David pivoted, ducked, and went out through the doorway by which he’d entered.

A second shot, a third. The maze seemed to shake with the roar of the pistol, as if a primordial monster, previously in suspended animation, must be rising from caverns even deeper and stranger than Jessup’s labyrinth.

| 81 |

Maybe Stuart Ulrich didn’t have a second magazine for the pistol. Maybe the weapon’s capacity was eight or ten rounds, with five or seven shots remaining. However, a knife against a pistol didn’t work either in a dueling field at dawn or in a windowless labyrinth.

Go deeper into the maze and be murdered there. Go back to the receiving room and be murdered there. They weren’t choices. They were fates to be avoided.

David prayed that his pursuer, having seen there were two knives, would proceed with caution when clearing the doorway, wasting a few seconds. He made it to the first turn without being shot in the back. Took a fork to the left, another to the right. He hurried toward the receiving room, but went only as far as the upper mummification chamber. There was nowhere else to go.

He stepped inside and closed the door.

The blue eye gazed down at the stepladder.

Eventually Ulrich would come here. In a minute or three or ten.

The door opened inward, but that availed David nothing. Ulrich wouldn’t be deceived by a lame hide-behind-the-door ruse. The barren room offered no other place of concealment.

He’d arrived also in a new mental space, mere terror having lost its grip on him. He stood in icy desperation, in energized despair, hope receding in the rearview mirror, with no option other than vigorous, reckless action. Do or die, all or nothing.

David crossed the chamber to the previously concealed entrance to the secret crypt. The space below was lit by sconces, a soft milky light like that in the upper chamber.

He quickly descended the stairs, once more going down among the dead girls, into the chemical stink, the hint of a grim underscent.

A fourteen-foot-square space. The table with jewelry and other personal belongings of the deceased. The three walls of catafalques, six per wall.

The chamber was not as small as a coffin, but it was no larger than a family mausoleum. Although beyond terror, he couldn’t shed the clinging claustrophobia. He worried that he wouldn’t be able to quiet his panicky breathing.

He sheathed the large knife and chose the wall nearest the foot of the stairs. One of the highest platforms, almost seven feet off the floor, bore the name Isabella Lopez in Ronny Jessup’s fancy, painted script.

The catafalque was five feet deep, the body less wide than that. Four feet of clearance between the deceased and the ceiling. He hesitated, assuring himself that he could do this. If he was beyond terror, he was beyond horror, as well. The survival instinct trumped all. In a moment this extreme, the heart became a stone, temporarily beyond a capacity for emotion, incapable of abhorrence and pity, filled only with the furious determination to live.