Not just nerves, drinking, too. In fact, when he got out of here, he was going to start making a real effort to get his ass to a meeting and—

The other orange speck went back down again, all by itself.

Calhoun stopped breathing, not a conscious decision. His breath simply stopped.

Instinct sprang though him and he turned and fled. He kept his hands out in front of him like a sleepwalker, flipping and thumping off the unseen landscape of chairs, angles, and edges, his breathing fast and shallow, his feet staggering. A jingling sound followed him. At least once it sounded so close that he thought Snow was walking alongside him in the blackness, dangling the keys next to his ear. Head down, Calhoun blundered left, into what he hoped was a corridor of private ER rooms.

A door, I know there’s a door here, one that I can shut—

Turning left again, he felt the outer jamb of a door that he could hopefully close and reinforce from the inside. Barricading himself in again was a sucker bet but he was out of options. He jumped in and slammed the door closed behind him and put his back to it, shot one hand into his pocket, and gripped his lighter with trembling, sweating hands. His thumb rested on the little wheel. His lungs were screaming.

What if I flick it and the light comes up and I see him in here grinning at me? Grinning that same grin he had when he—

His thumb twitched and scratched the lighter’s wheel to life.

The flame threw light across the room in agonizing gradations, Calhoun’s eyes swelling to take everything in at once. A severed umbilicus of braided wires dangled from the wall. A bag of dirty linen lay next to his feet in a pool of dark, dried liquid. Beyond that there was nothing else in here, nothing but him.

He sank to the floor next to the laundry bag, shaking and gulping air, his back still to the door. He listened for the jingling sound, but now all he heard, from the far side of that door, was soft, congested-sounding laughter.

Within a moment, that, too, was gone.

21.

Back on the stairwell going down, Sarah finally had to bring herself to step over the rest of McPhee.

The yellow-orange cone of the Express’s headlight was just enough to outline the step in front of them, to keep her from falling. It was also enough to see his blood shining on the walls, hanging there in half-dried sheets. And the slick, lymphatic edgelessness of his staring head.

Don’t look. She pulled Eli’s head against her neck, made him keep his eyes shut.

“Is it okay, Mommy?”

“Hush, honey. Let Mommy listen.” The soles of her shoes made gummy sounds. She got to the landing, halfway down. Something crooked and three-dimensional lay tucked in the deep shadows, mercifully obscured, but when the tip of her foot struck some part of it she hadn’t noticed, it was all she could do to keep from crying out.