and by the time she asked him what he was doing, he was sprawled out on his bed reading a book and the keys were hidden between the mattress and the box springs where she’d never find them even if she was looking. He’d swiped a laundry marker, too, so he wouldn’t have to waste time carving marks in the corners to keep from getting lost.
Now, safely locked in the room with her mad enough after the fight that she wouldn’t let him out again, he checked his pockets one last time. The knife, the laundry marker, and the keys were in the front pocket of his jeans, and the pockets of his jacket were stuffed with extra batteries. He was ready.
Half an hour later he’d found his way down through the maze of passages until he was pretty sure he was in the basement of the building. Most of the passages had been pretty narrow, except for a big room that he thought was right behind Tony’s study. There’d been some things in that room that looked like hospital equipment — racks of bottles and tubes and stuff like that — and a bunch of other passages that had led away from it. He’d explored a couple of them and found peepholes along every one of them. He hadn’t been able to see anything through most of the peepholes, but whenever he found one where he could see the room on the other side of the wall, it always looked like a kid’s bedroom.
But except for him and Laurie and Rebecca, there weren’t any kids in the building.
And now Rebecca was gone.
And Laurie—
He’d almost started crying then. No matter what Tony said, he was certain Laurie hadn’t gone to school, and he’d known for sure that Melanie had been lying about her going somewhere after school.
And if they’d done something to Laurie, and his mother didn’t come home—
That was when he’d made himself stop thinking about it, because if he started crying he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to stop, and then somebody might hear him, or he might get lost, or—
He’d decided he’d better not think about that, either, so just to keep himself from thinking about all the bad things that could happen, he’d concentrated on making sure he didn’t make any mistakes at all on marking the path he took. At every intersection he put enough arrows that he couldn’t possibly make a mistake, and he’d even put numbers that would tell him how many floors he was from where he’d started.
Which was why he was now pretty sure he was in the basement, since he’d come down seven levels since he’d started from the ceiling of his bedroom, which was on the sixth floor. But the passages had changed on this level, too. There was only one, and it was wider than the ones upstairs, and the floor was made out of cement, and there weren’t any turns.
And it smelled funny — musty and kind of rotten.
There was a door at the far end, and he was halfway to it when he saw another door in the side wall.
He paused, uncertain which door to try first, and in the end decided on the one he was closest to.
Locked.
He shined the flashlight on it. It was just a big panel of wood, with none of the fancy carved moldings most of the doors in the building had. But under the brass knob was the same kind of keyhole as the door to his room — and every other door he’d seen so far — had.
He pulled out the key ring, and began testing the keys.
The twelfth one fit.
The lock clicked open.
Screwing up his courage, Ryan switched the flashlight off, then twisted the knob.
The door swung open, and a terrible odor flowed out, strong enough to make Ryan take an involuntary step backward and put his hand over his nose. But after a few moments his curiosity overcame his revulsion, and he moved close enough to the door to peer inside.
Behind the door was a large room roofed by the main beams that supported the floor above. It wasn’t quite pitch black in the room — in fact, after the total blackness of the maze of passageways, it seemed almost light by comparison. It took Ryan only a moment to determine the source of the light — in the far wall, high up, there were a few narrow windows opening into the drainage channel that ran around the building, tiny openings that let in just enough light so that the room wasn’t totally dark.
But it wasn’t light enough for him to see much of anything, either.
He switched the flashlight back on.
And instantly heard a faint moan.
He switched the light back off.
There was a long silence, and as it stretched onward, Ryan’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. When the sound wasn’t repeated, he began edging forward, pausing to listen after each step. After about ten paces he came to one of those rolling tables they used to move people around in hospitals. But why would they have one of those in the basement of The Rockwell?
Then, a dozen steps further on, he came to another one. Except that this one wasn’t empty.
A sheet lay over it, and there was something under the sheet.
Something that was the source of the stink that filled the room. Ryan stood staring at the table — and the still form under the sheet — for several minutes, fighting an almost irresistible urge to turn around and slip back into the darkness. But even as he took the first step backward, a voice whispered inside his head:
Could it?
He hesitated.
His terror grew, but even as his skin turned clammy with fear, the voice in his head grew more insistent, and finally he reached out, his fingers shaking, and lifted the sheet just far enough to see what was under it.
A body, its skin dull gray in the dim light.
Laurie!
The thought crashed into Ryan’s mind, and once again he felt an urge to turn away and flee into the darkness. But once again, the other side of him — the side that had to
Or, at least, what was left of the corpse.
The belly had been laid open, and in the empty cavity that had once contained the vital organs, maggots were already doing their work, their fat white bodies wriggling and burrowing through the rotting flesh, abandoning their feast in a frantic effort to escape the glaring beam of light. His gorge rising, Ryan shifted the light to the face, and found himself staring into a pair of empty eye sockets.
But the rest of the face was familiar — even with her eyes gone, Rebecca Mayhew was still easily recognized.
His eyes flooding with tears — but the pounding of his heart easing slightly as he realized that at least it was not his sister, he dropped the sheet back over Rebecca’s ruined corpse, and moved on.
He came to another gurney.
On this one, the shape wasn’t quite covered — the head was still exposed, and when Ryan shined his light on the face — the face of a boy only a little older than he himself — the eyes, wide and deeply sunken in their sockets — blinked.
Ryan jumped, then froze.
The boy’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
Uncertainly, Ryan reached out and laid his hand on the boy’s forehead, so gently that he barely touched it. “It’s gonna be okay,” Ryan whispered. “I–I’m gonna get you out of here.”
But even as he spoke the words, he could hear their hollowness, and he was sure the boy, whoever he was, didn’t believe them any more than Ryan did himself.
Then, out of the gray twilight, he heard another sound. It was a little louder than the one he’d heard when he first turned on his light, and now he knew what it was: a voice, but so faint and weak that he was almost afraid he’d imagined it. But then it came again.
“M-mom?”
His heart suddenly pounding, Ryan swept the room with his flashlight. On the second sweep, he saw it.
Yet another gurney, yet another shape all but concealed beneath a sheet. But there was someone on the gurney, and even though the single word he’d heard had been barely audible, he was almost certain he recognized the voice.
