handed the last brick to Tad. But then, realizing there was no longer any barrier between himself and the hidden room, he stepped back.
“You want to go in first?” he asked Eric.
As Eric gazed at the gaping hole where a brick wall had stood, his heart began pounding so hard that his breath caught in his chest. Even so, he gripped the flashlight tight and stepped over the few remaining rows of bricks into the dark room.
A feeling of utter isolation instantly fell over him. It was as if he were totally alone in a dark and cavernous place — a dangerous place — where unseen evil lurked in every shadowy corner. Turning away from the blackness, he ran into a veil of cobwebs that covered his face and nearly dropped the flashlight in panic as he clawed them away.
“This is so weird,” Tad whispered, stepping through the doorway and moving close to Eric. Eric reached out, closed his fingers on Tad’s arm, and immediately regained his equilibrium.
Despite the cool of the chamber, perspiration burst from his forehead.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” Kent said as he, too, stepped through to join them.
Eric slowly moved the flashlight beam around the room, his heart still hammering, his hand trembling as he wiped bits of cobweb from his eyelashes and hair. The room was, indeed, much larger than they’d expected — it seemed almost the size of his bedroom up in the main house. Yet from the dimensions of the carriage house, he’d expected it to be only a few feet wide and deep, no more than a large closet.
And now that they were inside the room, they began to see that in fact it was different from the storeroom behind which it was hidden. This chamber was well organized, with a desk, a long table, and bookshelves, as well as stacks of boxes, some of which were beginning to slump with age.
And it was filled with a heavy odor that made Eric think of death and decay.
Tad’s voice broke the silence that had fallen over them as Eric played the light around the walls. “This box is open,” he said. “Give me some light.”
Eric turned the light toward Tad, who lifted an old black leather valise out of a box and set it on the table.
“What is it?” Kent asked.
Tad gazed at the object for a second, then recognized it from something he’d seen in one of the antiques stores his mother had taken him to a couple of years ago. “It’s an old medical bag. Maybe it was Dr. Darby’s.”
“What’s in it?” Eric asked.
Tad unlatched the tarnished catch and stretched the bag’s hinged mouth wide.
Eric shone the light inside.
Empty.
Turning away from the bag, Tad opened more of the boxes while Kent began exploring the drawers of the desk.
Eric went to the bookshelves and played the light over the titles, but many of the books were so old and worn that the printing on the spines was all but illegible. Still, he had a feeling that whatever the reason this room had been sealed up, the books were part of it.
“Look at this old lamp,” Tad said, breaking Eric’s reverie as he pulled a heavy, ornate lamp base from a box that was all but invisible in the dim light from the single bulb in the storeroom. He set the lamp on the table, which wobbled under its weight.
“Table’s missing a leg,” Kent said, pointing to the two small boxes that were all that supported one corner of the table.
Eric ran his finger along the dusty spines of the books, brushing them just clean enough to make out their titles. Most of them appeared to be old medical texts.
A row of jars with black screw tops and murky contents lined the top shelf, but in the darkness that was broken only by the flashlight and the spillover from the storeroom next door, he couldn’t tell what was inside them.
Then his finger passed over a different kind of book, and he felt a strange sensation — almost like electricity. He pulled the volume from the shelf and laid it on the table. A single word was stamped on the front in ornate gold script:
Eric looked up from the book to see that Tad had become fixated on the lamp base, turning it around and around as he studied the intricate scrollwork, and that Kent was lost in tracing the pattern of the cracked Formica on the tabletop with his forefinger.
“Look what I found,” Eric said, and both their heads snapped up as if his words had startled them out of a deep sleep. As they moved closer, Eric opened the ledger to the first page.
Written in a fine, old-fashioned copperplate script were a variety of notes:
Eric turned the page.
He flipped to the middle of the book.
Tad reached out and touched the second entry with his forefinger. “Logan,” he breathed.
“And what’s that mean?” Kent asked, pointing to the entry above the one that mentioned Logan. “Fraud on a forty-seven dollar washbasin?”
But Eric was eager to continue and kept turning pages, his eyes scanning each of them in turn, the whole process taking on the same almost automatic, oddly hypnotic rhythm they’d experienced with the photo album in the other room.
Page after page contained strangely cryptic notes — words that didn’t quite mean anything, or seemed oddly out of place — all written in the same fine hand.
At the end of the thick tome were half a dozen blank pages, but only when he was gazing at the inside of the back cover did Eric turn to the final entry.
Kent whistled softly as he finished reading the entry, and Tad looked up to gaze straight at Eric. “H.D.,” he said. “Hector Darby. And that sounds like a suicide note, doesn’t it?”
Instead of answering Tad’s question, Eric played the beam of the flashlight around the room. “What is all
