The elevator dropped again, nearly two feet this time. Hildie screamed as she hit the floor, her knees buckling under her. She dropped the phone, which dangled against the wall as she scrambled back to her feet.
The elevator slowly rose back to its position at the fourth floor level.
“Ten feet,” Amy’s voice said, coming once more over the speaker system. “I used to be afraid to jump ten feet. Are you?”
Once again the elevator dropped, and Hildie screamed again, falling through the air until the car stopped abruptly and she crashed to the floor.
Inexorably, the car began to rise again. All at once Hildie realized exactly what was going to happen to her.
“No!” she screamed. “Amy, don’t do—”
The car dropped again, twenty feet this time. Hildie’s legs hit the floor and she felt a searing pain shoot up her leg as her right ankle broke. She collapsed to the floor, screaming partly with pain, partly with utter terror.
The elevator began its slow rise once again, and Hildie, leaning against its wall, her injured leg stretched out in front of her, began pounding on the metal doors. “Help me! Someone help me!”
The elevator jerked to a stop. Hildie braced herself, waiting.
It dropped, and Hildie screamed, but cut her own scream short as the elevator stopped after only an inch or two.
Fury rose in her once more, wiping out the pain from her broken ankle. Amy was playing with her! Toying with her as if she were some kind of rat in one of the cages in the labs! “Stop this!” she shouted. “Stop this right —”
The elevator dropped again. Hildie’s words dissolved into a scream of terror as she plunged downward. She tried to twist in the air, tried to prepare herself for the impact, but when it came, she only slammed into the floor once more, one of her hips shattering as it bore the impact of her weight, her face smashing into the wall, blood gushing from her nose.
“No,” she whimpered as the elevator once more began its slow rise to the top. “Oh, God, please, don’t let this happen to me.…”
But it happened again. And again. Some of the drops short, some of them longer.
Finally, when she thought she could bear the torture no more, the car rose steadily to the top.
It stopped there, and once more Amy’s voice came over the speakers. The little girl’s voice was trembling now, and she sounded almost sad. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Does it hurt? Does it hurt as much as I do?”
“Don’t, Amy,” Hildie moaned. “Why—”
“I know what you’re going to do to Josh,” Amy broke in. “He’s my friend. I won’t let you hurt him. I won’t let anyone hurt him.”
The elevator dropped once more — only a foot this time — but the impact on Hildie’s body sent searing arrows of pain through her as each of her broken bones shifted position.
An anguished scream erupted from her throat.
In George Engersol’s office Josh listened in terror to the muffled screams coming from within the elevator shaft. What was happening? What was Amy doing?
And who else was hearing Hildie’s screams?
He moved to the door, edging close enough to the stairwell so he could peer down. Though he saw no one, he could hear a babble of voices drifting up from the first floor.
Should he go down?
But what would happen to Amy?
As soon as the question came into his mind, he was certain he knew the answer. Dr. Engersol would try to kill her. Just as he would have killed him, Josh thought, if Amy hadn’t stopped Hildie.
Or would Dr. Engersol try to put him into the computer, too?
In a flash last night’s nightmares came back to him. He tried to imagine being trapped in that endless maze forever, without ever waking up.
Part of him wanted to run away, to call his mother and beg her to come and get him.
But another part of him couldn’t abandon Amy, couldn’t leave her alone after what she’d done for him.
Slipping back into Engersol’s office, he closed and locked the door.
“Stop her, Adam!” George Engersol demanded. “Kill her if you have to, but stop her!”
There was no answer from Adam, but his image on the monitor suddenly dropped away, to be replaced by a grotesque vision such as Engersol had never seen before.
Inhuman, with a face that projected pure evil, the being on the screen glared down at them with an almost palpable hatred.
Next to Engersol, Jeff Aldrich gasped. “What is it?” he breathed. “What’s happening?”
Engersol’s jaw clenched. “I don’t know,” he replied, his voice grating. “I don’t have any idea at all.” Before his eyes, his experiment was spinning out of his own control.
Demons surrounded her.
Creatures far beyond her own imagination encircled Amy, and when the first one appeared out of nowhere, flapping great bat wings, its forked tail whipping behind it, her first instinct was to duck away, to let it fly over her.
As she automatically obeyed her instincts, Amy suddenly lost control of the elevator. A final scream of fear and agony burst from Hildie Kramer’s throat as the car plunged to the bottom of the shaft, a scream that was abruptly cut off as her body slammed against the floor one last time, her neck breaking as she landed head first.
For Amy, her instinctive mental dodge was useless, for there was nowhere to escape from the terrifying creature that had assaulted her.
She twisted her mind then, refocusing her concentration, but no sooner had the creature disappeared, its ephemeral form dropping out of her consciousness as she refused to think about it, than another one appeared.
Its green skin covered with scales, its blood red eyes gleaming at her out of the darkness that surrounded it, it crept toward her, taloned hands reaching out, groping for her—
No!
It’s not real!
Amy screamed the words in her own mind, but repeating to herself what she knew to be true did nothing to alleviate the horror that filled her mind.
She knew the creatures didn’t exist — couldn’t exist! — for the world she lived in now held no such beings. Except for herself, and Adam Aldrich, it held no living beings at all.
Only stimuli, abstract stimuli, that excited the cells in her mind and created the visions her brain beheld.
Adam!
It was Adam who was imagining these things, translating the visions he created in his own mind into the stimuli that would duplicate them in her own.
But understanding what was happening made no difference, for all that was real in her world was what she beheld in the eye of her mind, and the fiends and monsters Adam had loosed on her were more real than anything she had ever experienced before.
She cowered away from them, seeking someplace to hide, but in her shelterless world they were everywhere.
One of them came at her, darting toward her, its great jaws gaping, yellowed fangs dripping saliva, forked tongue flicking toward her.
The tongue lashed at her, and in her mind she felt as if its slimy surface had touched her skin.
Instinctively she tried to wipe the phantom creature’s spittle from her cheek.
She had no cheek, nor any hand to wipe it with.
