Even you are not immune, old friend, the dry voice whispered. Not to me.

I know, Walker thought. In the end he carried only one coin to pay with, the only one that meant anything. The spirit in which he’d seen people give in to death were legion—anger, bravery, defiance, tears, relief, and none of it mattered any more than the shroud in which they wound the corpse.

Tonight, though, Walker meant to do everything in his power before he paid up. When he gave up his life he meant to get the best possible price. Given the circumstances, it was the least he could do.

He turned his head to the object in his right hand. It was a book, very old, eccentrically shaped and heavier than one might have expected. As Walker moved forward, it rode against his hip, its binding rustling with his gait, making the dry pages crackle with a noise like that of October leaves.

“The good doctor,” a voice behind him said, “alone in the dark, sir?”

Walker didn’t have a chance to turn before an open hand slammed his head into the wall. The penlight fell to the floor. Walker felt his world torque crookedly on its axis and reached out for balance, cursing his own sloppiness, but it was too late. Eager hands were fastening on the book, prying it loose from his fingers.

“Frank,” Dr. Walker said. “No!”

“Don’t worry,” Snow’s voice said, somewhere in the darkness, “I’ll take good care of it, as if it were my own. You of all people should know that.”

“You don’t know—”

“What?” Fingers pinned his throat to the wall like an iron collar. “What don’t I know?”

Walker tried to answer but his voice box couldn’t squeeze out the words. He was getting close to losing consciousness when the hand released him and let him drop on his knees to the floor.

“I’ll see you again soon,” Snow’s voice said. “Watch for me when I bring the light.”

28.

Calhoun had never intended to hide out in the chapel. He’d simply bolted from the emergency room, an orphan of blind velocity and questionable instinct, the collusion of which had brought him here.

He remembered the chain of events leading up to his escape clearly enough, up to a point. One second he had been barricaded in the ER room and heard voices, Mike’s and somebody else. Sticking his head out into the hall, Calhoun saw the waiting room illuminated by crisscrossed flashlight beams, the racket of wheels filling open space as a stretcher flashed by with a couch strapped to it. That was when he saw the shadow that made him shout at them to run. The next second the shadow wasn’t even touching the floor, it was flying from the far side of the room like a hawk on a field mouse and the cop—

Well, the cop was just gone.

Calhoun stopped processing at that point, making no further attempt to put the events in order and make sense of them. Motion took over. It had been less like running, more as if the floor of the world had gone vertical, flinging him through the ER exit, where utter blackness engulfed him like a man falling off an ocean liner at midnight. The screams and gargles and laughter ripping through the darkness behind him, the frantic slap and sting of running feet headed in the opposite direction—none of these distractions registered. Calhoun just kept going straight ahead, an arrow fired from the bowstring of his own neural plexus. And still it felt like he was traveling down.