The last thing Mike heard before he also turned and ran into the darkness was a hard spiky spray of laughter.

26.

Blind without the little toy train—she had searched everywhere for it and come up with nothing—Sarah crept into the basement corridor, feeling her way along the wall. The hospital breathed in and out around her, a cavernous black lung brought to life by the deepest sensory deprivation.

Trust your ears, Sarah. That was Mr. Clayton, her old piano teacher. They’ll tell you what’s right before your mind does.

Her ears, yes, but wasn’t there anything more powerful in her arsenal? She’d read somewhere about the psychic bond between mothers and children, the paranormal sensitivity that comes to life when their offspring are in mortal peril. Where was that instinct now? If she could conjure up an image of these empty halls breathing around her, why couldn’t she summon a vision of her son’s whereabouts?

Instead she felt a thick yellow gaze pressing on her beneath layers of eddying black, unseen fingers extending toward her throat. The darkness seemed to swirl and churn. What was Snow, anyway, if he could have done what he did to the corpse on the stairwell earlier? Could she even call something like that human?

The implications of his presence had already turned Sarah’s body against her. Her breathing had become irregular, a series of gasps and breaths held overlong, her heart stammering incoherently. In the darkness shapes were beginning to coalesce, leaning figures with gangling limbs, the misshapen heads stamped with oblong faces and deep, insane eyes.

Stop. You have to stop.

But she couldn’t. Modern technology might have banished superstition, but apparently it hadn’t exterminated it. How long did you need to suspend a person in total darkness before all those old fears came back? What if the occult had always been the true way of things, and science and reason simple self-delusion, a fringe benefit of artificial light?

Her fingertips grazed the wall, groping and fumbling their way over its unfamiliar texture. The tiny cracks in the concrete felt like wrinkles on a dead woman’s breasts. Yet she stumbled forward, inches at a time. What was she hoping for—that she would just run into Eli down here somewhere? In the dark these hallways ran forever, intersecting and crisscrossing in defiance of all reckoning. In the depths of her reptilian brain Sarah could almost feel them lengthening in front of her, canting and tilting at sickening, German Expressionist angles, their dark recesses expanding to fill the vacuum of deepest space.

Her foot came down on something soft and she gasped, recoiling. The smell wafted up to flood her nose, raw meat, spoiled blood, triggering reflexive intimations of public restrooms, tampon dispensers, girlhood pain.

“Oh no.” Did she breathe these words, or just think them? “Please, no.”

Squatting, she descended on a knotted rope of heartbeats until she was kneeling, forcing herself to brush her fingers across the shape on the floor. It was soft, pliant but firm underneath, plastered with a layer of damp fabric. Her hands passed over the claylike stickiness of cold flesh, the furze of wiry hair, and the unexpected protrusion of bone, until she got a sense of the size of the thing.