but they pressed on despite it being hard to breathe in the stale air. Way up ahead, they could just barely make out a small pinprick of yellow light.
After almost a quarter mile, they finally reached the large cavern from which the light was coming. They were standing in what looked to them like the biggest concrete sewer pipe that they had ever seen. It wasn’t a sewer pipe but something much more important a long time ago.
They felt really tiny standing inside it with the ceiling nearly fifty feet above them. They could see almost three feet of concrete that someone had drilled through to make two drainage holes in the ceiling. At one time, this place was built like a bunker, but now it mainly looked empty.
Despite it not being a sewer right in the middle, there was a small three-inch canal of water that ran from one end of the huge tube to the other, disappearing at both ends into the walls.
As they swung their flashlights back and forth, they discovered that the strange place wasn’t as empty as they had first thought.
“Hey, look,” Cory called out after shining his flashlight back up at the openings way up above them. “I think those are the storm drain covers that are sitting right where the school buses park in the back parking lot. Look, you can see the same weird design that they have.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right, Cory,” Kit answered. “I think we just backtracked most of the way back to the school. What is this place?”
“Hey, look, guys, old school stuff.” Morgan had found a huge area that contained a ton of old desks, a dozen blackboards, dozens and dozens of chairs and even half a dozen four-by-eight-foot black topped lab stations that still had a couple rusty metal sinks in the middle on each side and a dozen green, tarnished brass gas nozzles sticking up from underneath.
“This must have been like a storage area, maybe back in the day,” Morgan guessed. “But why is it so huge and weird?”
There wasn’t much else to see down there, and just to one side of a huge pile of old lockers that were strewn every which way, they saw a long-dead emergency exit sign that was mostly faded away like everything else here.
Cory had just opened the rusty door under the exit sign when Kit tripped on an old, frayed electric cable that was running out from under the lockers. This pulled one, knocking it over, spilling it open, and three skeletons fell out, breaking into pieces all over Kit.
She let out the most bloodcurdling scream either Morgan or Cory had ever heard in their short lives. They both almost crapped their pants.
They both quickly ran over to Kit and dragged her up to her feet by her armpits and started pulling her through the exit door with them. She rapidly got her footing and started running blindly ahead so fast that they began to lose her in their shaky flashlight beams.
They heard an audible metallic crunch up ahead and a loud, “Shit, Goddammit!”
Kit had run right into the side of a large aluminum chamber with extremely thin walls. You could see the indent from where the back of her head struck it, and when they caught up, she was rubbing it while checking for any bleeding.
If she hadn’t been looking back to see where her friends were, she would have broken her nose. As it was, she received a nice big lump on the back of her head.
“Are you okay?” Morgan asked her when they finally caught up to her, out of breath.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she answered slowly as she stopped examining her head and started to examine the large obstruction directly in front of them, blocking their path out of there. “How are we going to get out now? I am not going back there,” she said, pointing back down the corridor where they had just come.
“I don’t…” Morgan started to answer when she noticed something off to the side of the large aluminum air chamber. “Look, I think this is a maintenance corridor or something. Look at the wiring on the ceiling and the empty light sockets every twenty feet or so. I think this is the way out. Come on, guys.”
Morgan led them through a long, twisty maze down a thin corridor just barely wide enough for them to walk through without turning sideways. Their hips were just scraping against the ductwork as they slowly made their way through it. It was claustrophobic and stuffy, and it was getting hotter and hotter the farther that they went.
They were covered in sweat and dust by the time they reached the end of the ductwork maze and ended up in a small, strange storage room/broom closet at the bottom of a short flight of stairs.
They ran up the stairs and through the door, finding themselves at one of the side entrances to the school. They shoved through the side doors, slamming their bodies against the pushbar and running a few dozen feet, then they all collapsed on the lawn there.
A few minutes later, a police car arrived and suddenly lit up as a voice over the intercom commanded them not to move. A couple of police officers exited the car, hands on their guns, but after seeing that it was just a bunch of kids, they relaxed and walked over to them.
