Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ as she began to pull it open, but she never saw its interior.

      The floor dropped from under her. As she fell, she clutched wildly at the handle of the cabinet’s drawer, but her grip had been too loose. It slipped through her fingers, and for an instant she fell into nothingness. Then she landed on a steep incline of smooth metal. Her feet hit first and instantly shot out from under her, and she fell backward with a thud that stunned her. She caught a glimpse of a trap door closing over her head as she slid rapidly down the incline into darkness.

      CHAPTER 3

      Adelle tried frantically to stop herself, but her elbows banged hollowly on metal and her hands clutched at emptiness. She shot downward, flat on her back and enfolded in darkness, until she skidded to a stop on a smooth cement floor. For a few moments she lay there idiotically worrying about her new pants suit. Then she decided she was fortunate to have worn it. In a dress, she probably would have lost skin.

      Something above her head rattled and creaked. There was a faint, prolonged swish; then silence. Staring upward, she saw no crack of light to indicate where the trap had been. She got to her feet and felt about her blindly. A step forward, two steps—her hands encountered an obstacle, a smooth surface of metal that felt cold and gave off a solid whang when she thumped on it. She ran her hands along it, first sideways and then vertically. It was a wall. She turned in the opposite direction, and after four cautious steps she encountered another wall. She stood with her back against it trying to figure out what had happened.

      She knew there was no point in calling for help. Madam was two stories above her, and the fact that the lights had been out in the basement meant all of the goons were elsewhere. If one of them had been available, Madam wouldn’t have sent Adelle after the folder.

      She seated herself on the hard, cold floor, embraced her knees, and thought furiously. She had been given precise instructions for finding a folder on tires. That meant someone had put the folder in the cabinet—but no one could have done that without stepping on the trap, just as no one could remove it without stepping on the trap.

      The top drawer, at least, had seemed empty.

      “Something,” she announced to herself, “is decidedly fishy, but the problem is how to get out.”

      She cautiously got to her feet. Her first thought was to find out where she was. Since it was too dark to see anything, the Braille system was the only tool available. She turned to her right and edged forward, hands in front of her.

      A dim light flickered on. She dropped her hands with a sigh of relief, but as she looked about her, she knew instantly that Mondor’s words “loony” and “sinister” had been understatements. She was in a small room, perhaps six or seven feet square, with gray metal walls and ceiling. The tiny, recessed light at the center of the ceiling was no brighter than a night light, but she noticed at once that the ramp she arrived on had vanished. There was no opening in the walls or ceiling that she could have passed through, and that baffled her completely.

      Each wall was in three sections, with braces reinforcing the seams. There was a horizontal reinforcement about six feet from the floor. The ceiling consisted of strips of riveted sheet metal. It was a bare room with a cement floor, but there was one remarkable feature: Above Adelle’s head on three of the walls were incomplete, upside down baseball scoreboards. The inning numbers were in the bottom row instead of on top—white numerals, one through zero placed on square black protrusions about the size of her hand. Above each row of black squares was a row of bulging white squares. When the game started, she thought, the white squares would show the runs scored in each inning, but she had no idea why all three scoreboards had space for only one team.

      She abandoned the scoreboards and gave the room another puzzled scrutiny. There was no possible way she could have entered it, but here she was. She must have passed through a wall or the ceiling, but she could see no trace of an opening.

      She called out, “Hey! Anyone here?”

      Her voice echoed thunderously in the metal room.

      Suddenly one white square on each of the scoreboards—the square for the third inning—showed a brightly illuminated numeral three.

      As Adelle stood looking bewilderedly from one scoreboard to another, the lighted squares went dark, and the white squares for the sixth inning showed brightly illuminated numeral sixes. They were followed by numeral nines in the ninth inning squares. Then the threes came on again and went out; the sixes, out; the nines, out. Pause. Threes, out; sixes, out; nines, out.

      “I can do even better than that,” Adelle announced caustically. “Twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-four.”

      The pattern kept repeating: threes, out; sixes, out; nines, out.

      She walked over to one wall and looked up at the scoreboard. The numbered black squares in the lower row looked like control buttons similar to those found on many electronic devices. Adelle reached up and punched them in turn as the numerals in the upper row lighted: three, six, nine.

      The ceiling light went out. The lighted numerals faded. For a moment she stood blinking in darkness. Then, with a sustained swish, a section of wall below one of the the horizontal supports slowly sank into the floor. Beyond it was a well-lighted passageway the same width as the room, with gray metal walls and a high ceiling of translucent squares that glowed with light. It was an explosion of illumination, and Adelle had to shade her eyes as she sprang through the opening.

      She heard another sustained swish. The doorway was closing after her.

      When her eyes became adjusted to the flood of light, she looked about her. The metal walls were similar to those of the room she had just emerged from. At the foot of each wall, at regular intervals, steel brackets were bolted to the unpainted cement floor. At longer intervals, grooves on opposite sides of the corridor ran all the way to the top of the walls, and they were connected by inch-wide strips of black rubber or plastic material that crossed the cement floor from one side of the corridor to the other.

      None of this signified anything at all to her. “So where am I?” she demanded. “And why?”

      She thought she heard a subdued murmur of talk coming from somewhere. She called out, “Is anyone here?”

      A response echoed along the passageway, faint but understandable. “Is that you, Adelle?” It was Craig Dolan. She called back sarcastically, “No. It’s Dracula’s mother.”

      “You could be, at that. Come and join us.”

      She walked toward the distant end of the corridor. Before she reached it, she saw an opening on the left that led into an even longer corridor, identical to the other except for length. She called, got another response, and turned. At the end of that corridor she found yet another opening on the left; and, after a short distance, another. A dozen more steps, and she stopped to stare through an opening on her right. She was looking into a narrow kitchen where Dolan and Mondor sat at a small table. Dolan was tilting a can of beer. Mondor, who had his back to her, clutched a can of his own with both hands and leaned forward as though praying over it.

      After the long succession of identical blank walls, this was too much detail to take in with one glance. Adelle found herself speechless.

      Dolan set his can down, carefully wiped foam from his beard with a paper towel he was using for a napkin, and grinned at her. “So they suckered you, too.”

      Mondor spoke gloomily without looking around. “We figured you’d be along. Pull up a chair.” He СКАЧАТЬ