I didn’t get a chance to catch up with Ally until two days later, I suddenly became so busy with work. I knew where to find him, it was obvious he’d be in the theater. And he was. In the theater office to be precise. (Though Holloway had never set foot in there even once) He had the large desk pulled away from the wall and the map we had of the school spread out across it. (Even though the blue prints were larger than the desk) He looked up at me, first in shock and then in reverence.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” He admitted.
“To be completely honest,” I told him, “I wasn’t going to.”
“What changed?”
“Freeman tried to tell me off, he must have known you contact me,” I explained, “But when I told Roger he seemed shocked, I guess he was next on the list.”
“Is Roger coming?”
“I have no idea,” I said, “But what is this letter?”
Ally seemed relieved that I asked and pulled the huge key ring that all tech leads were given. Originally there had only been one set, passed from lead to lead, but somehow it became ritual for every lead to have them. I, in fact, had my set in my bag. He unlocked one of the only drawers we had that locked and pulled out a white envelope and handed it to me. The envelope was perfectly white, the kind you can buy for ten cents at the post office, and typed across the front was “Alistar Millainey”. The letter itself was also typed and folded from obvious rereading. It was quick and to the point:
Mr Millainey,
Somewhere in Hemery High are the five pillars. If activated by the wrong person it could be disastrous. They are spread out within the school, find them first.
“There are five,” was all I could say at first.
“What do you mean?” Ally asked.
“There are four schools, it would make sense to split the pillars within the schools, but they aren’t. There are five.”
“Yeah, and this school doesn’t have pillars, its too modern.”
“You’re thinking too literally,” I scolded, “Pillars don’t have to be actual pillars, they could just be specific places.”
“Either way there are a million secret passages,” Ally said and pointed to the map where years of tech leads had scribbled out the secret passages they had discovered, “These ‘pillars’ could be anywhere, just waiting to be activated.”
“Hemery was used as a bomb shelter, it makes sense that it would have lots of places to hide.”
“It was more than that,” A voice said and both Ally and I turned to look at the sudden appearance of Roger, “Hemery was built not as a bomb shelter but as an entire underground city to hide from the soviets,” Roger continued, “And if the soviets did infiltrate, there were hundreds of secret passages in the secret passages, we’ll never find them all.”
“Roger,” Ally said just as happily as when I had arrived, maybe a little happier, that irked me. Roger didn’t respond but he did hold up a white envelope exactly like the one Ally had received.
“This showed up in my mailbox yesterday,” Roger said.
“Why would this mysterious person send you a letter?” I asked, trying to make sense of it all, “I didn’t get one, all I got was Freeman trying to scare me off.”
“There must be a reason,” Ally offered, probably trying to keep me from throwing one of my ever so famous temper tantrums
“These pillars can’t be new,” Roger continued, “They’re just in danger of being activated now.”
“Or they need to be activated now,” I guessed, “the letter says ‘find them first’ maybe all the schools are competing to find them, whatever these pillars do is needed now, and they are making all four schools compete in hopes that we’ll find them all in time.”
“You think so strangely,” Ali said.
“That’s probably why Freeman tried to get you from helping, you think differently.”
“He wants all the schools to have a fair chance of whatever the pillars hold?” I guessed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Roger said and went to the map, immediately he cringed, “this is incomplete.” He dragged his finger across a blank area, “There’s a passage connecting these two rooms, remember, Colin showed it to us during our training.”
“You’re right,” I realized, “people must have really slacked off on recording stuff after all our information became verbal.”
“Well, if your theory is right,” Ally was still saying, “We only need to concentrate on the passages here in the theater. I can’t imagine the other schools haven’t explored their passages yet, after so many years.”
“You never know,” I told him, “the intellectuals are too interested in their studies, the vocationals are all idiots, and the arts are all pansies. We’re the only school that really gets down and dirty, the only ones that have a real connection to this place.”
“So your saying we don’t have to worry about just our passages, we should check up on everything just in case? That’ll take days!”
“Probably more,” Roger said, “we’ve only found so many passages in nine years, and we aren’t familiar with the other schools.”
“We’re screwed,” Ally said, dejected.
“Don’t say that,” I scolded again, “We wouldn’t be given an impossible task.”
“Fine, you two know the most about this theater, where should we start?”
“Colin knew more,” I said.
“And
“He’s dead,” I reminded, “He got hit by a car a year ago.”
“Then let’s go with the clues he’s given us,” Roger rationalized, “Let’s see, this place is a haven from soviets… What did he always call you?” He asked me.
I rolled my eyes. Despite being the
co-lead tech, when
“Grace and Faith,” Roger said, thinking out loud again, like he always did, “They have to do with religion. The soviets were a religionless society, that’s why ‘in God we trust’ was added to the pledge of allegiance, to separate from the atheists.”
“A chapel,” Ally said, “there’s got to be a chapel. We should start there?”
“Let’s get this map out where we can see it better,” Roger said.
