The Secret Room

Shelly and Jessica find a horrifying secret in their secret place.

I spent most of the next week in a bit of a daze, I suppose you could say. My thoughts kept returning to that door I had seen at the castle Jessica had taken me out to, and I found it next to impossible to keep my mind on my school work, or even the classes while they were going on. My teachers would have to call my name three or four times before I would answer them. This seemed to concern some, while it irritated others to no end. I honestly thought I was going to be kicked out of two or three classes before the week was over. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to coach my mind to separate itself into the staying with the program part, and the drifting over the thoughts of the castle part. Thoughts of the castle were dominating my every waking moment, and I just couldn’t seem to stop it. It was as if a spell had been placed on me, and I had no idea how to undo it.

I would go home at night with more homework that needed to get done than I had been able to finish in school, and would spend most of the night working on things that should have taken me only an hour or two. Some nights, I would be up way past midnight, having done nothing all evening but eat dinner and work on homework. My parents didn’t seem to notice that anything was out of the ordinary, but I soon feared that the school personal might. I knew they wouldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong, but notes to my parents containing words like drugs and dropping grades would do little to make my folks proud of me. I had little doubt in my mind that my trips out to our secret place would not be allowed if I didn’t fix my problems, and quick.

Well, it was just one week, I told myself. I would be able to focus better in my classes once I had had a look inside that locked room, and then I could explain all this away as a passing bit of illness, or some such thing as that, something that would put everyone at ease, and make sure I didn’t end up in detention, or worse. All I had to do was see what was inside that room, and then my life could return to normal. After I got to see what was in that room, the images of that magnificent structure would stop playing themselves in my mind, day and night, and I would be able to get back to life. Well, at least as normal as it could be with such a grand secret to keep.

I kept my eyes on the clock most of the time during that week, willing the hands on its face to spin faster and faster, speeding me along to the weekend when Jessica and I would be able to go back to our secret place. We managed not to say a word about it during the entire week, not even to each other in private, although I have no idea how we managed that. I knew it was all either one of us was thinking about, and yet our conversations stuck firmly to the typical high school students’ topics. We talked of our classes. We talked about the latest movies and the music we had been listening to lately. Jessica brought up the subject of several boys she had taken some interest in, but to the best of my knowledge she never went out with any of them. I don’t know if she even dated. I know I didn’t, but I really didn’t take much interest in guys my age. Most of them seemed stupid or immature, and I was a little too young to think of going for anyone older, what with being jailbait and all that.

Friday finally rolled around, and it was all I could do to hide my excitement. I was jumpy and antsy most of the day, and had a heck of a time keeping my mind on track, more so than the rest of the week. I was amazed that none of my teachers kept me over after class, which would have ruined our plans.

Jessica and I had both asked our parents for permission to stay at the other’s house again, and of course they had agreed, both parents thinking it would be nice to have the kid out of the house for the night. Neither group cared enough about their child to check in with the other kid’s parents, so we were alright there. No one would be checking on either one of us. We’d be free to do as we pleased for several hours, and we intended to make the most of it we could.

Jessica made it to school that day, as we had agreed to leave the sleeping bags at the castle the last time we had been there, and that we would swing by a fast food place to get dinner and breakfast for the next day before heading off to the castle.

I was out in the truck shortly after the last bell of the day had rung, and Jessica joined me shortly afterwards. Guess she must have hot footed it over as well, seeing how her last class is on the opposite side of the building than the parking lot.

With an excited smile on her face, she said in a near breathless voice, “Ready for this?”

I couldn’t help but smile back at her. “I’ve been ready all week.”

“Then let’s get this party started,” she remarked, patting the worn and battered pack she had brought along with her last week when we had gone out to the castle that we both now thought of as ours. I sort of wondered what her teachers had thought of her second pack, but I guess no one had given her any trouble over it. Jessica had not always been the best of students in the first place, so she might not have been drawing as much attention to herself as I had been over the past week. Even if she had, she would have been able to talk herself out of most trouble. That was how she was, always the one to pull a fast one on you, and it seemed that she didn’t even have to try all that hard to do it. How I envied her at times.

