Timebound(119)

She made a slight face, but nodded once and pulled back against the wall so that I could inch out in front of her. “It should be the second left.”

After my last experience with her thinking it was the second left, I was tempted to ask if she was sure it wasn’t the third, but I decided it was best to keep chatter to a minimum.

We crossed to the other side of the hallway and were just about to make the turn when two gunshots sounded from behind us. All three of us jumped and ducked as we ran around the corner, but the shots were clearly on a lower floor. The good news? Holmes was nowhere near our current location. The bad news? He was most definitely still in the building. And from the sound of things, that bad news had probably been much worse news for someone on the first or second floor.

“Come on,” I said. “At least now we know he’s in the building, but not close by. We just need to find that window.”

“But he doesn’t shoot anyone tonight,” Katherine said.

“You know that for a fact?” I asked, my voice tense. “He killed a lot of people here.”

“I just hope he hasn’t killed someone else because of us,” she said. “Someone who wasn’t supposed to die.”

“I do, too,” I said. “But there’s not much we can do about it now, is there? We need to keep moving.”

There was a rapping sound behind me and I whipped the CHRONOS key around to look down the corridor, bumping into Kiernan as I spun around. For a split second, I saw a tall shadow in the very middle of the hallway and then it was gone.

“Did you see that?” I asked Katherine.

“No,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“I thought…” I shook my head. It clearly wasn’t Holmes, and I’d had very little sleep in the past forty-eight hours. “Nothing. Just jumpy, I guess.”

We ran down two more corridors, including the one where I’d paused earlier to unbolt the door. The door was open a good deal wider than it had been when I left, and I wondered whether the occupant had escaped the frying pan only to land directly in the fire.

And that’s when I smelled the smoke.





22





I don’t know how long we spent in those hallways. It was probably less than ten minutes, but they were easily the longest ten minutes of my life. The place was, for all intents and purposes, a maze, designed to disorient anyone unfortunate enough to get lost in the middle.

We had just passed the door I had unbolted earlier and the stable point in the linen closet for the second time. Every time we were forced to backtrack after encountering a dead end, I was terrified that we’d come face-to-face with Holmes. To make matters even worse, the smoke was getting thicker.

“I know there was a window, Miss Kate. It was on this side of the buildin’.” It was the second time we’d walked all the way to the end of this corridor and tears were now pouring down Kiernan’s face.

“Well, there’s no window at the end of the hall and no rooms on this side of the hallway,” Katherine said.

I stopped for a moment. “Unless… there’s a hidden door? He used trapdoors, didn’t he? I remember something about him walling up a shipment of furniture—building the room around it—so that he could claim it never arrived and avoid payment. Maybe…”

“What are we supposed to do then?” Katherine asked. “Start kicking in walls at random?”

I didn’t answer her, just tore down the hallway, back to the linen closet. Ignoring the fact that something back there reeked foully, I gave the closed door inside the closet a hard kick with the side of my foot. It opened about an inch and I had to put my arm over my mouth and nose to keep from vomiting.

I kicked again, trying not to think about what I was dislodging. With the third kick, there was a soft thud and the small door swung inward.

I bent down to look inside and could just barely see the window at the very end of a long, narrow room that stretched the entire length of the hallway. If there was a moon out, it was behind a cloud, because only the faintest hint of light was coming in through the glass. I couldn’t see a ladder, but Kiernan had said he didn’t think we’d be able to see it from the inside, since the rungs began just below the window’s edge.

I turned to Katherine and Kiernan, who were standing at the entrance to the linen closet. “You were right, Kiernan. This has to be it.”

“What is that god-awful smell?” Katherine asked.

“I think we both have a pretty good idea,” I answered. “I guess Holmes didn’t manage to get all of the victims to the pit in the basement. Just hold your breath as much as you can—and be careful to duck as you enter. The doorway is very low.”