I looked. Would you mind checking down the hall—bet she’s somewhere doing a line or having a crying jag or what the fuck ever. I’ve got to herd my sheep toward the exit before they start bleating in an insane frenzy of DTs.”
“Sure,” he said, regretting it in the same breath. Kara had uttered a true statement: the halls were dark, dark. She wouldn’t have ventured into them alone, not with her apparently sincere apprehension. He located a central bank of dials in an adjoining passage and fiddled with them until a few domes winked on. Mercifully, each door was locked and he satisfied his obligation to search for the woman with a knock and a half-hearted inquiry—yoo-hoo, in there, lady? No? Moving on, moving on, even as the walls tightened like the throat of a cave burrowing into bedrock. His sweaty hand made it increasingly difficult to grasp door handles. He felt liquor in the wires of his brain, but he hadn’t drunk enough, Ms. Diamond had noted it rightly, so why this haze, this disorientation?
Inside the employee break room, she lay in a fetal position on a table. A water-cooler bubbled in the corner. The refrigerator door was ajar and its white, icicle-chill light shone over her naked legs, white panties, and slip. Her upper body curved away, her face hidden in the sweep of hair. He slapped the wall switch and the overhead light flashed once and went dead. He approached and bent toward her still form.
She shuddered violently and raised herself on one elbow and laughed. Her arm unfolded like a blade. She seized his collar, pulled his face to hers. She kissed him hard with the taste of cold metal and all he could see was the refrigerator shivering in her eye, his own eye shivering in her eye. His eye rolled, rolled. This wasn’t Kara. The dimness had tricked him. “Be glad those lights didn’t come on,” Christine said, sounding different than he’d expected—she hadn’t spoken once during cocktails the previous evening at the hotel as she hung on Mr. Blaylock’s arm. Her voice was hoarse. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here,” she said. A certain fluidity suggested multitudes beneath her skin. “The service door was open, by the way. That’s how we got in.”
“You killed small animals as a child, didn’t you?” Mr. Blaylock said. He stood before the gaping refrigerator, backlit so his face was partially hidden. Lancaster recognized the man’s voice, his peculiar scent. Mr. Blaylock soothed him. “That’s how it begins. Don’t be afraid. It’s not your turn. Not tonight. Really, you’ve been dead for years, haven’t you?” And to his left, past a doorframe that let yet further into the heart of the complex, more figures crowded. Presumably Mr. Blaylock’s acolytes from the dinner party.
Lancaster pulled free from Christine’s clutches. She spoke gibberish to him, lips and the sound from her lips moving asynchronously. He wheeled and plunged into the hall, blundered without sight or thought toward the conference chamber and the reassurance of a crowd. His mouth hurt on the inside. The caterers were already gone, leaving the room as antiseptic as they’d found it. The guests milled, awkward and surly in the absence of entertainment.
“Finally you appear!” Ms. Diamond said through her teeth. “Don’t believe in answering your phone. Damn it and hellfire, Lancaster! The natives are restless. We need to move on out.”
“Yeah, can we just go already?” Kara pressed tight against Mr. Rawat, wheedling in a daddy’s-little-girl tone. Her white cheeks were blotched pink. Lancaster’s tongue ached and he tried to recall what he’d meant to say, why those two disturbed him. Hadn’t he gone searching for her? The possibility seemed more remote by the second. He pressed a napkin to his lips, stemming the blood-flow, his short term memory erasing itself like a tape under a magnet.
He followed at the tail of the procession toward the parking lot. He glanced over his shoulder. A figure watched him from the darkened hallway. It slipped backward and vanished. Then he was letting the door close, a gate shutting on a sepulcher, and a few moments later he couldn’t recall why the taste of adrenaline mixed with the mouthful of wet copper.
* * *
The limousine and its running lights floated on the black surface of the night road. Farther on, the skyline of the city glowed like a bank of coals. Lancaster thought of his townhouse, the cold comfort of his large television and