forth, back and forth, resisting the urge to turn around and shine it on
the festering cadavers behind her. She knew she should mourn them
rather than fear them, be angry for the abuse and loss of dignity that
they had suffered, but she only had room at the moment for fear. And
now she heard Hatch coming closer, around the other side of the statue,
completing his circumnavigation, thank God. But in the next breath,
horribly metallic as it passed through her mouth, she wondered if it was
Hatch or one of the bodies moving. Or Jeremy. She swung around,
looking past the row of corpses rather than at them, and her light
showed her that it was, indeed, Hatch coming back.
Are was Regina?
as if in answer, a distinctive creak sliced through the heavy air.
Doors the world over made that identical sound when their hinges were
corroded and unoiled.
She and Hatch swung their flashlights in the same direction. The
over-lapping terminuses of their beams showed they had both judged the
origin of the sound to have come from a rock formation along the far
shore of what would have been, with water, a lake larger than the lagoon
outside.
She was moving before she saw it. Hatch whispered her name in an urgent
tone that meant move after me, I’ll go first. But she could no more
have held back than she could have turned coward and retreated up the
spill way. Her Regina had been among the dead, perhaps spared the
direct sight of them because of her strange keeper’s aversion to light,
but among them nevertheless and so aware of them. Lindsey could not
bear the thought of that innocent child held in this slaughterhouse one
minute longer. Lindsey’s own safety didn’t matter, only Regina’s.
As she reached the rocks and plunged in among them, stabbing here with
her light, then there, then over there, shadows leaping, she heard the
wail of distant sirens. Sheriff’s men. Hatch’s phone call had been
taken seriously. But Regina was in the hands of Death. If the girl was
still alive, she would not last as long as it would take the cops to
find the funhouse and get down to the lair ofLucifer. So Lindsey
pressed deeper into the rocks, the Browning in one hand, flashlight in
the other, turning corners recklessly, taking chances, with Hatch close
behind her.
She came upon the door abruptly. Metal, streaked with rust, operated by
a push-bar rather than a knob. Ajar.
She shoved it open and went through without even the finesse that she
should have learned from a lifetime of police movies and television
shows.
She exploded across the threshold as might a mother lion in pursuit of
the predator that had dared to drag off her cub. Stupid, she knew that
it was stupid, that she could get herself killed, but mother lions in a
fever of matriarchal aggression were not notably creatures of reason.
She was operating on instinct now, and instinct told her that they had
the bastard on the run, had to keep him running to prevent him from
dealing with the girl as he wanted, and should press him harder and
harder until they had him in a corner.
Beyond the door in the rocks, behind the walls of Hell, was a
twenty-foot-wide area that had once been crowded with machinery. It was
now littered with the bolts and steel plates on which those machines had
been mounted. Elaborate scaffolding, festooned with spider webs, rose
forty or fifty feet; it provided access to other doors and crawl spaces
and panels through which the complex lighting and effects
equipment-cold-steam generators, laser-had been serviced.
That stuff was gone now, stripped out and carted away.
How long did he need to cut the girl open, seize her beating heart, and
take his satisfaction from her death? One minute? Two? Perhaps no
more than that. To keep her safe, they had to breathe down his
goddamned neck.
Lindsey swept her flashlight beam across that spider-infested
conglomeration of steel pipes and elbow joints and tread plates. She
quickly decided their quarry had not ascended to any hiding place above.