She stopped and snapped again, flooding the hall with another pulse of light.

In the new image, the hallway looked shorter. A sepia-encrusted canvas straitjacket lay right in the middle of the floor. Up ahead she could see the doorway off to the right, forty feet away, that led to the outdoor exercise area. It had been built on top of one of the hospital’s many low-level additions, three stories up, a full-sized basketball court for the psych patients, completely enclosed in twenty-foot-high chain link. Jolie had been up here only once before, to pick up a paranoid schizophrenic for a brain MRI, but she remembered the basketball court, and if her memory served, the only part that wasn’t enclosed was the top. If she could climb up there and then lower herself back down the other side, she’d be on top of the roof, pretty high up, it was true, but maybe…

She’d cross that bridge when she got to it. First, though, she had to get outside.

Arms extended, she advanced into the dark hallway, made herself take ten steps, raised the camera for another picture, put her finger on the shutter…and stopped.

Someone was coming up the stairs in front of her.

Coming fast, too, either chasing something or being chased. Either way, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As soon as he got to the landing, whoever it was would be blasting right through that door.

Ahead of her in the darkness, the running footsteps gained volume and intensity, superimposed over her pounding heart.

Jolie jerked the camera up and hit the button for one last picture. Another double-pulse of light winked at the walls, momentarily blinding her, and she waited in agony while her eyes adjusted enough to see the photo on the camera’s screen.

The image showed the shortened hallway as before. But now the door at the end was swinging open, a blur of something coming toward her, frozen in a shutter too slow to catch its shape.

All she could see was its eyes, wild and sick, caught in the camera’s flash.

Then, while she was still looking at its image on the screen, the shape rammed past her in the dark, knocking her sideways against the wall, and she almost dropped the camera. A whiff of hair tonic, cigarettes, and cheap cologne passed through her nose and she thought of Calhoun. He was already blundering past her, farther down the dark hall, the way that she’d come, tripping and crashing into obstacles that she’d passed over by taking pictures of them along the way.

She almost called his name but stopped.

The thing that had been chasing him up the stairs was still coming toward her, no subtlety in its eagerness. She could feel it hammering forward at incredible speed, feet scraping the floor, pushing a wall of foul-smelling air in front of it. In the darkness it felt about as human as a runaway train.

Groping for the camera, Jolie flipped it over to hide the bluish glow of its screen and plastered her back and shoulders as tightly as possible to the wall as the thing careened past, powerfully enough to riffle her hair. There was a great, complicated clattering sound down at the far end of the hall, a door slammed, then silence.