Chapter 8: Stairway to Nowhere
"The steeples on the roof are actually light shafts, as you can see," the tour guide said in an echoing room. She stood in the center of a splash of bright illumination on the parquet floor. The tourists ranged around the four walls—none of them with windows—and carefully avoided sitting on the overstuffed armchairs or sofa, all of which had computer-printed and laminated PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH! notices on them. Dipper had almost grown used to the sharpish scent of furniture polish. The antiques must require frequent attention with polish and cloths, he thought.
The guide paced and turned so she addressed all parts of her audience: "Originally, this room had windows overlooking the backyard in that wall, but when Minerva extended the house back, all the rooms on this side lost the windows and the light. The back wall there was rebuilt to remove the windows. Now, in the days before electric light, a big room like this one would be very dark, even with oil lamps or candles."
"How about chandeliers?" a dumpy lady asked.
"Some of the rooms had them. You noticed there were three big chandeliers in the grand ballroom, but that also has a balcony and French doors to let in daylight. There's supposedly another ballroom somewhere, but at some time the builders closed it off and now it's lost. It was reportedly an interior room, and we'd like to find it to see how it was lighted. The search goes on."
"Why doesn't this room have a chandelier?" the woman persisted.
"A chandelier with a hundred candles is really a pain to use. The candles have to be replaced within hours, and imagine the difficulty of lighting a hundred of them at a time. Mrs. Wesminster didn't much trust servants and usually had only a cook, five young maids to clean the house, and a yard man for the gardens. Nobody who could easily lower a hundred-pound chandelier, fill it with candles, light them, and raise it again, you see. This was a music room originally, but when it was closed off, it was unusable because it was too dark. So in compensation, Minerva had the workmen build an eventual total of eighteen steeples across the roof, which are hollow and topped with heavy glass pyramids that send daylight down."
"Like those railed-off openings in the floor we saw upstairs," a man said. "I noticed the ceilings in them all had the same square hole as this one does."
"Right," the guide agreed. "And the light wells give light to all the rooms they pass through. I'm in sunlight right now, even though there are no windows. If you stand here and look straight up, you can see that the ceilings of this room and the three above us all have cut-outs, those railed-off openings, so the light can stream down and provide natural illumination, and that bright shining thing up there at the very top isn't artificial—that's a reflection of the sun."
"Refraction," Dipper murmured. "The glass is like a prism and bends the light and sends it down here, it doesn't reflect it."
Eloise gave his hand a little squeeze. The group had roamed and wandered all over the house, had ventured up staircases with stair treads only three inches high—the stairs were long because of that—and had come close to getting lost in three different corridors that meandered so much no one without a compass could hold on to their sense of direction. She had held his hand the whole way, and he had begun to feel a little antsy about it, thinking of Wendy.
But . . . what the heck, he wasn't going to kiss Eloise or anything, and he certainly wasn't going to ask for her phone or email later. This was just two teens who got along together being friendly. Nothing romantic. Yeah. I'll keep telling myself that!
"Now the steps behind this," the guide said, walking to the wall behind Dipper and opening a narrow door, "are the only ones that lead down to the basement."
People craned to see. The visible part of the stair slanted steeply down, and from the blackness cool air scented with earth wafted over them. The guide said, "Because of safety issues, we can't go down there, but I will say that experts who have examined the basement tell us the Wesminster House was built on a floating foundation. Does anyone happen to know what that means? Anyone?"
When no one else spoke up, Dipper quietly said, "It makes the house earthquake-resistant."
"Very good!" the tour guide chirped, closing the door. She came over and stuck a gold-star sticker on his vest, reminding him of Mabel. "This young man is exactly right. A floating foundation is a reinforced concrete slab designed to distribute the building's weight smoothly and evenly over a soft subsurface, which is what we have here in San Jose. The building's walls aren't firmly attached to this slab. Because of that, the structure's supports aren't brittle, so it's easier for the house to shift and move a little during an earthquake without completely collapsing. Now, the house has survived two 6.9 quakes. Does anyone know when? I'll bet someone does!"
