Well, it was a good-bye of sorts. We went our separate ways.
Hunting for a fellow agent in a haunted building is never much fun. It complicates matters. Not only were we still keeping psychic watch (we had to: the drifting Shades that thronged the halls kept pace with us, never drawing too close, but never dispersing, either; and we knew other presences prowled the echoing halls), we had to exert all our ordinary senses for sight or sound of Bobby Vernon, too. The two activities were not really compatible: when we concentrated on one, we neglected the other, which consistently increased our underlying anxiety and alarm.
I particularly disliked the open halls and the blank, dark spaces at the ends of aisles. I kept expecting to see the crawling figure, far off and coming after me.
The strain of being doubly alert soon told. Holly and I lapsed into sullen silence, communicating mainly by gestures. We hurried through Cosmetics and Visitor Defenses on the ground floor, then climbed the backstairs at the north end of the building right up to the top floor. Office Supplies was empty both of Visitors and Bobby Vernon, and so were the Aickmere meeting rooms. By unspoken agreement we then descended to the third floor, which was where he’d disappeared, and tight arrangements of sofas, chairs, and tables spread out in jumbled parodies of real homes. Sometimes we called out for him, softly, instinctively unhappy at disturbing the silence; mostly we just listened. We looked in closets, chests, and storerooms. Sometimes we saw the others at a distance, or heard them calling; but all sounds and all shapes were suspect now, and we kept away from them. Bobby Vernon was nowhere to be seen.
We arrived at the elevator lobby, and the main stairs. “No good,” Holly Munro said. “We’ll try the next floor down.”
The skull in my backpack had been quiet for some time, since before I’d seen the apparition and its train of spiders. Now I felt its presence stirring at my back.
“If you leave him now,” it said, “he’ll die.”
“But he’s not up here.” I ignored Holly Munro’s baffled look; to her it sounded like I was talking to the empty air. “We’ve tried everywhere.”
“Have you?”
I looked around the lobby. Stairs, walls…creamy marble and mahogany. Behind us the two brass elevator doors gleamed. The power was off. There was no point looking there; Vernon would have been unable to take the elevators, or even open the doors.
Even so…I stepped close to the doors, put my ear to them. It seemed I heard a moan, a muffled cry.
“Bobby?” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“He can’t be in there.” Holly Munro stepped close. “The electricity—”
“Quiet. I think he answered. I heard a voice.”
I stabbed at the buttons on the wall. They were dead and unresponsive, but I had an alternative in my bag.
“A crowbar?” Holly hung back. “Do you think that Mr. Aickmere—”
“Stuff Aickmere! He said this place had no ghosts! Shut up and help me shove.”
I slammed the bar in between the metal doors and strained to pry them apart. Grim-faced, not looking at me, Holly grasped the metal too. We exerted our strength. At first we made not the slightest impression; then something internal made a reluctant extended cracking sound. The doors slid open—a small distance, perhaps a quarter of their width. But it was enough.
Inside: blackness. And a feeble moaning, coming from below.
My penlight showed the hollow interior of the shaft: oil-stained bricks and loops of black cables, but not the elevator itself. When we craned our heads out over the drop, we saw the roof of the car about six feet below. And on it, curled in a forlorn ball, with his knees drawn up and his arms tightly wound about his spindly knees, was Bobby Vernon. He looked in bad shape.
“What the hell happened to him?” I said. “Think he’s ghost-touched?”
“No. But see the bruise on his face?”
Vernon’s eyes rolled upward, winking and twitching in the beam of the penlight. He coughed raggedly. “I hurt my head; think my leg’s busted.”
“Oh, great…” Something made my skin crawl. I looked back into the darkness of the Furniture Hall. The blackness there seemed to swirl. “How are we going to get him out?”
“One of us could slip in there,” Holly said. “It should probably be me.”
“Why? Why? You were looking at the width of my hips then, weren’t you?”
“Of course not. You hold the doors open. You’re much stronger and burlier than me.” Holly shimmied through the doors, turned to face me, bent to grip the edge, and with surprising agility jumped down into the dark.
I jammed the crowbar into the aperture, fixing the doors open, and flourished the penlight through the hole. She was crouching beside Vernon, touching his leg.
“What happened to you, Bobby?” she asked.
“Ned. I saw Ned….”
“Ned Shaw?” I looked down at Holly. “That’s their dead friend.”
“I saw him…he was standing in the dark, smiling at me….” Vernon coughed his ragged cough again; his voice was weak. “I felt I had to go to him….I don’t know. He didn’t turn away, but he sort of receded, flowed away from me, past all the tables and chairs. I followed….He went into the elevator—it was all lit up, I swear. Doors open, lights on. He stood there waiting for me, smiling. I walked in….Then the lights just went out and the elevator wasn’t there. I fell. Hit my head. My leg hurts….”
“It’s all right,” Holly said. She squeezed his hand. “You’ll be fine.”
Annoyance flared in me. “Bobby, you’re an idiot. Holly—can you help him stand? I could pull him up, maybe, if I grab him.”
“I can try.” She did so; plenty of groans and whimpers ensued.
“Better hurry, Lucy….” The skull’s whisper was casualness itself. “Something’s coming.”
“I know. I feel it. Bobby—hold out your hands. I can reach you, pull you up.”
He was vertical now, draped on Holly, one leg raised, hobbling and squinting like a poor imitation of a pirate. “I can’t…I’m too weak.”
“You’re not too weak to lift your arms.” I was on my hands and knees now, reaching between the doors. “Come on…hurry it up.”
He lifted a frail hand; a ninety-four-year-old dowager summoning a servant to refill her cup of tea would have raised her arm more vigorously. I swiped at it and missed.
“We might need to get Lockwood,” Holly Munro said.
“There’s no time….” I looked back into the dark. “Do it, Vernon.”
My second swipe struck home. I grabbed his wrist. Launching myself backward, I hoisted him up, ignoring his cries of pain. A moment later Vernon’s face, bruised and groggy-looking, appeared in the aperture. I heaved—out came his spindly shoulders, his pigeon-chest…
“Oh, hell,” I said. “He’s stuck.”
Holly gave a squeak from below. “How can he be stuck? He’s thinner than me.”
“I don’t know….” My eyes swiveled. Away among the darkened furniture, amid those blank and meaningless arrangements of armchairs and settees, a voice came calling. “Lucy…”
“Help me!” I shouted. “Push his backside! Get him out of there.”
“I’m not pushing his backside!”
“There’s a Visitor coming, Holly. Why is he wedged?”
“I don’t know! Oh, I do! He’s got his work belt caught.”
“Well, can you free it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know….I’m trying to reach….”
I still had one hand clasped on Vernon’s wrist. With my other, I got my rapier out. Away in the hall I heard a rhythmic scraping….It sounded like something approaching on bony hands and knees.
“Holly…”