The boy limped down the halls in a blind panic. The incision on his right thigh throbbed and oozed bloody pus. He could barely see as the batteries of the otoscope started to fail. He lost track of the turns. He paused at a door and wondered: had he come this way before? When he reached for the handle, he could barely see it beginning to turn on its own. He backed up slowly at first, and then picked up speed. When he saw the door begin to swing towards him, he turned and ran in earnest. The slippers on his feet offered no traction. He managed to kick them off and ran even faster.
At the end of the corridor, he crashed into the wall and pushed off, throwing himself down left the passage. This was new — he was certain. Ahead, an iron gate with a big padlock blocked the way. The vertical bars, topped with sharp points, had several cross-members holding the bars in place. The boy started climbing, hoping to squeeze between the top of the bars and the ceiling. Desperation drove him forward — he threw his knee up and got a foothold on the waist-high brace. He grabbed two of the points and pulled, climbing the gate like a ladder.
The boy squeezed his chest over the top of the gate and heard the approach of heavy footsteps. He had to concentrate. He pushed and pulled with all his strength. One of the points dug into the side of his right knee. Instead of pushing away from the bars, he managed to wrangle his panic and figured how to lift his leg off the snag.
From what he could see, the hall on this side of the gate was not in very good shape. The walls were discolored and unpainted, and the floors were littered with scraps of drywall, dirt, and dust. He rounded another corner and found a set of decrepit stairs, leading up. Thick, rough-cut planks with protruding nails took him up to a small landing and then turned left before ascending again. The boy suspected he had gone up at least two flights, maybe more.
At the top of the stairs, he found another small landing and then the hall continued off to his right. The boy bent over for a second to catch his breath, and in the darkness he saw tiny flashes of white until his heart rate slowed a bit more. With the last light of the otoscope, he saw that the construction looked older here, and even more run-down. The floors were stained, cracked hardwood, and the walls showed gaping holes through the plaster to the lath slats.
He straightened slowly, and started to walk down the hall. The boy waited to hear footfalls ascending the steps at any second.
The otoscope pulsed and then shut off completely. The boy twisted the handle on and off, and slowly realized that he could still see his feet.
He crouched and peered through the vent at his ankles. Set in the wall was a vent with a twisting, looping, pattern to its grate. The room on the other side had a faint blue light. The screw at the top of the grate anchored into nothing — the plaster above the vent had fallen away and the screw didn’t quite reach to the wood. It dawned on the boy that it might be big enough for him to fit through. It looked tight, but anything would be better than staying in the pitch black hallway with the crazy man somewhere behind him.
He tugged at the metal for a few seconds and then sat on the floor and braced a foot on either side of the vent and pulled with both hands. When it gave a little, he doubled his efforts. In a few more tugs he popped off the cover.
The light on the other side came through several windows. He put his left arm through first and then pulled until his head was on the other side. Turning his shoulders, he managed to get his chest and other arm free.
Suddenly, he imagined an unseen axe descending on his naked legs and he struggled to get his legs to safety. He scrabbled across the floor of the new room, desperately trying to free his feet. When he made it, he cautiously looked back but the hallway he had left was empty. The boy screwed up his nerve and then reached for the cover, back in the hall. He did his best to pull it back into position.
Relieved, he tiptoed over to one of the windows. The window was two or three stories up and overlooked an overgrown field bordered with woods. A nearly full moon hung low, just about even with the treeline. He pressed his face close to the window so he could look straight down; the ground looked a long way down. A door on the adjacent wall was open a crack, he walked as quietly as he could and swung it open.