small spot on the steam covered mirror, he combed his hair and slipped into his boxers, hustling out of the bathroom and into his bedroom.
Harry was waiting downstairs for him to change. After allowing Scott to sleep until close to ten, he had brought him home so that he could change his clothes and freshen up. His body still resonated with a dull ache from the exposure to the cold the night before, the throbbing in his head slowly subsiding. The shower had definitely helped; the hot water soaking through his tender flesh had been nothing short of divine. He knew how lucky he was that he hadn’t been frostbitten, but he felt far more fortunate than that as the image of his old buddy Brian being ripped to shreds right in front of his eyes had burned a permanent scar into his mind, rising up constantly. His brain choked back the image, but it was never very far off, appearing from out of nowhere every time he closed his eyes long enough to blink.
Grabbing a button down shirt and a tie from where they hung in the closet, he slipped right into the shirt, dangling the tie around his neck. Producing a pair if slacks from another hanger, he hopped into them, tucking in the shirt before buttoning them up. He tied the hanging tie, knotting it loosely beneath his chin. Walking over to the dresser, he pulled out a balled pair of socks and pulled them up to his calves, shuffling along the plushly carpeted floor to the closet and slipping into a nice pair of black leather shoes. Running his hands through his hair, he opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall.
He could see Harry sitting down in the living room at the bottom of the stairs, straight ahead. One of Scott’s large, rolled blueprints from atop his drafting table in the corner of the living room was spread out across his lap, and he was staring down at it quite intently, his eyes squinted as he tried to discern the thin contrast of the powder blue paper. He looked up briefly as Scott bounded down the stairs, before returning his attention back to the page.
“Well?” Scott said, grabbing his coat from the closet in the entryway.
“Just a minute,” Harry mumbled, his brow furrowing. He traced a line on the paper with his right index finger.
“What are you looking at?”
He walked into the living room and looked over Harry’s shoulder at the slightly crumpled blueprint.
“Does this show all of the tunnels beneath this area?” Harry asked.
“That’s just the location of the old mines around here. We have to be careful where we build or any one of these houses could just fall straight into the ground,” Scott said, pointing down at the plan. “You see, all of these mines have been collapsed and refilled—”
“All of them?”
“Everything that you see on this map.”
“So there could be others that aren’t on this map, or tunnels leading from one to the next.”
“Sure, this map has to be close to as old as I am.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt. Go ahead and say what you were going to.”
“All I was really going to say was that we have to be particularly careful where we place any houses or anything else of significant weight, as, even though these mines were filled, the dirt and rock that they used to fill them hasn’t settled quite right yet. The ground could just sink right beneath it, causing a house to crumble, or as you can see in some of the older neighborhoods to the south of here, driveways could fall right in, as could any of the streets. In the neighborhood I grew up in, barely fifteen minutes from here, you would see these driveways where the cement had fallen close to twenty feet into a gaping hole beneath the driveway. There was this one that I remember quite vividly, where the hole just opened up beneath the two cars they had parked in their driveway. You could barely see those things down there in the darkness.
“It was kind of cool as a kid, but as a builder, it’s really nothing you want to mess with. All of our houses were built away from the sealed mine shafts. The only ones on that blueprint in this development we built around so that they are beneath the sidewalks, and the park, neither of which has any reason to have enough weight on them to cause them to suddenly settle.”
“Interesting,” Harry said, rolling the blueprint back up and clambering off of the couch. “Does that concern you at all?”
“It would take nothing short of a seismic event to trigger these things to collapse with that little weight on them. The neighborhood I grew up in, Raven Hills, was basically built onto a hillside, the mines nearly carving the hills hollow, but there were only a few properties that actually ever had any problems. And while those properties seemed to have the same problems every five years, none of the others appeared to settle in the slightest.”
Harry walked across the living room and set the rolled blueprint next to the line of others atop the table, flipping off the switch atop the overhanging lamp.
“I didn’t see that tunnel that you said you were in last night on that little map,” Harry said, brushing past Scott and towards the stairs leading down into the family room.
“Hmm,” Scott muttered, gnawing slightly on the inside of his lower lip.
The two passed through the family room, heading toward the garage. Opening the door, the two stepped down the pair of stairs onto the cement pad of the garage.
“Do you have any flashlights?” Harry asked, staring curiously at the stacks of boxes that filled half of the garage.
Following his quizzical gaze, Scott volunteered, “I didn’t plan on living here as long as I already have. There’s no point unpacking just to have to repack after a year or so.”
“Sure,” Harry said, raising his eyebrows and his hands to his side.
“Oh yeah, flashlights.”
Scott slipped past the tightly stacked boxes and through the small wooden door behind them into the third garage. Flipping the light switch, he headed straight for the makeshift workbench consisting of a four by eight sheet of plywood braced atop three sawhorses. Rustling through the stack of tools and nails and screws, he produced a large, rechargeable flashlight, the adapter still wedged into the slot in the unit, the long white cord running straight up the wall and into the small square plug stuck in the outlet. Slipping it from the charger, he cradled it beneath his left arm, fishing for a second one that he knew was there. After a moment, he produced an old, plastic flashlight. It was nowhere near as modern and nice, just the cylindrical type with the two “D” sized batteries that drop straight down into the shaft, but as he verified by flipping up the white, sliding switch, it worked.
Heading back into the main garage, he closed the door behind him and held up the lights for Harry to see. Pressing the button on the garage door opener mounted to the right of the stairs on the wall, a loud rumbling sound ensued as the garage rolled upward against the ceiling. Harry stepped out onto the driveway, the flakes of snow bouncing into the garage from the blowing wind outside. Pressing the button one more time, Scott jogged to the end of the garage. Ducking his head and raising his left leg to step over the unseen line of the electric eye that would stop the garage if anything broke the laser line between the two units mounted to either side of the garage door, just inches above the floor.
Harry closed the driver’s side door of the old red and white Scout, leaning across to pop open the passenger side door for Scott. Transferring both flashlights to his left arm, he opened the door all the way and climbed up, closing the door with a loud thud that shook the car. His parents once had a Scout when he was growing up, and he had noticed, even way back then, that all of them had a similar smell. He wasn’t sure whether it came from the fiberglass shell of the rear portion roof, or from the black tape that ringed the roll bars, but it always smelled like the cars were thirty years old and had been kept submerged in water and then used to tan leather.
Harry backed out of the driveway, heading through the neighborhood. The Realtors were out there in droves once again, working their tails off for that seven to ten percent commission. That thought was somewhat comforting, but Scott was hardly able to steer his mind from the task at hand for more than a few seconds. They were going to go back into the tunnels he had been in last night. At first it had seemed like a completely terrible idea, but now that he was somewhat used to the thought, it scared him senseless.
Turning out of the development, they headed west on the thinning, snow-covered road. The midday sun peered out briefly from behind the swelling storm clouds, only to disappear even more rapidly behind a wave of dark clouds, the precursor to the line of black that rolled over the rocky peaks to the west.
Pulling off the side of the road onto the snowy meadow, the car idled for a moment as the two stared at the house. With a sigh, Harry killed the engine and opened the door. Reaching into the back seat, he pulled out a dark blue parka, the collar and rim of the hood lined with a thin layer of fake fur. Slipping into it behind the shield of
