If he were armed with a gun, he might have advanced through the passageways by one police strategy or another, as he’d learned when doing research for a book: his back to one wall in order to look both ahead and behind, each doorway a danger to be addressed, each room a lair to be cleared, proceeding expeditiously but also with a prudence arising from an appreciation of the enemy’s cunning.
But he had no gun, and this was a maze with uncounted ways that his quarry could circle behind him regardless of how carefully he proceeded. Better to move boldly, quietly but with few hesitations.
He had often written about fear, and he had known profound fear in his life, but he had never experienced or imagined terror as raw as this, his gut alternately clenching tight and fluttering, acid refluxing into his throat—swallow it, keep it down—his sweat cold and his breath hot. His scalp prickled as if acrawl with pin-legged ants, and he strained to hear more than the booming of his heart that made of him a one-man cortege.
His eyes were wider than they had ever been, the sullen rose-colored light layering a sameness on the maze, increasingly like a fog that obscured rather than illuminated.
He had to guard against recklessness. Boldness was essential, but the situation was not one of mortal urgency.
Ulrich wouldn’t be killing her, not immediately after bringing her here, and he wouldn’t already be engaged in rape, either. For him, this was about sex, yes, transgressive sex, but it was foremost about power, as it had been for Ronny Jessup, as it always was for such men. For a while, Ulrich would want to savor his authority, his control of her, his absolute dominion.
David needed to get to her in a timely manner, spare her from as many indignities as possible, but not at too great a risk of her life and his. Firefighters found their way around the flames to those entrapped; they didn’t forge through the fire to be ignited.
Doorway after doorway, corner by corner, turn by turn, past the upper mummification room where the door remained closed . . .
He was so high on adrenaline, blood flooding brain and muscles in the fight-or-flight response, that the walls appeared at times to buckle, becoming concave or convex, and the ceiling seemed to swoon.
His claustrophobia intensified, and a demon of doubt spoke of calamity, warning him that he would never see the sky again or feel the sun on his face or breathe air untainted by mold.
He persevered and came to the room that Ulrich had furnished with armchair, bed, TV, fridge. He stood with his back against the wall, to the left of the arched and doorless opening. Listening. No voices. A rattling-clinking. And a sob of frustration.
She was in there.
But what of Ulrich?
In his mind’s eye, David saw that face: the high brow unlined by a habit of contemplation, the gray eyes as cold as dirty ice, the slit of a mouth, the lantern jaw that made the man appear as though he regarded everyone and everything with teeth-clenched contempt.
Do it. Do it now. Do it while he still might have the element of surprise on his side. Across the threshold, into the room, the large chef’s knife at his side, his arm drawn back, ready to thrust or slash, all squeamishness having evaporated in this mortal moment.
The girl wasn’t on the bed, and she wasn’t in the armchair. She wasn’t real, not in the here and now, but only a tense presence on the television screen. Seventeen or eighteen. Fresh-faced. Lovely. With great caution and feigning terror, she made her way silently through the labyrinth beyond this playroom, through the eerie rose light. As she turned a corner, a sudden eruption of melodramatic music accompanied her shrill scream, and before her loomed Ronny Jessup, grinning maniacally, not the real Ronny but an actor who seemed to be channeling a crazy clown rather than making an effort to portray realistically the demented man who had terrorized and killed so many in this warren. Ulrich was running the cheap horror movie that had been filmed here, perhaps because he thrilled to the screams echoing through the passageways of Jessup’s old hunting ground.
Reality and surreality were becoming indistinguishable, fiction and fact folding together in a hallucinatory kaleidoscopic moment.
In a corner of the room, beside the small refrigerator, were cases of bottled water and beer that hadn’t been here earlier. That was what Ulrich had brought down the stairs on the hand truck: beverages. Stocking the playground.
Evidently, no woman was here yet, no prey selected.
Directly across the room from where he’d entered, an archway led to another segment of the maze. Ulrich might return through it or through the entrance David had used.
On the screen, the sobbing girl begged Jessup not to hurt her. His reply—like nothing the real killer would have said—boomed out of the TV, and from elsewhere in the catacombs came Stuart Ulrich’s voice, raised to a fierce shout, reciting the corny dialogue along with the actor: “You’re my toy now, my toy, and I’m a bad boy who always breaks his toys!”