We stopped by a Wendy’s on the way there, and picked up a few burgers, both of us wondering if they would keep as well as a McDonald’s burger had the previous week. Well, guess we would be finding out over the course of time which fast food places were most likely to give you salmonella and which ones weren’t.

It took a bit of time, but we finally made it out there. We forced our way through the iron gate much as we had the last time we had been out here. We both agreed that the next time we came out we would see about breaking the aged lock, and replacing it with a brand new one that we would have the key to. That seemed only logical to us, as it would make it easier for us to get in and out of the place, and maybe it would keep others away, not that we were really worried all that much about anyone else breaking into our secret castle. I figured if anyone had really wanted to, they would have already made it into the place by now, and it was just too dusty, too undisturbed for me to think that anyone had been here since the last owner of the place had left.

We made it into the front room, and before anything could even be said, I turned and headed off to the lab. It looked just as it had the week before. Nothing had been moved, nothing had been disturbed in the least. It was ours, and I was thrilled with it. Our own little place, that no one else knew about. Finally, something my parents couldn’t threaten to take away from me. No one could take this from me.

I moved over to the door that I had noticed last week, the door that had haunted my waking thoughts and my dreams for the entire week. It looked just as I remembered it, narrow and locked to me, locked to the entire world, but we would soon be changing that. Turning to Jessica, I asked, “Bring that crowbar?”

With a wicked grin on her face, she pulled a good sized bit of metal from her pack. “Yeah. Packed that away last Sunday so I wouldn’t forget to bring it. Ready?”

“I’ve been ready all week. Come on, let’s see what’s behind door number one.” I felt sort of silly saying such a thing, and have no idea why it popped out of my mouth, but I didn’t question it. I was too excited about finally viewing the secrets I had dreamed of all week to think about anything else.

We both fit the crowbar through the clasp of the lock, and put all our strength into getting it to come off. At first, nothing happened, and I was starting to get a little worried that between the two of us we didn’t have enough strength to break the lock. I didn’t want to let anyone else into our secret world, and I knew Jessica wouldn’t want that either. If we couldn’t get this open with just the two of us, we would have to give up on the door, leaving it locked and its secrets unknown to us forever. I couldn’t have that. I wouldn’t have that. I was getting through this door, no matter what.

I was so determined to get through that door just the two of us that when the lock finally did break, I wasn’t the least bit prepared for it, and stumbled forward into the room we had been trying to break into.

I managed to keep from falling over by pin wheeling my arms and shuffling my feet in an odd little dance. Jessica, who apparently hadn’t been so focused on our task as I had been managed to keep from falling through the door, and just walked in behind me.

The room that greeted us was bathed in such darkness that we could see nothing at all. There were no windows or openings of any sort to let in the slightest bit of light, and the light that was falling into the lab wasn’t making it even a foot into this room, the door was at such an angle that this wasn’t possible.

Jessica had packed a flashlight in her bag, and brought that out now. Turning it on, she directed its beam into the room. The beam of light cut through the dark to expose a sight that I hadn’t even dreamed of, and all I could think was thank goodness I hadn’t fallen face first against the floor when the door had flown open.

The ground beneath our feet was a metal grid that was suspended only a few feet above the dirt of the ground below the room. The metal was old and rusted, and would have hurt like heck if I had fallen against it, not to mention the horrible marks it would have left against my bare and unprotected skin. The rust was so thick in places that it looked sort of like an alien landscape, Mars perhaps. Chains littered the entirety of the room here and there, piled in the corners and snaking their way around the center of the room. They, too, were old and red with rust. Some of the chains were just simple chains, while others ended in manacles that would have been the right size for a man’s wrists to fit through, and looking about the walls of the room, that’s just what some of them had been used for once upon a time, presumably when they had been clean and new.

The bodies were old, old enough for most of the flesh to have decomposed off the bones. Many of the skeletons that were still sitting up where their owners had been chained to the wall were being held together by only the thinnest strands of tendon or what bits of a person’s anatomy that rotted the slowest. Only two or three of the near dozen bodies there had enough flesh on them to get a rough idea of what they might have looked like in life, but one would have to use a great deal of imagination to even come up with half an idea of what they might have looked like. They looked much like I’d imagine a mummy looking like, and I wondered how long they had been down here. The flesh had shriveled and dried against the bone, so I assumed it had been for some time. Those that had flesh, or a close facsimile thereof, had expressions of what I would call terror or horror. However they had come to their demise in this room, it had not been quick or pleasant for them, and a shiver ran up my spine at the thought of it.

