She squeaked a soft, strangled “what?” and he smiled at her, cocking his head and leaning in until his nose was almost touching her own.
As if sharing a secret, his voice dripping with hate but absolute authority, Danny whispered the last words Niamh Wesley would ever hear:
“You know what you have to do.”
And she did.
twenty-three
“Run!” cried Sarah in a half-scream, half-whisper, uncertain how much her voice might carry up the elevator shaft. The four hurried to the stair entrance and Sarah whipped out the keys from Janet’s purse.
Sam had a disturbing thought. He placed his hand against the lock just as Sarah was about to thrust the key inside. Her face shot up at his. “Wait, Sarah,” Sam urged, “what if this is a trick?”
Janet was keeping her eye on the brass arrow across the room. The blessedly slow-moving elevator was now at “4.”
“What if it sent the elevator down empty,” Sam continued, “so we'd open the door?”
Sarah hadn't considered this, and took a beat.
The arrow fell to “3.”
“Guys…” urged Janet.
A thought came to Sarah. “No, Sam, this is right,” she said. “It wouldn't send down the elevator because the elevator's the only way out.”
The logic behind this clicked to Sam as well. From the creature's perspective, giving them the elevator was too risky. With the stairs, they could only get so far. He snatched his hand back from the lock and Sarah opened the door.
The arrow fell to “2” as they hurried into the stairwell, praying they closed the door behind them fast enough to avoid detection. Sarah locked it from the other side the instant it was closed, and they started up the staircase.
“Where are we going?” asked Al.
Sarah had an idea. “We just need to get to the next level,” she said, panting as the alcohol made its way through her fast-pumping blood, slowing her progress. “Then we can race across the hall and call the elevator ourselves while the thing is trying to get into the stairwell.”
Sure enough, they heard pounding on the locked door below them as they raced up the last few stairs, Sam and Sarah in the lead, followed by Al, and Janet in the rear, still limping in pain and dependent on her pool cue crutch.
“Come on,” Al said, falling back a bit to help Janet by the arm.
Sam wasted no time, though the scotch gurgled in his stomach, begging him to slow down. He swung open the door to the second level and raced to the elevator call button, Sarah just yards behind him. The instant he pressed the button, he heard the elevator whir to life, and he stepped back.
Or had he heard the whir begin an instant before he pressed the button?
Sam looked back at Sarah. She must have had the same thought, because her eyes did not show relief, but were asking a question. His face revealed that he didn’t know.
Al and Janet had entered the hallway and were walking toward the elevator, just as Sarah and Sam began to back away from it. If the car was occupied, they would have to return to the stairs. But would they have time to climb another flight to try again?
They could see the top of the elevator now.
Shit.
The second Vaughn’s head was visible through the gate, Sarah and Sam bolted for the stairs in panic. Al followed behind, as did Janet, though the cane continued to slow her down.
“Guys!” called Vaughn’s voice from the elevator car. “Wait up, guys! I’m hurt!”
Sam’s heart was screaming to go back, to help his best friend. Even his mind tried to make excuses and rationalizations, urging him to return, insisting on a logical explanation that would make the pursuer the real Vaughn after all. Only his gut instinct, and his faith in Sarah’s logic, propelled him forward.
They could hear the elevator gate opening just as Janet made it through the door.
“I’m hurt!” cried the voice of Vaughn. “I need help!”
Sarah seemed to sense that Sam had slowed, and grabbed his arm roughly.
“It’s not him, Sam,” she pleaded.
“I know,” Sam assured her, gasping for breath.
Sam and Sarah had made it to the third floor, with Al close behind, but Janet was trembling so hard as she climbed that she lost her secure hold of the pool cue. It propelled itself out of her grasp and clattered down the half flight she had ascended, only to roll against the boot-clad feet of Larry Blair.
Janet looked back, and screamed.
