Scents of pine and citronella oil swirled in the drafty hallway. Opal peered into empty guest rooms as she walked by. A maintenance supply closest. The humid soapy aroma of the laundry facilities. All the doors were missing. The Pitch had been busy inside the Totem Lodge. Hinge pins lay scattered on the floor.
Why would they take down the doors?
A gust of wind nudged Opal along.
She came to the hallway’s end. The wings of the Totem lodge split.
Left or right?
To the right was total blackness.
Left were more torches, terminating in a bright wash of electric light coming from the last room.
Left, then.
She turned and kept walking. Her boots thumped on the carpet. She shifted the satchel higher up her shoulder, tightened her grip on the strap. She didn’t want anyone popping out of a doorway on either side of her and snatching away the stone. She stopped peering into the rooms. They were too dark. Her mind played tricks on her. She saw heavier shadows shifting in the black voids. Red lines flickered and disappeared. They were like the streaks she saw on the inside of her eyelids when she closed
them on a sunny day. Her heart pounded. She forced herself to take deep breaths. Despite the cold, she was sweating.
Taking the doors off didn’t make the Pitch any safer. It was just the opposite; if they were preparing to make the lodge their stronghold, they’d want to keep the doors closed and locked, just as she, Wyatt, and the kids had done back at the Rendezvous. But the Pitch weren’t worried about defending themselves from attack. Not tonight they weren’t. They didn’t need doors to protect them from outside threats. So why take them down?
She clamped her arm on the satchel.
A stony point jabbed her ribs.
The stone.
It had something to do with the stone.
Max said they believed the stone was a compass pointing to hell.
If the Pitch weren’t worried about keeping people out, maybe what they wanted was to let something in.
The final torch shed an orange pool on the carpet.
She waded through.
Grazing her fingertips along the log wall as she went, she noticed rough marks engraved into the wood. The logs were cold, their touch like cemetery stone. The carved lines felt warmer, as if they pulsed with some feeble yet undeniable circulatory life. She inspected them more closely. Spirals and slashes—a pictography of amoebic creature shapes. A number of the wood cuttings displayed greater detail. High and low, the walls resembled an alien fossil bed—mollusks, trilobites, sea spiders, cone-headed squids, and worm casts. With her thumb Opal traced the outline of a two-headed fish, its body an arrowhead of bones, the gaping mouths prickled with spiny, needlelike teeth. She glanced backward down the hallway. The strange carvings were everywhere.
How had she missed seeing them f
She drew her hand back.
Her ears were filling with a watery silence. She experienced a plunging moment of panic, imagining herself to be the last woman
on earth. Wyatt was dead. She was absolutely alone. Exposed to anything lurking in the hushed dark.
“She’s here.”
The sand-choked, slithery voice—she recognized it immediately as belonging to the man from her visions. The rotted face from her television.
Whiteside .
She should have been terrified.
But a muscular slowness invaded her body, and at the same time, a relaxing detachment overtook her mind. She wandered forward, drugged by the occult strangeness surrounding her, drunk perhaps on too much fear; yet there was more to it. She lost any sense of control over her body, mind, and emotions. She felt untethered. A pleasant gush of euphoria pumped into her veins.
She entered the room.
Unable to specify what she expected to find, she could at least say this was not it. The bright electric lights were precisely that: Battery-powered lanterns of various sizes and models lined the interior perimeter of the lodge suite. Tables and dressers supported more. An insectile humming vibrated the air.
In the center of the room were two beds elevated on cinder blocks.
Their height and flatness reminded Opal of altars.
Hospital monitors crowded the bedsides. One bed was empty, a mess of twisted sheets and a cheap foam pillow.
Whiteside occupied the other bed.
She recognized him instantly.
How she knew it was Whiteside was harder to explain.
Because he did not appear now as he did in her visions. For one, his bandages were intact; although they were soiled, stained rusty yellow around the edges, and in obvious need of changing. The body cocooned inside the bandages barely made a swell under the sheets. Wasted, atrophied, inert. She could not fathom how this
dying man could rise, speak, and threaten her in the vilest terms. His fragile head looked like a white wasp’s nest. Oxygen tubes were taped to the tip of his nose. He slept soundlessly. Only the scrolling, jagged, lime-green peaks on the heart monitor gave any evidence he was alive.
The scrape of leather on carpet...
The silence drained away. Opal turned to see a man standing inside the doorway, his back aligned straight against the wall. He said nothing. His eyes staring ahead like a military sentry.
He was the nurse from her vision inside the trailer.
She saw the German pistol holstered under his arm.
Nurse and bodyguard.
She did not appreciate the danger. Still curiosity piqued her. An eagerness to witness a predestined event. But mostly she felt enveloped, wrapped in cotton, cushioned from the reality of her situation, comfortably numbed.
In the background, from around the corner of a half wall, came the rushing sound of water falling into a sink bowl.
A third man emerged.
He did not seem surprised to find her there.
“Pinroth, get the lady a chair.”
He wore black lenses. His eyes were a secret. He had been there in the trailer, too—the man she thought of as a patient. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up. More doctor than patient. He smiled at her.
“You’ve brought the artifact.”
«T 99
X • • •
The bodyguard, Pinroth, placed a chair behind her. She sat.
“Excellent,” said the doctor with the secret eyes. His lenses reflected the lanterns, changing from black to glaring white. “We should get started.”
I