That didn’t mean they could venture outside again. Something was coming. A sound like screaming aircraft. Like jets inbound with their payloads.
Still holding the pistol but pocketing the key to everything, he grabbed his daughter’s hand. “It’s like Halloween at Knott’s, at Disneyland, think of it that way, plastic skulls and nothing real.”
She couldn’t deceive herself any more than he could, and God knew what damage this was doing to her psyche, to her soul, but he could think of nothing else to say.
They hurried along the path between the skulls, to a hallway off the lobby, to the elevators. Beyond the elevators were spacious public restrooms, from one of which he intended to make the jump out of this timeline to the one where they belonged. At 3:20 a.m., there would be no
restaurant customers or arriving hotel guests who might be using those facilities when he and Amity materialized on Earth Prime.
He yanked open the men’s-room door and urged the girl in after him. Across the threshold, the flashlight revealed that whatever the nature of those who had done this, they were violent in the extreme and mad beyond the power of analysis. Here, the trophies were not skulls but human spines, curved configurations of barren vertebrae stacked everywhere, filling the toilet stalls. The chamber of skulls had contained no foul odor of which he’d been aware; but a stench filled this room. The meninges membranes as well as the gray and white matter of the spinal cords had dissolved, leaked through the vertebrae, and puddled the floor, providing a breeding ground for a foul black mold that thrived in lumpish colonies from end to end of the lavatory.
“Sorry, oh Jesus, sorry,” Jeffy chanted, pulling Amity from the room. The flashlight swooped wildly across dense abstract patterns of the interlocked vertebrae of countless stacked and tangled spines, which seemed like an intricate alien life form that might suddenly twitch and come awake and lurch at them.
In the hall again, he didn’t make a move toward the door of the women’s restroom, for he was sure that it would contain more spines or something worse. Were there trophy rooms containing skeletal arms and hands, others for hips and leg bones, for rib cages? Who flensed the flesh from the murdered bodies? Or was that work done while the victims still lived? Who unhinged the dead into their separate parts? Who boiled thousands of skulls to make them pristine white and presentable for the lobby display?
A clatter arose from the front entrance of the hotel. He was too far away to see the cause. Something was coming.
His heart knocked as if on Heaven’s door.
Holding Amity close against him, he realized they had to get out of sight. No way in hell would they go outside and face whatever forces were gathering there. Assume the ground floor of the building and maybe a few levels above it were boneyards. The hotel was seven stories high. They had to go up.
“The stairs,” he said, and Amity sprinted to the labeled door, with him close behind.
Jeffy had no illusions about the human potential for evil, but this seemed to be insanity far in excess of any human obsession ever recorded. No men or women could sustain so long the fierce intensity of hatred necessary to do all of this. A legion of sociopaths would have been required to slaughter and process so many thousands, maybe millions. The explanation could not be human, and he hoped to escape this place before he was confronted by the answer.
52
They went all the way to the fourth floor. The building was old, constructed in the days when things were built to last, so the stairs were concrete, not metal. As Jeffy and Amity ascended, the most noise they made was their rapid breathing.
The fire doors at each floor stood open, their self-closure mechanisms having been disabled. The main hallway on the fourth floor was narrower than in a more modern hotel, the carpet a pale celadon marked by stains of some kind, although none that looked like blood.
On both sides, the regularly spaced doors stood open, as though a search had once been conducted. The flashlight revealed not one trove of bones, only hotel rooms with beds and chairs and dressers.
“Where?” Amity asked.
Whoever or whatever was coming, they or it would sweep the building from bottom to top. An idea struck Jeffy. Although it might be a useless gambit if the searchers had technology that could read the heat signature of a human being through a wall, he enlisted Amity to help him execute it.
“You take the left, I’ll take the right, close all the doors.”
Perhaps because a window was broken out at the end of the hall, allowing salty sea air to enter, the hinges of the doors were badly corroded. The knuckles of the barrels grated noisily and stubbornly against the pintles, but the hinges worked.
When the task was quickly done, Jeffy led Amity to a room on the east side of the building, halfway along the corridor. He said, “Flashlight off,” and took her inside and closed the door. When searchers arrived on this floor, they were likely to start at one end of the hall and work toward the other.
At the two windows, heavy draperies were sagging and ripe with mold, but they covered all the glass.
When Amity switched on the flashlight, she nevertheless hooded the trembling beam with one hand.
“We’ll be all right,” he said.
“I know.”
“We’re almost out of here.”
“I know.”
The electronic lock on the door could be engaged and disengaged only with a coded magnetic card issued to each guest. Jeffy didn’t have a card. Anyway, the hotel no longer seemed to have electrical service. A traditional knob allowed him to brace the door with a straight-backed chair.
Amity nervously swept the finger-filtered light across the furniture, through the open doorway to the adjoining bathroom, as though reluctant to believe they were alone and even briefly safe.