Conclusion: there was someone else in the room at the far end of the hall.

His feet started making their way in a series of slow, cautious half-measures, like two blind rats creeping through a maze of traps and poison. With every step he anticipated Snow’s cold hands seizing his throat from behind, the jag of the blade ripping into the flesh of his back, lifting him up off his feet. Of course, he couldn’t really anticipate such unimaginable pain without experiencing it. If it happened, Calhoun just hoped it would be quick.

Was Snow watching him in the dark, playing with him? Had he actually lost track of him somewhere between the stairs and the hall?

Impossible.

Then why aren’t I dead?

He stared harder at the light under the door.

A peculiar thought shot to the forefront of his mind, irrational as hell, but if life had taught him anything it was that the mind always had time for the irrational. The irrational was A-list. No matter how busy things were, it always got a seat.

What if whatever was behind that door was so bad that even Frank Snow himself had turned around rather than go toward it?

Calhoun grunted at the sheer preposterousness of the idea. Of course, what was behind the door at the end of the hallway was just a light. Maybe a cop with a flashlight, maybe just a flashlight with no cop, maybe his own mind blowing fuses on him, or—

Maybe it was the other thing.

He thought again about what he’d seen when he was with Dr. Walker and Snow in that dusty, toy-filled room on the sixth floor. He remembered Walker’s creepy incantation, if that’s what you could call it, and how he, Calhoun, had even at that moment thought to himself, Is this guy actually saying this? And, of course, the answer had been yes, because nobody else was speaking. He remembered the thing that had happened when the door was closed, and what it had looked like down there, before Calhoun had the presence of mind to look away. He remembered how it had made him want to scream, to pluck his eyes out, leaving only sightless holes, which, ironically enough, would have given him almost exactly what he’d seen up until now.

He looked again at the light under the door.

What if he opened this door and saw it again? Would he scream then? Oh, yes. Would he tear out his eyes? All hyperbole aside, Calhoun thought there was a very good chance he would.

Yet here he stood before it just the same, in a kind of nerve-brutalized wonderment, watching his own hand reaching for the knob.

He turned it and opened the door, and stared inside.

The dead woman dangling inside had a huge red grin smeared over her face.

Calhoun stared at her, her name already popping into his head: Mona Homely.

He’d heard about her years ago from the security guard who had actually discovered her body. She was a nurse who had hanged herself here in the hospital for reasons unknown. Calhoun saw her now, as he heard she’d been then, naked and purple, her young body fast-forwarded into sudden old age by the exigencies of strangulation. Blood and gravity had sausaged her legs and feet, fattening them into white-stocking loaves that dangled eighteen inches above her neatly folded nurse’s uniform on the floor. Her head hung at a slight angle, just so, as if in mock-consternation or disapproval. The blank eyes and smeared red lipstick stared back at Calhoun from the coifed helmet of blond hair, and he saw her mouth twitch. That’s because of the bugs in there, he thought dumbly. The bugs are already eating her insides out.