“Wow,” breathed my companion from behind me. I turned to look at her, having forgotten for a moment that she was even there. Looking at what we had stumbled across, she whispered, “What do you think he was doing in here?” I have no idea why we had both decided that the former owner of the place had been a man, but we had, and we were just going to keep doing that until we learned otherwise. “What do you think he had all these dead bodies down here for?” Did she think that he had collected them already dead, or did she realize that those that had been held here had died here and was just avoiding the thought of what had really happened here? I couldn’t even guess.

I shook my head, not sure how to answer her question. “I’m…I’m not sure.”

She continued to pan the light around the room, and it fell upon a metal cabinet on the other side of the room, attached to the wall directly opposite the door. This was locked as well, although the lock was nothing like the one that had been on the door to this room. Perhaps our demented friend had not been so worried about anyone breaking into it, as they would have had to get through the lock on the door first. “Let’s see what’s in there, “ I said, already on the move. I walked the length of the room carefully avoiding the chains and making sure to stay as far away from the bodies as possible. Most of the time that was easy, for the majority of them had been chained to the stones on the walls of the room, but a few had been fixed to the floor, and getting around them without disturbing them was a bit difficult, seeing as how they lay directly between the door and the cabinet I was going for. Yellowed bones and loose skulls rattled against the metal grid as I walked by them. Empty eye sockets stared accusingly at me as I disturbed the sleep of those who had perished here so long ago.

We both reached the cabinet, and Jessica brought out some little pliers, how she had thought to bring those along with her on this trip was beyond me. Perhaps she wanted to be ready for anything this time. I didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell. She slipped the pliers in the clasp of the lock, and broke it with ease. The cabinet swung open with a slight squeak, and we could see that it was filled with papers, a journal of some sort, and a wooden box. We took the box out and opened it to find that it had been filled with glass slides. Each slide had a label and a rusty spot on it, a blood sample that had dried up some time ago. Were these samples from the people who had inhabited this room until their dying day? What had the owner of this place been looking for? Why had he imprisoned these people? What purpose had all this been for, and had he found what he was searching for?

“What do you supposes was going on here?” Jessica asked, directing the light back towards the rest of the room while I took out the papers and journals. I knew they had to be old, so I handled them very carefully, even though they held together unbelievably well, considering how old I thought they must be. They edges of the pages had yellowed and were tattered, but the majority of the page was intact. I wanted to find out every thing I could about this room and what had been going on here, and thought the documents that had been left in this cabinet might be the best way to find that out. There had been nothing else in the place that we had seen that would have even hinted at such insanity belonging here.

Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “I’m not sure. This sure doesn’t look like it was a grand party of any sort. Is this place starting to scare you? Do you want to go home?” Part of me wanted her to say yes, it was time for us to stop this right now and forget all about our secret place, but another part prayed she would say no. The part that wanted to stay was morbidly fascinated by what we had found. This was not a part of the real world I had ever gotten to experience, a part few got to be a part of, and I wanted to see where this had all begun, where it had all ended. I was now a spectator to some sort of insanity, and, in some dark and primal way, this thrilled me. What had happened here? What had transpired to cause this to occur? It was obvious from the lab that the person who had last lived in this place had been fascinated with science, he may have even been a genius, and the courtyard spoke of someone with a heart of wonder, so what had made him do this to his fellow man? What had driven him to this? I had to know, I just had to, and fleeing from this place wouldn’t give me the answers I needed, but I would take Jessica from this place if she asked me to. I could always come back later, without her, to search for my answers in private if I decided I had the courage to do it alone.

I was just about to ask her again if she wanted to leave, when she finally shook her head, one of her patented grins upon her face. “Are you kidding? This is better than Halloween. If this isn’t the neatest thing I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is. I want to know what was going on here, and we can’t find out if we’re not here.”

It shocked me to hear my own thoughts coming from her mouth, and all I could do was grin back at her and hand some of the papers to her. “Here. We’ll take these to the dining room, and look over them. I’m sure we’ll find out something if we read over the guy’s notes.”

