The sound came again, and her eyes shot back toward the window. This time, she saw a dark silhouette of a head bobbing in the hallway beyond, swaying a little, backlit and indistinct. It loomed in the little window — and then, as it pressed up against the glass, the light from the lab revealed its features.
She caught her breath, blinked, and stared again.
Chapter 17
Nora jumped back with a cry. The face vanished. She felt her heart accelerate, thudding in her chest. There was no question this time.
She scrambled backward, looking around wildly for a place to hide, and ducked behind a lab table, gasping for breath.
There was no sound. The lab, and the hallway beyond, were utterly silent. She thought:
Slowly, she stood up. The window remained empty.
Her hand moved across the tabletop, grasped a Pyrex graduated cylinder, and lifted it from its stand. Then, with a sharp rap, she knocked it against the edge of the stand, shattering its end. More quickly now, she moved to the door, shaking fingers trying to punch in the code. On the third try she got it, threw open the door, and stepped into the hall.
From around the far bend of the hall came the sound of a door closing. '
She broke into a run, charging at top speed down the hall and around the corner. The hall was lined with doors, but only one was near the intersection. She seized its handle, found it unlocked, jerked it open.
She fumbled along the wall, felt the banks of light switches, and in two swipes of her hand turned them all on.
Ahead lay a room she had heard of but never seen, one of the museum's most legendary storage areas. It had once been the old power plant; now, the vast space contained the museum's collection of whale skeletons. The enormous bones and skulls, some as large as city buses, hung on chains from the ceiling; had they been set on the floor, their own weight would have caused them to deform and break. Each of the suspended skeletons was draped in plastic sheets that hung, shroud — like, almost to the floor, a seascape of draped bones. Despite the banks of fluorescent bulbs overhead, there were still too few for such a large room, and the lighting had a gauzy, almost submarine quality.
She glanced around, makeshift weapon at the ready. To the left, a few of the sheets were swaying, as if recently disturbed.
'
Her voice echoed weirdly in the cavernous vault. She ran toward the nearest shrouds, then slipped between them. The great skeletons cast strange shadows in the indistinct light, and the plastic sheets, dirty and stiff, formed a maze — like set of curtains that prevented her from seeing more than a few feet in any direction. She was almost gasping with mingled tension and rage.
She reached out and jerked aside a curtain of plastic. Nothing.
She stepped forward, pulled aside another, and then another. Now the plastic shrouds that surrounded her were swaying crazily, as if the giant skeletons within had come to restless life.
'
A rustle — and then she saw a shadow move swiftly against the plastic. She lunged forward, slashing with the cylinder.
Nothing.
Suddenly she could take it no longer and ran forward with a cry, batting aside curtain after curtain, sweeping the broken glass tube before her in wild arcs, until she became tangled in the heavy plastic and had to struggle to free herself. The fit passing, she took a few more steps, listening. At first all she heard were her own gasps of breath. But then she made out, quite distinctly, a shuffling sound to her right. She rushed toward it, slashing and lunging, preparing to call out again.
Then, abruptly, she stopped. A voice of reason began to penetrate her red haze of fury. This was stupid — very stupid. She had allowed her anger to cloud her judgment.
She stopped to listen again. A scrape, a flitting shadow, more swaying sheets. She spun toward it. Then she paused, licking lips that had suddenly gone dry. In the dim light, surrounded by countless hulking, shrouded skeletons, she asked herself a question: who was hunting… and who was the hunted? Her anger dissipated abruptly, replaced by mounting anxiety as she realized what had happened. Fearing had been unable to get into her locked lab. Instead, he had drawn her out. And now she'd allowed herself to be lured into this maze.
Suddenly, a knife slashed through a nearby plastic curtain, creating a huge rend. A figure began coming through the gap. Nora whirled toward it, slashed at it with the jagged end of the cylinder, made glancing contact. But the figure struck her makeshift weapon away with his knife, sending the glass tube crashing to the floor.
She backed up, staring at him.
Fearing's clothes were tattered, stinking, stiff with old blood. One livid eye stared at her; the other was whitish, dead looking. The mouth yawned open, exposing a mouth packed with black, carious teeth. His hair was full of dirt and leaves. His skin was sallow and smelled of the grave. With a wet snoring sound, he took a step forward and slashed at her, the knife — a knife she recognized too well — moving in a glittering arc.
Nora twisted aside as the weapon swept past, losing her balance and falling to the ground. The figure advanced as she took up a large piece of broken glass and scrambled backward.
The mouth yawned wide, making a horrible, gurgling sound.
'Get away from me!' she screamed, brandishing the shard of glass and rising to her feet.
The figure shambled forward, slashing clumsily at her. Nora backed up, then turned and ran, thrashing through the curtains of plastic as she tried to fight her way to the rear of the room. Surely she would find a back door. Behind her, she could hear the figure cutting through the plastic, the knife almost shrieking as it nicked hanging bones.
The figure made horrible sounds as it drew in ragged breaths through a wet windpipe. She cried out in fear and dismay, her voice echoing crazily in the cavernous gloom.
She was disoriented now, unsure she was going in the right direction. She fought against the plastic, struggling for breath, getting entangled again, finally throwing herself to the ground and crawling frantically under the rustling, swinging shrouds. She had become completely lost.
In desperation, she stood up underneath the plastic drape of a low — hanging skeleton, reached up and seized a whale's rib bone, then swung herself up, crawling into the rib cage as if it were some monstrous piece of playground equipment. She climbed frantically, the desiccated bones swaying and clacking together, until she had reached the top of the rib cage. Here a slot between two ribs was big enough to squeeze through. She slashed a hole in the covering plastic with the piece of glass, then hauled herself between the bones and through the plastic, clambering onto the back of the skeleton. For a moment, despite everything, she paused, frozen by the bizarre sight: a sea of whale skeletons, large and small, hanging in all directions beneath her, arranged so close together they were touching.
The skeleton beneath her feet began to sway again. She looked down. Fearing was below her, climbing up into the jungle gym of bones.
With a groan of fear, she ran as quickly as she dared along the top of the skeleton, crouched, then jumped to the next, grabbing on tight as it swayed crazily beneath her. She ran along the second backbone, jumping to a third skeleton. From here, she could just make out a door at the far end of the hall.
