Chapter 9

Cracking the Code

(1)

"Okay, our main plan of action is to check out Mr. Tipton's rooms and find that list, then begin trying to find the lyrics one by one." Cody said. "But first things first. That letter said the code to the keypad in the basement was hidden in this room on the tables."

He headed over to the maitre d's podium.

"The correct combination is going to be tables one through eight."

There was a map on the podium listing all the tables. Cody took it with him and walked over to where the designated first table was.

Though the disappearances had occurred during the party of the century, the tables were completely cleaned off.

The dining room and kitchen had probably been taken care of, post investigation. Otherwise this place would be smelling quite rank. And that would probably be the reason.

The tables each had nothing on them but identical red tablecloths. Cody flipped the cloth off table one and checked all around it. No sign of a symbol. Cody bent down and checked under the table. Nothing there either.

Cody stood up and looked perplexed. It had to be there! The letter said it would be there!

"Nothing." He said. London had no response.

He examined the chairs closely. No sign of a symbol on any of them. Why would the letter say it would be here if it wasn't? What else was there to check?

He looked down at the tablecloth. He picked it up and examined both sides. Still nothing.

"This makes no sense." London said,

"It has to be there!" Cody said exasperated. "Maybe it was something like the dishes or silverware was table specific! Maybe since all that was removed now there is no way of finding it!"

Cody checked the map and walked over to table two, yanking the cloth off of it. A quick investigation revealed the same thing, nothing.

"Crap." he said, frustrated.

"Don't tell me where to find something if it's not actually here!"

He walked around and stared at a few more tables. London stood watching him with one arm crossed over her front holding her other one. Suddenly, Cody stopped dead in his tracks. He seemed to have figured out something. He stooped down and looked at the tablecloth real closely.

"Got it!" he exclaimed.

"What is it?" London asked, coming over to join him.

"It's hidden into the pattern of the tablecloths. See? Each cloth has a different pattern!"

"Oh! That makes sense!"

Cody went back over to the first two tables, put their respective cloths back on, excitedly took out his notepad, and went table to table jotting down the combination.

"Okay, now that we've got that, time to head down into the basement."

(2)

Cody wasted no time punching in the combination. There was a loud click, an even louder whirring, and the door swung open by itself.

The place was rather spacious. There were several tables, one for Mr. Tipton's hobby of tinkering and inventing, and another for developing photos. Cody thought he must have had every type of tool imaginable, either hanging on the walls, or on the table. Various pieces of junk that Mr. Tipton had been using for parts lay discarded on the table and floor against the wall as well. Cody opened the various drawers and checked through them. Nothing but more tools and junk.

London leaned at the doorway, arms crossed, watching him go about it.

The other table was for Mr. Tipton's hobby of developing photos. There were some hanging up that had been recently (the night of the party) developed.

Cody picked one off and looked at it. It showed a picture of a hallway of the hotel and a large, shadowy shape that dominated the center.

So, he had actually managed to get some of the paranormal activity on photo. The other one was of a similar sort, but the hallway was empty, however, there was a sort of ghostly wispiness blurring over the whole shot.

Cody put it back, took the last one and nearly jumped.

It was of the dining room. In the right hand corner stood the Dark Man.

Well, he wasn't SURE that's what it was, it was kinda there and it kinda wasn't. It was like the picture was snapped when it was either phasing in or out.

Could have just been another moving shadow like the first picture and nothing else, but...

London must have seen him tense and asked; "Is everything okay?"

Cody put the picture back.

"Yeah. Fine."

Cody looked down at the wall in front of him and spotted what he had come here for in the first place. Two keys, unmarked.

"Found the keys." He said.

Cody also noted a small flashlight on the desk. He pocketed it, too. Just in case the batteries on his ran out.

"Okay, let's go."

They exited together. They were about to head upstairs, but Cody stopped and turned around.

"Hold on."

"What's wrong?"

Cody didn't say anything. He walked up to the back wall and pressed his hands up against it. He walked all around, feeling through each crevice. When he got to a certain point, he stopped.