Jessica stared at me in disbelief as she juggled the stack of papers I had handed her and the flashlight, trying to keep them both from falling to the metal floor. “You really think he kept notes on what went on here?”

I could only shrug. “He kept notes on what he found in the blood sample of the animals he kept out in the lab. Maybe this was all some sort of huge science experiment to him, and he wanted to keep notes to help him keep track of what he was finding. Maybe he thought of himself as the next Einstein or something like that. If he was looking for an answer to some huge secret of the universe, then he would have wanted to keep notes to prove what he had found. I’m sure we’ll find something interesting in those pages, if we just take the time to look them over.”

We took the papers to the dining room table, where Jessica took out a rag from her pack and wiped down an area free of dust where we could work. She took the loose pages while I looked through the journal. The words were difficult to read, and it took me a while to get used to the handwriting. It was English, thank goodness, but the guy’s writing was horrible, confirming my assumption that the place had once belonged to a man. Only a guy could have hand writing this bad.

The first entry in the journal dated back over thirty years, and seemed to consist mainly of equations that were too advance for me to understand with notes off to the sides that made little sense to me. If I had more knowledge in the area of biology, I might have had a chance at this, but as it was, it was mostly gibberish to me. I hadn’t gotten very far before Jessica stated a similar opinion of the papers she was looking through.

“This is just a bunch of nonsense,” she said, tossing the paper she had been holding onto the table.

She sounded so discouraged with her lack of findings, that I set the journal aside, and took up one of the papers. Looking at it I could see that there was a code number at the very top of the page, and then a lists of stats, sort of like a person’s medical chart. Picking up another paper, I saw the same thing, just with a different code at the top of the page. I went though page after page to see that they were all set up this way. I counted though the pages, and separated them out into piles, each pile of one code. After everything was put in its place, I counted eleven stacks of sheets, eleven different codes. Turning to Jessica, I asked, “How many bodies were in that room we found?”

She started counting on her fingers. “Oh, I think about eleven, maybe twelve. Why?”

I was starting to feel a bit excited now. Although I still didn’t know what had been going on in that room, I had a feeling that we were getting closer to an understanding of what it had all been about. The answer was here, somewhere, we only had to decipher it. “These papers are about those bodies. There’s eleven of them, and eleven bodies in that room. He was studying them for some reason. He was monitoring their heart rate and blood pressure and God knows what else. They were…some sort of lab rats to him. Now, we just have to figure out what he was using them for. What did he want to know about that he couldn‘t find in a biology book?”

Jessica looked at the pages before her. “Well, this is way out of my league. I don’t think I’m going to be much help here at all.” She shook her head in bewilderment, and gave me a sickly smile. She had really wanted to know what was going on here, but it was obvious that she was in way over her head.

I shook my head, and put all the piles back into one, big stack. “That’s alright. I think I’m going to go through this journal. It might tell us something. It’s going to take me a while, though.”

I was about to turn back to the journal when Jessica placed her hand on my arm. I turned back to her to see her shaking her head. “Not right now. Right now, we’re going to look about the place a bit more, and see if we can’t find the door to that courtyard.”
Looking back at the journal, I felt a bit reluctant to leave it, but I could take it with me when we left, read it on my own time. We only had a little bit of time to spend here, exploring this place, and I still wanted to find a way into that courtyard. Setting the journal aside, I said, “Sure, let’s go.”

We went up the stairs that lead to the guestrooms on the second floor, or had they been prison rooms once upon a time, and took the hallway on the left side. It lead down one side of the courtyard, teasing us with a magnificent view of the courtyard below, but what it didn’t give us was a door leading down into it. There were no rooms along the length of it, and we soon found ourselves in yet another hallway. This one had another staircase leading back down to the first floor, but we decided to save that for another time, and looked into the rooms along the corridor instead, even though we were sure none of them would lead us down to where we really wanted to go. It was decided that we would be thorough with our search of the place. No point rushing it.

By the time we were ready for bed, we had looked into a number of studies that had nothing of interest in them, and had decided that we didn’t really care about that part of the castle.

I fell asleep that night with visions of tortured bodies and screaming racing around my mind, wondering what had driven the last owner of this place to do it. What had driven him to such madness?

Author's Note

First Draft