She was no professional; that was painfully apparent.
Why would they be after her already? She felt confident she had not been followed. Maybe the wad of paper had fallen out by itself. Susan advanced toward the door again.
“What the hell’s the matter with this lock?” she said aloud, shaking the keys, playing for time. She remembered that the watchman was not at his desk downstairs. Should she go down and knock on someone else’s door, saying that hers was stuck? Susan backed away again and moved over to the stairs. She thought that was the best idea under the circumstances. She knew Martha Fine on three well enough to knock at this hour. She didn’t know what she should tell her. It was probably best for Martha if she told her nothing. All she’d say was that she couldn’t get into her own room and she needed to sleep on Martha’s floor.
Susan stepped slowly onto the wooden stairs. They creaked mercilessly under her weight. The sound was unmistakable and Susan knew it. If someone was poised behind her door he would have heard it. Susan ran down the stairs headlong. As she got to the third floor she heard the latch on her door snap open. She went on down, not bothering to stop.
What if Martha wasn’t there, or wouldn’t answer? Susan knew that she could not let the man get hold of her again. The dorm seemed asleep, although it was only a little after one.
Susan heard her door fly open and hit the wall of the hall. She heard some steps and imagined that someone had run to the banister. Susan dared not to look up. Her mind was made up. She’d leave the dorm. It would be easy to lose whoever was following her within the medical school complex. Susan felt she could run relatively quickly and she knew every inch of the area. She was at the ground floor when she heard her pursuer start down the stairs above.
At the bottom of the stairs Susan turned sharply to the left and ran through a small archway. Quickly she opened the door to the quad outside, but she did not exit. Instead, she let the hydraulic hinge begin to close the door. She turned and passed through the door into the adjacent wing of the dorm, shutting that door after her. She could hear feet running on the landing of the second floor.
Avoiding the noise her shoes would make if she ran normally, Susan moved down the ground-floor hall of the adjacent dorm, keeping her legs relatively stiff. She moved quickly but silently, passing the Student Health Office. At the end of the hall she opened the stairwell door quietly and allowed it to close behind her without a noise. She found herself on a stairway to the basement level and wasted no time in descending.
D’Ambrosio was tricked by the slowly closing door to the quad but not for long. D’Ambrosio was no novice at pursuit and he knew just how much time Susan was ahead of him. As he ran into the quad, he knew immediately that he had been duped. He would have been, except there were no other doors close enough for her to have got back into the building.
D’Ambrosio darted back through the door he had just opened. There were only two alternate routes. He chose the nearest door and ran forward down the hall.
Susan entered the tunnel connecting the dorm with the medical school.
She was sure she must be in the clear. The tunnel proceeded straight for twenty-five or thirty yards, then twisted out of sight to the left. Susan moved ahead as quickly as she could: the tunnel was fairly well lit by bulbs in open wire cages.
At the end of the tunnel she reached for the handle on the fire door and opened it. A breeze of air hit her as she went through. A sinking feeling passed over her as she realized that could mean only one thing.
The door behind her had to be open at the same time! Then she heard the unmistakable heavy footsteps of a man running in the tunnel.
“My God,” she whispered in a panic. Perhaps she had misjudged. She had left a dorm full of people, even if asleep, for the labyrinthine spaces of a dark, deserted building.
Susan rushed up the stairs ahead, feeling a sense of helplessness as she remembered the strength of D’Ambrosio. Quickly she tried to think of the layout of the building she was now in. It was the Anatomy-Pathology Building, which had four floors. There were two large lecture amphitheaters on the first floor as well as several ancillary rooms. The second floor had the anatomy hall with a number of smaller labs. The third and fourth floors were mostly offices, and Susan was not familiar with them.
She opened the door onto the first floor. Unlike the tunnel, the building was totally dark except for light from the street-lamps filtering through infrequent windows. The floor was made of marble and it echoed with her footsteps. The hall followed a circular pattern as it skirted the pit of one of the amphitheaters.
With no particular plan in mind, Susan rushed up to one of the wide but low doors leading into the first amphitheater. It was the door through which patients were wheeled for demonstrations. As Susan closed the door she heard running footsteps on the marble hall behind her. She moved away from the low door into the center of the amphitheater. The banks of seats rose in regular tiers until they were lost in darkness. She mounted the steps leading up one aisle from the pit.
The footsteps got louder and Susan hurried upward, afraid to look back.
The footsteps passed and became less audible. Then they stopped altogether. Susan moved higher and higher. Behind her the pit of the amphitheater became more and more difficult to distinguish. Susan reached the upper tier of seats and moved laterally along it. She heard the footsteps on the marble again. She had a few moments to think. She knew there was no way she could cope with this man directly; she had to lose him or hide long enough so that he would give up and leave. She thought about the tunnel to the Administration Building. But she wasn’t one hundred percent sure that it would be open. Occasionally it had been locked when she tried to take that route home from the library in the evening.
She froze as she heard the door open into the pit of the amphitheater.
The shadowy figure of a man entered. She could barely see him. But she was dressed in the white nurse’s uniform and she feared that she was more easily visible. She slowly crouched down behind a row of seats, but the backs of the chairs only rose eight to twelve inches above the level she was on. The man stopped and did not move. Susan guessed that he was trying to scan the room. She carefully lay down on the floor. She could see between the backs of two of the seats. The man walked over to the podium and seemed to be searching. Of course. He was searching for the lights! Susan felt panic again take control. Ahead of her, about twenty feet away, was a door to the hall on the second floor. Susan prayed that the door would be open and not locked. If it were locked she would have to try to make it to the door on the opposite side of the amphitheater. That would take about as long as it would take D’Ambrosio to get from the pit up to her level. If the door ahead of her was locked, she was lost.
There was a snap of a light switch and the lamp on the podium went on.
Suddenly and eerily D’Ambrosio’s horrid pockmarked face was illuminated from below, casting grotesque shadows and making his eye sockets appear like burnt holes in a ghoulish mask. His hands groped along the side of the podium, and the sound of a second switch reverberated in Susan’s ears. A strong ray of light sprang from the darkened ceiling, illuminating the pit in a brilliant beam. Now Susan could see D’Ambrosio clearly.
She crawled forward as rapidly as she could toward the door. Another light switch snapped and a bank of lights lit up the blackboard behind D’Ambrosio. At that point D’Ambrosio noted the switches for the room lights to the left of the blackboard. As he walked over to the switches, Susan got up and broke for the door. She turned the knob as the lights went on in the room. Locked!
Susan stared down into the pit. D’Ambrosio saw her and a smile of anticipation came to his thin, scarred lips. Then he ran for the stairs, taking them in twos and threes.
Susan shook the door in despair. Then she noted that it was bolted from within. She threw the bolt and the door opened. She flung herself through it and slammed the door behind her. She could hear D’Ambrosio’s deep breaths as he neared the top row of seats.
Directly across from the second-floor amphitheater door was a CO2
fire extinguisher. Susan ripped it from the wall and turned it upside down. She spun around, hearing the metallic click of D’Ambrosio’s shoes coming closer and closer, and got set just as the knob turned and the door swung open.
At that instant, Susan depressed the button on the fire extinguisher.
The sudden phase change and expansion of the gas caused an explosive noise that shrieked and echoed in the silence of the empty building as the spray of dry ice caught D’Ambrosio full in the face. He reeled backward and tripped over the upper row of seats, his big body teetering, then crashing sideways onto the second and third rows. A seat back dug deeply into his side, snapping his left eleventh rib. His arms flew out to protect himself, grabbing at