"I can feel a draft. The temple is through here. Sorry. Just wanted to figure out where it was in advance, in case we are in a hurry later."

"Good thinking."

"Alright. We're done here. Let's go."

He turned around and stopped dead still. London turned around and gasped.

The shadows in the corner of the room began to move. A shadow was dividing from the shadows in the corner. It rose up, began twisting and contorting into a certain form, getting bigger and bigger...

"Should we run?" asked London.

"Wait." Cody said.

After a point, the shadow floated up towards the ceiling and started expanding out and evaporating.

"Zack's diary said these kinds of things were occurring with great frequency right before everything went to hell. We are not in any danger yet."

Then he added: "But we need to hurry."

(3)

Room 1416 was easy to find. You didn't have to even look at the room numbers, just find the door where Zack had been trying to slam into it with an axe, the one where the wood had been chipped away and the metal stuck out like a sore thumb.

Cody fished out the first unmarked key and tried it. No go. He fished out the second, and it slid right in and he turned it with a tell-tale click.

He opened the door.

He was surprised. Maybe it was just years of all the stories, theories and legends hyped around Mr. Tipton, but he was nearly bracing himself for a setup that would be a lot more bizarre.

In retrospect, he wasn't even sure now what he had expected to find.

Ouija boards, strange occult artifacts, maybe even an altar, perhaps?

There was none of that here. Mr. Tipton's first room was done out like an artist's studio. It was messy, with paper and art supplies and what-not spread out everywhere, but it wasn't at all anything out of the ordinary.

There were paintings spread all around, some on easels, a lot more on the ground. Cody saw that Mr. Tipton had actually been quite an accomplished painter. Come to think of it, he remembered now that he had read somewhere that there were two museums in Boston that held several of his paintings.

There was an easel on the far wall where it seemed that Mr. Tipton had been doing a self-portrait.

There was also a desk on the other side of the room. Cody walked towards it and began methodically thumbing through everything.

London said nothing and stood behind him with her arms crossed, watching.

Cody went through everything for about five minutes, then said:

"Nothing. If that list IS in this room, it could be anywhere!"

"Maybe it's in the other room?" London suggested.

"Probably. But since we're here, we can't rule out any possibility."

Cody gave up on the desk and began tearing through the entire room in a similar fashion, with devoted concentration.

15 minutes passed, and still nothing turned up.

Cody gave an exasperated sigh.

"I guess we're going to have to try the other room. If we can't find anything there, we can come back here and try again."

London had no response.

Cody turned to walk back out the door, and London turned to follow him when he suddenly changed his mind and headed back over to the desk.

"Are we going or are we staying?" London asked.

"I just have to be certain." Cody said. "If I missed anything, it will do us no good for us to go running off when, in fact, it was here all along and I was just overlooking something. Besides, I don't believe Mr. Tipton would have told us to check a room where there was nothing to find!"

He started scanning his eyes over the desk, this time not thumbing through everything, looking carefully.

"What if 'It' managed to destroy the list after all?" London suggested.

"I don't know. Remember what Mr. Tipton said. He thought that it might not have been capable of the sort of cognition to go actively looking for it, like it wasn't all there. And he was smart. His letter said he had to encrypt it. It's got to be hidden somewhere, quite well, maybe..."

He was looking carefully at everything on the desk.

"I'm trying to think, if I was going to hide something, something really important, what are all the ways I would go about hiding it?"

Cody noticed something, and a flash of inspiration hit his face.

His eyes had landed on a holder on Mr. Tipton's desk that was filled with pens.

Just a stupid hunch, but maybe...

He turned over a random document, and one by one began taking each pen and scribbling on it.

He would scribble with one really quickly, stop, grab another, and start scribbling again.

With one, he stopped abruptly, started scribbling with the same one again, then stopped and turned around with an extremely serious expression.

"Got it."

"Got what?" she was almost frightened by the level of seriousness he had on his face.

"Come here and look at this."

