Dryden stared down the tunnel’s length; the flashlights could illuminate only a few dozen yards of it, but he knew it stretched much farther than that.

He felt the breath want to lock itself in his lungs. It took effort to keep it going in and out.

On either side of him, Danica and Lauren stood staring, too.

“I’ve dreamed about this,” Danica whispered.

Dryden could hear the just-controlled fear in her voice.

“The lights were on in the dream,” Dryden said. “Right?”

Danica nodded slowly, then looked at Lauren. “How about you? Have you dreamed this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Dryden thought she sounded every bit as rattled as himself and Danica. He glanced at her and saw a sheen of sweat on her forehead.

Danica said, “In my nightmare, I never reach the end of it. I just know I’m moving toward something bad. Really bad. And when I wake up, I think … I don’t get to the end because I know I can’t handle it.”

“No choice this time,” Dryden said.

Danica took a deep breath and forced it out. “Let’s go.”

Dryden stepped through the doorway into the tunnel.

They watched the walls and floor slide into view ahead of them, yard by yard in the flashlight beams. Dryden listened to the strange acoustics of the place, the echoes of their footsteps seeming to race away in front of them and behind them.

Far ahead, something glimmered on the left-side wall, just catching the glow of the Maglites.

They came to it thirty seconds later. The three of them stood staring at another block of stencil text in black paint:

STATION 14 - 450 FEET LEFT

STATION 17 - 350 FEET RIGHT

Strangely, Dryden found the words struck no chord in his memory. Not even the vague feeling some of the places above ground had given him.

That didn’t make sense; he had to have seen this writing before. He must have gone right past this spot—

Yes, at a dead sprint. You weren’t stopping to smell the roses last time you came this way.

The intuition chilled him. He thought about it for another second, then he and the others turned and kept going—toward Station 17, and whatever ghosts might be waiting there for them.

On the occasions when he had wondered about the tunnel in his nightmares, and what might lie at the end of it, Dryden had never actually envisioned anything.

Now he saw it for himself:

It ended by opening into a space that measured probably thirty feet by thirty. A big square chamber with the same concrete floor and walls as the tunnel itself, and the same metal gridwork ceiling.

On the far wall, opposite the tunnel’s mouth, were four doorways, evenly spaced apart. Each one had its corresponding door lying flat on the concrete in front of it, its hinges cratered out by a cutting torch like those back in the stairwell.