After the wave of nausea passed, he picked up Ulrich’s pistol. An ammo pouch hung from the dead man’s belt; David extracted a spare magazine from it. He ejected the partially depleted magazine from the weapon and replaced it with the fully loaded spare. A quick search of Ulrich’s pockets turned up a small ring of keys in addition to an electronic key for a vehicle.

He got to his feet.

With his shirt sleeve, he blotted the sweat from his eyes.

He was shaking, though not as badly as he’d been earlier.

From the items on the table, those few belongings of the lost women, he took a folded midnight-blue silk scarf with a pattern of silver stars.

He ascended the stairs to the upper crypt. He climbed the step stool and used the scarf to wipe his prints from the ceramic tile with the never-blinking blue eye.

He folded the stepladder and put it in the passageway outside the door. He inserted all the flashlights and the two bricks of plastic explosive into the backpack and set it beside the ladder. He untied the leather sheaths from his belt and put the knife in the backpack, and then the pistol, as well.

He went a short distance through the maze to the cell that Ulrich had prepared for whatever girl he had intended to capture.

No mirror hung above the white pedestal sink. He was grateful for that.

He washed the blood from his hands and dried them and used the towel to wipe the faucets and, on leaving, the knob on the cell door.

In the passageway, he looked left, right, half expecting Ronny Lee Jessup to lunge at him, which sometimes happened in his dreams.

A rushing sound. Like a flight of dark birds, an enormous flock. But it wasn’t birds at all, only the susurration of his own blood eerily audible to him, his life in circulation through his arteries and veins.

| 84 |

David retrieved the step stool and backpack from the passageway outside the door of the mummification room.

To his eye, the character of the maze had changed. There was no longer an inherent menace in these passageways, no gathered demonic forces, no evil ineradicable. The place looked foolish, more like a tacky carnival fun house than a genuine den of horror, a construct designed by a puerile mind, concocted by a perpetual adolescent who had achieved adulthood only physically, having otherwise been formed by video games and internet porn.

In spite of all the cruelty and murder that had occurred here, the cellar was not haunted. He felt no ghostly presences. The dead stayed dead. The dead did not return.

Emily had not died here.

If she had died elsewhere, knifed by Ronny Jessup as she fought him off, she had not returned as Maddison Sutton.