There it was again — the noise — low but audible.
She knew that noise.
A sharper tremor passed through her, and a new squeeze of fear cramped her belly.
Hinges.
The rusty hinges of the exterior door, the north door, the door she’d unlocked with the ring of stolen keys.
Hinges creaking now as that door opened for a second time.
Panic impelled her upright, and she retreated around the bend in the corridor, and then she was running to the door on the east side, the only other exit.
A hard carom off a wall, and with a gasp she came up short against the steel door, yanking furiously at the handle before remembering that all the doors in the hospital wards were locked on both sides, and a key was required to enter or exit.
She had keys, they were in her left hand, and she fumbled with them, jamming one after another into the keyhole until she found the key that fit, then twisting her wrist clockwise.
The bolt, strangely loose, seemed to yield immediately, as if it had never been secured at all.
She tugged the handle again, pulling the door inward. Still it would not open.
Stuck.
Somehow the door was stuck, wouldn’t open, and she was trapped in here, no way out.
Cray stepped out of the night into the north corridor of Ward C, then clicked on his flashlight. The red-filtered beam wavered over the tile floor and concrete walls, reaching halfway down the hall.
She was not within sight. But her tracks were. The prints of muddy shoes, tracing an irregular, panicky path away from the door.
He breathed in, out. There was a calmness in him, the strange calm before the gale.
He had her. She could not escape.
True, she had a passkey that would unlock the east door. But the bolt on that door had been broken years ago, and rather than bothering to replace it, Cray had merely ordered the door padlocked.
Padlocked from outside.
The door could not be opened from within, a fact Kaylie no doubt had discovered by now.
She could double back and run straight into him. Or hide at the farthest end of the east corridor and wait for his arrival.
Or she could scream. Scream for help.
He would like that. He had never heard her scream.
No one would answer her cries, if there were any. Screams were common on the grounds of the institute. The staff had long ago learned to ignore such distractions.
Cray turned and shut the north door behind him, then carefully locked it with his passkey.
Then he pivoted to face the corridor again and advanced, guided by a beam of red, into the beckoning dark.
Kaylie stumbled away from the door that would not open, her hands slapping blindly at the side wall in search of an escape route, finding the door to the last cell in the row, not a good place to hide, but the only place left.
The press of a button released the pneumatic lock. The door swung wide, and she slipped into the room, then shut the door and looked for a latch on this side, but there was none, because in rooms like this, patients were locked in. They could not lock others out.
In the mesh window of the door, a faint red light appeared.
Flashlight. Still far away, but growing brighter.
Cray.
He had turned the corner, rounding the bend in the L, and he was closing in.
Cray aimed his flashlight down the east hallway, alert for any blur of movement.
Nothing.
He scanned the floor. Her tracks, increasingly faint as the dirt was pounded off her shoes, disappeared a few yards away.
She must have run to the exit and found it locked. After that, she would have backtracked. But how far?
No way to tell. The only certainty was that she was hidden… and close.
Rows of closed doors lined both sides of the corridor. Rooms where patients had been domiciled — stalls for cattle, pens for sheep.
Kaylie had been kept in one of these rooms, many years ago.
It was right for her to die here.
He would take her face, peel it from the subcutaneous tissue that wrapped her skull, and in the flashlight’s red glow he would display it to her, the bleeding mask — her own face, disembodied, the last thing she would see.
Later — tomorrow night, perhaps — he would bury her in the woods. She would never be found. Another successful escape, or so the world would think.
But first he had to find her.
Behind which door was his prize?
He moved to the nearest one, thumbed the button, aimed the flash inside.
Empty.
To the door on the opposite side. Same procedure. Same result.
There were twenty more doors. He would open them one by one. The task would not take long.
His sense of calm receded. A new force grew in him, wild and strong. A keening exultation.