I HAVE TO say, getting onto the mansion grounds is almost too easy. Margo tells a guard to open the rear gate, and he does. She walks straight through. Lamont and I are right behind her.
Talking her way past the guard in the loading area is no trouble either.
A minute later, Lamont leads us into the dark basement. “Over here,” he says, moving into a dark corner. He reaches up and pulls down a thin metal ladder, like the fire escapes at school. He climbs up the ladder and opens a hatch in a metal duct that runs along the ceiling. Margo follows him up. I follow Margo. We’re in a metal rectangle so tight, we can only fit by lying on our bellies.
“Lamont!” Margo whispers. “Where the hell are we?”
“My air conditioning system,” says Lamont. “First of its kind. Runs through the whole basement.” He points off into the darkness. “That way.” He crawls off and we follow. Three ants in a tunnel.
As we crawl along, we pass over grates that look down into different rooms in the basement, one after the other. Storage area. Workshop. Boiler room. When I move toward the next grate a few yards ahead, I get a weird tingle in my gut. Something tells me not to look down into the room, but I do anyway.
It’s a room full of bodies.
They’re all lying face-up on metal tables. Their skin is pale and bluish and their eyes are open and dull. Two of the bodies are right below me, staring up through the grate. It takes me a second to recognize their faces. Julian Fletcher and Creighton Poole. Two people I never wanted to see naked. I get a bitter taste in my mouth and my heart starts thumping like crazy. I start crawling faster.
A few yards ahead, Lamont stops and raises his hand. I crawl up next to Margo, so close our hip bones are touching. We’re looking down through a thick grated hatch into the room below, bigger and brighter than any of the others. The walls are lined with shelves, and the shelves are filled with bottles. I hear a voice coming from the room, and that dark, twisted energy blows right off the charts.
Gismonde’s voice.