He couldn’t see—with his eyes, anyway. But after the initial disorientation had whisked away, he realized how much he remembered. He was stone cold sober now, a rarity for this time of night, and he was surprised at how clearly his memory conjured up the main-floor concourse that he’d walked down tens of thousands of times.

Up ahead he could sense the concourse broadening around him. Yes…That would be the main information desk coming up on his right, the hospital admissions to the left, a warren of administration offices nobody had used for ages. Past the row of architecturally useless Doric pillars that signaled the end of the lobby, the hallway would become a thinner tributary, and if Calhoun just kept going straight ahead—

Whack! A great clanking chandelier of pain swung through his center of gravity as he collided with the last of the pillars, bright pinwheels corkscrewing through his inner ears, and for an instant he stepped back dazed on his heels.

From somewhere behind him the glow of a more real light was coming up the concourse toward him.

It’s him.

Stumbling away, shaking off the fireworks, Calhoun started running again. He could sense Snow’s light getting closer, gaining ground behind him, and he knew without a doubt that he was running into a blind alley, the remaining exits severely restricted. Soon his choices would be limited to a flight of stairs leading to the upper floors of the North Wing, or—

Without another thought his hands found the door to his left and grabbed it, levering his body inside and whooshing the door shut behind him.

Let him think I went upstairs.

He crouched, listening, listening.

Let him think, oh let him think…

As time drew its long blade, Calhoun came unclenched, realizing only now where his feet had chosen to deposit him. He had literally found sanctuary in the hospital’s nondenominational chapel, the oldest part of the original building, erected back at the end of the nineteenth century from the original stones the workmen dug out of the field when they’d first broken ground.

It was pitch-black in here, too: Calhoun couldn’t see any better than he’d been able to out there. His sense of smell grew sharper, and he caught a whiff of old prayer candles, greasy tapers whose tallow had long ago guttered to puddles. Calhoun recognized the odor. After his father left, his mother had dragged him to church, planted his small bottom in a wooden pew, making him sit through endless hallelujahs and visions of kingdom come. Now, hunkered in the dark, he had an odd thought: unlike most chapels, few souls had ever come here to praise God or to thank Him. They knelt in extreme desperation, to plead mercy for themselves or their loved ones, to gain understanding or discharge toxic levels of grief. Maybe they had been granted a reprieve; probably not. This had never been a place of joy or worship but a septic landfill for panic and pain.