I reached the elevator and pushed the Down button before I saw the fire stairs. There they were, right where they were supposed to be, with the customary warning that they, rather than the elevator, were to be used in case of fire.
Everything had been labeled but the basement. The man and woman had used the word "basement" as a verb and had argued about it. The elevator wouldn't take you to the basement if you didn't have a key. On the whole, it seemed to me, I rather wanted to have a look at the basement.
So I took the stairs.
They were grimy, even for the Borzoi, and ill-lit. More important, though, they didn't stop at the lobby. There was a rickety waist-high grate closing them off, the kind of thing people in two-story houses buy when they have a baby, with a sign across it that said no access. I accessed by stepping over it and continued down.
The stairs ended in a heavy metal fire door. I turned the knob slowly and inched it open just far enough to peek through. Nothing that I could see. I opened it quickly and stepped through.
The smell of damp was stronger down here than it had been in the lobby: the place smelled like it hadn't been dry in years. A forty-watt economy bulb hung from a wire above my head. The wire, an electrician's nightmare, was actually stripped bare in places. The Church obviously saved the high-wattage light bulbs for Revealings.
I was at the end of a concrete-walled corridor. By the time I'd realized I was in a cul-de-sac, the door had closed behind me with a soft, steely sound. Experimentally I tried the knob. From this side, the door was locked. I was going to need another exit.
Something dripped, and I looked down. The floor was covered evenly with a quarter of an inch of black water. Another drop plopped into it, sending out dull concentric ripples that pushed bits of suspect debris before them. Water had seeped through, or condensed on, the ceiling, and it dripped more or less continuously into the fluid on the floor. This was not the kind of place tourists bought maps to find.
Well, I couldn't just stand there. Sooner or later someone was going to come through the door behind me or round the corner at the other end to check out my little hallway, and I didn't think they'd be happy to see me. If they didn't want to see me, I certainly didn't want to see them.
So I sloshed through the water toward the open end of the corridor. Something entirely too large for my liking scuttled past me in the other direction: a rat. It was wet and black and sleek and it looked mean enough to eat snakes. I accelerated away from it and found myself standing in a wider corridor that crossed mine like the longer stroke of a T. My heart was going like a bass drum.
Neither left nor right was particularly appealing, but I had to go one way or the other, and the right seemed to be more brightly lighted. Figuring that the people were likely to be where the light was, I headed left.
I'd covered more than twenty yards before I found a door. It opened into a small service closet, even wetter and darker than the hallway, with nothing in it but a couple of buckets and some old rags. I closed it and went on, feeling like Jean Valjean in the sewers of Paris. At least he'd known that his enemies were behind him. I had no idea where mine were.
A second cul-de-sac, this one jutting off to the left, led to an enormous and apparently new air-conditioning system, probably installed right where the old gravity furnace had been. It roared along at full output, making me doubt my senses. Who could want air conditioning on a day like this one, fifty-five degrees and raining? And then I remembered the television studio and all those bright lights. Couldn't have beads of sweat on little Angel's upper lip.
Big ducts, almost three feet square, branched off from the business end of the air conditioner like the legs of a spider, except that most of them seemed to lead in one direction: toward what would have been the left side of the hotel if I'd been outside and facing it from the street, which I very much wished I were.
A square opening had been cut into one of the ducts with a blowtorch, and then the piece of metal had been removed, hinged, and replaced, perhaps for maintenance access. I thought about the man who would willingly crawl through those ducts in this rat's nest and asked myself whether even Dexter Smif would do it. Probably not the career change he had in mind. I opened the little door and looked up the duct. It was blacker than the back door to hell and probably narrower.
The main corridor now swung to the right, and I paused at the corner to make sure I had my bearings straight. It wasn't much fun being down there under the best of circumstances, but it would be a lot less fun if I were lost. I'd been counting not only turns but hanging light bulbs as well. When I was certain I could get back, I went on.
I found, first, a changing room, with hooks spaced on the wall at regular intervals for uniforms or street clothes, and then a bathroom with the most ungodly brown water I'd ever seen brimming over in the toilets. On the doors to the toilet stalls hung signs that said dipping pool. Each dipping pool was numbered. I wondered what got dipped in them.
I left the dipping pools behind and entered a large empty tiled room with no features at all. Every room has features, I thought, studying the walls by the light of what seemed to be a ten-watt bulb. I spotted something dark and round in the center of the floor and went over to it. A drain. When I looked up, I saw the shower heads.
The details of the morning's nightmare came back to me more vividly than I liked. I had to force myself not to look up for the gray worms as I very slowly left the room, and I tried not to acknowledge the relief I felt when the door opened in front of me.
Two empty closets and one backtrack later, I found the kitchen of the Borzoi.
It was vast and cavernous and empty. What seemed like acres of filthy wet counter stretched in every direction, lighted by the standard-issue hanging bulbs. The old gas ranges were cold and rusty, their oven doors hanging open. I didn't much think I wanted to look in the ovens.
In addition to the one I had entered through, there were four doors in the kitchen. Two opened into dish closets, still stacked high with authentic dinnerware of the twenties that Eleanor would have killed for. The third was as wide as it was high, and as heavy as it was wide. I had to use both hands to pull it open.
When I did, a wave of cold air broke over me. I had obviously found the refrigerator that had once served the kitchen, keeping the Barrymores' caviar chilled. I was holding the door open with one hand and feeling around on the inside wall for a light switch with the other, when something in there moved. Then it moved again. Then it scuttled toward me. It had at least four legs.
The largest rat in the world swam into my imagination, and I yanked my arm out and backed away so fast that I cracked my hip on the edge of a counter. The refrigerator door slowly swung shut. Whatever it was, it was going to stay inside.
The fourth door was worse.
It was narrow but tall, and it opened to reveal a dumbwaiter that in the old days had carried hot food up into the chandeliered dining room. When I tugged it open, I saw nothing but a bundle of rags that had been wadded up and thrown inside. I reached in to test the ropes, wondering if I could somehow haul myself up to ground level, and the bundle of rags stirred. A bunch of darker rags slowly lifted itself and became hair, and I was looking into the face of a woman.
A girl really; she couldn't have been more than twenty. Her face was pasty and hollow. Her eyes were black and flat, as empty and lifeless as windows into a dark room. She looked first at my face and then down at my clothes. Then she sighed and started to lower her head again.
"Honey," I said. "For Christ's sake, let's get out of here." I put my hand on her shoulder, but she didn't even shrug. She was barely breathing. I shook her and got no response. I left the door open and backed away, and she reached out a slender white arm and slowly pulled the door closed again.