He felt a slight twinge in his stomach, but it was of minor consequence. He was okay. There were no ravenous monsters with bulbous demonic red eyes hot on his trail. Not anymore. The staircase below him was empty, as was the little hallway at the bottom. He listened intently, but he could detect no sounds of destruction from the little security room. Well, that was good. Something had worked in his favor for a change. Then he turned his eyes toward the ceiling and looked at the blinking red light of the security camera. He thought of how much closer the camera had seemed when he was in the hallway.
Actually…
Well, the staircase, too, seemed much steeper even than it had originally appeared. He was maybe a third of the way up, and he felt as if he had been climbing the stairs forever. A feeling of unreality gripped him. A new creeping sensation of fear spread through him. Unreality. That was just the right word for it. Or was it just that reality was very fluid in this strange place?
Would he climb these stairs forever without reaching the top?
“No. Nuh-uh. No way, nohow.”
He would give it one more good effort. Thirty minutes. No, an hour. And he would climb the steps at a more reasonable rate this time instead of using up all his energy at once. If he was still only a third of the way up the stairs after another hour of climbing, he would give it up and toss himself off the staircase. He would rather die than be condemned to this odd purgatory forever.
“Okay, then.”
He got to his feet, took a deep breath, and resumed the upward trek. He was a bit wobbly and he desperately craved a bottle or two of Gatorade, but he felt reasonably okay. He kept his head down this time instead of staring at the impossibly faraway door. To while away the time, he counted the steps as he climbed. One, two, three… a dozen … two dozen … three dozen … same old story.
Or maybe not.
When he finally glanced up, he was surprised to see the door was actually getting bigger. And closer. An impulse to pick up the pace-nearly impossible to resist-flashed through him. But he forced himself to continue at his steady rate.
And the door loomed larger still.
And closer still.
Until, at last, he could count the number of steps remaining between himself and the landing. Seventeen steps. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Less than ten. And then he did move faster, covering the last several in leaps and bounds. He came to a stop on the landing and felt that he knew what it was like to climb Mt. Everest. Hell, Mt. Everest was for pussies. What did a simple mountain have on a haunted stairwell?
Well, maybe it wasn’t haunted.
He decided that wasn’t the precise right word-but he did know this was a place that had absolutely nothing to do with the natural world.
And he knew one other thing.
He wanted out.
Now.
He studied the door. It was made of much simpler stuff than the previous two he had encountered. In fact, it was made of wood. There was no electronic keypad to either side of it. There didn’t appear to be any locking mechanism of any kind. Just a simple brass doorknob. All he had to do was reach out, grasp it, and turn it. …
Then he thought of how deceptive appearances often were here.
And he thought of the skewered couple in the security room. The perpetrator of that act was probably somewhere on the other side of this door. The idea of encountering that abomination chilled him to the core, but he knew there was no going back.
And he couldn’t just stand here on this landing forever.
So he took a deep breath.
Gripped the knob.
And turned it until the door began to ease away from the frame.
Setting aside decades of ingrained agnosticism, he muttered a prayer and entered the devil’s home.
The entity the denizens of Below called The Master was several centuries old. His existence on this plane spanned more than three quarters of a millennium, but when he was in his human guise, his appearance was that of a gray-haired man in his early sixties. He could adopt the appearance of a much younger man, but he’d found most humans treated their elders with a degree of deference he enjoyed. It established their subservience from the beginning.
And that was the real jewel at the heart of the game. A creature of such longevity needed amusements, and he enjoyed the games he played with the humans. Like bugs mired in a spider’s web, they didn’t realize they’d entered the devil’s den until it was too late to get away. He loved to taunt them, to strip away their layers of false civility and pride, to torment them until they were just broken, sniveling shells. Some he would kill, preferably as their friends and loved ones were made to watch, others he would banish Below, where they would do the work that honored his own dark gods and allowed him to exist in this haunted corridor of the world, a darkly enchanted place that was simultaneously of the natural world and beyond it.
He stared at the reflection of his human mask in a mirror in his chambers. He saw a handsome, distinguished face, an artfully crafted facade. He knew what he would see should he choose to lift the mask. In neither instance would he see the visage of a deity. His kind was flesh and blood. Like all the other creatures of the world. In the end, his special abilities would not save him. The knowledge he possessed of his own nature was limited to what little he was able to glean from ancient texts he knew to have been penned by his forebears. He knew his natural life cycle was approximately a thousand years, an arc he was three quarters of the way through. The two to three hundred years remaining to him would seem an eternity to lesser beings, but to a creature that had already lived so long this stretch of time seemed terribly finite.
Two hundred years.
Maybe three.
A drop in the celestial bucket.
He tilted his head to one side then the other, focused his concentration, and deepened the shade of gray around his temples. He examined this final touch, smiled, and found it satisfactory. He pulled on a tweed jacket he’d removed from the corpse of an Englishman in the 1930s, slid on an Oxford class ring (from another Englishman of the same approximate vintage), and left his chambers.
For the time being, he shunted aside disquieting thoughts of mortality.
There was much to do tonight.
He stepped into the darkened hallway, grinned like a Halloween ghoul, and went downstairs to meet the newest arrival.
Mark Cody fiddled with his Zippo lighter, flipping the top up and down, up and down, and stared nervously about the room. It was a large den, anchored by a suitably impressive fireplace and lined with bookshelves. He was sitting at the edge of a plush sofa, his knees inches from an oak coffee table. There was an ashtray on it, but there was something off-putting about its pristine appearance-it looked never to have been touched by falling ash.
Mark sighed. He was in desperate need of a soothing brace of nicotine, but he wasn’t sure whether he should light up. There was something not right about this place. Oh, he’d been happy to see the woman in her black Bentley, that Ms. Wickman, when she’d shown up next to his deceased Volvo.
Strange thing, that.
The car was barely a year old and it was down for the count. The engine didn’t even attempt to turn over when he twisted the key in the ignition. There was only that annoying click. He supposed the battery was dead, even though he’d always been careful about not doing anything dumb to run it down, like leaving the headlights on when he went into work.
So it was just dead. And he’d been in the probably pointless process of locking it up when the Bentley’s headlights came into view up the road. He remembered the sigh of relief that shuddered through him. He sure hadn’t been looking forward to that hike into town, whichever town it was, and he’d initially been effusive in his gratitude when the Bentley slowed and the driver’s-side window slid down.