86
After midnight, the silence that crept into the strange rooms and corridors that honeycombed Henderson House thickened until it could almost be felt on the skin. It emerged as the day’s second of three shifts checked out, replaced by the late-night crew. This much smaller assemblage consisted primarily of security staff who retreated to their stations, surrounded by monitors displaying the moving images from the building’s black, bulbous glass eyes, lost in the magical pages of the twin Ks, King and Koontz. The ubiquitous glass camera housings were almost everywhere, their output tied into motion sensors and computer analysis software that used sophisticated algorithms designed to alert the guards should something out of the ordinary occur.
One of these monitors showed a janitor working next to a trolley filled with an assortment of mops, brooms, buckets, and chemicals strong enough to kill germs by smell alone. The janitor had started the shift clad in snow-white coveralls that had now turned dingy, his rolled up left sleeve dripping brown water from the retrieval of a scrub brush lost to the depths of the mop bucket. His graying crew-cut head bobbed in a hypnotic rhythm as he swung the industrial mop slowly back and forth across the tile floor, each swing revealing the Grateful Dead tattoo that covered his right forearm.
The janitor returned the mop to its bucket and pushed the trolley around the corner into a narrow hallway that led only to the public restrooms and a large janitor’s closet. Fumbling with a heavy key ring, he unlocked the closet door, reaching inside to flip on the light. Then pulling the cart inside, he closed the door behind him.
The dimness of the lone 40-watt bulb caused him to pause momentarily to let his eyes adjust. For several seconds, the sharp shadows from the double utility sink hid the pipes beneath it. The janitor removed the thick, Coke-bottle glasses and placed them on a shelf, rubbing his eyes with his fingers. Then, without bothering to empty the mop bucket, he reached his damp left arm deep inside the murky water, extracting a plastic baggy from the bottom.
Drying the packet with a towel, he unzipped the zip-lock and removed a small cassette recorder and a tiny microphone at the end of a long, thin cord. The janitor worked quickly, inserting the plug into the microphone jack on the cassette recorder and then kneeling to lower the mike through the slits in the floor drain beneath the sinks. When it reached the bottom of the thirty-foot cord, he placed the recorder behind one of the sink pipes. Then, he slid a particularly foul smelling bucket of bleach over the drain, hiding both the microphone cord and the cassette.
Straightening once again, he rubbed the base of his back, returned the glasses to their position on his nose, and pushed the cart back into the hallway. He paused to turn off the light and lock the door behind him before once again picking up the hypnotic mopping motion that made him all but invisible to the guards and their monitors.
It had taken him six weeks of calling in every underworld IOU he had amassed over his career, as well as the bulk of his life savings to obtain the fake identity that had passed the security checks, which had allowed him to get this job. But the janitor had no doubt that the investment would prove well worth the cost.
Several times, in the deep, post-midnight silence of Henderson House, he had heard the noises percolating up from the depths of the facility, from the lower levels to which he was denied access. Sometimes it sounded like distant screams. At other times, the sounds hinted at something far more horrible. They were so strange and distant that he could have almost believed he imagined it.
But if there was one thing his ex-wives agreed upon, it was that imagination was a trait he completely lacked. As he worked the mop steadily back and forth, the thinnest of smiles tweaked the corners of Freddy Hagerman’s mouth. Imagination indeed.