and grisly souvenir collections for the admiration of family and
neighbors, they are forced to preen privately.
Then I had thought the gallery was nothing more than pornography to
titillate a radically twisted mind. To this freak, the newspaper
headlines might be the equivalent of obscene dialogue. The victim and
crime-scene photographs might get him off more readily than any triple-X
adult film ever made.
But now I saw that the display was an offering. His whole life was an
offering. The murder of his parents, the single killing every twelve
months, his three hundred sixty-four days of stern self-denial each
year, and recently the storm of child murders. Burnt offerings.
As I studied the vile gallery, I didn’t know to whom these terrible
gifts were made, or for what purpose, although even at that point, I
would have been willing to hazard a guess.
The tunnel ended at a fully deployed, eight-foot-diameter gate valve,
which had once been operated by an electric motor.
When Doogie set aside his machine pistol and hooked his fingers into a
groove on the face of the valve, without the aid of a motor he was able
to roll the barrier aside almost as easily as he would have retracted a
sliding door. Although unused for more than two years, it traveled in
its recessed tracks with only a little noise, which was, in any case,
lost in the increasingly ominous sounds that rumbled and squealed
through these drained guts of the “temporal relocator.” Oddly enough, I
thought of the awe stricken, shipwrecked seamen who had been rescued by
Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and then given a tour of
the labyrinthine mechanical bowels of the megalomaniac’s Nautilus.
Eventually they might have felt enough at home aboard that leviathan of
a submarine to break out the hornpipe, play a tune, and dance a
sprightly jig, but even the most gregarious and adaptable of folks, left
to prowl the seemingly endless metal intestines here below the egg room,
would forever feel that they were in alien and hostile territory.
Although Doogie opened the door like valve only three feet, lamplight
poured through from a space beyond, flaring with blinding power in my
infrared lenses.
I raised the goggles to my brow, switched off the infrared flashlight
and jammed it under my belt. The lamplight wasn’t as bright as I had
expected, the lenses had exaggerated it, because they weren’t meant to
function in the ultraviolet spectrum. The others pulled up their
goggles, too.
Beyond the gate valve was a fourteen- or sixteen-foot length of tunnel,
clad in seamlessly butted sleeves of brushed stainless steel,
terminating in a second valve, identical to the first. This one was
already open approximately as far as Doogie had opened the first, the
goggle-defeating UV light issued from the room beyond.
Sasha and Roosevelt remained at the first valve. Armed with the . 38,
Sasha would make sure that no one came along behind us to block what
might be our only exit. Roosevelt, whose left eye was swelling again,
stayed with her because he wasn’t armed and because he was our essential
link to the cat.
The mouser hung with Sasha and Roosevelt, keeping safely out of the
forward action. We hadn’t dropped a trail of bread crumbs on the way in,
and we weren’t a hundred percent certain that we could find the route
back to Bobby and the elevator without feline guidance.
I followed Doogie to the inner gate valve.
After peering into the space beyond the gate, he raised two fingers to
suggest that there were only two people in there about whom we needed to
worry. He indicated that he would go first, moving immediately to the
right after entering, and that I should follow, going to the left.
As soon as he cleared the doorway, I slipped into the room, with the
shotgun thrust in front of me.
The Twilight-of-the-Gods rumble, rattle, bang, and skreek that shook
down through the entire facility, from roof to bedrock, was muffled
here, and the only light came from an eight-battery storm lamp sitting
on a card table.
This chamber was similar in shape to the egg room three floors overhead,