If this had been an amusement park ride, it could not have been designed any better. The lobby of the hotel, in the early stages of renovation, was devoid of furniture, and the ceiling and floor were composed of dark stripped wood. Tattered sections of old wallpaper hung against dirty white walls, and the out-of-service elevator was visible as a broken metal box through the open double doors. The hotel looked for all intents and purposes like a haunted building, and the lack of electric illumination combined with dim fractured sunlight seeping through the dusty front windows only emphasized the resemblance.
The students had been talkative and enthusiastic on the way over, even while waiting on the sidewalk for everyone to arrive, but the atmosphere of this place was deadly, and ever since entering, they had all been silent, cowed.
Afraid.
Angela didn't know about anyone else, but she was afraid, and she wasn't quite sure why. She thought of that terrible mumbling in Winston and Brock's apartment, and maybe that was part of it, but it seemed to her that what frightened her was more than a resemblance to something that had happened before. This was something new, even if along the same lines, and her dread was amplified by not knowing what was to come.
One girl from Dr. Welkes' advanced course stopped in the middle of the lobby, her face chalky, and said she'd changed her mind: she didn't want to see the corpses; she'd wait for them outside. Angela knew how she felt, and part of her wanted to flee as well, but her curiosity was stronger than her fear, and as the other girl turned and exited, she followed the policeman, the professor and her classmates through a service door and into a stairwell.
"Lights on!" Dr. Welkes called, and those who had flashlights turned them on. The policeman had a strong, powerful beam that illuminated a large swath of the area before them, but here in the back of the crowd it was dark, and Angela was glad her dad had made her pack an emergency flashlight in the trunk. Brenda had nothing with her and so she stuck close by.
They started down.
At the bottom, moving single file, they passed two industrial washing machines with adjacent dryers and a massive furnace, half-disassembled, before reaching more crime scene tape. The officer held up the yellow ribbon as they ducked underneath it. Beyond was a janitor's closet and, at the back of that, an ancient metal door that had been recently pried open. Crumbling and irregularly broken brick around the exposed doorjamb testified to the fact that prior to this it had been sealed shut for many years.
The policeman's powerful beam shone into the darkness.
And they saw the bodies.
One by one, they walked into the tunnel. The corpses were farther down, not near the entrance but a few yards in, beneath the street rather than below the hotel. Even from her vantage point near the end of the line, Angela could see them, however, and she wished she'd turned around with the other girl and waited outside. It seemed suddenly hard to breathe, and her hand on the flashlight was sticky with sweat.
The bodies were unmoved; the police had left them exactly as they had been found, huddled along the sides of the tunnel, crammed into impossible positions, shoved against each other. Sunken eye sockets were granted life by moving flashlights, and though these weren't mummies, they looked like they were. Clothes had rotted into colorless rags and the skin beneath was horribly wrinkled, stuck fast to bone, all trace of fat and muscle long gone. Every one of them, no matter the pose or placement, appeared to be smiling, that familiar skull's rictus grinning into the passing beams.
Angela didn't want to be here. She was not claustrophobic-or had not been until now-but she was filled suddenly with a desire to escape from this passage. It was more powerful than an urge or impulse, more like an increasingly desperate need, and with each step she took into the tunnel it grew stronger until finally she stopped, unable to go any farther. Behind her, Brenda said, "What's wrong?" Ahead, at the front of the line, Dr. Welkes was speculating about the identity of these dead people.
And a hand reached out to grab her.
A corpse hand.
Then she was screaming, and then everyone was screaming. The bodies were alive, moving, and people were scrambling over each other, pushing each other aside to rush back out of the tunnel the way they'd come. Angela heard the professor's cry of surprise and the policeman's roar of bewilderment behind her as the beam of her flashlight hit an undersized corpse that was rocking back and forth on its haunches, bobbing its insanely grinning head at her. She tried to leap over it but was pushed by someone in back of her. She stumbled over the rocking body and went sprawling, landing atop another skeletal form making its
way grimly across the floor toward the open doorway. She felt skin the texture of sandpaper, smelled the scent of foul dust in her nostrils. For a brief second, her lips touched hair-dead brittle hair-then she jumped up, .knocking into another student before finally reaching the open area near the tunnel's entrance and bolting put into the janitor's closet.
Like the others in front of her, she did not stop there but dashed into the basement and up the stairs to the lobby. Instinct was telling her to continue outside, onto the street, but the others had stopped near the door, and she immediately understood why. Embarrassment. Here in the dark dismantled lobby, the horror of what they'd experienced was still fresh, real, but on the other side of those doors, they would have to explain their fear and panic, would have to notify anonymous passersby that there were mummies or zombies under the street, that the dead bodies that had been discovered were alive.
And none of them were willing to do that.
Besides, who was to say whether it had really happened or whether they'd simply scared themselves and imagined it all?
She was. She could still feel the sharp pressure on the skin of her arm where the corpse's bony fingers had grabbed her.
Brenda was sobbing, as were several of the other students, both male and female. Dr. Welkes and the police officer had finally run up, so everyone was accounted for; everyone had made it out alive.
"Jesus!" the policeman kept shouting, his voice too loud in the empty lobby. "Jesus!"
He was the one Angela felt sorry for. He was going to have to write this up, put it in a report, explain what had happened to a group of skeptical cops, who would then have to release the information to the newspaper and the public. And she had no doubt that the bodies in the tunnel would be still once again, that whatever team came out to investigate would find nothing unusual or out of the ordinary, no sign of animation amongst the decaying corpses. That was the way these things always worked.
They stood there in various states of denial or emotional recovery, looking at each other. Angela expected someone to take charge, thought the policeman or the professor would tell them what to do, but both men seemed lost in their own thoughts as they repeated, "Jesus! Jesus!" and muttered incoherent words, respectively.
So they didn't talk about what had happened, didn't try and find another cop or fireman or public-safety worker to verify what was down there, made no effort even to get together later and discuss what they'd seen. They simply ended up wandering aimlessly out the front doors onto the sidewalk where the fortunate girl from the advanced class waited for them, completely unaware of the horror that had transpired beneath her feet.
Angela drove Brenda and the other two students who'd carpooled with her back to school, none of them speaking, then drove immediately home-where she told everyone in Babbitt House what had happened. Randy wasn't in, but the others were, and Angela gathered them in the first-floor foyer, in front of Winston and Brock's apartment, and described in detail what she'd seen. The cone of silence that had existed with her fellow anthropology students had shattered, and now she couldn't seem to stop talking, telling and retelling specific scenes over and over again as her friends and roommate plied her with questions. None of them seemed to doubt her, and she found that surprising. If she'd heard such a story from one of them, she would not have believed a word of it.