He hadn’t had enough time to explore all the passages on the upper floors, and when he’d dropped back into his closet, he’d only had one set of fresh batteries left.
It wasn’t more than five minutes after he got back that a key turned in his lock, and there stood his stepfather, his dead eyes fixed on Ryan. “You will apologize to Miss Shackleforth.”
Ryan did it, carefully making his face look like he was really, really sorry for what he’d done.
He sat through dinner, forcing himself to eat, pretending he believed his stepfather’s story that Laurie was having a sleepover with one of her friends.
He didn’t ask which friend; instead he acted like he didn’t care.
At eight, he told his stepfather he was tired, and was going to go to bed early, and when Tony came in to tuck him in, he didn’t object. And he asked if he could go visit his mother in the hospital the next day.
“We’ll see,” Tony told him. Then he left, closed the door, and just as Ryan had been hoping, locked it.
Now Ryan was looking out into the night, and the courage he’d been working up all evening was starting to ebb away. Taking one last look out the window, he patted the batteries in his jacket pocket, checked for the keys and the black laundry marking pen and his pocketknife, then stuffed some extra pillows under the covers, just in case Tony came back for a look. Turning all the lights off, he went into the closet and climbed up the shelves one more time. Lifting the trapdoor carefully, he pulled himself through, then re-closed it.
Using the flashlight as sparingly as he possibly could, feeling his way along the passages that were now familiar to him, he began working his way upward. This time he ignored most of the side passages, going only far enough down any of them to determine that there were no stairs leading further up, for tonight he had a single goal.
To get out.
And if there were no way out through the basement or the first floor, there was only one thing left: the roof.
He was on the ninth floor — which he was pretty sure was the top floor — when he ran out of stairs. The last flight of steps seemed longer than any of the others, and when he finally came to the top, the passage only ran for about thirty feet before it ended at another passage that ran perpendicular to it.
He shined the light in both directions, but neither seemed any more promising than the other, and finally he started down the one to the right. It ended after about fifty feet, and there was another perpendicular passage. He explored the corridor in both directions and found dead ends both ways.
He went back the other way; passing the corridor he’d originally come through, he found a second transverse at the far end.
Both ends of this transverse ended as abruptly as the first.
No way out.
His heart sinking, he started back toward the passage that would take him to the stairs leading downward, but then, just as he was about to start down the steps, he remembered how he’d gotten into the passages in the first place.
Shining the flashlight upward, he began going back through the passages one more time, this time in search not of a door or of stairs, but of another trapdoor.
He found it at the very end of the first passage he’d explored. At first he wasn’t sure what it was — it looked like a ladder that was bolted to the ceiling. But when he examined it more closely, he could see that it was hinged at one end, and that there was what looked like a rope going up through the ceiling at the other end.
He stretched, trying to reach the ladder, but no matter how hard he strained, his fingers couldn’t even come close to touching it.
Taking off his shoes so he’d make as little noise as possible, he jumped.
And still didn’t touch the ladder’s lowest rung.
A stool — that’s what he needed. But where was he going to get one?
His desk chair?
But how could he even get it up through the trapdoor? And if he dropped it, and Tony Fleming heard the noise—
The flashlight was starting to get weak, and he reached into his pocket for the last set of batteries. Then, as he was deciding whether to change them now, or wait until the others were completely dead, an idea started forming in his mind. Stripping off his jacket — a thin nylon one whose big pockets had been more important than its lack of warmth — he tied a knot in one of the sleeves, then dropped all the batteries he had into the sleeve. Twisting the jacket as tight as he could, he grasped the end of the other sleeve so that he had a sort of makeshift rope with a weight at one end. It wasn’t very long — maybe four feet total, but if he could sling the weighted end over the bottom rung of the ladder, he just might be able to pull it down.
He hefted the jacket, giving it an experimental swing. If he wasn’t careful, the sleeve with the batteries in it would thump against the wall or the floor and—
He decided he didn’t want to think about that.
Taking a couple of more test swings, he finally arced the sleeve of the jacket up toward the ladder.
It thumped against the ceiling, not even hitting the ladder, then dropped back down. Ryan barely caught it before it hit the floor.
He tried three more times before he finally found the angle that would hit the bottom rung of the ladder.
It took twelve more tries before the sleeve containing the batteries miraculously slid through the narrow gap between the rung and the ceiling itself.
He started flipping the jacket, trying to feed more of it over the rung, counting on the batteries to pull it down the other side.
His right arm was fully extended when he realized that the second sleeve was still a foot from his grasp.
For almost a full minute, he stared up at the jacket and the ladder, then made up his mind. The lower sleeve still in his hand, he jumped up, trying to feed the jacket a little further, then let go of the sleeve.
And now both sleeves hung tantalizingly above him, just out of reach. But if he jumped, and then grabbed both sleeves at the same time—
He paused, gathering himself, then crouched down and took three deep breaths, as if he were about to dive into water instead of leap into the air. Then, as his lungs reached full capacity he launched himself upward, and a split second later his hands closed on the sleeves of the jacket.
And as the end of the ladder came down he heard the faint squeak of an unseen pulley as the counterweight rose somewhere in or on the other side of the wall. A moment later the bottom of the ladder was on the floor, and Ryan held it in position as he unknotted the sleeve, put the batteries back in the jacket pocket, and put the jacket on. Then he climbed the ladder, and pushed up on the small trapdoor that the ladder’s rungs and rails had hidden almost perfectly.
He was in the attic of the building, and as he flashed the light around, he saw another door.
A door whose lock responded to one of the keys on the ring his mother had taken from the shop.
A door that led to the roof.
He paused on the threshold, sucking the cool night air deep into his lungs. Above, the sky was clear, and the moon was almost full. Turning off the flashlight, he dropped it into the pocket of his jacket and began making his way along the narrow catwalk that ran between two of the roofs’ steeply pitched peaks, around one of the turrets, and finally to the low rampart that ran around the building’s perimeter.
He worked his way slowly all the way around, searching for a fire escape.
And found none.
Each of the four fire escapes that served the building started from the eighth floor, two floors below Ryan.