After nearly an hour of searching for the correct spot and tromping through the snow in boots borrowed from the old man, they finally found the bunker’s entrance. Beaman had brought along a shovel, and Marcus dug the entrance clear of snow and dirt. The rusted metal doors were only a few feet beneath the surface. It reminded Marcus of the door to a cellar, except that in this case there was no house above it.
Marcus looked around the area. It sat on a slight hill, but there were no outward signs of the bunker. “I don’t see any intake or exhaust pipes.”
“I cut those off and filled them in,” Beaman replied.
“That means the air might not be very good and there’s nowhere for our carbon dioxide to go. We’ll leave the doors open and only stay down a few minutes. But if you start feeling strange or light-headed, we get out immediately.”
Maggie and Beaman nodded.
Using the end of the shovel, Marcus pried open the doors. He expected to find a set of stairs but instead there was an old metal ladder bolted into the concrete blocks. The shaft was as wide as the cellar doors and descended into darkness. The ladder did make more sense; stairs would have taken up a lot of space. He shone the Maglite down into the hole. The floor looked stable enough.
“I’ll go first.”
Marcus stepped down onto the first rung of the ladder and tested its strength. It seemed sturdy, so he began his descent. Along the way, he noticed that the bunker’s top seemed to be constructed of wooden support beams topped with corrugated metal. He reached the bottom and tested the wooden floor. It was made from thick sheets of plywood, but no carpet or other material covered it. There were only a few rugs and blankets scattered about. The plywood creaked under his weight but gave no indication that it would cave in.
“Come on down.”
As the sound of feet on the metal rungs echoed off the bunker’s walls, Marcus examined the space. The right wall was constructed from gray concrete blocks. A blackboard hung from it. There was a large circular rug sitting in front of a stool near the blackboard. A schoolroom? The wall at his back that held the ladder was also made from concrete blocks, but the walls on the left and at the back of the room were interior partitions covered by dark wood-grain paneling. Marcus guessed that the room was fifteen feet wide and thirty long. The back half contained old particle-board folding tables, chairs, and bookshelves. Some of the tables still had cups and plates and opened books on them. The air was stale and musty.
Maggie’s flashlight beam danced around the space, revealing the same sights. She said, “I bet they used plans for an old fallout shelter and just expanded the dimensions.”
“Could be. They could also have skimped on some of the materials from bomb-shelter plans, since their goal really wasn’t to survive a nuclear blast.”
Three cheap hollow-core doors lined the left-hand wall. Marcus walked over, pulled open one of the doors, and shone his light around the room on the other side. He supposed it was a bedroom, but the bare utilitarian space reminded him more of a monastic cell. He stepped inside. There was a triangular-shaped piece of wood that acted as a desk mounted in the left corner. A gray folding chair sat in front of it. The right wall contained a home-made set of bunk beds. There were several sets of deteriorated clothing stacked in one corner. The neutral-colored garments looked similar to prison jumpsuits.
From the doorway, Maggie said, “Could you imagine living like this?”
“I’ve seen worse,” he replied, thinking of the tapes of Ackerman as a boy. He stepped back into the first room. “I’m going to see what’s behind that door on the end. You check these other two bedrooms.”
Marcus moved across the room, past the makeshift classroom, past the tables and chairs and bookshelves. He shone his flashlight on the spines of a few of the books. He saw names that he recognized from his research on the case—Anton LaVey, the iconic founder of the Church of Satan, and Aleister Crowley—and then other names he recognized, such as Ayn Rand.
The door on the end, like the ones for the bedrooms, had no lock. He moved inside and found what appeared to be some type of communal dining area. This room was darker than the previous one, since there was no ambient light coming through the opened cellar doors. There was a wood-burning stove connected to a pipe that led up into the ceiling and an old-time icebox in the corner. Shelves filled with canned goods and jars covered the back wall. There was enough food there to feed several people for at least a couple of months. More doors lined the left wall as they had in the first room. Marcus made a cursory search of each, but they were all the same and filled with nothing but the bare essentials for human existence. The only anomaly was that the back wall of the last bedroom had bulged inward and dirt had seeped in, probably from the intrusion of a tree’s root system.
Returning to the first room, he asked Maggie, “Did you find anything?”
“Just this. It was on one of the desks in the corner.” She held out a stack of old dot-matrix printer paper, the kind that had perforated edges and rolled from the printer in a long interconnected strip.
He shone the light onto the pages and read a few lines. It seemed to be some type of satanic manifesto. It described the world with terms like The Father, The Slaves, The Disciples, The Work, The Great Fire, and The Chosen. Marcus had done some basic research on cults and had found that most of them developed their own special vocabularies and terms. Controlling words and encouraging black-and-white thinking helped the leaders to control the thoughts of the members.
Quickly flipping through the pages, he also found mention of ceremonies like those from the Anarchist crime scenes.
He shone his light around the space again, knowing that there had to be more to the compound than this. And then he saw it in the corner.
There was another hole, covered by a trapdoor, near where they had climbed down. The trapdoor had a small brass handle screwed to one edge. Marcus pulled it open and found a ladder that descended to a second underground story.
Shining his flashlight up into the faces of the others, he said, “Let’s see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”