Safe here, Mike told himself, surprised that the words brought him any comfort at all. I didn’t hear it come after me, whatever it was, it didn’t follow me here, I shut the door behind me—

Gradually, his pulse and breathing began to normalize. The oxygen brought a welcome sense of levelheadedness, and he was relaxing into his first deep breath when the lights shuddered and went out.

17.

“Don’t look,” Sarah murmured to Eli, pushing his head down into her breast as she started through the door. “Close your eyes, don’t look, just keep your—”

And stopped. Her hand crawled to cover her mouth, barely stifling the faint little moan of horror that escaped her lips. Though she couldn’t have spent more than a moment or two looking at the scene sprawled out below her, it burned itself into her mind so deeply that she felt as if she’d been staring at it for hours.

Blood seemed to have been piped across the walls and ceiling with a high-pressure hose, sprayed in looping, dripping patterns in every direction. Within it all lay slabs and lumps like leftovers from some glutinous feast. Something eager and carnivorous had gorged itself here, ripping and slashing, digging out the tasty bits and leaving indiscriminate heaps of grayish-pink offal where they fell. Only moments later did Sarah realize that the pieces had once been a man.

On the top step, McPhee’s severed arm lay crooked, still half-swathed in the soaked sleeve of his uniform, only two fingers, pinkie and thumb, jutting like bits of crabmeat from the mangled blob of flesh that had been his hand. Gobbets of muscle and tendon dangled listlessly from denuded bone. Two steps below that, a pale haunch of something tufted with fine black hairs lay shimmering in an already coagulating pool of blood, a scrap of undershirt draped over it, saturated in deep, arterial red. Sarah’s mind flashed back to when her dad and her brother, Terry, used to take her fishing out at Crystal Lake and afterward they’d gut the bluegills and sunfish, leaving dinner for the gulls. Her stomach gave an audible lurch and she gagged, throwing up a little into her mouth.

“Mommy?” Fear in Eli’s voice now, his face lifting from the swell of her chest. “What—”

Still trying to swallow, Sarah grabbed his head and shoved it back against her. She prayed that the boy didn’t see this, prayed that he kept his eyes closed. Finally, she turned her head and spat without looking at the floor. “Don’t you look,” she croaked, and coughed until her throat was clear. “You keep your head down and eyes closed and don’t look until I say, do you understand?”

“Yes, Mommy.”

At the bottom of the stairs, she saw McPhee’s head, upturned, mouth and eyes open in an expression of eternal astonishment. She was going to have to step over it to get her keys. Could she do that?

No way.

But if she didn’t…

Steeling herself, she started making her way down the stairs, among the parts, choosing each step with trembling, painstaking care. She could count how many steps were left until she was past it: twelve, perhaps less, but she didn’t want to overstep, to slip and—