51

The stainless-steel revolving door, with its four compartments, required no power other than human effort. It spun them smoothly off the sidewalk into a large vestibule, where the flashlight revealed a dead palm tree in a center planter. An upscale women's dress shop lay to the left, a men's store to the right, display windows peopled by mannequins wearing once-stylish clothes that moths and rot had converted into rags.

At the end of the vestibule, they pushed through another door into what Jeffy knew would be the lobby with its marble floor and columns. The generous space was indeed pretty much as it had been in his world, but here it served also as a repository for human skulls.

Shock and horror brought him and Amity up short. On both sides of a pathway that had been left open, fleshless skulls were piled in ascending mounds, brain box on brain box, sans brains, sloping up to the left and right. Thousands of lipless and eternal grins. Hollow sockets blind to the atrocity of which they were a testament. The registration counter, the bellhops' station, the concierge's desk were buried under drifts of white bone, the discarded craniums of adults and children, gender and race and age stripped away with the flesh, yet in such numbers that were the definition of holocaust.

"Oh, shit," Amity said.

"Don't look," he said.

But the grim collection was so encompassing, so compelling, that nothing else could command attention, nor was this a place where they would dare to close their eyes.

He pivoted back the way they had come and looked through the nearer doors, through the vestibule, through the outer doors. Soft purple light no longer washed the night, and he couldn't hear the throbbing foghorn sound.

That didn't mean they could venture outside again. Something was coming. A sound like screaming aircraft. Like jets inbound with their payloads.

Still holding the pistol but pocketing the key to everything, he grabbed his daughter's hand. "It's like Halloween at Knott's, at Disneyland, think of it that way, plastic skulls and nothing real."

She couldn't deceive herself any more than he could, and God knew what damage this was doing to her psyche, to her soul, but he could think of nothing else to say.

They hurried along the path between the skulls, to a hallway off the lobby, to the elevators. Beyond the elevators were spacious public restrooms, from one of which he intended to make the jump out of this timeline to the one where they belonged. At 3:20 a.m., there would be no restaurant customers or arriving hotel guests who might be using those facilities when he and Amity materialized on Earth Prime.

He yanked open the men's-room door and urged the girl in after him. Across the threshold, the flashlight revealed that whatever the nature of those who had done this, they were violent in the extreme and mad beyond the power of analysis. Here, the trophies were not skulls but human spines, curved configurations of barren vertebrae stacked everywhere, filling the toilet stalls. The chamber of skulls had contained no foul odor of which he'd been aware; but a stench filled this room. The meninges membranes as well as the gray and white matter of the spinal cords had dissolved, leaked through the vertebrae, and puddled the floor, providing a breeding ground for a foul black mold that thrived in lumpish colonies from end to end of the lavatory.

"Sorry, oh Jesus, sorry," Jeffy chanted, pulling Amity from the room. The flashlight swooped wildly across dense abstract patterns of the interlocked vertebrae of countless stacked and tangled spines, which seemed like an intricate alien life form that might suddenly twitch and come awake and lurch at them.

In the hall again, he didn't make a move toward the door of the women's restroom, for he was sure that it would contain more spines or something worse. Were there trophy rooms containing skeletal arms and hands, others for hips and leg bones, for rib cages? Who flensed the flesh from the murdered bodies? Or was that work done while the victims still lived? Who unhinged the dead into their separate parts? Who boiled thousands of skulls to make them pristine white and presentable for the lobby display?

A clatter arose from the front entrance of the hotel. He was too far away to see the cause. Something was coming.

His heart knocked as if on Heaven's door.

Holding Amity close against him, he realized they had to get out of sight. No way in hell would they go outside and face whatever forces were gathering there. Assume the ground floor of the building and maybe a few levels above it were boneyards. The hotel was seven stories high. They had to go up.

"The stairs," he said, and Amity sprinted to the labeled door, with him close behind.

Jeffy had no illusions about the human potential for evil, but this seemed to be insanity far in excess of any human obsession ever recorded. No men or women could sustain so long the fierce intensity of hatred necessary to do all of this. A legion of sociopaths would have been required to slaughter and process so many thousands, maybe millions. The explanation could not be human, and he hoped to escape this place before he was confronted by the answer.