No, this could only have been done by the owner of the house.

18.

The thing that feigned the appearance of an ordinary man. A mortal man. A creature worse by far than the fearsome things that had hounded him through the tunnels.

The Master.

The monster to end all motherf.u.c.king monsters.

Eddie's internal terror barometer shot past the red zone. The only thing he wanted to deal with less than the tunnel creatures was that... thing. He cast his gaze about the rest of the room, which was otherwise nondescript. There was a single tall filing cabinet, beside it an overflowing wastebasket. A doorway revealed a tiny room with a dirty toilet. There was another door next to the bank of monitors. It stood slightly open, letting in a sliver of yellow light.

The closed metal door behind him rattled louder than ever.

He could hear the sc.r.a.pe of tortured hinges pulling slowly free of concrete moorings.

Still, he didn't move.

He stared at the sliver of light, his body quaking like that of a man in the grip of a small seizure. He was moments away from being eaten alive. But it was possible an even worse fate awaited him through that open door.

He heard the heaviest thud yet from the tunnel.

The door came loose from the wall and fell heavily to the floor beneath the weight of the surging creatures. There was no more time to think. No more time to weigh one fate against another. Eddie moved. And slid for a microsecond on the pool of blood that surrounded the chair. But he righted himself immediately, slipped through the open door, and pulled it shut. This one locked electronically. A resolute click a.s.sured him it was sealed against all

19.

unauthorized personnel. He glimpsed an electronic keypad embedded in the wall next to the door. He tried to remember seeing something similar near the other door, but he was drawing a blank. Not that it mattered. It was just curious how the primitivism of Below gradually gave way to higher-tech gadgetry.

The creatures slammed against the door and bellowed outrage at yet another thwarted chance to corner their quarry.

Eddie allowed himself a shaky sneer. "Poor monsters. No dinner for you tonight."

He was in a short hallway with a high ceiling. The cold electronic eye of a security camera stared down at him from the ceiling. A red light next to the lens blinked on and off. It didn't bother him. The security guard wouldn't be coming after him anytime soon. Still, that door-like the one before it-probably wouldn't hold forever, so it wouldn't do to linger.

At the other end of the hallway was a tall concrete staircase. It seemed to stretch into infinity. Maybe not quite that far, but it was certainly the tallest staircase Eddie had ever seen. There were good-sized office buildings that didn't reach that high. But he could just make out the tiny outline of a door at the top of the staircase. He glanced in the other direction and saw nothing but gray wall-a dead end.

He strode in the opposite direction and began to mount the stairs. He climbed the steps two at a time at first, driven forward by a new burst of adrenaline and a renewed flicker of hope. It was probably a foolish hope, but he would nonetheless chase it until he collapsed. Or until

20.

hostile forces caused his collapse. A dozen steps fell away below him. Two dozen. Three dozen. Then he was taking them one at a time, but was still moving at a pretty good clip. The door at the top grew incrementally larger, though it remained tantalizingly far away.

Fatigue began to set in after a few dozen more steps. He had to work at making his tired legs move up another level. A sheen of sweat covered his bare torso. He concentrated on continuing the upward trajectory, focusing the whole of his will on the monumental physical effort needed to keep moving. The act of swinging a leg up another step became excruciating, worse than, say, carrying large sacks of potatoes up a steep hill on a sweltering summer day. He wanted more than anything a spare moment or two to sit down on one of these steps. His heart pistoned in his chest like the engine of a very old and very feeble car.

"Don't throw a rod, motherf.u.c.ker...," he muttered to his beleaguered heart.

It was a while before he realized the pursuing creatures were now nonpursuing creatures. He was ascending the steps at a rate slower than an elderly Florida driver steering a Buick through a choked intersection. Awareness dawned as a realization of the absence of any sound other than his labored breathing and the rapid thrum of his heart.

He came to a stop, an act that didn't require a lot of effort. He sagged against the cold concrete wall, slid slowly down until he was in a squatting position, and stayed right there while his body tried to recover. He figured he might be able to cease panting within a week or two. He sat there with his eyes closed for several minutes, thankful he was

21.

no longer in quite so much imminent danger of being ripped to shreds. His breathing leveled out, and his heart no longer seemed ready to propel itself out of his chest. He allowed his eyes to flutter open, and he had his first opportunity to cast a downward glance.

The sensation of vertigo made his stomach lurch. His head swam, and he was dizzier than he had been at any time since he'd made himself spin like a top as a kid. He gripped one of the steps above him with one hand, slapped the open palm of the other against the wall, and held on for dear life. The vertigo pa.s.sed in a few moments. Then, when he felt prepared, he risked another look down.

He felt a slight twinge in his stomach, but it was of minor consequence. He was okay. There were no ravenous monsters with bulbous demonic red eyes hot on his trail. Not anymore. The staircase below him was empty, as was the little hallway at the bottom. He listened intently, but he could detect no sounds of destruction from the little security room. Well, that was good. Something had worked in his favor for a change. Then he turned his eyes toward the ceiling and looked at the blinking red light of the security camera. He thought of how much closer the camera had seemed when he was in the hallway.

Actually...

Well, the staircase, too, seemed much steeper even than it had originally appeared. He was maybe a third of the way up, and he felt as if he had been climbing the stairs forever. A feeling of unreality gripped him. A new creeping sensation of fear spread through him. Unreality. That was just the right word for it. Or was it just that reality was very fluid in this strange place?

