The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [216]
“I just use this old elevator for storage,” he said. “I never go down below anymore. Place gives me the jeebies. I never needed that room anyway.”
When he had cleared out the elevator we all squeezed inside, including the fat-footed cat. The elevator lurched and bounced when Leon stepped onto the platform. Mr. Locksmith looked at Leon, and looked a bit worried.
“How much you weigh, kiddo?” he asked. “Tell me honestly.”
“One hundred and seventy,” said Leon.
The man looked at him in confusion, then shrugged and pushed the button.
“Kilograms!” Leon whispered to me.
The elevator jolted into movement, and the cables began to chatter, squeal, grumble, and moan as the ancient machinery was put to rare use.
“Don’t make ’em like they used to,” said Mr. Locksmith in the dark.
“Well,” said Leon, “this is clearly a contraption that was built prior to the total hideous decline of modern aesthetic philosophy.”
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Locksmith.
We watched the line of the floor rise up and up until it was out of sight, and everything was dark, and in the dark we listened to our own breathing and to the machinery clattering and moaning above and below us. We sank down and down in the dark. As we sank Mr. Locksmith lit a cigarette with a match that momentarily underlit his face, threw a green shadow from his plastic visor onto the ceiling behind him, and filled the small metal box with a burst of phosphor. He dropped the match on the floor and it was dark again.
“I come down here only once a year or so,” he said. “Maybe less. It was supposed to be a subway station back when they first built it, about a hundred years ago. They redirected the lines before they ever connected them to the station. So they just walled it in, good night. Bricked over the tunnels and everything. There used to be stairs to it around the block. That’s gone. This elevator’s the only way to get in or out of it now. I thought I was the only one who knew about it anymore.”
“Mkgnao!” said the cat. It was pawing my pant leg with its freakish feet.
We hit the bottom of the elevator shaft with a decisive clunk, and the machinery went quiet. Leon’s great-uncle rolled back the shrieking brass grate, and we stepped out into a dark room, which we could tell was enormous from the echo before we saw it. The locksmith groped along the wall to the right of the elevator and found an old-fashioned electric switch with a metal cable running from the bottom of it and a handle that clacked up and down. He pushed the handle up with a squeak and clunk, and three lights slowly came alive in metal lamps that hung down almost to head level from long cords in the ceiling.
The effect of the room’s enormity was compounded by its almost total emptiness, with vaulted ceilings maybe thirty, forty feet high, supported by thick square columns whose capitals were cluttered with more turn-of-the-century ornamentation. Cornice moldings skirted the perimeters of the room. There were two levels—a big square main room and above that a balustrade running around its perimeter, big arching windows looking out onto brick walls and nailed-up sheets of particleboard. Huge round archways were set in the walls below the balcony, but the arches had been bricked in and painted over. The room smelled stiflingly of dust, mildew and chalk, and everything in it—walls, ceiling, floor—was whitewashed: it had been painted over, coat after coat until all the cherubs and lion’s heads had become vague, sort of soft and gloopy-looking. I coughed from the swirling dust that we kicked up as we walked into the room. Near the elevator door there were some boxes and tools and old paint cans, but other than that the room was empty.
Our footsteps echoed hugely throughout the room, multiplied several times over. Even the cat’s purring was amplified by the echo.
“Bruno,” Leon said. His voice was half-hushed in amazement. “This is perfect