fire to ascend through the structure, might also allow me to descend.
The quantity of equipment amazed me. Because the thermostat in every hotel room can be set independently of that in every other, each room is heated and cooled by its own fan-coil unit. Each fan-coil is connected to branch lines from the four-pipe system that circulates superchilled and superheated water throughout the building. These units, served by pumps and humidifiers and drain-overflow basins, created a geometric labyrinth that reminded me of the machinery-encrusted surfaces of one of those massive spaceships in
Instead of starfighters, I saw spiders and vast webs as complex as the spiral patterns of galaxies, an occasional empty soda can left behind by repairmen, here and there a fast-food sandwich container licked clean long ago, and more rats, before at last I located one of the chases that might be my way out of the Panamint.
The five-foot-square shaft, lined with metal-skinned fireboard, continued four stories above my position. Below, it dwindled into darkness that my flashlight could not fully probe.
Such a roomy chimney would have been a vertical superhighway easily accommodating me, if not for all the pipes and conduits that lined three and a half of its walls. Bolted to the one otherwise clear section of wall, a ladder offered not just rungs, but four-inch-wide treads that provided surer footing.
This chute did not lie near the elevator shafts. If Datura or Andre listened at that location, they would not hear me as I made my way down this vertical chase.
Additional handholds and steel rings to receive the snap links of safety tethers bristled from among the pipes and conduits on the other three walls.
Fixed at the top of the building, a half-inch-diameter nylon line, of the type employed by mountain climbers, hung loose down the center of the shaft. Massive knots, spaced at one-foot intervals, could serve as handholds. This appeared to have been replaced after the fire, perhaps by rescue workers.
I deduced, perhaps incorrectly, that if in spite of the generous steps of the ladder and the ubiquitous anchor points for tethers, you took a plunge, the plumb-bobbed rope was a lifeline to be seized in free fall.
Although I had fewer monkey genes than these conditions implied were necessary to transit the service well, I saw no alternative but to make use of it. Otherwise, I could wait for the mothership to beam me up-and one day be discovered here, all bones and jeans, in the rat graveyard.
The beam of my flashlight had dimmed. I replaced the batteries with spares from my backpack.
Using the spelunker's Velcro cuff, I fixed the light to my left forearm.
I put the folded fishing knife in one of my pockets.
I drank half of the bottle of water that I hadn't left with Danny, and I wondered how he was doing. The shotgun fire would have scared him. He probably thought I was dead.
Maybe I was, and I just didn't know it yet.
I considered whether I needed to pee. I didn't.
Unable to find any further reasons to delay, leaving my backpack behind, I went into the vertical chase.
FIFTY
ON A HIGH-NUMBER CABLE CHANNEL THAT I THINK IS called Crap That Nobody Else Will Show TV, I once saw an ancient movie serial about these adventurers who descend to the center of the earth and discover an underground civilization. It's an evil empire, of course.
The emperor resembles Ming the Merciless from those old Flash Gordon festivals of hokum, and he intends to make war on the surface world and take it over as soon as he develops the right death ray. Or when his immense fingernails grow long enough to be appropriate for the ruler of an entire planet, whichever comes first.
This underworld is populated by the usual thugs and knaves, but also by two or three kinds of mutants, women in horned hats, and of course dinosaurs. This film masterwork was made decades before the invention of computer animation, and the dinosaurs were not even stop-motion clay models but iguanas. Rubber appliances were glued to the iguanas to make them appear scarier and more like dinosaurs, but they just looked like embarrassed iguanas.
Descending the vertical chase, careful step by careful step, I reran the plot of that old serial in my mind, striving to focus on the absurd mustache of the emperor, on the particular race of mutants that looked suspiciously like dwarfs outfitted with rubber-snake headgear and leather pantaloons, on remembered bits of the hero's dialogue marked by a wit that crackled like cream cheese, and on those campily amusing iguanasaurs.
My mind kept drifting to Datura, that dependable spike through the foot: to Datura, to reverse psychic magnetism, to how unpleasant it would be when she disemboweled me and fished her amulet out of my stomach. Not good.
The air in the service well proved not to be as savory as the soot-scented, toxin-laced air in the rest of the hotel. Stale, dank, alternately sulfurous and mildewy, it gathered substance as I went down into the hotel, until it seemed thick enough to drink.
From time to time, horizontal chases entered the well, and in some instances, drafts flowed from them. These cool currents smelled different from but no better than the shaft air.
Twice I began to gag. Both times I had to pause to repress the urge to heave.
The stink, the claustrophobic dimensions of this chimney, the trace chemicals and mold spores in the air combined to make me feel lightheaded by the time I had descended only four floors.
Although I knew that my imagination was running away with me, I wondered if a couple of dead bodies-human, not rat- might lie at the bottom of the shaft, undiscovered by the rescue crews and post-fire search teams, reposing in a slime of decomposition.
The deeper I went, the more determined I became not to direct the flashlight downward, for fear of what I would see at the bottom: not just the tumbled dead, but a grinning figure standing atop them.
Representations of Kali always show her naked, brazen. In that particular idol called a
Every two floors, I passed through another crawlspace. At each of these interruptions, I could have gotten off the ladder, then on it once more; instead, I found myself switching to the rope, using the knots as grips, swinging back to the ladder when it reappeared.
Given my lightheadedness and incipient nausea, using the rope struck me as reckless. I used it anyway.
In her temple representations, Kali holds a noose in one hand, a staff topped by a skull in another. In her third, she holds a sword; in her fourth, a severed head.
I thought I heard movement below me. I paused, but then told myself that the noise had been only the echo of my breathing, and I continued down.
Painted numbers on the wall identified each floor as I went by it, even when no passable opening existed at that level. As I reached the second floor, my right foot dipped into something wet and cold. When I dared to direct my light below, I found that the bottom of the shaft was filled with stagnant black water and debris. I could go no farther by this route.
I climbed to the crawlspace between the second and third floors and exited the vertical chase.
If rats had perished at this level, they died not by suffocation but by hungry mouths of fire that spat out not even charred bones. The flames had been so intense, they left behind an absolute black soot that absorbed the beam of the flashlight and gave back no reflection.
Twisted, buckled, melted, mercurial metal shapes, which had once been heating-and-cooling equipment, formed a bewildering landscape that no mere drinking binge or jalapeno pizza could have inspired in a nightmare. The soot that coated everything-here a film, there an inch deep-was not powdery, not dry, but greasy.
Weaving around and climbing over these amorphous and slippery obstacles proved treacherous. In places, the floor felt as if it had bowed, suggesting that the heat at the height of the blaze had been so terrible that rebar embedded inside the concrete had begun to melt and had almost failed.
The air here was more foul than in the shaft, bitter, almost rancid, yet seemed thin, as if I were at some great altitude. The singular texture of the soot gave me intolerable ideas about the source of it, and I tried to think instead about the iguanasaurs, but saw Datura in my mind's eye, Datura with a necklace of human skulls.