She came over and stood close to him as he grabbed another piece of paper and started writing all over it. However, it was apparently out of ink because no words appeared on the paper.

"I think you need a new pen." London said.

"This isn't a normal pen." Cody said.

"I just remembered, when I was a kid, I had a diary that I didn't want Zack nosing through, so I wrote the entire thing in invisible ink. It was only visible using an ultraviolet light. It was something special I convinced my mom to buy me."

"So, we're going to have to find an ultraviolet light to read it?"

"Not necessarily. Some invisible inks are different. Sometimes the words only show up when heat is applied, others by applying specific chemicals. Some have special pens that work in reverse of this one, actually causing the invisible ink to become visible."

"So, how does this one work?"

"I'm unsure." Cody said. "And even if I can figure that out, then we have to figure out where the list actually is. If it's something like heat that we need to make the words appear, we can't just go through this entire room applying heat to every single document. We don't have that luxury of time."

"But without that list, we're completely screwed."

Cody thought of something.

"But Mr. Tipton WAS an inventor."

He began rummaging through the drawers of the desk again until he pulled out a small flashlight. He flicked it on and began shining it over the desk. Just an ordinary flashlight. He flicked it off, discarded it and began rummaging again.

He pulled out something else that looked kinda like a flashlight, but was a little odd and bulky looking. He flicked it on and shined it on the desk.

The ink on the page he had been writing on appeared under the beam.

"Whoa." London said.

Cody grinned. "Jackpot."

Cody couldn't believe he had figured it out. He felt like reaching over and patting himself on the back.

It felt like serious a boost to his self-confidence. It suddenly occurred to him that since he left school, he hadn't been utilizing or continuing to develop the one thing that had been his his entire life: his brain.

Sure, Zack had all the social skills and self-confidence, but there was one thing that Cody had had that Zack never did: A sharp knack for memorization and problem solving. Grades. Book smarts. Cody was a natural braniac. The kind who would meticulously takes notes in class even though he never really needed to at all.

It was the one thing Cody had always had that he could be proud of. He suddenly realized that he hadn't been proud of it in a very long time.

He could pinpoint the rough time period when he had stopped being proud.

When all my book-smarts failed to cause me to do anything significant with my life.

When I realized that it was my worthless brother, the one who did not have the gift of knowledge, or even necessarily common sense, suddenly found himself at the top with everything I ever wanted, and I never achieved anything because... because...

Cody knew how that thought should have finished itself in his head. He didn't. He blocked it out. For now.

It was an almost subconscious mental block. The kind that a man gets when he is hit with the realization of a sudden, unarguable truth that he wants to argue with, but also doesn't, because it is something that forces him to face something unsavory about himself that he would be too embarrassed to have to realize, something that would force him to have to look back on all his previous pity parties and acknowledge a greater truth.

It would involve the utterance of five words, just five, no more, no less, but five harsh, incriminating words that would alter the very fabric of the personal reality he had tried to create, and he knew he should utter them, that he should have finished the thought in his head at this moment, that he will probably finish it at some point in the future, and that he will have to face something unsavory and embarrassing about himself, and then he will have to figure out where to go from there. However, he just can't do that yet.

No, it simply cannot be done now.

He shoves it out, he knows he's shoved it out, but he just simply can't face it right now, and so life goes on.

He forgets about it, remaining internally unchanged (for now), yet continuing to reap the negative consequences of his intentional amnesia, (for now), to allow himself to wallow in his...

No, can't be allowed to finish that thought either.

Pushing stuff out of my head because I find it frightening or embarrassing?

No, he never did that. Preposterous. There was nothing wrong with him. He was simply the victim of circumstance.

There was a DARK MAN and BEINGS OF LIGHT and SYMBOLS ALL OVER THE WALLS and you ALMOST DIED but were given a second chance for a GREATER DES...

No, can't finish that thought either.

YOU FORGOT.

No, he never forgot. Just simply wasn't ever there. Probably never will be.

It was just...

"Is everything okay?"

