The clang of feet on metal. Alex backtracked to the first door he could find. Fortunately, it opened into a storage closet. He hid inside, watching through the rack as Mr. Grin appeared, rising out of the ground like a vampire on a bad day. As the sun hit his dead white face, his scars twitched and he blinked several times before walking off into Block D.
What had he been doing? Where did the stairs go?
Alex slipped off his shoes and, carrying them in his hand, hurried down. His feet made no sound on the metal steps. It was like stepping into a morgue. The air-conditioning was so strong that he could feel it on his forehead and on the palms of his hands, fast-freezing his sweat.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put his shoes back on. He was in another long passageway, stretching back under the complex, the way he had come. It led to a single metal door. But there was something very strange. The walls of the passage were unfinished dark brown rock with streaks of what looked zinc or some other metal. The floor was also rough and the way was lit by old-fashioned bulbs, hanging on wires. It all reminded him of something … something had very recently seen. But he couldn’t remember what.
Somehow Alex knew that the door at the end of the passage would be locked. It looked as if it had been locked forever. Like the stairs it was unlabeled. And it seemed somehow too small to be important. But Mr. Grin had just come up the stairs. There was only one place he could have come from and that was the other side. The door had to go somewhere!
He reached it and tried the handle. It wouldn’t move. He pressed his ear against the metal and listened. Nothing, unless … was he imagining it? … a sort of throbbing. A pump or something like it. Alex would have given anything to see through the metal. And suddenly he realized that he could—the Game Boy was in his pocket. So were the four cartridges. He took out the one called Exocet. X for X ray, he reminded himself. Now … how did it work? He flicked it on and held it flat against the door, the screen facing him.
To his amazement, the screen flickered into life; a tiny, almost opaque window through the metal door. Alex was looking into a large room. There was something tall and barrel shaped in the middle of it. And there were people. Ghostlike, mere smudges on the computer screen, they were moving back and forth. Some of them were carrying objects—flat and rectangular. Trays of some sort? There seemed to be a desk to one side, piled with apparatus that he couldn’t make out. Alex pressed the brightness control, trying to zoom in. But the room was too big. Everything was too far away.
But Smithers had also built an audio function into the machine. Alex fumbled in his pocket and took out the set of earphones. Still holding the Game Boy against the door, he pressed the wire into the socket and slipped the earphones over his head. If he couldn’t see, at least he might be able to hear, and sure enough the voices came through, faint and disconnected—but audible through the powerful speaker system built into the machine.
“…place. We have twenty-four hours.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s all we have. They come in tonight. At o’two hundred.”
Alex didn’t recognize any of the voices. Amplified by the tiny machine, they sounded like a telephone call from abroad on a very bad line.
“…Grin … overseeing the delivery.”
“It’s still not enough time.”
And then they were gone. Alex tried to piece together what he had heard. Something was being delivered. Two hours after midnight. Mr. Grin was arranging the delivery.
But what? Why?
He had just turned off the Game Boy and put it back into his pocket when he heard the scrunch of gravel behind him that told him he was no longer alone. He turned around and found himself facing Nadia Vole. Alex realized that she had tried to sneak up on him. She had known he was down here.
“What are you doing, Alex?” she asked. Her voice was poisoned honey.
“Nothing,” Alex said.
“I asked you to stay in your room.”
“Yes. But I’d been there all day. I needed a break.”
“And you came down here?”
“I saw the stairs. I thought, they might lead to the toilet.”
There was a long silence. Behind him, Alex could still hear—or feel—the throbbing from the secret room. Then the woman nodded as if she had decided to accept his story. “There is nothing down here,” she said. “This door leads only to the generator room. Please…” She gestured. “I will take you back to the main house and later you must prepare for dinner with Herr Sayle. He wishes to know your first impressions of the Stormbreaker.”
Alex walked past her and back up the stairs. He was certain of two things. The first was that Nadia Vole was lying. This was no generator room. She was hiding something—from him and perhaps also from Herod Sayle. And she hadn’t believed him either. One of the cameras must have spotted him and she had been sent here to find him. So she knew that he was lying to her.
Not a good start.
Alex reached the staircase and climbed up into the light, feeling the woman’s eyes, like daggers, stabbing into his back.
NIGHT VISITORS
« ^ »
HEROD SAYLE WAS playing snooker when Alex was shown back into the room with the jellyfish. It was hard to say quite where the heavy wooden snooker table had come from, but Alex couldn’t avoid the feeling that the little man looked slightly ridiculous, almost lost at the far end of the green baize. Mr. Grin was with him, carrying a footstool, which Sayle stood on for each shot.
