M.L.N. Hanover - Vicious Grace

“What is he doing?” Aubrey asked.

“Digging up his grandfather,” I said.

“What?” Oonishi said, raising his hands in bewilderment and annoyance.

“That’s a real problem,” Kim said.

I pushed the cell phone into my pack and pressed my palms to my temples. I had to think. He was in the hospital already, within the rider’s domain. Even if I could talk to him, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to break the control it had over him now.

“Okay,” I said. “We need to find him. The rider’s able to guide him. Talk to him. It’s probably worked out a plan to get David there as quickly as possible. Wherever the hell ‘there’ is.”

“Civil defense ward under the north tower,” Ex said. “Fifth level down, right underneath the fallout shelter.”

“Really?” I said.

“All this time you people were sleeping and figuring out your love lives, I was working. Remember?” Ex said. “It’s not spelled out on Eric’s blueprints, but the implication’s right there.”

“Okay,” I said. “Once he gets there, how hard is it to undo the interment?”

“If he can get the coffin,” Chogyi Jake said, “it’s not hard at all. A little blood, the right words, and the intention. It’s like a balloon. All you have to do is make a pinhole and the pressure inside it does the rest. But reaching the coffin might not be easy.”

“But we don’t have a north tower,” Oonishi said.

“You used to,” Ex said. “It got incorporated in the new design in ’48. You know how the floor numbers are different east and west of the operating theaters? That’s because the new construction joined the north tower with the Campion office complex that was just east of it, and they used different—”

“Ex!” I snapped. “Gold star for research later. Why won’t the coffin be easy to get to?”

“Um,” Ex said. “Because it’s buried?”

“Probably under a concrete slab,” Chogyi Jake said. “If he didn’t bring a jackhammer or dynamite—”

“A tank of gas,” I said.

“There are plenty of ways to make something explode in a hospital,” Kim said. “We’ve got a lot of tanks of pressurized gas, and most of them are oxygen.”

“What’s cyclopropane?” I asked.

“It used to be an anesthetic,” Oonishi said. “No one uses it anymore.”

“Because it kept blowing up?” I asked. Oonishi blinked. That was answer enough. “Ex. Can you get us to the civil defense ward?”

“The plans were eight years old. If they haven’t remodeled anything, then yes.”

“Let’s go,” I said. Aubrey hit the elevator’s call button, and the doors slid open immediately. Oonishi came in with us. As the doors slid closed, I wondered whether I should have told him to get out instead. The car dropped down, gravity shifting. I watched the numbers crawl: Two. One. G. L. B. B1. SB1. SB2. We were underground, and I imagined that I could feel the weight of earth pressing in against the air.

I’d underestimated the rider. I didn’t get to do that twice. If we could reach David before it was too late, carry him out of the hospital, we’d be okay. We’d sedate him if we needed to . . .

The doors slid open on a hallway, fluorescent lights bright as noon, and green-white walls that kept every ray of it bouncing back. The ceiling was high, marks on the wall showing where a network of sound-killing acoustical tiles had once been. Pipes ran the length of the hall, turning at corners or vanishing into walls. I thought of blood vessels. Grace Memorial as a single, vast body more complex than any individual human within it.

“We’re going to need to head north,” Ex said.

“Cool,” I said. “Is that going to be right or left?”

“Left,” he said.

We walked fast. Signs in English, Spanish, and what I thought was Chinese pointed us toward the laundry, the film library, records storage. The mix of languages left me with the eerie feeling that I was in some universal ur-hospital, like I’d stumbled into a network of halls and tunnels that connected to infinity at the back. If I followed them long enough, I’d wind up in the basement of the Mayo Clinic or St Mary’s in London or some tiny little hospital in the middle of Serbia. The pipes above us shuddered and clanked, locked in a conversation of their own. Ex led us left, and then right. We passed through a warehouse, chain-link fencing on both sides of a single hall making storage cells for ancient medical equipment. The skeletons of beds with cranks on the fronts, wheelchairs of rotting wicker with shredding rubber wheels. Cabinets of glass jars filled with foggy liquid and covered in dust.

“There should be a stairway over here,” Ex said. “It can get us down to the fallout shelter. The civil defense ward is underneath that .”

“Have I mentioned that this is really creepy?” I said.

“We’re going to be okay,” Aubrey said, and the lights went out.

The darkness was total. Suffocating. I felt a hand brush my arm, and I yelped a little. Then a deep throbbing came, resonating all around us. Once, then twice, and then a vicious wind whipped through the passageway, hot and damp and thick with the smells of old soil and corrupt flesh. To my right, a rat squealed in terror. The silence that followed was worse.

The lights flickered back on, dimmer and dirtier than before. They grew darker and brighter and darker again, like something breathing. A violent rattling passed through the pipes overhead, something huge sprinting one floor above us. We all looked at one another. No one needed to say it. We all knew what had happened; we were too late. David had reached the coffin. The haugsvarmr , the demon, the Beast Rahab was free. The hospital, taken over.

I thought for a moment I saw the cold, blue glow of a demonic fish swimming through the air at the end of the corridor. I heard the rider’s voice in my memory. I can’t see you, but I know you’re here. I can smell your skin . The hair on my arms was standing up straight.

“Okay, new plan,” I whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Retracing our steps, we were all quiet. The walls around us seeped with the threat of violence and a sense of something vast and implacable. Even our footsteps were quiet. Careful. Frightened as mice in a cat’s bed. Chogyi Jake wasn’t smiling. Oonishi kept speeding up or slowing down, unconsciously keeping himself at the center of the herd. Kim and Aubrey were walking side by side, neither looking at the other but their strides matching perfectly. Around us, the hospital changed.

At first, I thought it was only the low light, fluorescents buzzing and flickering as we passed them. It was more than that. The floors got damper, and the air thickened. The salt smell was somewhere between ocean water and blood. When we passed back through the storage cells, I had the feeling that the old equipment had moved, that it was still moving whenever I wasn’t watching it. The pipes started dripping rust-brown water that burned a little when it hit the back of my hand. We got to the elevator faster than I’d expected, and paused there. There were five levels above us, just to reach the surface. I didn’t care about getting to the parking garage. Anyplace with a window I could break and crawl out of would do just fine. But when I reached out for the call button, I couldn’t quite do it. Somewhere in dim memory, there was a story about people getting into a haunted elevator and coming out as a thin, red soup.

Ex, at my side, saw me hesitate.

“Stairs?” he said.

“Stairs.”

We found the stairwell a few doors down, still marked by a glowing red exit sign. The door stuck when I tried to open it, but Ex and Aubrey pushed with me, and we got through. The railing was icy cold under my hand. I leaned in, looking up the central shaft. Two short flights to go up a story, twisting up for what looked like forever. Behind us, someone started shouting: a deep, angry sound. I started up.