Now it was Lia’s turn to frown. She hadn’t even seen a door there, herself, shrouded as it was in cobweb and shadow. She supposed a part of her hadn’t wanted to see it.
But she closed the lighter, as Tom indicated she should, and after giving her night-vision a long moment to adjust, she too was able to see the thin seam of light that lined the bottom of the door.
It was only the faintest glow, seeping out from the next room, but it was there, definitely there, beyond any shadow of a doubt. The flashlight and the old Zippo had each provided enough illumination to obscure it.
In the darkness that seemed to iris down around them, Black Tom pointed toward the stairs, punctuating the gesture with a questioning raise of his eyebrows. (He could bypass Lia’s retinas when he wanted to, appearing directly on the movie screen of her mind, so her ability to see him wasn’t compromised by the dearth of ambient light. It was still disconcerting not to see much of anything besides him, however, hovering there in the entoptic murk while he waited for her to make a choice.)
She re-lit the tarnished Zippo and squinted against its bright yellow tongue of flame as she considered her options. There seemed to be a name stenciled on the door in front of her, barely legible beneath what looked like ancient rust stains, even with her nose an inch from it. She held the lighter’s flame up before the letters one by one and found they spelled out ‘Miguel Caradura,’ a name Lia translated as ‘Michael Hardface.’ It might’ve struck her as funny at a different point in time, but not so much, right now.
Tom won’t fault you if you turn back, she told herself. He’s letting you off the hook. And it’s not like he can tell anybody if you chicken out, anyway.
But Lia shook her head. They’d come up here because Tom needed to know if the rooms at the top of this tower were occupied and open for business once again, yes, but also because they’d been asked. Asked by someone who needed their brand of help and had nowhere else to turn, which was more than Lia could refuse. She knew all too well what it felt like to need an ally.
So they weren’t leaving, she decided, not quite yet. Not until she’d seen all there was to see, and not before she’d done what needed doing.
She closed the lighter, put it in her pocket, and reached for the doorknob.
Black Tom looked on, radiating his regret as Lia pushed open the door to the rooms he’d once called las Cameras del Rey-the King’s Chambers-and her startled, wondering face was bathed in dazzling light.
Miguel Caradura’s office suite was brightly lit and fully functional, in surreal contrast to the rest of the shabby and apparently abandoned modern-day building.
Lia stepped tentatively into the outer office, shielding her eyes and feeling blown away by the sheer weirdness of it all. Instead of the decrepit, run-down room she’d been expecting, she found herself inside an office decorated to rival any top CEO’s establishment. The leather furniture smelled new, and the walls shone with a fresh coat of paint in a designer shade of cool mint green. The waiting room might’ve been refurbished that very afternoon.
The door to the next chamber stood open, beckoning like an invitation.
The overhead lights in there were switched off, but Lia couldn’t miss the huge flatscreen monitor glowing on an executive desktop, so she crept a few steps nearer to that shadowy inner office. The monitor was displaying security-cam angles of locations within the building that were already familiar after her laborious climb up the stairs.
Each window on the display seemed to be showing a short video clip on a loop, in fact, and every clip she saw was of her. Lia’s stomach tightened at the realization. Black Tom wasn’t visible, not anywhere on the screen, but then his presence never had been perceptible by a thing like a camera’s lens. Not unless he wanted it to be.
The clips traced Lia’s progress upwards through the building. Starting in the upper left corner of the screen, she saw herself down at the front entrance, looking up into a fish-eye lens and seeming to scrutinize it with one huge eye. (There had been a stone gargoyle mounted over the door; Lia remembered looking up into its snarling face when trying the bell. The camera must have been hidden inside its mouth.) In the next video window she was pixilated in poor lighting, standing in a downstairs corridor and plainly wondering whether the dusty relic of a camera she was staring up into could possibly still be viable and functioning.
Got my answer on that one now, don’t I?
Yet another window showed infrared footage of her brightly-colored silhouette standing outside the office door, minutes ago, flicking the wheel of a cold blue antique lighter and making psychedelic sparks. The tongue of flame they finally kindled made for a dramatic, multi-hued fireball on the feed from the thermal spy cam.
The very last window, in the lower righthand corner of the screen, showed her right here and right now, real time, standing in the well-lit outer office. As her eyes continued to drift south she realized there was a silver tray sitting next to the monitor, one piled high with what looked to be wet, red, and weakly-pulsing human hearts. Her own heart seemed to stop in her chest at the sight of them. A rose in a cut-glass vase stood beside the tray, completing an elegant presentation. Lia hadn’t registered the grisly offering immediately because of the bright glow from the computer screen, which made everything else in the dim second chamber difficult to see.
Oh, shitballs, she thought, watching herself assess the situation, live on digital video. What is this?
Not what she and Tom had been led to believe, that much was certain. This place wasn’t dormant at all. It was fully awake. Awake, alive, and active. The abandoned-and-vandalized facade it presented to the world was nothing more than stage dressing.
Black Tom faded into a corner of the first room while an appallingly large tarantula descended from the ceiling on a thread of viscous webbing, sinking down to the floor behind Lia. She almost turned, sensing its motion peripherally, but her attention was arrested by the luminous flatscreen on the desk in the darkened second chamber. She paused in the middle of the first room and strained her eyes from where she stood, wanting paradoxically to get a better look at the screen without moving any closer to the next room’s doorway.
Tom hung back and watched as bees and beetles and fat red ants poured out from the baseboards and roiled together in silence, as roaches and wasps and tiny white scorpions teemed up into a swaying tower that stood almost six feet high. Right behind his girl. The looming mass of insects and arachnids seemed to be trying as one to copy a human form, clumping together into a vaguely feminine, hourglass configuration, perhaps using Lia herself as a handy example. They organized into a number of long tentacles that the lady-shaped swarm reached out with while her individual bugs began melting together, working furiously to congeal into a single, outsized specimen.
Lia’s eyes darted away from the mound of shining hearts beside the bright computer screen when she realized that someone was watching her very closely, even still.
A black-cowled figure seated at the desk-a figure obscured by the high back of his chair-now moved for the first time. She saw the reflection of the creature’s robe and his heavy, face-obscuring hood in the dark window beyond the desk when he picked up a half-eaten heart from a linen napkin and tore a squelching bite out of it with his long, gumless teeth. Lia knew immediately that this was not a man, although it still impressed her as being male. The thing’s skeletal hand, she noted with hallucinatory clarity, was stippled with clots of blood and fringed with fresh red shreds of flayed tissue. All she could see beneath the shadow of his cowl was a skeletal grin. Dark heartblood dripped down his bony wedge of a chin.