City of Endless Night

56

Ozmian waited in the blackness at the bottom of the stairwell and listened to the faintly receding steps of his quarry as he ascended, counting each one. The man was evidently taking two steps at a time, given the slight delay between footfalls, and was no doubt heading for “high ground,” a wise if predictable decision.

For Ozmian, entering Building 93 after all these years had triggered a surprisingly deep emotional reaction. Even though the memory of those times had dimmed almost to the vanishing point, when he first entered the old cafeteria, the underlying smell of the place was still there, and it had released an unexpected rush of memories from that awful period of his life. So intense was the flood of remembrance — the sadistic aides, the raving fellow patients, the lying, smiling psychiatrists — that he staggered, the past intruding horribly into the present. But only for a moment. With a brutal application of will he shoved those recollections back into the bunker of memory and returned his focus to the stalk. The experience had given him a sudden insight. He had chosen this place as a kind of exorcism, a way to drive out the ghosts of that period once and for all.

In the dark, still listening and counting the receding steps, he ordered his thoughts. So far, he was mildly disappointed in the progress of the hunt and the lack of cleverness of his quarry. On the other hand, the way Pendergast had dropped out of the tree just as he’d fired was an impressively athletic move, even if it was unsatisfactory to find him in such a predictable place to begin with.

Ozmian sensed that the man had resources yet to be tapped, and the thought excited him. He had confidence that his quarry was good enough to give him a decent, perhaps even epic, stalk; one that would repay his effort and trouble.

The extremely faint footfalls finally vanished: the quarry had exited on a floor. Ozmian would not know which floor precisely until he had counted the steps between floors one and two and done a quick mental division.

Now he, too, began to mount the stairs, moving swiftly and silently but not too fast. Upon reaching the second floor he was able to calculate that his quarry, taking two steps at a time, had exited on the ninth floor. The top floor would have been the most obvious, but the ninth made more sense, as it still allowed his prey additional avenues of escape. As he continued climbing the stairs, he realized that he had never felt so alive to the thrill of the chase as he did now. It was an atavistic pleasure that only the true hunter could appreciate, something built into the human genome: this love of the stalk, the pursuit, and the kill.

The kill. He felt a quiver of anticipation. He recalled his first big-game kill. It was a lion, a big black-maned male that he had winged with a bad shot. It had fled, and because he had wounded it he had a responsibility to track and kill it. They followed it into elephant grass, his gun bearer becoming more and more nervous, expecting a charge at any moment. But the lion didn’t charge, and the spoor led them into even worse country, deep heavy brush. Here the bearer refused to continue and so Ozmian had taken the gun himself, advancing into a dense stand of mopane. He got that unmistakable tingling sensation and knelt, gun pointed; the lion leapt out, coming at him like an express train; he fired a single slug that went into the lion’s left eye and tore off the back of his head as he came down on top of him, all 550 pounds of muscle. He recalled that feeling of ecstasy at the kill even as he lay pinned, with a broken arm, the lion hot with stink and crawling with bugs and flies, his blood flowing over Ozmian’s own body.

But that feeling had grown harder and harder to come by — until it returned when, at last, he began hunting human beings. He only hoped the kill of this one would not come too soon.

At the eighth floor he switched on his light briefly and examined the stair treads, noting with satisfaction the spoor of his quarry’s passage. And at the ninth floor, another brief examination confirmed what he’d already determined — his quarry had exited the stairwell and headed down the long hall of the east wing.

He paused at the landing, catching his breath and listening. Up here, a cold wind blew, moaning around the building, adding a layer of sound that covered the fainter noises of movement. He crept to the edge of the shattered opening leading into the hallway, where a steel door hung sideways on rusted hinges, and peered through the gap between the door and the frame, which provided a view down the corridor. The main ELOPEMENT RISK door that blocked off the wing, imprisoning its patients at night, had been battered down long ago by urban explorers, and it lay broken on the floor. Faint moonlight filtered into the corridor, providing just enough light to see. The hall stretched the length of the eastern wing, ending in a distant window that framed, grotesquely, the withered claw of a potted plant. A rotten rag of curtain flapped back and forth, like a white waving hand. Doors opened on either side leading into tiny lockdown bedrooms, which he remembered so clearly, really nothing more than prison cells, each with its own closet and bathroom. He remembered that his own cell, like these, had been padded, the pads stained with the dirt, snot, and tears of previous occupants.

He quickly suppressed this new jolt of memory.

Moving with infinite silence and care — in case his quarry had set up another ambush — Ozmian slipped into the shadows, creeping along the dark side of the corridor, his back against the wall. He ventured a split-second flash of light across the floor, where he once again identified his quarry’s fresh tracks among the others, heading toward the far end of the wing. Pendergast had gotten rid of his shoes, as had Ozmian, the better to move in silence.

Gun in hand, sliding along the wall, he continued his stalk. Toward the end of the hall he saw that Pendergast’s footprints veered into one of the rooms. And the door had been shut. Remarkable he had managed to do it without making a sound.

Interesting. The man had made no move to try to cover his tracks, even though he knew Ozmian was after him. All this meant Pendergast had a plan, most likely another ambush, which the tracks would lead Ozmian into. But what kind of ambush? Probably one that, even if it failed, would flip the tables on Ozmian, turning the pursued into the pursuer.

He paused at the closed door, then took a step back. Made of metal, it had been designed to be strong enough to withstand even the most lunatic assault, though now the hinges were corroded and broken, the screws pulling out of the metal covering. But he knew that you could not lock these doors from the inside; only from the outside.

Grasping the handle, staying well to one side out of the line of fire, he turned it, half expecting a fusillade of shots to come tearing through.

Nothing. He pushed the door open, still keeping to one side, and then, in a single furious movement, handgun at the ready, spun into the room and swept it while moving diagonally across the small space. It was empty, except for a bed with a mattress, a closet, and a ragged teddy bear lying on the floor. The window was gone, leaving an open frame, moonlight pouring in along with an icy wind, the bleak landscape outside rolling away to the distant water of Long Island Sound.

Examining the floor, he saw that Pendergast’s tracks headed into the bathroom — with the bathroom door shut but, of course, again not locked.

His own cell-like room had been identical to this. The attached bathroom had a window, but it was too small for a person to fit through. So if Pendergast had gone in there, he was now trapped. Once again he examined the floor. The tracks plainly went in, but didn’t come out.

Ozmian smiled and raised his gun.