“Jesus, what happened to you kids?” Deputy Rodriguez asked them when she approached and saw the filthy condition that they were all in. She instructed her partner to call for an ambulance and get the emergency kit from the trunk, which had bottles of water in it. She wrapped them all in blankets as they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
It took them a while after they got to the hospital and were cleaned up and examined to begin to make any sense at all. They were still in a state of shock, and all of them were having a hard time explaining everything due to their excitement and exhaustion.
Eventually, they got enough of their story out for the local police to start an investigation. After a couple of hours, and once they were fed, they were released to their parents and were all fast asleep long before they reached home.
It was nearly two weeks later and a full week into summer vacation when they were all called down to the police station one Saturday morning with their parents.
They were all invited into the Chief’s office, which had a dozen chairs placed in it just for them.
“Please sit down, everyone and make yourselves comfortable. Can I get anyone coffee, tea or a soda, maybe?” he asked before sitting down behind his large desk. “No? Okay, so let’s get this started then. It appears that you three have managed to solve an open missing persons case that stumped detectives and the FBI fifty years ago when it first occurred. We have examined the book that you gave us and examined the crime scene, and we think we have figured it out.”
“Fifty years ago, there was a defense and building contractor who lived in town named Kagan Parks, whose young daughter attended the old high school. Mr. Parks was contracted not only to build the new high school but also to tear down the buildings around the old one and to seal up the nuclear bomb shelter that had been built nearly thirty years earlier and was deemed too expensive to maintain at the time.
“It was a very good year for Mr. Parks and his daughter despite his wife leaving him for another man earlier that year. According to his old diary, which we found at the crime scene, he felt that his life was finally starting to turn around, despite his recent personal setbacks.
“But less than three weeks into this new contract, Kagan came home early one day, and he overheard his daughter Peggy, her boyfriend Cliff and her best friend Marsha planning on all running away together since Peggy was pregnant with Cliff’s baby and Peggy didn’t want her quick-tempered and violent father anywhere near her baby.
“When he heard this, he completely mentally snapped, got his shotgun from his garage and shot them all dead right there on the spot. He then drove their bodies out to the old bomb shelter and hid their bodies among the school equipment, and mostly sealed up the main entrance by blocking it with ductwork from the outer buildings. He left the emergency exit unsealed, just in case he had to move the bodies, because he was too fat to make it through the very narrow passage that you kids went through. However, he hid the exit in a new rest stop building in old Copper Park.
“He then reported his daughter missing to the police, and within a week, all three were on missing person posters distributed throughout the state. Since Peggy had mentioned her plans to several of her other friends, the police soon assumed that the three had just run off together as planned, and within a month, they unofficially closed the case.
“But Mr. Parks started to feel guilty about what he had done, so that same month, he donated that bird book with the clues in it to the school, along with a large collection of brand new books for the school’s library on the condition that the librarian at the time would never throw it out. She kept her promise, but it was still a minor miracle that it was still there and that you kids managed to find the clues.
“So, in appreciation for helping us solve this case, I am authorized by the mayor to give each of you these medals of heroism, these three small keys to the city that you can wear around your necks and five hundred dollars in gift certificates to spend at various places around town. We are also going to place a large brass plaque in the lobby display case telling all about your heroic deeds.”
The sheriff then got up and presented each of them with their rewards, shook hands with each of them, and congratulated them all individually. The three friends were grinning from ear to ear during all of this, and their parents couldn’t have looked prouder.
After the meeting and short ceremony, a reporter in the corridor, from the local newspaper, took down their names and then took their picture with the police chief while they held up their medals in front of them.
For a few weeks, they were all local heroes and celebrities, and they received several free fast food meals and ice cream cones from the local ice cream shop that summer.
It was the adventure of a lifetime that they all remembered for a very, very long time.
******
Eric Bishop is an Army Field Artillery veteran who spent over twenty years working in dozens of different fields, including shipping, military armor manufacturing, heat treatment, and semiconductor manufacturing. It was at a community college, on his journey to earning his first degree in his late forties, that Eric discovered a hidden talent for writing and storytelling. He has been writing a couple of short stories a week for the last fifteen years and plans to continue writing them until he dies.
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