Dryden aimed his flashlight from one empty doorframe to the next. There were glimmers and vague shapes beyond each, but nothing he could clearly discern.

His mind was already numbering the doorways—one through four, left to right. His light beam settled on number one, at the far left; he crossed toward it. Even as he did, another of those spooky, sourceless thoughts came to him:

Inside door number four is a doozy. Hold on to your hat for that one.

The notion was there and gone in a beat. Nothing followed on its heels. Dryden let it go as he stepped through the first doorway.

The room beyond was the size of a two-stall garage, containing a machine that took up more than half the space. At a glance Dryden guessed it was a furnace; there were huge metal ducts going in and out of the thing, disappearing into the concrete wall behind it.

There was a hatch on the front of it, the kind that might be used for shoveling coal into a burner—except it was a bit large for that, and anyway the unit had a gas line running into it on the right side. It didn’t burn coal at all. So what was the hatch for?

Dryden’s flashlight beam caught something at the bottom edge of the hatch’s steel door. He went closer, Danica and Lauren following. The three of them crouched low and concentrated their beams on what he’d seen.

It was a tuft of fur, stuck to the metal frame that the door closed against. The fur seemed to have been caught on the edge of the hatch’s opening.

“Cremator,” Dryden said softly.

He stood upright and gave the space a last once-over with his beam.

“I don’t think I was ever in this room,” he said. “I get no reaction to it at all. How about you?”

“Nothing,” Danica said.

Lauren just shook her head.

They returned to the larger room outside and went to the next doorway.

The purpose of the second room was clear at once: it had been a weapons cache. The space was small—not much larger than a walk-in closet—and its walls were lined with gun racks for firearms of every size. All those racks were empty now, though the room had been fully stocked at one time: Dryden could see faint outlines where oiled metal and wood had once rested against the wall surfaces behind the racks.

Like the first room, this one gave Dryden no hint of familiarity. He had never seen the inside of it before.

The third room was a different matter.

Just inside its doorway was a narrow entry channel, stretching fifteen feet in. That was necessary because the room itself would not have fit between the two on either side of it: it was twice the size of a high school classroom.