Chapter 4: End of the Corridor

End of the Corridor

He came off the pipe feet first and hit the desk.

The desk jumped. The monitor tilted. The goat head was already swinging toward the noise when he got both hands on the phone, tore it up off the desk — base, handset, cord and all — and threw it.

The base hit the animal square across the front of the skull. The cord whipped around the left horn and pulled tight, and the handset swung in and cracked against the bone and stayed there.

The thing made a sound like a drain opening. It stopped dead with its head cocked and both hands working at the cord.

Ash went off the back of the desk with the knife out. Monitor cable. Keyboard. Mouse. The power strip under the desk. The blade skated off the insulation and bit through on the second pull. Then he shoved the knife into his waistband and got both hands under the monitor and brought it down on the skull.

Glass went everywhere. The screen folded inward and the frame came apart and something inside it popped and started smoking, and the animal dropped to one knee with both horns in the tile.

Ash stepped off the desk onto its back.

He got one hand on a horn — ribbed, warm the way horn is not supposed to be warm — and with the other he went into the bag and came out with a bottle. Full, heavy, the kind of weight that only means one thing.

He brought it down on the skull as hard as he could.

The bottle came apart in his hand. A shard clipped his ear and spun off somewhere. Then the smell arrived — sharp and clean and enormous, filling the room — and the animal under him convulsed like it had taken current. Whatever it hunted with, the alcohol had taken it away for now. It shook its head and the phone came off the horn, cord and all, and went across the room, and Ash went flat on its back and held on with one hand and stayed there.

Which is when he saw it, six inches away in the light off the monitor.

There was no seam. No strap, no buckle, no gap at the back where a fake head ends and a real one starts. The white plate of the skull came down and kept going, bone into bone, into the neck, and the hide came up over the jaw and under the eyehole and along the whole length of it.

Not a mask.

And the teeth — long in front, yellow at the roots, flat and wide at the back — had hair in them. Dark hair, wound tight between two molars, still wet. There was grit in there too, white and fine, and he didn’t look at it long.

Hay. Manure. Wet hide. It had come out of a pen. It had eaten tonight, and not hay.

He dropped off its back and went out through the door.

The corridor was gray and long and empty. He got the four bottles out of the bag and threw them backhanded, one after another, through the doorway. Glass broke on glass and the smell came back out at him, thick enough to taste. Then the lighter. Then he pulled the door shut with both hands.

The IV pole was still against the wall where he’d left it, its base wedged into the loose trim. He pulled it out, laid it across the handle at an angle, jammed the base against the wall and the shaft across the lever, and braced the whole thing.

Blue light came up under the door and around the frame. Inside, iron hit tile at a run — four quick beats — and then the door took the weight. Metal boomed. The door held. Security door, steel core, steel frame; that was the whole reason he’d picked this room over any of the ones with a window in it.

The door moved an inch in its frame and came back.

Then his own hand lit up.

The alcohol had gone everywhere, including on him. It had soaked along his fingers and up his cuff, and the flame found it while he was still standing there looking at the door.

He didn’t swat at it and he didn’t run. He turned and went into the bathroom at the end of the station and got the blanket out of the sink — he’d balled it into the basin earlier and left the cold tap on, and it had been drinking water the whole time — took it one-handed on the way down, and hit the floor.

He rolled. Tile, cold water, wet wool, fire going out of him in patches. He rolled into the wall and back out and rolled again, and the flame died under the blanket, and then he lay there on the tile with the tap running, soaked through, breathing.

In the next room something very heavy was still working at the door.

He didn’t get up. He didn’t check. He lay on his side with the wet blanket over his shoulder, hand open in front of his face, watching water run off his own fingers — the two he couldn’t feel yet, the skin that had started talking to him about the fire.

Something hit the tile by his hand.

Small. Black. The size of a thumbnail.

He crawled for it. Got an elbow under him, dragged himself a foot, reached, picked it up. A bud, the kind that goes in one ear, with a seam and a mesh and a tiny light on it that wasn’t on.

He put it in his left ear.

Static. A tick, a hiss, a channel opening.

Then a man.

“Get up.”

Not gentle. Level, though. Not loud and not rattled, and something in the middle of it that had nowhere to be except right here.

A cop? He almost asked it. His mouth was already open on the question.

“Run to the end of the corridor. Come find me in the monitor room.”

He put a hand on the wall and stood up.

The corridor was long and the lights were far apart. His sleeve was still wet to the elbow and the two fingers still weren’t talking to him and the smoke was in his clothes, and none of it mattered. He ran.

The extinguisher cabinet was on the way. Red box, glass panel, a dry chemical unit on hooks inside it. He took it off the hooks while he was still moving, one hand, and pulled it into his chest. Heavy the way a full one is heavy. He knew what a canister did when it took a hard hit. He’d stopped caring about that some distance back.

The lights got farther apart. Behind him, the knocking at the nurses’ station door stopped. He heard it quit the way you hear a fridge quit, and he didn’t look back and he didn’t slow down.

The far end of the corridor went dark before the last fixture did, like something was standing in front of it and drinking it, and then he saw what it was.

The shape under the monitor-room sign was tall. Horns.

He had left it behind a steel door and jammed the handle. He hadn’t seen it come out of there. He didn’t know how long that door had held after he walked away, or what had come through it if it hadn’t, and he wasn’t going to work that out from here.

There was one corridor and one way out of it, and the thing was standing in the one way. He turned his shoulders and planted his back foot and brought the extinguisher around behind him in a long windup.

The door at the end of the corridor came open.

Not open. Kicked, from the inside, by a boot that was long and black and didn’t slow down for anything.

Somebody laughed. High and delighted, and it kept going while the man came through the doorway with a length of steel pipe up in both hands — hollow, off a bed frame, one end ragged where it had been broken out of the fitting.

He was swinging before his feet finished landing. He came down on the goat’s back, knees first, both boots on the spine, and drove the pipe through the hide and the muscle and into the corridor floor. He rode it down and leaned his whole weight on it, and his hair — long, curled, the color of the inside of a plum — swung forward and fell around his face, and the animal went flat and pushed with all four limbs and got nowhere.

The bleat cut off.

The corridor went quiet.

The man stayed up on the pipe with both hands, head back, mouth open, breathing. The teeth in it were triangular, jagged, too many for the space, and the fixture over the door was on them. He held the pose one beat and then another, in no hurry.

Then he looked left and saw Ash.

He let the pipe go and stood up. He fitted the metal snap at the cuff of one glove, and then he started walking.

Deerskin, dark, soaked to the wrist. Long coat, wine-red shirt, no tie, boots to the knee. Pale plum hair past the collar, and eyes the red of something under pressure. Ash got the face put together before the man was three steps in, and his head supplied, unasked, the small two-note hit-confirm that went with something new dropping into the frame. He didn’t have time to argue with it.

On his chest there was a silver plate: a white line in a black square, the wayfinding mark for a subway line. Under the mark, raised letters.

SOL WHITLOCK.

Ash stood in the middle of the corridor with a dry chemical extinguisher in both hands. Between him and the sign over the door, an animal was pinned to the floor with a length of hospital bed in it. In front of him, a man was walking at him with his gloves on.

In the back of his head, the old wiring ran the check it ran at the end of a long night in front of a screen, when the music changed and the corridor opened up.

Boss room. You just walked into the boss room.

He was fairly sure that was what he’d done.