He pulled out the key ring, and began testing the keys.
The twelfth one fit.
The lock clicked open.
Screwing up his courage, Ryan switched the flashlight off, then twisted the knob.
The door swung open, and a terrible odor flowed out, strong enough to make Ryan take an involuntary step backward and put his hand over his nose. But after a few moments his curiosity overcame his revulsion, and he moved close enough to the door to peer inside.
Behind the door was a large room roofed by the main beams that supported the floor above. It wasn’t quite pitch black in the room — in fact, after the total blackness of the maze of passageways, it seemed almost light by comparison. It took Ryan only a moment to determine the source of the light — in the far wall, high up, there were a few narrow windows opening into the drainage channel that ran around the building, tiny openings that let in just enough light so that the room wasn’t totally dark.
But it wasn’t light enough for him to see much of anything, either.
He switched the flashlight back on.
And instantly heard a faint moan.
He switched the light back off.
There was a long silence, and as it stretched onward, Ryan’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. When the sound wasn’t repeated, he began edging forward, pausing to listen after each step. After about ten paces he came to one of those rolling tables they used to move people around in hospitals. But why would they have one of those in the basement of The Rockwell?
Then, a dozen steps further on, he came to another one. Except that this one wasn’t empty.
A sheet lay over it, and there was something under the sheet.
Something that was the source of the stink that filled the room. Ryan stood staring at the table — and the still form under the sheet — for several minutes, fighting an almost irresistible urge to turn around and slip back into the darkness. But even as he took the first step backward, a voice whispered inside his head: ’What if it’s Laurie?’ But it couldn’t be Laurie.
Could it?
He hesitated.
His terror grew, but even as his skin turned clammy with fear, the voice in his head grew more insistent, and finally he reached out, his fingers shaking, and lifted the sheet just far enough to see what was under it.
A body, its skin dull gray in the dim light.
Laurie!
The thought crashed into Ryan’s mind, and once again he felt an urge to turn away and flee into the darkness. But once again, the other side of him — the side that had to know—won out. Peeling the sheet all the way back, he turned on the flashlight and shined it on the corpse.
Or, at least, what was left of the corpse.
The belly had been laid open, and in the empty cavity that had once contained the vital organs, maggots were already doing their work, their fat white bodies wriggling and burrowing through the rotting flesh, abandoning their feast in a frantic effort to escape the glaring beam of light. His gorge rising, Ryan shifted the light to the face, and found himself staring into a pair of empty eye sockets.
But the rest of the face was familiar — even with her eyes gone, Rebecca Mayhew was still easily recognized.
His eyes flooding with tears — but the pounding of his heart easing slightly as he realized that at least it was not his sister, he dropped the sheet back over Rebecca’s ruined corpse, and moved on.
He came to another gurney.
On this one, the shape wasn’t quite covered — the head was still exposed, and when Ryan shined his light on the face — the face of a boy only a little older than he himself — the eyes, wide and deeply sunken in their sockets — blinked.
Ryan jumped, then froze.
The boy’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
Uncertainly, Ryan reached out and laid his hand on the boy’s forehead, so gently that he barely touched it. “It’s gonna be okay,” Ryan whispered. “I–I’m gonna get you out of here.”
But even as he spoke the words, he could hear their hollowness, and he was sure the boy, whoever he was, didn’t believe them any more than Ryan did himself.
Then, out of the gray twilight, he heard another sound. It was a little louder than the one he’d heard when he first turned on his light, and now he knew what it was: a voice, but so faint and weak that he was almost afraid he’d imagined it. But then it came again.
“M-mom?”
His heart suddenly pounding, Ryan swept the room with his flashlight. On the second sweep, he saw it.
Yet another gurney, yet another shape all but concealed beneath a sheet. But there was someone on the gurney, and even though the single word he’d heard had been barely audible, he was almost certain he recognized the voice.
His heart racing now, he hurried toward the next gurney and a moment later was shining the light on the face of the person lying on it.
Laurie.
“N-no—” she stammered, trying to twist her eyes away from the glare of the light. “Don’t—”
Ryan shifted the light away from her eyes. “It’s me!” he whispered as loud as he dared.
For a moment Laurie didn’t react at all, but then she slowly turned her head toward him. Her lips worked for a moment, and then words began to come out, slowly and weakly.
“Find Mom,” she whispered. “Find her, Ryan. If you don’t, I’m going to die.”
Night lay like a shroud over the city, and as Ryan gazed out his window at the park, the first thing that popped into his mind was what had happened to his father there. Ever since that night, Ryan had hated even the thought of going out alone after dark, terrified of what might happen to him. But tonight there was no choice.
He’d wanted to leave right after he found Laurie — in fact, he’d wanted to take Laurie with him. But she was so weak she could hardly even talk, let alone get off the gurney and follow him through the maze to—
To where?
That was the thing — even if Laurie could make it, he didn’t know where to take her.
He didn’t even know how to get out of the building. In fact, he didn’t even know if he could get out of the building.
Once he’d figured out she couldn’t make it up even the first flight of stairs, he’d wanted to just stay with her, but she’d kept arguing with him. “You have to find out how to get out — you have to find Mom. If you don’t…”
Her words had trailed off, but she hadn’t had to finish for him to understand.
They’d both die, like Rebecca.
So finally he’d promised Laurie he’d find a way out, then gone to see if he could keep his promise. The first place he’d tried was the door at the far end of the corridor he’d come into as he came down the last flight of steps. He’d approached it slowly, stopping every few steps to listen for anyone who might be coming, for the closer he got to that door, the farther away he was from the stairs that were the only other way out. But there had been no sounds, and finally he’d come close enough to the door to try its knob.
Locked.
Locked, and with no keyhole.
He’d gone over every inch of the door, using up two whole batteries, searching for a way to open it, but except for the knob, there was nothing at all on his side of it. No hinges whose pins he might be able to pull, or a place where he could try to pry it open if he could find a crowbar somewhere. When the batteries had started to fade, and he’d seen what time it was, he’d given up on the door, but instead of going straight back to his room, he’d explored as much of the maze of corridors as possible.
And found no way out.
On the first floor, there’d been only one narrow corridor, with only one door. Or at least he thought it was a door. It hadn’t had any knob or lock or anything else, but it looked like it might slide if he could just figure out how to release it. But when another set of batteries began to fade as he searched for anything that might open the door, he finally gave up, knowing he’d never find his way back to his room if he ran out of batteries.