Hand trembling, he picked up the bottle and studied it. His mother had said some things to him that he hadn’t believed then and couldn’t believe now, though he sensed they were probably the truth. More often than not, the truth turned out to be what you couldn’t accept the first time around.

He turned the bottle upside down and shook it, then gave up and flung it as hard as he could at the wall. The glass shattered and the note fell out.

He read it once, pinched it into a ball, and stuffed it into his pocket.

Suddenly his headache was gone.

CHAPTER 40

40.

Mike stepped out of the file room and stopped dead in his tracks, staring at the giant red arrow painted on the wall in front of him. The arrow pointed right. Above it, in wide-set capitals, was slashed the word:

OUT

One arrow, he thought, one word, underlined. But how much sense does it make to follow directions written in blood?

He could see down the hall where it pointed. Likewise empty. And down at the end was another arrow, pointing left. Is this what Snow had been doing while the lights were out, redecorating the hospital with dubious directions or misdirections, signposts to certain doom? Creating a maze that led deeper into the guts of the building for the simple purpose of stringing them along for the rest of the night?

It struck Mike as a very real possibility. Wherever “OUT” was, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find Snow waiting for him there with a machete, or bone autopsy saw, or worse.

But he wasn’t there yet.

He walked to the second arrow, peered around the corner, saw another empty hall. With the lights back on, these surroundings ought to have felt familiar again, even comforting. But something about them had inexplicably changed, like debris left behind by retreating floodwaters, altering the landscape, rendering it permanently alien.

The next arrow pointed at a stairway door.

Mike stopped and looked at it. Opening that door without knowing what was behind it could very well be the definition of stupidity. Open it up and the monster pops out, Wes Craven 101.

No, for the time being at least, he was perfectly willing to—

Footsteps.

He started backing away through what felt like invisible quicksand. And the quicksand was inside and outside his legs, slowing him down in two ways. Too late he realized that his response time, already conditioned to darkness and the thousands of incidental hiding places it had created, had now been fatally compromised by the relentless omnipresence of the light. Footsteps louder now, the door flying open—

Jolie bursting out, spilling into his arms, already ready to scream.

“Whoa.” He caught her shoulders. “Jo, it’s Mike. It’s okay.”

She was breathing hard, big asthmatic whoops that made her shoulders leap, eyes oval.

“Are you all right?”