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  A silent moment elapsed.

  Karen closed her eyes and awaited the inevitable.

  Chad chuckled, but some of the edge was gone from his voice. Dream had a sudden precognitive flash about what he was going to say, something that just couldn’t be.

  Something very, very wrong.

  Chad said, “I fucked your girlfriend, Shane.”

  Dream drew in a sharp breath.

  Chad kept talking, driving the figurative knife home and giving it a wicked twist. “I fucked her while you were out fishing with Dan.”

  Dream drew in a sharp breath.

  One strangled word emerged from Shane’s throat: “Bullshit.”

  Karen sobbed. “You fucking asshole, Chad.”

  “It wasn’t the first time, either. But you shouldn’t be jealous.” Some of the malice returned to Chad’s voice. “There’s no emotional involvement. She calls me her fuckbuddy. She has several fuckbuddies, Shane. The way I understand it, she just can’t get enough dick.”

  Shane was shaking with barely controlled fury.

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  “Now, don’t be angry with her.” A tone of mock consolation entered Chad’s voice then. “She needs help. Professional help. Booze isn’t her only weakness, guy. She’s addicted to sex, too.” He smirked. “She’s a nymphomaniac. A slut. A whore. A cheap floozie. Not to mention a really nice piece of ass.”

  Dream flicked on the Accord’s right turn signal.

  The action went unnoticed by the rest of the car’s occupants, including Alicia, whose attention was riveted to the brewing shitstorm in the backseat.

  Karen sagged in her seat and said, “Somebody just put me out of my misery, please.”

  Shane looked at her. “Tell me he’s full of shit, Karen.”

  Karen apparently had nothing else to say.

  Chad’s smirk deepened. “There you go, Shane. Secret revealed.”

  Shane lunged across the suddenly gasping Karen Hidecki and clamped a large hand around Chad’s throat.

  Karen shrieked.

  Alicia surged through the gap between the front seats in an attempt to save Chad Robbins from almost certain asphyxiation. The backseat became a cacophony of screams, shouts, and choked gasps.

  No one realized the Accord was slowing down.

  Or that it was turning off the interstate.

  Most of them would never see it again.

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  ***

  Monsters pursued Eddie down a long tunnel lit intermittently by flickering gas lamps. The narrow passage twisted every so often, sometimes creating a blind spot untouched by the gaslight. Several times he crashed into the tunnel wall, tumbled to the hardpacked dirt floor, and staggered back to his feet. Every time he got up, the monsters seemed just a little bit closer than they were before. Their frenzied, hungry cries filled his ears and made his stomach clench with fear. Soon, he supposed, he would feel their hot breath on the back of his neck.

  And then it would be too late.

  He arrived at a place where the tunnel branched off in two directions. He came to a sudden stop, risked a glance behind him, and listened to the sound of his pursuers drawing still closer. His gaze snapped back to the maddening intersection and the unwanted complications it

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  created. He experienced a long moment of panicky indecision that threatened to paralyze him. He saw himself rooted to this spot until fangs pierced his flesh and tore him apart.

  The passage to his left glowed with a brighter light than that cast by the lamps. Somewhere down that length of tunnel, perhaps just around the next bend, lurked lights powered by electricity. The notion of electricity was alluring, with its hints of things sane, of things created by men from the world of his former life. The passage to the right was darker by far. He detected a faint flicker of gaslight from that direction. So he had a choice-on the one hand, more of the same; on the other, a slim possibility of deliverance from this land of madness.

  He listened a moment longer to the heavy thud of dozens of dreadful creatures careening down the tunnel behind him.

  His once-comfortable head start was dwindling by the nanosecond.

  His only choice was forward motion.

  NOW

  He turned toward the light and started running again.

  The tunnel continued in a straight line for a few moments, and the light-its source still unseen-grew steadily brighter. Eddie then reached another bend in the tunnel, the last he would encounter. The hardpacked dirt of the tunnel floor gave way to a short expanse of cracked tile bordered by cinder-block walls. Someone had scrawled “Lazarus is the way” on one of the walls. A bank of fluorescent lights hummed quietly from the ceiling. An

  15 unlatched metal door at the center of the wall directly opposite him beckoned like a street-corner whore in stiletto heels and a microskirt.

  “What the hell … ?”

  A goddamn open door. The fleeting thought that maybe he was being herded rather than chased flashed through his mind like a comet. The implications were dreadful, but there was no time to contemplate this new layer of mystery. No time at all. He would be monster dinner if he lingered any longer. He bolted toward the door, crossed the expanse of tile quicker than Carl Owens on crack, yanked the door open, stepped through the opening, and slammed it shut. He threw the latch home, turned a crank that secured it, and stepped back to catch his breath and gather his wits.

  Something large and powerful struck the other side of the wall. Eddie flinched, but he thought he was safe for the moment. Another creature struck the door and its hinges groaned a bit. Eddie gulped. Maybe he wasn’t so safe. He remained certain the door would hold a little longer, but he had to concede it would eventually yield to the furious assault it was enduring. Which was cool, since he meant to be long gone from here by then.

