Wyvern’s underworld. More distressing is a perception little more than
an intuition but nonetheless powerful that some of what happened here
was not merely well-intentioned foolishness of a high order, not merely
science in the service of mad politics, but pure wickedness. When I
spend more than a couple of nights in a row under Wyvern, I’m overcome
by the conviction that unknown evils were loosed in its buried warrens
and that some still roam those byways, waiting to be encountered.
Then it isn’t fear that drives me to the surface. Rather, it’s a sense
of moral and spiritual suffocation as though, by remaining too long in
those realms, I will acquire an ineradicable stain on my soul.
I hadn’t expected these ordinary warehouses to be so directly linked to
the hobgoblin neighborhoods below ground. In Fort Wyvern, however,
nothing is as simple as it first appears to be.
Now I switched on the flashlight, reasonably confident that the
kidnapper if that’s who I was following was not on this level of the
building.
It seemed odd that a psychopath would bring his small victim here rather
than to a more personal and private place, where he would be entirely
comfortable while he fulfilled whatever perverse needs motivated him. On
the other hand, Wyvern had a mysterious allure akin to that of
Stonehenge, to that of the great pyramid at Giza, to that of the Mayan
ruins at Chichen Itza. Its malevolent magnetism would surely appeal to a
deranged man who, as was frequently true in these cases, got his purest
thrill not from molesting the innocent but from torturing and then
brutally murdering them. These strange grounds would draw him as surely
as would a deconsecrated church or a crumbling old house on the
outskirts of town where, fifty years ago, a madman had chopped up his
family with an ax.
Of course, there was always the possibility that this kidnapper was not
insane at all, not a pervert, but a man working in a bizarre but
nonetheless official capacity in regions of Wyvern that perhaps remained
secretly active. This base, even shuttered, is a breeding ground of
paranoia.
With Orson remaining close at my side, I hurried toward the offices at
the far end of the main room.
The first of them proved to be what I expected. A barren space.
Four plain walls. A hole in the ceiling where the fluorescent lighting
fixture had once been mounted.
In the second, the infamous Darth Vader lay on the floor, a molded
plastic action figure about three inches tall, black and silver.
I recalled the collection of similar Star Wars toys that I’d glimpsed on
the bookshelves in Jimmy’s bedroom.
Orson sniffed at Vader.
“Come to the Dark Side, Luke, ” I murmured.
A large rectangular opening gaped in the back wall, from which a pair of
elevator doors had been stripped by an army salvage crew. As a half
baked safety measure, a single two-by-six was bolted across the gap at
waist height. Several elaborate steel fittings, still dangling from the
wall, suggested that in the days when Fort Wyvern had served the
national defense the elevator had been concealed behind something
perhaps a slide-aside or swing-away bookcase or cabinet.
The elevator cab and lift mechanism were gone, too, and a quick use of
the flashlight revealed a three-story drop. Sole access was by a
maintenance ladder fixed to the shaft wall.
My quarry was probably too busy elsewhere to see the ghostly glow in the
shaft. The beam soaked into the gray concrete until it was barely
brighter than a seance-summoned cloud of spirit matter hovering above a
knocking table.
Nevertheless, I switched off the light and jammed the flashlight under
my belt once more. Reluctantly, I returned the Glock to the holster
under my coat.
Dropping to one knee, I reached tentatively into the inkiness that
surrounded me, which seemed as though it could be either the dimensions
of the warehouse office or billions of light-years deep, a black hole
linking our odd universe to one even stranger. For a moment my heart
rattled against my ribs, but then my hand found good Orson, and by
smoothing his fur, I was calmed.