The girl wasn’t on the bed, and she wasn’t in the armchair. She wasn’t real, not in the here and now, but only a tense presence on the television screen. Seventeen or eighteen. Fresh-faced. Lovely. With great caution and feigning terror, she made her way silently through the labyrinth beyond this playroom, through the eerie rose light. As she turned a corner, a sudden eruption of melodramatic music accompanied her shrill scream, and before her loomed Ronny Jessup, grinning maniacally, not the real Ronny but an actor who seemed to be channeling a crazy clown rather than making an effort to portray realistically the demented man who had terrorized and killed so many in this warren. Ulrich was running the cheap horror movie that had been filmed here, perhaps because he thrilled to the screams echoing through the passageways of Jessup’s old hunting ground.

Reality and surreality were becoming indistinguishable, fiction and fact folding together in a hallucinatory kaleidoscopic moment.

In a corner of the room, beside the small refrigerator, were cases of bottled water and beer that hadn’t been here earlier. That was what Ulrich had brought down the stairs on the hand truck: beverages. Stocking the playground.

Evidently, no woman was here yet, no prey selected.

Directly across the room from where he’d entered, an archway led to another segment of the maze. Ulrich might return through it or through the entrance David had used.

On the screen, the sobbing girl begged Jessup not to hurt her. His reply—like nothing the real killer would have said—boomed out of the TV, and from elsewhere in the catacombs came Stuart Ulrich’s voice, raised to a fierce shout, reciting the corny dialogue along with the actor: “You’re my toy now, my toy, and I’m a bad boy who always breaks his toys!”

Before David could retreat, the fanboy styling himself after Ronny Jessup came through the archway, barefoot and bare chested, as if he was at home here, the new master of the murder maze. He wore a belt holster at his right hip. “You,” he declared as if David had been a lifelong nemesis who had, for the hundredth time, appeared to thwart Ulrich’s intentions. He picked up the remote control from the arm of the chair and clicked off the TV. He threw down the remote and put his right hand on the grip of the holstered pistol.

| 80 |

David in the doorway. The locked labyrinth lay behind him, every corridor a dead end.

“You got yourself big trouble,” Stuart Ulrich said, halting a few steps into the far end of the room. “What you think you’re doin’ here besides trespassin’?”

David’s racing heart decelerated. A seeming calm overcame him, which was in fact cold expectation, the stabilizing clarity of the survival instinct. “And what’re you doing here like this, like you are?”