“I'll try again when we get in,” he said, handing the phone back to her. “If there's still no reply we'll go straight up there, find out what's happening.”
They had said nothing to Lieutenant Daniels about Adam Wyatt or the experiment in which Roger had been a participant. It would come out later, they knew, and there would be questions about why they had stayed silent. But time enough for all that then. Getting entangled now in a slow-moving police inquiry was the last thing they needed, though what precisely they intended to do next, aside from telling Ward what had happened, they didn't know.
SHC, Sam had told her when they were clear of the building, was thought by some, including Sam himself, to be a form of poltergeist phenomenon: there were many recorded cases of people, children and adults, unconsciously causing fires of extraordinary intensity that caused injury or death to others or to themselves.
“The facts are there, people just have to look at them,” he said. “This is one of those times they're going to have to.”
Joanna shuddered involuntarily and looked out of the window, trying to escape the appalling image that kept flashing in merciless detail into her mind. Sam knew what was happening and took her hand.
“I don't think I'll ever sleep again,” she said.
“You will,” he said. “I promise.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder, but dared not close her eyes.
When they stepped off the train at Penn Station, Sam stabbed Ward's number into the cellular again. This time it was answered almost at once. The Chinese manservant's voice was high pitched and distressed.
“You better come, Dr. Towne,” he said. “Mr. Riley leave message for you-and Miss Cross. Come quickly, please.”
45
The Chinaman was waiting at the door of the apartment as they stepped out of the elevator, their footsteps soundless on the thick carpet. They did not speak until they had entered the hallway of Ward's apartment with its polished wooden floor, and the door was closed behind them.
“What's going on?” Sam asked without preamble.
The manservant spoke quickly in his light voice, rocking slightly from the waist, his hands clasped before his chest.
“Last night I see Mr. Riley when he return-this shortly before eight. He say he go to bed and not to be disturbed. I spend morning visit friends, do shopping, but when I return, still no Mr. Riley. I begin to worry if he sick. Mr. Riley never this late in morning. So I knock on Mr. Riley's door, but there is no’ reply. I open door, find his bed not slept in. This note on it.”
He produced a card bearing a few lines in Ward's neat and uniformly slanting hand. It read:“ Allow Sam Towne and Joanna Cross into my quiet room. Nobody else. W.R.”
Sam looked from the card to the manservant. “His ‘quiet room’?”
“I show you.”
He led them down a corridor and through a double door into a spacious bedroom furnished with the same Eastern influence as the rest of the apartment. Joanna sensed something odd about the place at once, and realized that it had no windows. She glimpsed a tiled and mirrored bathroom through open doors, then followed the manservant to a far door that was virtually invisible in a dark, wood-paneled wall containing built-in drawers and closets.
“Nobody allowed in here ever,” he said. “Mr. Riley even clean this room himself. I leave you now.”
He gave a stiff little bow and retreated the way they had come. Sam turned the door handle. They found themselves in a space about the size of a closet, bare walls and nothing in it except another door on the far side. They exchanged a look, and Sam opened the second door.
A wall of cold air hit them. The room was medium sized, with a floor-to-ceiling window running the whole of the far side and overlooking the park. Three sliding-glass panels had been opened as far as they would go. There was no furniture other than a few bookshelves and several pictures and statues that looked as though they had religious or iconic significance.
In the center of the floor was a mat. Ward Riley sat on it in the classic cross-legged meditation pose. He was barefoot and wore only a simple robe of thin cotton. His eyes were closed and his skin waxy pale.
“Is he dead?” Joanna whispered, falling to her knees and reaching out to touch him. He was ice cold.
There was a slamming sound behind Joanna. She turned to see Sam sliding the windows shut, then he came and knelt on Ward's other side.
“I can see a pulse,” he said, “in his neck, very slow.”
“Thank you for coming, Sam…”
They both jumped as Ward's voice came out of nowhere, filling the room.
“…and Joanna. It is good that you are here, that we are together now.”
They exchanged a look over Ward's head, both unnerved by the familiar yet strangely disembodied voice.
“By the time you hear these words I will have reached a place from which I will neither wish nor be able to return.”
“It's coming from his throat,” she said. “His mouth isn't moving, but the sound is coming from his throat.”
“I want to help you,” Ward's voice continued. “It is too late for you to take the path that I have taken-it involves long preparation. But do not fear the void before you. Enter it as you would the light…”
“Look,” Sam said suddenly. She followed the direction he was pointing in and saw a small sound system on a shelf to Ward's right. A cassette was turning in it. “We must have triggered it when we came in,” he said.
As he spoke she saw what looked like an electronic eye, positioned so that anyone entering the room would break its beam.
“Our world has changed,” the voice continued, “and there is no going back…”
The voice stopped as Sam impatiently yanked a plug from the wall. “Go find that manservant, Joanna. Get some blankets. And have him call Sam's doctor, or emergency, right now.”
She hesitated. She did not know why she hesitated, except it came into her mind that Ward did not want them to do this. He had made his choice, and it was not for them to interfere with it. But she pushed the thought aside as swiftly as it had come. She did not, on the whole, regard the right of self-destruction as inalienable; and what Ward had done looked very much like attempted suicide.
She ran through the apartment calling out, “Hello? Where are you?” because she did not know the manservant's name. There was no sign of him in the hallway or the main reception room where they had sat with Ward the day before. She tried a door that led to guest rooms and extra bathrooms. She called out again, but there was no response.
A couple of doors were visible on the far side of the reception room. She guessed these probably led to the kitchen and domestic quarters-the “butler's pantry” as she supposed it might be called in a building like this. She tried one of them and found herself in a maze of corridors between laundry rooms and storage areas, then she pushed through a swinging door that led into a large and ultramodern kitchen, all-white walls and stainless steel. Still there was no reply when she called out.
Another door brought her into a dining room with a long table and places for about twenty people. It, too, was empty and immaculate, with a barely-ever-used look. The door she pushed open on the far side took her back into the reception room, still as empty as it had been two minutes ago. Another door to her right opened into a corridor that she hadn't noticed before, although it connected with the main hallway, which she could see in the distance to her left. She looked to her right for signs of further hidden rooms and recesses, but as she did so she caught sight of a movement in a mirror on the wall.
She turned to her left just in time to see someone disappearing, evidently in a great hurry, out of the main door of the apartment-someone wearing a raincoat the same color as Sam's.
“Sam!” She called after him, but there was no response. She ran toward the hallway where the door was still