Her husband was dressed in the same red flannel and ill-fitting faded jeans he had been wearing the night he had beaten her. His hair and stubble were the same, too, and that look on his face…Janet would never forget that crazed, hate-filled expression as long as she lived. Larry had been angry with her before, sure, and said the most hurtful things one could imagine, about her being fat, and worthless, and “not even a good lay.” Once he had even spat in her face when she had performed an unsatisfactory blow job. But the night he had beaten her, truly beaten her, it was different. He had looked like a man possessed, hungry for violence, like a rabid animal, drool and all.
There was something else, Janet realized. The image of her ex-husband was flickering somehow, as if under a faulty fluorescent light. Behind the image of Larry, or perhaps, inside of it, was an oily blackness that seemed to ooze underneath the surface, never quite matching up with the illusion of skin and bone. Each time Janet blinked, she thought she could almost see the other creature, the real creature, but it was just for an instant, like seeing the echo of a bright light after closing one’s eyes.
“Where are you going, Janet?” The voice was blood-curdling, dripping with hate, using the same words he had spat at her before he landed the first blow. In his right hand, Janet remembered, would be an empty beer bottle. He would beat her with that bottle until…until she…
What was in his hand?
She was frozen now on the stairs, jaw agape in terror, transfixed on Larry and his right hand. And Larry knew he had Janet’s undivided attention, even as Al, realizing she was no longer behind him, had sprinted back down, turning the corner just in time to see the stranger holding something horrible in front of his body, just six feet from Janet’s terrified face.
“Jesus,” Al gasped.
As a fisherman might hold up a trout still dangling from the line that snared it, the right hand of Larry Blair dangled a dead, bloody, tiny child from a foot of grey umbilical cord.
“Looking for this?” he sneered.
Larry shook the cord, causing the body beneath it to convulse, making the doll-sized head appear to turn in mid-air, until its little black eyes snapped open, staring right at Janet.
Janet screamed again, and kept screaming, flashes of pain shooting through her belly as she remembered the beating, and the bloody miscarriage on her kitchen floor tile. “I'm sure it will come out in the wash,” Larry would say heartlessly an hour afterward, when he found her crying in front of a heap of bloody clothes, as if she had been distressed over the laundry challenge and not the loss of her only potential child. It all flooded back to her now, and Janet kept screaming up until the second Al fired the shot that knocked her ex-husband back a half flight of stairs.
Sam and Sarah had heard the screaming from a flight above and had slowed. The gunshot, they knew, had been from Al. But had it been effective? They stared at each other, uncertain, not knowing if they should save themselves or try and help their fallen sister. And then all Sam could think about was the first time he had heard a gunshot in person, at Venue A, and could hear Vaughn’s whispered voice ringing in his head. Together, we’re strong.
He closed his eyes for half a second, gaining strength from the darkness, and raced down to help.
Sam arrived just as Al fired a second shot, presumably as a warning, as the stairwell appeared empty. He raced down a few stairs past Al to help Janet to her feet. As Al stood straight and tall, feet wide in a shooter’s stance on the half-landing
, Sam half-dragged his panicked Realtor up the stairs as fast as he was able. Al stayed in the back, gun raised and taking the stairs backward, slowly, making sure not to lose focus, ready for anything that moved, human or otherwise.
Sarah was there to help with Janet when they reached the third floor. The couple each took an arm and carried the woman across the hall to the elevator. Sam pushed the call button, repeatedly, trembling with panic and nausea and believing the slow-moving elevator was even more glacial than he had remembered. But it came, empty this time, and he ripped the gate open and they piled inside, Al the last to enter the car, still with gun raised and eyes staring down the hall to the stairwell door.
Sam hit “12” and the car whirred to life, leaving behind the third floor. But within moments of the start of their ascent, they saw through the gate the stairwell door burst open, the figure of Larry Blair standing before them down the long hall, the same murderous rage on his face that Janet had witnessed moments ago. But instead of racing down the hall and toward the ascending car, the face of Larry merely smiled, turned around, and re-entered the stairwell.
