A Door in the River by Inger Ash Wolfe

Author:Inger Ash Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781605984209
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2012-09-04T18:30:00+00:00

] 22 [

James Wingate walked into the trees. He put the phone against his ear and whispered, “You there?” and heard her faint reply from the other end:

“We’re here.”

He slipped the open phone into his pocket so she could continue to listen to his progress. Immediately he stepped into the shade, and he saw that the copse had more trees in it than appeared from the road. Three metres in, it swallowed him whole. A scrap of old deciduous forest, untouched because once a river had flowed here and people had used it and they had not cleared the land. Instead, they brought the boulders they dug up in their fields and put them here, among the trees and in the riverbed. Eventually, the river had disappeared. You could see the history of the place in it.

Apart from trees and boulders, there was nothing here, though. He walked in deeper. Behind him, he heard Thurlow’s car pulling away, and his skin horripilated. Sticks and last year’s leaves cracked and tore under his feet and he imagined that the sounds were booming out to the ears of whoever was going to find him here and, perhaps, put an end to his meddling.

There was no one here. He saw no structures at all.

Wingate stood in the midst of it and turned in a slow circle. He looked up and saw only the trunks of trees, pouring upwards into a dimming sky.

He walked to where the grove thinned out a little and followed the old riverbed. There was a concentration of larger boulders in the river there, and he stopped and studied them. There was a space behind a particularly large stone, and he clambered across a couple rocks to look. Detritus was strewn beyond, including discarded wood and some chickenwire, and in the midst of it, he made out a large plate of rusted steel sitting on what appeared to be a concrete platform of some kind. As his brain adjusted to what was important in that welter of refuse, he also saw that there was a shiny black box about two centimetres wide and ten centimetres long, on the concrete, below the plate and protected by a Plexiglas shield. A card reader.

He scrambled down and looked at it. This was what the IDs were for. You checked in at the Eagle, you showed your casino ID to Thurlow, you ran it through this reader. Then you went in. He ran the card.

It didn’t work. He tried it again. Then a male voice came from an unseen speaker. “Not working?”

“Nope.”

“First time?”

“First time,” Wingate said. “Am I supposed to run it through left to right or right to left?”

“I don’t think it matters. Are you facing it the right way?”

“Yeah.”

“Hold on.”

The voice snapped off. Then there was a deep, metallic sound, chunk, and the metal plate popped up an inch. He got his fingers in under it and pulled it open. It was a heavy door on a pair of arcing metal hinges. It drew right up and revealed a set of concrete steps going down at a slant into the darkness.

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