Chapter 5: The Drive to Samuel's Workshop
The leather seats of the sedan were cold, holding none of the stifling heat of the ballroom we had just left behind. Outside, the sodium lamps of the parking lot flickered, casting long, bruised shadows against the polished side panels of parked luxury cars. I pulled my dark security tie loose, letting the fabric drop into my lap, and pressed my fingers against my temples where a dull, persistent ache had settled.
The man in the sharp black suit pulled the shift lever down into drive, the engine settling into a quiet, muffled hum. He kept his eyes on the exit ramp ahead, his knuckles resting lightly against the black leather steering wheel. He hadn't introduced himself properly back in the corridor, beyond the raw demands he had thrown at me while holding my grandfather's compass. Now, as the car merged onto the empty highway, the silence between us stretched until it felt heavier than the metal box resting in the console cup holder.
"My name is David," he said, breaking the quiet without looking over. His voice was lower now, stripped of the sharp urgency he'd had when he pulled the wooden box from the trash can. "David Vance. I worked with Samuel at the Institute before the restructuring committee took over the lower archive rooms."
I turned my head toward the passenger window, watching the neon signs of gas stations and all-night diners streak past in a blur of amber and gray. "You're not on the foundation payroll," I said, my voice flat against the hum of the tires. "I check the visitor logs every Monday morning. No one named David has signed in for the historical wing in three years."
"I haven't used my real badge since they stripped Samuel of his tenure," David replied, his tone steady, unoffended by my skepticism. He reached out and adjusted the dashboard heater, turning the fan up a notch to cut the chill seeping through the glass. "They called it a modernization project. Clean out the old inventory, digitize what mattered, and discard whatever didn't fit the quarterly progress reports. I tried to stay inside to keep tabs on what they were moving out through the service docks, but by then, the locks had already been changed."
I looked down at my hands, resting in my lap over the white cotton of my security shirt. The cuffs were slightly frayed at the edges—something I had meant to mend before my shift started that evening. "He told me they stopped answering his letters," I whispered, the words slipping out before I could trap them behind my teeth. "Every time he went down to the administrative offices, security told him appointments were full. He thought he was losing his mind. He kept saying his entire life's work was sitting in boxes marked for municipal disposal."
"He wasn't losing his mind," David said, his grip tightening slightly on the steering wheel as he took the exit for the county highway. "The committee knew exactly what they were throwing away. Samuel's field notes from the northern excavations contained records of property acquisitions the foundation had tried to bury back in the nineties. When he refused to sign off on the sanitized survey reports, they erased his clearance and threw his personal effects into the corridor bins."
The city buildings thinned out, replaced by dark stands of oak and pine that crowded close to the asphalt. The county roads were poorly lit here, the yellow center lines faded and worn down by years of winter salt and heavy rain. I knew every curve of this stretch. It was the same route I used to take in the passenger seat of my grandfather's rusted station wagon when we would drive out to the workshop after school to clean brass instruments and sort through old glass-plate negatives.
"Take a left at the flashing yellow light," I said, pointing toward the overgrown shoulder of a narrow side street. "The mailbox is missing, but you'll see the cedar fence with the broken post."
David slowed the sedan, the transmission downshifting smoothly as we turned onto the gravel lane. The tires crunched loudly against the loose stones, the sound echoing off the dense wall of trees that bordered the property.
As we rounded the final bend, Samuel's house came into view under the pale wash of the moon. It was a modest, single-story cottage with weathered gray siding and a slanted tin roof that had long since lost its green paint. The front porch light was off, dark and uninviting, and the driveway was choked with tall, dormant weeds that brushed against the undercarriage of the car as David brought it to a stop near the back steps.
The workshop stood just behind the main house—a separate wooden structure with wide sliding doors and small, high windows that showed no sign of light within. A rusted metal chimney rose from the center of the roof, cold and dead against the night sky.
David switched off the engine, plunging the car into absolute silence save for the ticking of the cooling exhaust pipe. He looked across the console at me, his face half-shadowed by the dim light reflecting off the dashboard.
May you like
"Is this it?" he asked quietly.
"This is it," I said, reaching for the door handle. The metal was freezing under my fingers, but the weight of what waited inside felt heavier still.
