Nicholas was stunned when he heard that master Hildebrand van der Kuijp had left his house to him. “In appreciation for saving my life,” the will had read.
Nick became a merchant himself twenty years ago, and was doing reasonably well with it. He had gathered a small but loyal staff and turned a steady profit from his trade. He spent most of his money on various projects intended to help the poor.
He had to do some soul searching when he learned that he was inheriting the stately home at the Keizersgracht. He was living in, and operating his business out of, a perfectly adequate but much smaller house. So he seriously considered selling the inherited house, possibly to one of van der Kuijp’s sons, who had after all be born and raised in that home.
In the end, however, he decided to accept the inheritance and move into the house himself. It wasn’t the size of the house, or even the prestigious location that made him decide. It was the cellar, and the strange crypt beneath it. To Nicholas, that crypt was the only connection he had left to his little brother, and he grew determined to poke around, dig up the entire cellar floor if needed, to find out what had happened on that December evening so many years ago.
Moving in was not hard. Nicholas had never been interested in society or even company, and had never married, so his household consisted only of himself, his servants and his employees.
It felt strange at first, entering the large office on the first floor as the lord and master rather than the young scribe, but he started to get used to that when his own furniture and books were brought in. He gifted his staff a small bonus for the smooth operation of the move and suggested they go out and celebrate, which meant he was all alone in the large house when night came.
With trepidation he went down the stairs into the cellar, much as he had done all those years ago to retrieve the wine bottle. The wine collection of master van der Kuijp was gone, of course, and the cellar only held the few bottles Nicholas owned for the rare occasion he had to celebrate a particularly successful business deal.
He put the four lights he brought on shelves around the cellar and started to carefully examine the middle of the room. The floor was clean, and nothing special revealed itself, least of all any hidden entrance to strange caverns.
He walked around, looking at every one of the floor stones, but could not see anything of note. Finally, he lowered himself on the cold stones and sat down near the entrance to the room. He tried to remember exactly what he had seen forty years ago.
As he focused on getting every detail of his memory right, a scraping sound came from the center of the room. The floor seemed to sink down and the same hole he had been trying to remember re-appeared in front of him.
More than five feet but less than fifteen, he thought as he held one of the lights over the opening and peered down. The ladder from before was there again, and he knew what he had to do. He felt as if his whole life had been leading up to this.
He had come prepared this time, with a long rope he hung over his shoulder and a couple of pieces of wood he dropped down the hole, before he went down into it.
Descending the ladder was a lot harder now than it had been all those years ago but he managed to get down safely. He tied one end of the rope securely to the bottom of the ladder and the other end around his middle before walking down the corridor.
Instead of blundering into the room, he held one of the pieces of wood in front of him, sticking it into the room. Nothing happened.
He threw the wood and it landed in the middle of the room. No invisible hands picked it up. Still not entirely trusting, he walked carefully into the room.
Nothing. No floating. No bright lights. Nothing at all.
It was a bit of an anti-climax. All those years he had yearned to go back to the cellar and the strange installation, but had been fearful of the magic that had taken place, afraid that this time he would not get out alive. And now he was back and prepared, and—nothing.
He walked around the room, looking at the strange furnishings on the wall, then looked around again. None of them made any sense. There were markings, but not in any script he recognized.
Emboldened, he started touching the different furnishings. Most of the wall fell hard, with different textures. Some parts, though, seem to have some give. Carefully, he tried pushing at them.
After more than ten minutes, he finally got a reaction when he pushed a panel almost directly opposite the entrance. The lights in the room got brighter and low vibrations started filling the air.
“Oh my, what was that?” he spoke out loud, not expecting any response.
“Good morning.”
Nicholas jumped away from the wall, looking around him, but he was still alone. The voice seemed to have come from everywhere.
“Eh... good evening,” he answered hesitatingly.
⁂
The voice, which spoke accentless Dutch, said that it was a machine, not a person. Conversations with the voice had a tendency to drive Nicholas crazy, since as well as it spoke, the machine tended to take everything he said literally. It answered direct questions without volunteering any information at all. The hardest part was to find the right questions to ask.
It took Nicholas months of repeatedly visiting the room to understand even part of what he had found. The strange room had not been built by the previous house owners, not even by people. It was created by aliens called Altons.
The Altons were gone. As far as he could reconstruct, they disappeared the same night that he had entered the crypt for the first time. The machinery had been left behind, lying dormant, until he awakened it.
He asked about that first time, and why he had found the crypt open, while nobody else even knew it existed. From what he was able to find out, the Altons would occasionally leave the crypt, which called itself the Base, on a scouting expedition. Normally, the entrance would have closed as soon as anyone entered the cellar, but according to the Base there was something called Alton energy around Nicholas. It was the same term the strange man had used more than forty five years ago.
The Base had been around for a long time, since long before Amsterdam even existed. It was one of several installations the Altons had established across the Earth. When the houses on the Keizersgracht were built, the Base had simply created an entrance to its basement.
The Base was unclear about why the Altons were there and what they wanted. But one thing Nicholas finally figured out was that it could make things. He had to tell it exactly what to make, but if he brought it an example, it could make endless copies of the same thing.
He immediately realized the possibilities of this. If he brought a box of spices, or a bale of tobacco, or a roll of fine silk, and the Base could make copies of that, he would be able to sell much more merchandise than his ships would bring in. It would turn his trade from marginally profitable to a goldmine—a goldmine he could use to really help the poor people of Amsterdam, the dearest wish of Nicholas.