The head bobbed a second longer, and Adrian could see it was attached to a springy base, like a jack-in-the-box toy. It was painted like a clown, with garish red lips and a black diamond on its cheek, and he wondered if it was supposed to be the missing head from the doll outside.
The picture frame slammed shut. Inside the wall, he heard the click of gears as the mechanics reset themselves.
He swallowed, and realized he was shaking.
“Adrian?” Nova yelled from below.
Panic ebbing, he tucked the gun away and dug out his marker. “Hold on, I’m coming down to you.” Kneeling over the floorboards again, he started to draw a trapdoor of his own.
“No—wait!”
He paused, tilting his head to listen more closely.
“I think there might be two routes through this place,” Nova yelled. “We should keep going—check them both out.”
He frowned. There was nothing appealing at all about being separated, especially when this really might be Nightmare’s secret lair. Though the longer they stayed, the more Adrian questioned how anyone could stand to spend more time here than they had to.
Finally, Adrian forced his shoulders to release some of the mounting tension. “Okay,” he yelled down to Nova. “I’ll meet you at the exit.”
She didn’t respond. Perhaps she had already moved on.
Adrian took a moment to draw himself a new tranquilizer dart and loaded the gun before leaving the corridor. He opened the door at the end and froze as he found himself standing in a hexagonal room, where each wall bore an identical green door.
“Fine,” he muttered. Letting the door shut behind him, he turned and marked it with an X, so he would know he’d already been this way. He pulled open the first door to his right, revealing a plain brick wall. He reached out and knocked and, determining that they were real bricks and not an optical illusion, shut the door and marked it.
He opened the next door and his pulse jumped.
The room before him was painted, floor, walls, and ceiling, in swirls of black and white, making it appear that the room got smaller and smaller as it stretched out before him.
But this was not what had given him pause.
Rather, the optical illusion was broken up by three things.
A sleeping bag. A pillow. And a large black duffel bag.
He stepped into the room, eyes darting over every surface. He half expected Nightmare to appear from some dark corner, but there was nowhere in here for her, or anyone, to hide.
Adrian crouched beside the duffel bag and pulled back the zipper. Inside, he found a change of clothes, a pair of sneakers, and the bazooka-size gun Nightmare had used to throw those ropes around him during their fight above the parade.
It was all the confirmation he needed.
Standing, he raised his wrist and sent a quick message to Nova, asking her to meet him back up on the second floor. Then he alerted the Council, informing them of what he and Insomnia had found.
He had just sent the message when he heard the squeak of floorboards. He stilled, holding his breath to listen. After a long silence, in which he could once again catch the tinny notes of faraway carnival music, he heard another groan of ancient floorboards.
Returning to the door, he peered into the hexagonal room. Trying to guess where the noise had come from, he adjusted his hold on the gun and stepped across to the opposite door. He opened it slowly. Silently. Grateful when it did not creak on its old hinges.
Inside was a narrow hall, just wide enough for one person to walk through. It was pitch-black, but for a series of tiny round holes on each wall, placed at varying heights in sets of two. Adrian stepped forward and the door shut behind him, throwing him into near blackness. He approached one set of holes and bent down to look through. On the other side of the wall, he recognized the corridor with the portraits, where Nova had fallen through the trapdoor, and quickly realized that he was staring through the eyes of one of the paintings.
His blood chilled as he recalled the peculiar sensation of one of the paintings watching them.
He turned to the other wall and found himself staring into another crooked room, where the walls were painted to trick the mind into thinking it was walking downward, and pitching to the left, while the floor itself was slanted the opposite direction. There were doors at each end of the strange room, and as he stared, the door to the left opened.
He waited for Nova to appear, but instead a figure in a black hood swept into the room.
He stifled a gasp, his lungs squeezing painfully in his chest.
Nightmare.
He had found her.
Without pause, Nightmare stalked purposefully to the next door and disappeared into the hexagonal room. Adrian listened as doors opened and slammed shut, then he thought he heard her shuffling things around in the room where he’d found her bag. His brow knitted. Did she know her location was compromised? Was she preparing to run?