The air was pleasantly cool and smelled faintly of garlic, basil, cinnamon, and spices that I could not identify.
The silence and stillness were alike to those at ground level, but we knew the facility had not been abandoned. In addition to Panthea’s and Bridget’s visions, we could all feel presences unseen, waiting perhaps beyond the next door, and Winston proceeded with his ears pricked and his nose twitching, as alert now as he had been when he’d served as an attack dog for a drug gang.
Without conferring, the four of us had come this far without drawing our guns, leaving them concealed as best we could. Step by step, however, I felt a greater need to have a weapon in my hand.
Sparky cracked a door on a pitch-black room. When he crossed the threshold, LEDs bloomed bright, activated by motion detectors. Beyond lay an institutional kitchen equipped as well as one in a large restaurant or a small hotel. Everything looked clean and functional.
No chef, no cooks, no bakers, no prep workers.
An exhalation of warm breath on the nape of my neck caused me to pivot with a start, but there was no one behind me.
We found storerooms with a variety of contents, food pantries, a room full of janitorial equipment, an expansive chamber containing the heating and cooling system, and two spacious elevators.
A prickling in the palms of my hands. I blotted the left on my shirt, blotted the right.
This level was larger than the ample square footage dedicated to the car collection on the ground floor. It was apparently also offset to some degree from that upper story, because we found no evidence of the shaft through which the Buick Woody was transported to a still lower stratum of the structure.
The two most interesting rooms were at the end of the corridor, the first on the left. A recess featured the marquee and box office to a home theater, a lavishly detailed Art Deco masterpiece with an Egyptian theme. Cast-bronze cobras for door handles. Two life-size figures of Tutankhamen covered in gold leaf seemed to welcome us to the cinema of Death. Stone columns incised with hieroglyphics. Cast-bronze bas-relief lobby-wall panels that depicted gods of ancient Egypt—Bast, Horus, Isis, Osiris, Amen-Ra. An impressive auditorium. Five rows of eight plush seats each, descending to a proscenium flanked by nine-foot-tall gold-leafed statues of Anubis, the god of tombs and weigher of the hearts of the dead, he in a human body with the head of a jackal, his eyes and fingernails of polished onyx in this depiction. Throughout, the rich ruby-red carpet was patterned with stylized gold scorpions, their sharp-tipped tails raised.
The bright style and obsessive detail conveyed the playfulness with which Bodie Emmerich had begun construction of his retreat, while also revealing—these years later, in the light of subsequent events—that a morbid mysticism and a disturbing attraction to the power of dealing death had even then been sown in his subconscious. That fatal seed would eventually put down deep roots and produce poisonous foliage.
When we cautiously exited the theater, turning out the lights behind us, the continued silence and stillness had begun to chafe our nerves such that we might have welcomed a sudden showdown with the zombified followers of the Light, those whom Emmerich called his “soul children.”
To our left, at the end of the corridor, an enclosed staircase led down to whatever lower levels might exist. Directly across from the theater, beyond a door that seemed out of place because it was so plain, the last space on this floor awaited exploration.
Bridget moved boldly toward it. Suddenly I felt as if I were in a dream, the highly decorated floor and walls and ceiling seemed to meet at wrong angles, and my head filled with ghost voices so faint that I could not make out their words, the voices of some legion beyond the door. I whispered a warning—“Bridget, wait!”—with the intention of taking for myself the consequences of being first to enter that room. She favored me with a look that said she neither doubted my chivalry nor would step aside like some demure maiden. Winston sniffed with great interest at the half-inch air space between the door and threshold. With the measured insouciance that made it possible for her to feed ice cream to a tiger without fear and breeze into a terrorists’ bomb factory with the confidence that she could get out again alive, Bridget turned the knob.
The door was locked.
When Panthea touched Bridget, the lock was not engaged any longer, and the knob turned.
Soft amber lights shone at several points in the darkness, each producing a fraction of the brightness that a humble votive candle would provide, anointing the gloom with a strangely sacred quality, as if the steady flames were disembodied souls. Trusting her intuition, Bridget didn’t enter fast and duck to the side, but stood exposed and fumbled for the wall switch and brought more light to the scene.