“You have to warn her,” Crane said. His voice was weak.
“Warn who? About what?”
I was squatted next to him, trying to establish where and how he’d been hurt. So far all I could see was blood, and all I could tell was that it was bad.
“Marcus is back.”
“What?” I said.
“Marcus Fox,” Fisher said, misunderstanding me. “The other man on the documents for this building. The one I couldn’t find anything about for the last ten years.”
“You wouldn’t,” Crane said. “He was dead. You’ve got to warn her. Warn Rose.”
My hands froze, and I stared at him. “Rose? How do you know about Rose? Who is she?”
His eyes were unfocused. “Oh, you know Rose,” he said, with affection and bitterness. “Everybody knows…”
His face contorted, and the words became a sharp intake of breath.
“Where did he go? Marcus?”
His face slack, Crane jerked his head to the left.
“In one of those rooms?”
He shook his head. I flicked the flashlight down along the corridor toward the back of the building.
“Into the basement,” Fisher said.
I thought for a second. Amy and the Zimmermans would be long gone by now. There was no point in my running after them. “Gary, go out on the street and get help. Quickly. Get an ambulance.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Find the person who did this.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No. This guy’s badly fucked up. He needs an ambulance, and he needs it now.”
Fisher pushed past me and headed along the corridor. “I don’t care. I have to know what’s down there.”
“For God’s sake.”
I started to move back past Todd toward the street door, but his hand reached out and grabbed my leg. “Don’t let him go down there alone,” he said. “He’ll die.”
“Todd, you need a doctor.”
“Go after him,” he insisted. “Please.” His eyes were strong again, for the moment. “Or he will die.”
I hesitated. “Hold your hands over the wound,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I ran back toward the staircase down into the basement. Fisher was already heading down the steps.
“You’re an asshole,” I said, shining the light so he could see his way into the darkness. He just started descending more quickly. The stairs hit a return halfway down and kept going. There was a full story below-ground, which didn’t make much sense. I knew that there were areas like this in the old town, but here?
We came off the bottom into an open space. There was a door on the left side. Beyond it lay ser vice areas, full of pipes and dampness. There was another door on the right, hanging open. It was three inches thick, with the same reinforcing we’d seen on the top floor. I pointed the flashlight through the gap. A narrow corridor led away into total darkness.
Fisher went through. I followed. The walls on the other side were of old brickwork, the mortar rotted out in parts. I passed a bank of switches and flicked them, but nothing happened.
“Gary, slow down.”
Fisher wasn’t listening. When I caught up with him, I found he’d hit an intersection. The flashlight revealed only about eight feet in any direction. Darkness led three ways. The place smelled of rock and old dust.
“I don’t get it. We must be out under the street by now.”
We heard a sound then, from down one of the corridors. A moan, which abruptly climbed in pitch.
We turned together. The sound came back, splitting into something that could have been fractured laughter or someone choking, then broke into silence. It came from the left corridor.
“Down there,” I said.
He made her go right over to the corner. The thing in the chair was sealed into a plastic bag. When Marcus forced her hands to open the bag, a smell came out that was the worst thing ever, so bad that in the darkness it seemed to fill the universe. Her eyes watered, her stomach dropped out like seasickness, but instead of moving back he yanked the sides of the bag wider. He pushed her hands inside, needing to touch the last place he’d called home. From the smell you thought it would be warm, but it was cold. It was like stringy, fatty mucus with things in it, and there were bones. He made her come farther toward it, bringing her face to the gap, opening her mouth, as if he meant to taste the…
No way.
She’d thrown herself backward, flapping her hands spastically, and stumbled howling back into the darkness, frantically rubbing her hands on her poor coat, the coat now covered in dirt and blood and this appalling, horrendous crap. She’d gone running back across the room then, smashing into things and not caring, until she found another corridor and ran down it—and then into another, bigger space, not caring where she went because she knew now that all corridors were the same.
It didn’t matter how far you went. There was no escape from what was inside.
Gary ran down the left corridor. I began to smell something else, an earthier note underneath the dust.
We came to a doorway and stepped through it into a more open space. Forty feet square, a low ceiling, upturned furniture and wooden crates and debris all over the place. One whole wall was bookshelves, very old-looking volumes, leather-bound, most of them little thicker than notebooks. The room had thick concrete walls and was bone dry, but the odor was stronger here, far worse than the damp and mold we’d been enveloped in before.
As we started across the room, I stepped on something. It made a flat, crackling sound and gave way, dropping my foot onto something uneven.
I pointed the light down. There was a stretch of dark gray plastic beneath my foot, less than five feet in length, an uneven two feet wide.
“What’s that?” Fisher’s voice was dry.
I knew. I’d seen one before. It was a body bag. A good deal of packing tape had been fixed over the central zipper and reinforced the join at the top. The tape had curled a little at the edges, as if it had been in place for some time. I reached down toward it.
“Don’t open it,” Fisher said.
I peeled the tape back, found the zipper. Ran it down six inches. The smell that emerged was like nothing on earth. Fisher turned away jerkily. I shone the light into the hole. A face, or the remains of one. This person had been there awhile, sealed into a tough, nearly airtight bag. She had once had long red hair. She had not been very tall, or very old. Her face had been deeply sliced, in a series of wounds that together looked a little like the number 9.
I pulled the zipper back up, pushed the tape back down around the join. The smell did not go away. That smell is not just a smell. The brain keeps sending out alarms even after the source is taken away. It knows that this odor is a gateway to places you cannot go and stay alive.
Assuming I had removed the source…
I straightened up, remembering I’d been able to smell something of this as soon as we’d entered the room.
“Jack,” Fisher said. “There.”
I pointed the flashlight. Another bag, the same size, on the floor, partially underneath a table. I moved the light again. Found another bag, then another, and for a moment it was as if they hadn’t been there before we came but were appearing now in front of our eyes, multiplying to fill the space, coming closer, surrounding us.
And then one final bag. This was not on the floor but propped upright in a rotten armchair in the far corner, near another entrance. For a moment when the light bounced off the top, it looked like a face, though that must have been the folds, the remaining structure of what was sealed inside. This bag was a good deal longer than the rest. It had been opened, the sides pulled apart.
Fisher grabbed the light from me and pointed it to the side, fast. In the wall there was another door. I saw something in the corridor beyond.