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Pallas’s intuition slammed into overdrive, but it was too late. The business traveler was already in motion.
Pallas felt the needle bite into the curve of her shoulder. She tried to scream but her voice was already gone. She managed to turn far enough to glimpse the face of the woman who had held the door for her.
“You’ve caused us enough trouble,” the business traveler said. She dropped the hypodermic needle into her handbag.
Pallas finally realized she had never met either of the two in the elevator but she had seen photos of them in the course of the research she and Ambrose had done lately. Margaret Moore, the director of the Carnelian College Endowment, and Hugh Guthrie, the dean.
Snakes on a staircase, she thought.One used the needle on Geddings. One handled the body.
The light went out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
She opened hereyes to a dreamscape of fog lit by undulating waves of auroras. Wild visions came and went in the mist, sending sharp frissons across her nerves.You’ve been here before.You know what to do.
This was how the automatic drawing trances always began, but she usually entered her other vision intentionally. That way she was able to maintain control. She had been slammed into her other senses without warning this time. It was disorienting and unnerving.
The trick to channeling the visions and hallucinations was to draw. She put out a hand, instinctively reaching for a pencil and a sketchbook. Her fingers scrabbled across cold stone. Nothing. No pencil. No sketchbook.
The unnerving frissons flared into sparks of panic that electrified her nervous system, threatening to overwhelm her senses. In response, the visions became more vivid; more intense. She was not gaining control. She was losing it. If she did not master the hallucinations she would be lost forever in the dreamscape.
Frantically she pulled hard on her other vision, struggling to findthe source of the chaos. The hallucinations retreated but they did not vanish. She tried to transfer out of the trance state into her normal vision.
Darkness immediately engulfed her, absolute and terrifyingly claustrophobic. The darkness of a tomb.
The panic rushed back. Desperate, she intuitively retreated back into her trance vision. The space around her was once again lit by auroras, but this time the hallucinations were under control, more or less. When she concentrated she was able to make out some of the details of her surroundings.
Cold, cracked concrete everywhere. Floor, walls, ceiling. A dank smell infused the atmosphere. She thought she caught the tang of the ocean.
Then she saw the caskets.
For a horrifying moment she thought she was seeing another round of hallucinations. That would indicate she had lost control of her other vision. Maybe she really was trapped in a nightmare this time.
She took a deep breath. Her nerves steadied. The caskets were real, and there were a lot of them.
They were stacked in rows at the rear of the space. Made of cheap wood, many had partially rotted and collapsed. In several cases the contents had spilled out onto the floor. A clutter of rib cages, long bones, and skulls was piled in one corner as if someone had kicked them out of the way.
She was in an underground crypt.
In addition to the caskets there were two long black bags on the floor against one wall. She shivered, not because of dark energy but because her intuition told her what was inside the bags.
The only body bags she had ever seen were in the news mediaand in films, but she knew immediately what she was looking at. The two bags were not empty.
She looked around, hoping to find her messenger bag. She longed for her phone, with its handy flashlight app. Even more importantly, she wanted to get her hands on the Taser.
There was no sign of the bag.
She had to move. To act. She could not stay where she was, waiting for disaster. She managed to get to her hands and knees. Keeping the hallucinations at bay while simultaneously using her trance vision to navigate the absolute darkness proved to be a complicated juggling act. It was as if she had one foot inside a dream and the other foot outside.
You know this sensation. It’s the feeling you get when you’re in the place between sleep and the waking state.
Once again the panic welled up, threatening to drown her.
“Shit,” she whispered.
For some reason the expletive had a steadying effect on her nerves. She had to stay focused on escape. There was fresh air coming in from somewhere. If she found the source, she might discover the way out. She also needed a weapon, something—anything—she could use to defend herself.
She got cautiously to her feet and took a moment to regain her balance. Moving through a dreamstate was hard. In a sense, she was lucid dreaming and sleepwalking at the same time.