“What the hell?” demanded Sarah.
“Oh God,” said Sam. “He’s going to try and cut us off on one of the other floors.”
Sarah whirled to Al. “Can he do that? Can he stop the elevator?”
“I…don’t know,” Al admitted.
They could see the fourth floor hallway now through the gate. No one was there. They continued upward.
“Janet, who…” began Sarah, but upon seeing the woman’s ashen face, didn’t pry further. It didn’t matter who it was. It only mattered that it had been someone from Janet’s past who had terrified her. Or, perhaps more accurately, it only mattered that it hadn’t been someone. It hadn’t been anyone. It had been an illusion, designed to terrify, to catch them off guard, and to make them victims.
But they weren’t going to be victims, Sarah vowed to herself. Not today.
They could see the fifth floor now, and could see the baths through the double doors they had left open. This floor, too, was deserted.
The tension rose as they approached the sixth, then the seventh floor, both empty. Sam wanted desperately to gain confidence as they traveled higher, but couldn’t shake the feeling that it was some sort of trap. The elevator was moving so slowly that the creature could ascend the stairs just as quickly, perhaps even faster, unless Al’s shot had done more damage than it had appeared. Sam reasoned the last floor it could ambush them at would be the tenth floor, the transit level, for they knew the stair access door to the Mastersuite on the eleventh was blocked, and only the elevator reached the twelfth.
The eighth floor became visible through the gate. Still nothing.
Sarah reached for, and found, Sam’s sweaty hand. She felt sick, and dizzy, the combination of alcohol and adrenaline proving too much for her body to bear. Her right breast ached as well, and when she looked down, she saw that the action of dragging Janet had ruptured the bandage which was covering where her nipple and piercing had been. Blood was seeping out, not in spurts but a slow trickle, down to her waist and pooling atop her studded belt in a crimson stream.
Sarah applied pressure with her free hand, wincing but endeavoring to stay in control, as the ninth floor hallway came into view.
The hallway was not empty.
Sam cried out in sorrow as he saw Vaughn’s broken body. As the slow ascent continued, Sam saw the smeared trail of blood which led from the outer gate of the elevator to where Vaughn now lay. Sam looked down at the floor of the car, and noticed for the first time that here, too, was evidence of dried blood. He closed his eyes in pain, realizing what must have happened.
“When he went up to get the gauze,” Sarah said, reading his thoughts.
“And it was his body that was blocking the elevator door,” Al added, in the hushed, respectful tone of a funeral attendant.
Sam cut them off with a raise of his hand. He didn’t need it discussed.
Together, we’re strong, thought Sam again.
And Vaughn had been alone.
The car reached the tenth floor, the last floor Sam figured the creature could ambush them. But it, too, was empty. For the first time, Sam allowed himself to feel hope. He squeezed Sarah’s hand tighter.
The Mastersuite level, like the baths, opened into a small lobby with two waiting chairs and a set of wooden double doors. When they had passed it on the way down, they couldn’t get a good look at it through the cage with Vaughn’s battery-powered lights. But now, with the hotel lighting turned on, they could see clearly that one of the doors was badly damaged, a gaping, torn hole through the wood, and hanging from one of its iron hinges. Sam strained to look closer, but the room beyond the broken door was quite dark, and the single lobby light couldn’t cast enough past the splintered door to make anything out.
“Can you see inside?” asked Sam of the others.
“No,” said Sarah, and Al concurred, though Janet wasn’t looking and didn’t respond. She was silent, rocking her body softly, looking down at her abdomen in misery.
They passed the Mastersuite and slowly, impossibly slowly, arrived at the small lobby in which they had first found the elevator. The car purred to a halt, and nobody moved.
They couldn’t see a thing.
The floor, assuming they had actually arrived, was pitch black. The dim illumination of the elevator car seemed to travel mere inches into the space outside. When they had entered this space before, they had Vaughn’s DJ lights to guide their way. But now, there was only the dark.
