proposition in all that darkness. The top row of screens was devoted to several angles of a deceptively normal- looking house. How innocuous it seemed. How normal. How safe. Well, how else would the entrance to hell ensnare its victims? Other monitors revealed places he’d become all too familiar with over these last several months. Looking at these scenes made him anxious to get on with his flight from the howling terror behind him.
And he fully intended to do just that.
He needed another moment, however, to recover from the shock of seeing the dead people. He wasn’t too bothered by the death aspect. Up-close encounters with death occurred with regularity down here. He’d become almost blase about death. As a concept applied to other people, that is. The notion of his own death did still disturb him. Okay, it wigged him out. Still, he’d seen plenty of death down here, so much so that death as a phenomenon had lost its ability to shock him. Then again, maybe not, because there was something about what he was seeing now that was more disturbing than the things he’d seen before.
A nude fat man weighed down a swivel chair in front of the desk. A nude woman straddled him. The fat man had a large bald spot and a wedge of now-displaced combed-over hair. The woman was thinner and not bad- looking. She looked as if she’d been roughed up some time prior to her union with the fat security guard, and she bore the mark of a slave girl on her neck. Her head hung limply over the fat man’s shoulder and her glassy eyes stared at nothing at all. They’d been run through with an ornate sword-its bloody tip pierced the back of the swivel chair.
Eddie regained his voice. “Holy fuck …”
He tried to imagine a human being strong enough to put that thing through two people-one of whom had been very large-and the back of a chair. His mind couldn’t comprehend such a thing. But the solution to the puzzle was obvious-a human being hadn’t done it.
Nor had one of those monsters out there.
Who probably lacked the ability to effectively wield swords and didn’t really need them anyway.
No, this could only have been done by the owner of the house.
The thing that feigned the appearance of an ordinary man. A mortal man. A creature worse by far than the fearsome things that had hounded him through the tunnels.
The Master.
The monster to end all motherfucking monsters.
Eddie’s internal terror barometer shot past the red zone. The only thing he wanted to deal with less than the tunnel creatures was that… thing. He cast his gaze about the rest of the room, which was otherwise nondescript. There was a single tall filing cabinet, beside it an overflowing wastebasket. A doorway revealed a tiny room with a dirty toilet. There was another door next to the bank of monitors. It stood slightly open, letting in a sliver of yellow light.
The closed metal door behind him rattled louder than ever.
He could hear the scrape of tortured hinges pulling slowly free of concrete moorings.
Still, he didn’t move.
He stared at the sliver of light, his body quaking like that of a man in the grip of a small seizure. He was moments away from being eaten alive. But it was possible an even worse fate awaited him through that open door.
He heard the heaviest thud yet from the tunnel.
The door came loose from the wall and fell heavily to the floor beneath the weight of the surging creatures. There was no more time to think. No more time to weigh one fate against another. Eddie moved. And slid for a microsecond on the pool of blood that surrounded the chair. But he righted himself immediately, slipped through the open door, and pulled it shut. This one locked electronically. A resolute click assured him it was sealed against all unauthorized personnel. He glimpsed an electronic keypad embedded in the wall next to the door. He tried to remember seeing something similar near the other door, but he was drawing a blank. Not that it mattered. It was just curious how the primitivism of Below gradually gave way to higher-tech gadgetry.
The creatures slammed against the door and bellowed outrage at yet another thwarted chance to corner their quarry.
Eddie allowed himself a shaky sneer. “Poor monsters. No dinner for you tonight.”
He was in a short hallway with a high ceiling. The cold electronic eye of a security camera stared down at him from the ceiling. A red light next to the lens blinked on and off. It didn’t bother him. The security guard wouldn’t be coming after him anytime soon. Still, that door-like the one before it-probably wouldn’t hold forever, so it wouldn’t do to linger.
At the other end of the hallway was a tall concrete staircase. It seemed to stretch into infinity. Maybe not quite that far, but it was certainly the tallest staircase Eddie had ever seen. There were good-sized office buildings that didn’t reach that high. But he could just make out the tiny outline of a door at the top of the staircase. He glanced in the other direction and saw nothing but gray wall-a dead end.
He strode in the opposite direction and began to mount the stairs. He climbed the steps two at a time at first, driven forward by a new burst of adrenaline and a renewed flicker of hope. It was probably a foolish hope, but he would nonetheless chase it until he collapsed. Or until hostile forces caused his collapse. A dozen steps fell away below him. Two dozen. Three dozen. Then he was taking them one at a time, but was still moving at a pretty good clip. The door at the top grew incrementally larger, though it remained tantalizingly far away.
Fatigue began to set in after a few dozen more steps. He had to work at making his tired legs move up another level. A sheen of sweat covered his bare torso. He concentrated on continuing the upward trajectory, focusing the whole of his will on the monumental physical effort needed to keep moving. The act of swinging a leg up another step became excruciating, worse than, say, carrying large sacks of potatoes up a steep hill on a sweltering summer day. He wanted more than anything a spare moment or two to sit down on one of these steps. His heart pistoned in his chest like the engine of a very old and very feeble car.
“Don’t throw a rod, motherfucker…,” he muttered to his beleaguered heart.
It was a while before he realized the pursuing creatures were now nonpursuing creatures. He was ascending the steps at a rate slower than an elderly Florida driver steering a Buick through a choked intersection. Awareness dawned as a realization of the absence of any sound other than his labored breathing and the rapid thrum of his heart.
He came to a stop, an act that didn’t require a lot of effort. He sagged against the cold concrete wall, slid slowly down until he was in a squatting position, and stayed right there while his body tried to recover. He figured he might be able to cease panting within a week or two. He sat there with his eyes closed for several minutes, thankful he was no longer in quite so much imminent danger of being ripped to shreds. His breathing leveled out, and his heart no longer seemed ready to propel itself out of his chest. He allowed his eyes to flutter open, and he had his first opportunity to cast a downward glance.
The sensation of vertigo made his stomach lurch. His head swam, and he was dizzier than he had been at any time since he’d made himself spin like a top as a kid. He gripped one of the steps above him with one hand, slapped the open palm of the other against the wall, and held on for dear life. The vertigo passed in a few moments. Then, when he felt prepared, he risked another look down.
He felt a slight twinge in his stomach, but it was of minor consequence. He was okay. There were no ravenous monsters with bulbous demonic red eyes hot on his trail. Not anymore. The staircase below him was empty, as was the little hallway at the bottom. He listened intently, but he could detect no sounds of destruction from the little security room. Well, that was good. Something had worked in his favor for a change. Then he turned his eyes toward the ceiling and looked at the blinking red light of the security camera. He thought of how much closer the camera had seemed when he was in the hallway.
Actually…
Well, the staircase, too, seemed much steeper even than it had originally appeared. He was maybe a third of the way up, and he felt as if he had been climbing the stairs forever. A feeling of unreality gripped him. A new creeping sensation of fear spread through him. Unreality. That was just the right word for it. Or was it just that reality was very fluid in this strange place?
Would he climb these stairs forever without reaching the top?
“No. Nuh-uh. No way, nohow.”
He would give it one more good effort. Thirty minutes. No, an hour. And he would climb the steps at a more reasonable rate this time instead of using up all his energy at once. If he was still only a third of the way up the