The crowd chuckled, and everyone looked at Dipper. "Um, the first one would've been in 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake," he said. "Only that one did damage the house. There used to be a kind of stepped brick tower toward the back that was seven stories tall. The upper stories were damaged and that part of the mansion was lowered to four stories, same as the rest of the house—except for the detached bell tower in the enclosed courtyard. That's the equivalent of six stories, I read."
"I am gonna run out of stars!" the guide said, laughing. "How about the second earthquake?"
"The Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989," Dipper told everyone. "The epicenter of that quake was actually closer to San Jose. But since the house was lower then, and thanks to the floating foundation, nothing much was damaged."
"You have done your homework." The tour guide handed him a sheet of twelve gold-star stickers, with one missing. "Take them all!"
"Thanks," Dipper said, folding it carefully and tucking it into a pocket of his backpack. "My sister will love these." As soon as he'd finished, Eloise took his hand again.
A few minutes later the tour ended, and the guide told everyone they could go back for a second look at anything that was interesting. "But the next tour begins at one p.m.," she added. "Now, you guys have green wristbands. That means that the staff will kick you out fifteen minutes before that tour starts, so keep an eye on the time, OK? And remember if anyone has any questions, you can find me in the reception room—if you can find the reception room! Young man, can you tell them the secret?"
In a way, the ability to answer her questions pleased Dipper, but in another the questions themselves made him the center of attention, and that always yanked him right out of his comfort zone. Shrugging, he said, "Uh, all through the house the doorways that eventually lead here to the living room here have little yellow dots above them. Doors that don't have red dots instead."
"You are quite an observer," the guide said, pointing to the yellow dot above the doorway that led to the reception area—unnecessary here, since everyone could see the reception desk through the doorless archway. "Follow the yellow dot road and you can always find me in the reception hall. Remember that, and remember my name is Felicia."
The group broke up. Some of them wanted to go upstairs to the rooms overlooking the gardens; others wanted to take photos of one of the fake toilets (the normal wooden door had been replaced with clear glass); others wanted to look at the antiques, and so on. "What should we do?" Dipper asked Eloise.
Her hand in his felt cool. She took a deep breath. "Hmm. You know what? I'd really like to find that stair that just goes up to a ceiling and stops there. That is so weird!"
Dipper shrugged. "Well, yeah, but my theory is that it once led up to the fifth floor, which has been taken down. They just didn't remove the last part of the stairway, though it no longer had a place to go. I think I can find it." He checked his compass—of course he had a compass—and led the way.
They got baffled once, when a hallway turned left instead of the expected right, but then Dipper found where he had gone wrong and they finally spotted a stair ahead of them. It went up to the second floor, where another identical stairway—except it zigged where the lower one zagged—led up to the third floor, and then they had to walk two rooms away from the light shaft and into a gloomy, dim chamber to find the one that led up to the fourth floor, and then they had to go roughly back over the lower two flights to find the blind stair leading up to the ceiling.
It ascended into utter darkness, and Dipper took his flashlight from his backpack and turned it on. The stairway looked as if it had never been finished: Rough, dark, splintery wood with a time-warped handrail on either side, it slanted up like a fairly steep ramp, its treads conventionally wide but only about a third the height of normal ones.
"They're all low," Dipper said, flashing the circle of light over them, "because Mrs. Westminster had arthritis. She wanted to walk anywhere in the house that she cared to visit. I guess that meant everywhere but the basement, because those steps looked normal. Anyway, even when she got real old, she could still hobble up and down the stairways."
"I want to go up," Eloise said.
Dipper flashed the light all around. "Well, there's no keep off sign. But the light's bad. Let's be careful."
They started up side by side, the stair treads creaking and popping under their feet. "Hold my hand again, please," Eloise said. He put out his left hand to grasp her right.