Sam had a dim realization of what this meant. Either the large trap door that revealed this room had closed, or the trap door was still open, but it was too dark for any daylight to still seep in. He took his phone out of his pocket and turned it on. It was just after 7:00 p.m. Sam laughed aloud at this, not because it meant the sun had not yet set, or the corresponding implication that they could be trapped under a closed trap door, but the darkly comic realization that the entirety of their adventure so far had lasted a mere six hours.
“What’s so funny,” Sarah demanded.
“It’s only 7:00,” said Sam, and laughed again, the kind of laugh that could melt into a sob if he didn’t stay in control.
“So what?” she countered. But then she understood.
They four stood in silence for a moment. Even with the frantic desire to leave The Eaton, none of them wanted to be the first to enter the dark unknown.
“Wait,” said Sam. He fiddled with his phone until the LED light came on. Under normal circumstances, the flashlight app he used couldn't provide much illumination, but in the total blackness, it was quite effective. Sam could see through the gate that the waiting room was empty.
Al opened the elevator gate and the four stepped out, walking slowly to the staircase which seemed to ascend into a solid ceiling.
“Why do you think it's closed?” asked Sarah, since someone had to.
“It might be designed that way,” Al ventured. “To come back on its own mechanism after a short time.”
Sam frowned. Something felt wrong. On instinct, he turned back to the elevator.
“Janet,” Sam called, “don't let the car leave, just in case.” Janet nodded, and limped back, placing her pool cue crutch across the threshold, which she hoped was enough to stop the car from being called back from a lower level.
“What now?” asked Al.
“We push,” said Sam.
The two men climbed a couple stairs and began to push upward on the heavy panel. It lifted on its hinges with ease at first, and to Sam's great relief, the dim light from the dusk-filled station filtered into their space. But after about eight inches, it stopped, and could go no farther.
Sarah gave Janet back her purse, so she could assist in the effort, but even with the three of them working together, the panel wouldn't lift more than eight inches from the opening.
“What's wrong?” called Jan
et from back near the elevator car. There was a tension in her voice, a tension they all felt. Could they really have escaped The Eaton only to be trapped a few feet underground?
“It's okay,” Sam reassured them. “I can probably get a signal on my phone now.” But the display still reported no reception. He asked Sarah to check her own phone.
Sarah’s phone also showed no reception, but more worryingly, she realized that her earlier text to Kedzie informing her of their whereabouts was reported as “not delivered,” having been attempted from this very room.
Just as Sarah was about to panic, she heard the muffled sound of a woman's laughter from somewhere in the train depot. A distinctive laugh they knew well.
It was Kedzie. The real Kedzie. She had come after work, just like she said she would.
“Oh, thank God,” said Sarah, then cupped her hands to shout through the opening. “Kedzie! We're in here! Come help us!”
But then they heard another voice, and another muffled laugh, this time a man's.
Had Kedzie brought someone else by? Well, that was good, wasn't it? The two could help them out.
“Kedzie!” Sam shouted. “Can you hear us?”
The voices didn't seem to notice.
“What's happening?” Janet called behind them.
Al stepped down and joined her near the elevator. “I don't know,” he said. “I think their friends are here, but they're in the other part of the depot.”
Sam and Sarah screamed louder, and it was impossible the two of them could hear Kedzie's laughter without Kedzie being able to hear their shouting. The couple exchanged a nervous glance, and strained to listen instead of scream.
They began to hear fragments of Kedzie's voice, although the male voice was still too low and muffled to make out. She was giggling, a bit flirtatiously, and they heard things like “…it's so cool…” and “…it's going to be amazing!” Perhaps she was bragging to her male companion about what she knew of the plans for the bar. But then Sam heard her say something that seemed to stop his heart cold, and he gasped, and lost his balance, having to catch himself on the stairs by his knees.
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