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Because I’d been cautious, the kidnapper was surely unaware that I was present, which meant he would have no reason to conduct his business without benefit of a la unable to see his victim’s terror would diminish his twisted pleasure The absolute darkness seeerously close but in another room, shut off from here but nearby

The absence of screams must mean that the child had not yet been touched To this predator, the pleasure of hearing would be equal to the pleasure of seeing; in the cries of his victims, he would perceive music

If I couldn’t detect the dimmest trace of the lamp by which he worked, he wouldn’t be able to see ht from under my belt and switched it on

I was in an ordinary elevator alcove To the right and around a corner, I found a corridor that was quite long and perhaps eight feet wide, with an ash-gray ceramic-tile floor and poured-in-place concrete walls painted pale, glossy blue It led in one direction: under the length of the warehouse that I had recently traversed at ground level

Not much dust had filtered down to this depth, where the air was as still and as cool as that in a ue The floor was too clean to reveal footprints

The fluorescent bulbs and diffusion panels hadn’t been pulled out of the ceiling They didn’t pose any danger to er supplied to any of these buildings

On other nights, I had found that the governe operation had stripped away items of value from only limited areas of the base Perhaps, in the middle of the process, the Department of Defense accountants had decided that the effort was oods

To ht side lay roo behind a series of unpainted, stainless-steel doors without h I was currently unable to consult withonof two of these doors must have produced the crashes that had drawn ht couldn’t reveal the end of it I wasn’t able to see how many rooms it served, whether fewer than six or more than sixty, but I suspected that the boy and his abductor were in one of them

The flashlight was beginning to feel hot in my hand, but I knew the heat wasn’t real The beam was not intense, and it was directed away froht lens Nevertheless, I was so accusto this source of it too long, I began to feel so too near the sun, he’d detected the stink of burning feathers

Instead of a knob, the first door featured a lever, and instead of a keyhole, there was a slot for the insertion of a netic card Either the electronic locks would have been disabled when the base was abandoned or they would have disengaged automatically when the poas shut off

I put one ear to the door There was no sound whatsoever froerly, I pressed down on the lever At best I expected a thin, betraying skreek and at worst the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel’s Messiah Instead, the lever worked as noiselessly as if it had been installed and oiled only yesterday

Withthe Glock in one hand and the flashlight in the other

The roo I could only guess at the precise diht barely reached the width of the space and could not penetrate the entire depth

As far as I could see, no machinery or furniture or supplies had been left behind Most likely, everything had been hauled off to the fog-wreathed mountains of Transylvania to re-equip Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory

Strewn across the vast gray tile floor were hundreds of small skeletons

For an instant, perhaps because of the frail-looking rib cages, I thought these were the remains of birds--which made no sense, as there is no feathered species with a preference for subterranean flight As I played the flashlight over a few calciistered both the size of the structures, I realized that these must be the skeletons of rats Hundreds of rats

The majority of the skeletons lay alone, each separate from all the others, but in places there were also piles of bones, as though a score of hallucinating rodents had suffocated one another while coest of all were the patterns of skulls and bones that I noted here and there These reh the rats had perished at randoly positioned themselves with an intricacy similar to the elaborate lines in a Haitian priest’s voodoo veves

I know all about veves because my friend Bobby Halloway once dated an awesomely beautiful surfer, Holly Keene, as into voodoo The relationship didn’t last

A veve is a design that represents the figure and power of an astral force The voodoo priest prepares five large copper bowls, each containing a different substance: white flour, cornmeal, red brick powder, powdered charcoal, and powdered tannis root He ns on the floor with these substances, allowing each to dribble in a measured flow from his cupped hand He must be able to draw hundreds of complex veves freehand, from memory For even the least ambitious ritual, several veves are needed to force the attention of the gods to the Oumphor, the temple, where the rites are conducted

Holly Keene was a practitioner of good ic Bocor She said it wasthe dead, cast curses that transfor chicken heads, and stuff like that--even though, as she non oath and getting a Bocor union card She was basically a sweet person, if a little odd, and the only time she made me uneasy hen, with passionate advocacy, she declared that the greatest rock-’n’-roll band of all tie Fa time, because no flesh adhered to them--as far as I could see or cared to look Some hite; others were stained yellow or rust red, or even black

Except for a few scattered gray puffballs of hair, the rats’ pelts surprisingly had not survived decomposition This led me to wonder briefly if the creatures’ bodies had been rendered elsewhere, their boiled bones later arranged here by someone with more sinister motives than those of Holly Keene, bikinied Bocor

Then, under many of the skeletons, I saw that the tile floor was stained This vile-looking residue appeared to be gue, because otherwise it would have lent an appalling odor to the cool dry air

In a deeply hidden facility on these grounds, experi had been conducted--perhaps were still being conducted--with catastrophic results Rats are widely used in medical research I had no proof but plenty of reason to suppose that these rodents had been the subjects of one of those experiine how they had wound up here, like this