22.

Would he climb these stairs forever without reaching the top?

"No. Nuh-uh. No way, nohow."

He would give it one more good effort. Thirty minutes. No, an hour. And he would climb the steps at a more reasonable rate this time instead of using up all his energy at once. If he was still only a third of the way up the stairs after another hour of climbing, he would give it up and toss himself off the staircase. He would rather die than be condemned to this odd purgatory forever.

"Okay, then."

He got to his feet, took a deep breath, and resumed the upward trek. He was a bit wobbly and he desperately craved a bottle or two of Gatorade, but he felt reasonably okay. He kept his head down this time instead of staring at the impossibly faraway door. To while away the time, he counted the steps as he climbed. One, two, three... a dozen ... two dozen ... three dozen ... same old story.

Or maybe not.

When he finally glanced up, he was surprised to see the door was actually getting bigger. And closer. An impulse to pick up the pace-nearly impossible to resist-flashed through him. But he forced himself to continue at his steady rate.

And the door loomed larger still.

And closer still.

Until, at last, he could count the number of steps remaining between himself and the landing. Seventeen steps. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Less than ten. And then he did move faster, covering the last several in leaps and bounds. He came to a stop on the landing and felt that he

23.

knew what it was like to climb Mt. Everest. h.e.l.l, Mt. Everest was for p.u.s.s.ies. What did a simple mountain have on a haunted stairwell?

Well, maybe it wasn't haunted.

He decided that wasn't the precise right word-but he did know this was a place that had absolutely nothing to do with the natural world.

And he knew one other thing.

He wanted out.

Now.

He studied the door. It was made of much simpler stuff than the previous two he had encountered. In fact, it was made of wood. There was no electronic keypad to either side of it. There didn't appear to be any locking mechanism of any kind. Just a simple bra.s.s doork.n.o.b. All he had to do was reach out, grasp it, and turn it. ...

Then he thought of how deceptive appearances often were here.

And he thought of the skewered couple in the security room. The perpetrator of that act was probably somewhere on the other side of this door. The idea of encountering that abomination chilled him to the core, but he knew there was no going back.

And he couldn't just stand here on this landing forever.

So he took a deep breath.

Gripped the k.n.o.b.

And turned it until the door began to ease away from the frame.

Setting aside decades of ingrained agnosticism, he muttered a prayer and entered the devil's home.

24.

The ent.i.ty the denizens of Below called The Master was several centuries old. His existence on this plane spanned more than three quarters of a millennium, but when he was in his human guise, his appearance was that of a gray-haired man in his early sixties. He could adopt the appearance of a much younger man, but he'd found most humans treated their elders with a degree of deference he enjoyed. It established their subservience from the beginning.

And that was the real jewel at the heart of the game. A creature of such longevity needed amus.e.m.e.nts, and he enjoyed the games he played with the humans. Like bugs mired in a spider's web, they didn't realize they'd entered the devil's den until it was too late to get away. He loved to taunt them, to strip away their layers of false civility and pride, to torment them until they were just broken, sniveling

25.

sh.e.l.ls. Some he would kill, preferably as their friends and loved ones were made to watch, others he would banish Below, where they would do the work that honored his own dark G.o.ds and allowed him to exist in this haunted corridor of the world, a darkly enchanted place that was simultaneously of the natural world and beyond it.

He stared at the reflection of his human mask in a mirror in his chambers. He saw a handsome, distinguished face, an artfully crafted facade. He knew what he would see should he choose to lift the mask. In neither instance would he see the visage of a deity. His kind was flesh and blood. Like all the other creatures of the world. In the end, his special abilities would not save him. The knowledge he possessed of his own nature was limited to what little he was able to glean from ancient texts he knew to have been penned by his forebears. He knew his natural life cycle was approximately a thousand years, an arc he was three quarters of the way through. The two to three hundred years remaining to him would seem an eternity to lesser beings, but to a creature that had already lived so long this stretch of time seemed terribly finite.

Two hundred years.

Maybe three.

A drop in the celestial bucket.

He tilted his head to one side then the other, focused his concentration, and deepened the shade of gray around his temples. He examined this final touch, smiled, and found it satisfactory. He pulled on a tweed jacket he'd removed from the corpse of an Englishman in the 1930s, slid on an Oxford cla.s.s ring (from another Englishman of the same approximate vintage), and left his chambers.

26.

For the time being, he shunted aside disquieting thoughts of mortality.

There was much to do tonight.

He stepped into the darkened hallway, grinned like a Halloween ghoul, and went downstairs to meet the newest arrival.

Mark Cody fiddled with his Zippo lighter, flipping the top up and down, up and down, and stared nervously about the room. It was a large den, anch.o.r.ed by a suitably impressive fireplace and lined with bookshelves. He was sitting at the edge of a plush sofa, his knees inches from an oak coffee table. There was an ashtray on it, but there was something off-putting about its pristine appearance-it looked never to have been touched by falling ash.

Mark sighed. He was in desperate need of a soothing brace of nicotine, but he wasn't sure whether he should light up. There was something not right about this place. Oh, he'd been happy to see the woman in her black Bentley, that Ms. Wickman, when she'd shown up next to his deceased Volvo.