As the boys carried the map to the stage I went out a looked around. I had a lot of memories of the whole theater but no place as much as the stage. I remembered when Roger and I were still alone, I think we had only just started training Ally, he and I were sitting on the stage getting ready for a show with our lunch spread out around us and a two by four on Roger’s lap. We had been discussing where to hang lights in the catwalk and where to aim them and what gels to use, normal theatre stuff. Ally was in the middle of leaving the art school to join us (not uncommon for people to change schools) and walked in right as Roger and I’s conversation had devolved into the two of us screaming and threatening each other with the crayons we were each holding, the block of wood reduced to our scribblings. Roger and I never achieved a full fight, mostly we just screamed at each other. He thought I didn’t take things seriously enough while I thought he was all business. We were both right and it was those two qualities together that made us wonderful techs when we weren’t fighting.
Roger and Ally lay the map down and the three of us settled around it with our personal colored pens and started drawing out passages we remembered, arguing over where the exact location of each was and where they connected. When we were done (And Roger and I had stopped talking to each other for a few minutes) we had a fairly complete map of our theater’s passages.
“There,” Ally said, pointing to an odd shaped open area, “There are no known passages there and I doubt any of the other schools would have passages around there.”
“Its right under us,” Roger observed.
“If the chapel is right under us…” I started.
“…Each school has its own chapel?” Roger picked up. After working together for so long Roger and I had picked up this creepy ability to finish each other’s sentences.
“That would explain why the school is set up so strange,” Ally said.
“So how do we get there?” I asked.
“There are a set of stairs in the catwalk, but they just lead down to a storage room,” Roger explained.
“Oh yes,” I remembered, “one of the walls is brick.”
“So,” Ally laughed, “Let’s grab hammers and check it out.”
“We are not going to go smashing down walls,” Roger argued.
“Why not?” I asked, “Some of the secret passages we found were walled up, only falling apart, it makes sense they’d wall off everything so students don’t go exploring and get lost or go off to have sex or something. Plus, a chapel? Religion in school, oh god.”
“Faith has got a point,” Ally agreed, I made a note to thank him for that, he usually sided with Roger since I do have a tendency of being a little silly.
“I don’t like the idea of breaking down walls, it could get bad.”
“Colin did it,” I said.
“He what?”
“He made me promise not to tell you but we were in the tech closet and he found something weird so he broke the wall down,” I confided.
“I thought you guys found that one because you ditzed out and fell through!” Roger snapped, obviously angry to be the stick in the mud.
“It was a good lie,” Ally joked, “You do fall over sometimes.”
“It wasn’t a total lie, I tripped, hit the wall, it sounded hollow.”
“It sounded hollow?” Roger repeated, getting more angry, “It sounded hollow so you knocked a wall down?”
“It mortared very well,” I justified, “Didn’t take much effort. But then again, that was the type of person Colin was.” I chose my words carefully to make Roger feel bad enough to go along with our crazy plan, “That was what made him a good tech.”
Roger only grunted. He knew as well as I did that the only thing needed to be a good tech was a love for what you were doing. But it was commonplace for certain personality traits to be referred to as one that would make someone a good tech, just to give people something to shoot for. Colin was a risk taker, Roger was a professional, I was haphazard and random, they all helped us be better techs but not what made us good. I don’t want to make it sound like Colin liked me more than Colin, even if it was probably true. Colin and I had a lot more in common than Roger and he did. That was the reason I had become a lead tech. Roger was chosen because he was good, I was chosen because Colin thought I would do better. Only once or twice in the history of our theater had there been co-leads, and they had always been people equally qualified that worked together, Roger and I disagreed about everything, everything. Lead techs were almost always people who disregarded rules, Roger followed every rule to the letter. So I was impressed when he stormed off and returned with a large hammer and a small pick. What was even more impressive was that I recognized them from the stash kept exclusively for the lead tech. (most techs had their own tools so the stash was rarely every used since no one was allowed to use them but the lead.) I didn’t say anything when Roger handed me the pick, we were probably going to need the best tools we could get our hands on.
“You know what still confuses me,” Ally said while we pounded away at the well made brick wall, “If the pillars are under each school where would the fifth be?”
“Maybe there are five schools,” I guessed, “I mean, we don’t really pay attention to much outside of the theater, do we?”
“What could it be?” Ally asked.
“Don’t worry about that,” Roger snapped, but he was obviously thinking about something. Ally and I shut up. I’m not sure, both of us were very vocal people, completely incapable of internal monologue, but we did. I didn’t want to think. Maybe Ally didn’t either. I was afraid. The unknown was never my strong suit. When I worked in the theater everything was an aspect of something I understood from my training but this was different. The letter kept running through my head, “If activated by the wrong person it could be disastrous.” I didn’t like the choice of the word disastrous. I liked it even less when I considered how I was trying to be shut out of all this, maybe I was the wrong person. I considered voicing my fears but Roger would have just told me silly. I’d tell them later.
All contents on this and any other page on Complications is the intellectual property of Rebecca Moses.