He advised, "Hang onto the rail, too. Watch out, though. It's full of splinters." He had a sudden mental flash of Mabel on their first day in the attic of the Mystery Shack: "Check out all my splinters!" Somehow he didn't think Eloise would react in just the same way.
Climbing with slow caution, Dipper felt his eyes beginning to sting, and he fought back an urge to sneeze. The stale smell of dust and mildew filled his nose. They were about twenty steps from the abrupt end of the stairway—it reached a wall and ceiling and simply stopped—when they began having to duck to keep from bumping their heads. "We can't make it to the very top," Dipper said. "For the last four feet of stair there's only a foot of clearance or less."
Up here the flashlight showed that the ceiling was not in terrific shape—something you couldn't really tell from floor level. Fine cracks zigzagged through the plaster, and festoons of ancient dusty-gray cobwebs looped down here and there. They stirred lazily as Dipper and Eloise breathed, like ugly underwater plants swaying in a slow current.
Eloise stooped and crept up a few more steps, then sat down, the ceiling only an inch from her head. "It looks a lot further down to the floor than it seemed when we were coming up."
"Yeah," Dipper said, uneasiness creeping into his voice. He settled on the step next to her, but he was actually a little taller than she was and had to keep his chin down so his trapper's hat wouldn't brush the ceiling. "Maybe we should go back down. My spook sense is tingling."
She nudged him. "There's no such thing! Don't try to scare me. That's so typical of boys! We haven't seen any ghosts."
"Lots of times they don't want to be seen," Dipper said. "After you encounter a few, though, you do get to recognize the vibe. There's a kind of—well, strange change in the air. Like when you saw your ghost, didn't you get kind of a cold shivery feeling?"
"The first time," Eloise admitted. "But then I got curious and didn't notice anything the other two times."
"I always feel it when I'm around spooks," Dipper muttered. "This one time my friends and I found two ghosts in an abandoned convenience store. Going in, nobody among us thought ghosts were real then, except I had my doubts. The others were all having fun, but I was having, I guess, premonitions. A lot of little things should've tipped me off. I had the strongest feeling something was there, and I was right."
Sounding interested, Eloise asked, "What kind of things tipped you off?"
"Little stuff," Dipper said. "Really just the atmosphere of the place. Cold, like I said. Expectant. Like being watched by someone you can't see. Like—like being around someone holding their breath but still making real quiet sounds that you're not sure you hear. My friends and me all turning into skeletons. Just minor things that ordinary people wouldn't even notice."
Eloise leaned her shoulder against his and asked in a dreamy voice, "Do you really think there are any ghosts here right now?"
"One way to find out."
Setting his flashlight on the step so its beam shone straight up and gave the stairway some dim illumination, Dipper took off his backpack and pulled out the compact anomaly detector he'd received as a gift from his great-uncle Stanford. Eloise sounded interested: "What does that do?"
"It finds ghosts," Dipper said. "Well, it does that among other things. If anything supernatural is going on, I should get a reading of fifty or higher on the meter." He clicked a slider switch. "OK, it's on . . . now I adjust this dial for ghosts, apparitions, and phantasms. Annnnd click." He pressed a button.
A red light on the device flashed, and the screen lit up in a vivid yellow. "Oh, wow," Dipper whispered.
Eloise leaned harder against him as she tried to see the small screen. "What?"
"It's registering three hundred! And that's the maximum! There's at least one powerful ghost nearby!"
"I knew it," Eloise said, her tone almost calm.
"Wait, wait, I'll change to location mode. That'll give me a reading on where the ghost is at the moment."
The device began to click and hum. Dipper pointed the sensor toward the base of the stair, and the hum softened from a shrill zeeeeeee! to a lower, softer zzzzz.
"It's not in the room down there," Dipper said. "We can make a break for it."
"No, I don't think we can," Eloise said.
She reached for the device and turned it in Dipper's hands so it pointed directly at her.
And the alarm screeched ZEEP! ZEEP! ZEEP!