Cody suddenly snapped out of his little trance and looked at London. She was looking at him with a concerned look on her face.

"Hmm? Yeah. Why do you ask?"

"You were standing there just staring at the desk. I was getting worried."

"Oh, sorry. I was just deep in thought, that's all. I do that sometimes."

"Thinking about your brother?"

"No... well, yes. Sorta. Just some old memories, that's all."

"Oh."

"Anyways, I guess we should start looking for that list. I think if I were to hide something like that, I would probably hide it right out in the open."

London looked confused. "Why would he hide it out in the open?"

"So if someone was looking for it, it would be in the last place they'd think of looking."

London still looked confused. "I still don't get it."

"I'll explain later." Cody sighed.

Cody shuffled through the papers right there on the desk, shining the light over everything.

"Aha."

Cody pulled out a sketch of bird. Or at least, that's what it was disguised as. But the light showed the truth.

There were three columns hidden on the sheet. Names, Lyrics?, and room numbers.

It was written like this:

BETTY GABLE - TYMA - 1218

MATILDA FLY - MORCANA - 2913

JOANNE WINTERS - FRENIC - 2011

EDITH DAY - IXIAM - 1693

Cody looked at it, frowned, turned it around, put it down, and began shuffling around through the rest of the desk some more.

"What's the matter? That IS it, isn't it?" London asked.

"This list is incomplete." Cody said. "This only gives the location to four lyrics. There MUST be another list somewhere. Or maybe it IS here, just encrypted in a different way."

Cody took the light and began shining it on all the other pages on the desk. He opened the drawers, took any papers that were inside, and checked them all. No avail.

"This is ridiculous." Cody said frustrated. "Why would he state that he had a list hidden somewhere when it was only HALF?"

"Well," London said. "Maybe the second half is hidden in the other room?"

"Maybe. But the letter didn't SAY anything about it being split into two."

"It also said we needed to check BOTH rooms, that both had important information."

"I assumed the other room was only mentioned because that's where he set up the ritual to divine the final lyric."

"Well, maybe the other half IS in this room, but it's just hidden in a different way."

Cody put his head into his hands.

What a pain.

"Grandfather DID say in his letter that he had to be careful to the point where finding the lyrics would be nearly impossible."

She had a point. But had it actually been necessary to go to such an extreme? How were you supposed to do what needed to be done if the only person who had known what to do had deliberately made it borderline impossible? Careful or not?

"So..." London asked. "Do we keep looking here, or do we go and try the other room?"

Cody sighed. "No. We count our blessings, take what we have, and find these four lyrics first. We'll worry about the rest later."

He thought of something else.

"When I was in the men's bathroom, I happened across a lyric by happenstance. It wasn't that well hidden. Even if this is all there is to the list, he MUST have hidden the rest in places that can be found kind of obviously. If we keep our eyes peeled, we might run into others.""But wouldn't it take too long to go around the whole hotel trying to see if we come across them?" she asked. "Besides, what if that was one of the decoy lyrics?"

"It may end up being all we have to go on. Besides, even if it was a decoy, it would have to be accurate in order for 'It' to be able to find, recognize, and destroy it. So I think we can count on it being accurate. It's just one less we'll end up having to hunt down. Hopefully it won't be one of the ones already on this list, so we won't waste time chasing down a lyric we already have. We'll start our search down a few floors at 1218 and work our way up."

In truth, he was afraid to go poking around in Mr. Tipton's other room just yet in case this WAS the only list, even though it really may have been the smarter thing to do, but so far he'd felt like he'd been on a winning streak, and deep down inside, he didn't want to lose that.

Yes, he was running away again. Searching for the instant gratification that would numb his fears (temporarily),and then go about worrying about facing the possible cold, harsh reality lat... whoops. Can't afford to let himself finish that thought either.

Cody and London left the room and marched through the hotel silently, like hardened adventurers exploring some deadly, ancient labyrinth, as giving off the slightest sound would have been all that was necessary to wake the dead and spell certain doom. And indeed, it just may have been.