  The idea of freedom bloomed in his brain like a spring flower-it was intoxicating, the prospect of again being able to breathe fresh air. To see the sun again. To go anywhere his heart desired. To watch pay-per-view porn at his leisure. Mostly, it would be nice to again live in a world uninhabited by monsters and crazy people. Okay, there were crazy people in the surface world, too, but that was a

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  pedestrian kind of crazy by comparison. He would rather come face-to-face with Jeffrey Dahmer’s long-lost, meaner brother than spend one more second in this freak-show place.

  Speaking of which, wasn’t it high time he got his ass in gear again?

  The door hinges groaned a little louder.

  YEP

  He whirled around, staggered forward a foot or two, and came to an abrupt halt.

  “Oh my God …”he breathed.

  He was in a cramped, dimly lit room that appeared to be some sort of security office or checkpoint. A large, paper-cluttered metal desk occupied much of the room. Above it a bank of black-and-white monitors flickered quietly. Several seemed to show various empty tunnels. Or perhaps these were just different portions of the same tunnel. The tunnel-or tunnels-closely resembled the place he’d just left behind. Funny, he hadn’t noticed anything even remotely resembling a camera. He supposed they’d been obscured in some fashion, an easy enough proposition in all that darkness. The top row of screens was devoted to several angles of a deceptively normal-looking house. How innocuous it seemed. How normal. How safe. Well, how else would the entrance to hell ensnare its victims? Other monitors revealed places he’d become all too familiar with over these last several months. Looking at these scenes made him anxious to get on with his flight from the howling terror behind him.

  And he fully intended to do just that.

  He needed another moment, however, to recover from

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  the shock of seeing the dead people. He wasn’t too bothered by the death aspect. Up-close encounters with death occurred with regularity down here. He’d become almost blasé about death. As a concept applied to other people, that is. The notion of his own death did still disturb him. Okay, it wigged him out. Still, he�
��d seen plenty of death down here, so much so that death as a phenomenon had lost its ability to shock him. Then again, maybe not, because there was something about what he was seeing now that was more disturbing than the things he’d seen before.

  A nude fat man weighed down a swivel chair in front of the desk. A nude woman straddled him. The fat man had a large bald spot and a wedge of now-displaced combed-over hair. The woman was thinner and not bad-looking. She looked as if she’d been roughed up some time prior to her union with the fat security guard, and she bore the mark of a slave girl on her neck. Her head hung limply over the fat man’s shoulder and her glassy eyes stared at nothing at all. They’d been run through with an ornate sword-its bloody tip pierced the back of the swivel chair.

  Eddie regained his voice. “Holy fuck …”

  He tried to imagine a human being strong enough to put that thing through two people-one of whom had been very large-and the back of a chair. His mind couldn’t comprehend such a thing. But the solution to the puzzle was obvious-a human being hadn’t done it.

  Nor had one of those monsters out there.

  Who probably lacked the ability to effectively wield swords and didn’t really need them anyway.

  No, this could only have been done by the owner of the house.

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  The thing that feigned the appearance of an ordinary man. A mortal man. A creature worse by far than the fearsome things that had hounded him through the tunnels.

  The Master.

  The monster to end all motherfucking monsters.

  Eddie’s internal terror barometer shot past the red zone. The only thing he wanted to deal with less than the tunnel creatures was that… thing. He cast his gaze about the rest of the room, which was otherwise nondescript. There was a single tall filing cabinet, beside it an overflowing wastebasket. A doorway revealed a tiny room with a dirty toilet. There was another door next to the bank of monitors. It stood slightly open, letting in a sliver of yellow light.

  The closed metal door behind him rattled louder than ever.

  He could hear the scrape of tortured hinges pulling slowly free of concrete moorings.

  Still, he didn’t move.

  He stared at the sliver of light, his body quaking like that of a man in the grip of a small seizure. He was moments away from being eaten alive. But it was possible an even worse fate awaited him through that open door.

  He heard the heaviest thud yet from the tunnel.

  The door came loose from the wall and fell heavily to the floor beneath the weight of the surging creatures. There was no more time to think. No more time to weigh one fate against another. Eddie moved. And slid for a microsecond on the pool of blood that surrounded the chair. But he righted himself immediately, slipped through the open door, and pulled it shut. This one locked electronically. A resolute click assured him it was sealed against all

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  unauthorized personnel. He glimpsed an electronic keypad embedded in the wall next to the door. He tried to remember seeing something similar near the other door, but he was drawing a blank. Not that it mattered. It was just curious how the primitivism of Below gradually gave way to higher-tech gadgetry.

  The creatures slammed against the door and bellowed outrage at yet another thwarted chance to corner their quarry.

  Eddie allowed himself a shaky sneer. “Poor monsters. No dinner for you tonight.”

  He was in a short hallway with a high ceiling. The cold electronic eye of a security camera stared down at him from the ceiling. A red light next to the lens blinked on and off. It didn’t bother him. The security guard wouldn’t be coming after him anytime soon. Still, that door-like the one before it-probably wouldn’t hold forever, so it wouldn’t do to linger.

