When he looked down at the protuberant bulge in the front of his pants, reality of his ridiculous fantasies stuck him like a cold washcloth in the face. She wasn’t the sort of woman for the likes of him, he knew. He had no business thinking of her that way. She had no sexual interest in a gawky, inexperienced youth who was years younger than her. She was only being kind to a young college student she was befriending out of kindness, pity, or worse, a sense of public duty to a lonely sophomoric dweeb. Once he had regained his senses, he was only glad that walking behind her in the hall gave his tumescent condition time to subside before she turned around to talk to him again. He would have died of embarrassment if she had seen him in such a condition.
As they went down the hall, she turned the knob on one of the doors to show him the nursery which she used for housing for her temporary infant charges. Andrew was surprised at the height of the door handle on the nursery’s entry door; it had been mounted at an astonishingly high position on the door casement. The handle was at least four and a half feet from the floor! When she swung open the heavy wood-covered steel door, he saw the latch had a spring-driven extra-long two and one half inch bolt that sank deep into the doorframe when the door was closed. As Andrew walked in the room, the door swung slowly at first and then slammed shut under hydraulic pressure when it reached the last two inches of travel. The door seated itself automatically in its wood-colored, steel jamb that was almost perfectly hidden behind the screwed-on, walnut-butted trim with matching corner blocks and plinths that graced the regular wooden doorways in the hall. The illusion of normalcy was dispelled when the bolt slammed home with a distinctive metallic snap, making the steel strike plate emit a soft, short ring as the solidly bound steel fame resonated and gave audible assurance that the door was firmly latched.
“Evidently,” Andrew thought, “she’s had some problems with babies getting out of the crib and wandering around at night. I can’t say I blame her for being concerned. If a baby fell down those stairs he might be badly injured. The way she had the door handle mounted is a bit odd, but I suppose it’s a wise precaution when you’re not sure how smart the baby you’ll be housing next week will be.”
The walls were painted a somewhat depressing shade of dark baby blue with heavy black walnut baby furnishings. The curtains were the same shade of dark baby blue and were so densely woven that no light from the outside penetrated the thickness of the fabric. If he had opened the curtains, he would have seen that the windows themselves were constructed of a thick sandwich of bullet and shatterproof Lexan plastic held in place by steel casements that matched the door. Outside the windows of the room, Krystyn had had one-inch diameter “decorative” iron burglar bars installed that could only be opened with a special tubular “Ace” lock key from the inside. The window casement itself had locks mounted on either side that required similar but different tubular keys to open the windows. Aside from cutting through the ten-gauge thickness of continuous arc-welded steel plates that underlay the innocent-appearing plaster wallboard of the walls and ceiling as well as the wooden parquet floor, there was no escape from the room. Even the high frequency screech of an infant’s cries would be completely absorbed by the three-quarter inch layer of high-technology sound suppressing foam that lay beneath the steel plate of the room’s floor, walls and ceiling. No noise, from the merest whimper to the loudest wail, could escape the sonic security in which Krystyn encapsulated her charges.