into those realms many months ago. He had seen no rats at all,
anywhere, in all the weeks he had roamed the tenebrous corridors and
silent rooms of that vast structure, though he would not have been
averse to sharing space with them. He liked rats. They were
carrion-eaters, revelers in decay, scurrying janitors that cleaned up in
the wake of death. Maybe they had never invaded the cellars of the park
because, after its closure, the place had been pretty much stripped
bare. It was all concrete, plastic, and metal, nothing biodegradable
for rats to feed on, a little dusty, yes, with some crumpled paper here
and there, but otherwise as sterile as an orbiting space station and of
no interest to rodents.
Eventually rats might find his collection in Hell at the bottom of the
funhouse and, having fed, spread out from there. Then he would have
some suitable company in the bright hours when he could not venture out
in comfort.
At the bottom of the fourth and last flight of stairs, two levels below
the underground garage, Vassago passed through a doorway. The door was
missing, as were virtually all the doors in the complex, hauled off by
the salvagers and resold for a few bucks apiece.
Beyond was an eighteen-foot-wide tunnel. The floor was flat with a
yellow stripe painted down the center, as if it were a highway-which it
had been, of sorts. Concrete walls curved up to meet and form the
ceiling.
Part of that lowest level was comprised of storerooms that had once held
huge quantities of supplies. Styrofoam cups and burger packages,
cardboard popcorn boxes and french-fry holders, paper napkins and little
foil packets of ketchup and mustard for the many snack stands scattered
over the grounds. Business forms for the offices. Packages of
fertilizer and cans of insecticide for the landscape crew. All of
that-and everything else a small city might need-had been removed long
ago. The rooms were empty.
A network of tunnels connected the storage chambers to elevators that
led upward into all the main attractions and restaurants- Goods could be
delivered-or repairmen conveyed-throughout the park without disturbing
the paying customers and shattering the fantasy they had paid to
experience. Numbers were painted on the walls every hundred feet, to
mark routes, and at intersections there were even signs with arrows to
provide better directions:. Vassago turned right at the next
intersection, left at the one after that, then right again. Even if his
extraordinary vision had not permitted him to see in those obscure
byways, he would have been able to follow the route he desired, for by
now he knew the desiccated arteries of the dead park as well as he knew
the contours of his own body.
Eventually he came to a sign-OUT OF ORDER beside an elevator. The doors
of the elevator were gone, as were the cab and the lift mechanism, sold
for reuse or for scrap. But the shaft remained, dropping about four
feet below the floor of the tunnel, and leading up through five stories
of darkness to the level that housed security and video control and park
offices, on to the lowest level of the funhouse where he kept his
collection, then to the second and third floors of that attraction.
He slipped over the edge, into the bottom of the elevator shaft. He sat
on the old mattress he had brought in to make his hideaway more
comfortable.
When he tilted his head back, he could see only a couple of floors into
the unlighted shaft. The rusted steel bars of a service ladder dwindled
up into the gloom.
If he climbed the ladder to the lowest level of the funhouse, he would
come out in a service room behind the walls of Hell, from which the
machinery operating the gondola chain–drive had been accessed and
repaired-before it had been carted away forever.
A door from that chamber, disguised on the far side as a concrete
boulder, opened into the now-dry lake of Hades, from which Lucifer
towered.
He was at the deepest point of his hideaway, four feet more than two
stories below Hell. There, he felt at home as much as it was possible