  At the other end of the hallway was a tall concrete staircase. It seemed to stretch into infinity. Maybe not quite that far, but it was certainly the tallest staircase Eddie had ever seen. There were good-sized office buildings that didn’t reach that high. But he could just make out the tiny outline of a door at the top of the staircase. He glanced in the other direction and saw nothing but gray wall-a dead end.

  He strode in the opposite direction and began to mount the stairs. He climbed the steps two at a time at first, driven forward by a new burst of adrenaline and a renewed flicker of hope. It was probably a foolish hope, but he would nonetheless chase it until he collapsed. Or until

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  hostile forces caused his collapse. A dozen steps fell away below him. Two dozen. Three dozen. Then he was taking them one at a time, but was still moving at a pretty good clip. The door at the top grew incrementally larger, though it remained tantalizingly far away.

  Fatigue began to set in after a few dozen more steps. He had to work at making his tired legs move up another level. A sheen of sweat covered his bare torso. He concentrated on continuing the upward trajectory, focusing the whole of his will on the monumental physical effort needed to keep moving. The act of swinging a leg up another step became excruciating, worse than, say, carrying large sacks of potatoes up a steep hill on a sweltering summer day. He wanted more than anything a spare moment or two to sit down on one of these steps. His heart pistoned in his chest like the engine of a very old and very feeble car.

  “Don’t throw a rod, motherfucker…,” he muttered to his beleaguered heart.

  It was a while before he realized the pursuing creatures were now nonpursuing creatures. He was ascending the steps at a rate slower than an elderly Florida driver steering a Buick through a choked intersection. Awareness dawned as a realization of the absence of any sound other than his labored breathing and the rapid thrum of his heart.

  He came to a stop, an act that didn’t require a lot of effort. He sagged against the cold concrete wall, slid slowly down until he was in a squatting position, and stayed right there while his body tried to recover. He figured he might be able to cease panting within a week or two. He sat there with his eyes closed for several minutes, thankful he was

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  no longer in quite so much imminent danger of being ripped to shreds. His breathing leveled out, and his heart no longer seemed ready to propel itself out of his chest. He allowed his eyes to flutter open, and he had his first opportunity to cast a downward glance.

  The sensation of vertigo made his stomach lurch. His head swam, and he was dizzier than he had been at any time since he’d made himself spin like a top as a kid. He gripped one of the steps above him with one hand, slapped the open palm of the other against the wall, and held on for dear life. The vertigo passed in a few moments. Then, when he felt prepared, he risked another look down.

  He felt a slight twinge in his stomach, but it was of minor consequence. He was okay. There were no ravenous monsters with bulbous demonic red eyes hot on his trail. Not anymore. The staircase below him was empty, as was the little hallway at the bottom. He listened intently, but he could detect no sounds of destruction from the little security room. Well, that was good. Something had worked in his favor for a change. Then he turned his eyes toward the ceiling and looked at the blinking red light of the security camera. He thought of how much closer the camera had seemed when he was in the hallway.

  Actually…

  Well, the staircase, too, seemed much steeper even than it had originally appeared. He was maybe a third of the way up, and he felt as if he had been climbing the stairs forever. A feeling of unreality gripped him. A new creeping sensation of fear spread through him. Unreality. That was just the right word for it. Or was it just that reality was very fluid in this strange place?

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  Would he climb these stairs forever without reaching the top?

  “No. Nuh-uh. No way, nohow.”

  He would give it one more good effort. Thirty minutes. No, an hour. And he would climb the steps at a more reasonable rate this time instead of using up all his energy at once. If he was still only a third of the way up the stairs after another hour of climbing, he would give it up and toss himself off the staircase
. He would rather die than be condemned to this odd purgatory forever.

  “Okay, then.”

  He got to his feet, took a deep breath, and resumed the upward trek. He was a bit wobbly and he desperately craved a bottle or two of Gatorade, but he felt reasonably okay. He kept his head down this time instead of staring at the impossibly faraway door. To while away the time, he counted the steps as he climbed. One, two, three… a dozen … two dozen … three dozen … same old story.

  Or maybe not.

  When he finally glanced up, he was surprised to see the door was actually getting bigger. And closer. An impulse to pick up the pace-nearly impossible to resist-flashed through him. But he forced himself to continue at his steady rate.

  And the door loomed larger still.

  And closer still.

  Until, at last, he could count the number of steps remaining between himself and the landing. Seventeen steps. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Less than ten. And then he did move faster, covering the last several in leaps and bounds. He came to a stop on the landing and felt that he

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  knew what it was like to climb Mt. Everest. Hell, Mt. Everest was for pussies. What did a simple mountain have on a haunted stairwell?

  Well, maybe it wasn’t haunted.

  He decided that wasn’t the precise right word-but he did know this was a place that had absolutely nothing to do with the natural world.

  And he knew one other thing.

  He wanted out.

  Now.

  He studied the door. It was made of much simpler stuff than the previous two he had encountered. In fact, it was made of wood. There was no electronic keypad to either side of it. There didn’t appear to be any locking mechanism of any kind. Just a simple brass doorknob. All he had to do was reach out, grasp it, and turn it. …