straight toward a dead end now, but right at the bottom it banked sharply right.
And then the walls on either side disappeared.
“Gary, wait.”
My voice sounded different now as well. Fisher slowed, as he became aware that something had changed. It wasn’t just the sound. The air was cooler here. The other sound became clearer, ragged and hitching sobs.
We kept moving forward, more cautiously now. Twenty feet, thirty. Fisher held the light out, spinning it slowly. White jags of light cut through the air without hitting anything.
There was a scream, something that had words hidden in it. Gary pulled the flashlight around, fast.
Someone staggered into view. A young girl, standing in the flashlight’s beam like something transfixed in the night on a backcountry road. Her hair was whipped in all directions, as if she’d been trying to pull it out. She was wearing a coat that was covered in blood and something dark and viscous. Her face was wet with tears, smeared with dirt, the tendons in her neck pulled taut to the snapping point.
“Go away!” she screamed.
As Fisher moved toward her, the girl started hammering at her head and face with her fists. “You’re not allowed in here!”
Fisher held out his hands to her. “Shh,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s—”
The girl’s head jerked up. She stared at Fisher as if he’d appeared out of thin air. She blinked. Her voice changed, rasping deeper.
“Who…” she snarled, “…the fuck are you?”
“It’s okay,” Gary said, taking another step closer. “Everything’s okay. We’re—”
But then there was a clunking sound, and lights started to come on from the far end of the space, flicking toward us out of the darkness, coming on in groups.
I began to see that we were in a big, big space—about fifty yards long and forty yards wide. It was difficult to be exact, because the low ceiling was supported by brick columns that obscured the view. There was a central area of floor. In this was a circular wooden table. There were nine chairs around it, heavy, oak. A glass pitcher in front of each of them, opaque with dust. It looked like something mothballed since the Victorian era, or transported from a medieval hall, or discovered in a bunker on another planet.
Rows of wooden seats ran down both sides of the room, behind a flat front, like pews, each banked higher than the one in front. The light was coming from small, dusty electric lamps set along the rows, making it look like a Catholic church on a long-ago winter afternoon when no one had done much remembrance.
Fisher was openmouthed, taking it in. The girl was staring past him, back the way we’d come.
I turned to see that someone had entered the room. A tall figure, dressed in a coat. I knew immediately where I’d seen him before. In Byron’s. It was the man who had killed Bill Anderson.
He walked slowly down the center of the room, not giving the table and chairs or any of the rest of it a second glance. He wasn’t looking at Gary or me either.
He was here for only one thing.
“Hello, Marcus,” he said as he slapped a clip into the gun he held in his right hand. “At least this time you’ll know it’s me, right?”
The girl turned and ran, heading straight for a door at the other end of the room.
“Time to die!” the man shouted after her. “Again!”
Gary ran after the girl.
I turned back to the man in the coat. “Who the hell are you?”
He raised the gun and shot me, in passing, and then kept on walking as if I were already dead.
chapter
FORTY-ONE
Madison sprinted through the door, back into the dark, and went careering along a series of twists and bends into black corridors. She was the fox now, cunning and at home. She hardly even knew who she was anymore, in fact was barely sensible to her body’s crashes into walls, the stumbles and falls. As her body ran, she ran, too, inside, through a head that was no longer hers and no longer a haven, no longer even safe.
There were running footsteps behind her for a few minutes, and a flicking light, but for the moment she had lost her pursuers, dodging down a maze of corridors that Marcus knew but Shepherd and the other man did not: Shepherd, the man who’d come to her on the beach and smashed a hole in her mind wide enough for Marcus to start coming through. Shepherd evidently wanted to kill her now, and it sounded like maybe he’d done so before.
She’d been right not to trust him, huh.
She tripped over something, hard, and fell sprawling.
As she picked herself up, she suddenly realized she was in a place she’d been in already. She recognized it from the smell.
Which meant that the door, a way out back up into the building, was on the other side of this room.
She was exhausted from days of walking. She was exhausted just from being alive. She kept moving because she was terrified, but the man inside was not. He was not afraid of darkness or dead girls or anything else, had never understood the emotion properly. Never in all his lives. He’d seen too much. He’d known this place before it was even here, after all, known it when it was trees and rock and water. It was his. Everything was his to do with as he wished. Or so he believed.
Not everything, Madison decided.
As she stumbled through the chaos of the room, she tearfully pulled off her coat. She didn’t want it anymore. Not with so much blood in it. She didn’t want it because it hadn’t been she who’d known how to make her mother buy it for her. She wanted her mother now, and her father, but she did not want this coat. If she was ever going to see them again, it could only be as herself.
She threw the coat on the floor, but her legs stopped moving immediately, knees locking.
Of course. He wanted his notebook, which was still in the coat pocket. He didn’t want it left here. He needed it. Madison was glad to make him angry, and suddenly she had an even better idea.
She pulled the cigarette lighter out of her pocket. She knelt and held it to the coat, right where the dumb notebook was, with all its stupid words and sums and things she did not want to remember or understand. She flicked the wheel more awkwardly than when he did it, because he had smoked and she did not.
But she kept at it. He tried to pull her arm away, but she held firm, straining every muscle against his will, until she got a flame and the coat was on fire. Everything around it was dry. She moved the flame to a pile of dry and musty books.
The fire spread quickly. She started to laugh and scream, feeling her head split open, and then she was completely in the cloud.
It feels like someone hitting you with a sledgehammer, to which they’ve stuck a thumbtack, point out.
The bullet hit me high in the left shoulder, spinning me to crash into the first bank of seating. For a moment my vision went black, the impact to the back of my head hurting more for a moment than the shell wound.
I hit the ground hard and rolled, tried to push up with my left hand, felt something like cracking glass shoot along my arm. I reached up and grabbed the top of the wooden frontage with my right hand, hauled myself up.
Blood was running out of my jacket. My whole arm felt hot. The pain in my head already felt like nothing at all, and I knew that my shoulder was going start feeling worse real fast.
I ran into the corridor at the end of the room. A sharp, right-angle turn took me into darkness. I could hear the echoes of Gary shouting from somewhere up ahead, however, and I chased the sound.
When I made another right, I heard the sound of my footsteps change, flat and quiet, and knew I must be in a chamber of similar size to the one I’d just left. I pulled out my cell phone and flipped it open, the screen shedding a weak light as I stumbled forward.
This room had no seats, was more like a storage vault or an antechamber for the other room. I ran straight through it toward the other end.
