For a moment, she felt a small current of anxiety. Then she shook it away with a forced laugh. She’d just make her way back to the giraffes, then retrace her steps from there.
As she turned, her foot landed in a small puddle of water. She looked up just as a drop of water splattered on her forehead. Condensation from the pipes far overhead. She shook it away and moved on.
But she couldn’t seem to find her way back to the giraffes.
This was crazy. She’d navigated through trackless deserts and dense rainforests. How could she be lost in a museum in the middle of New York City?
She looked around, realizing it was her sense of direction she had lost. With all these angled aisles, these dimly lit intersections, it had become impossible to tell where the front desk was. She’d have to—
She abruptly froze, listening intently. A soft pattering sound. It was hard to tell where it had come from, but it was close.
“Mr. Puck? Is that you?”
Nothing.
She listened, and the pattering sound came again. Just more water dripping somewhere, she thought. Even so, she was more eager than ever to find the door.
She chose an aisle at random and moved down it at a brisk walk, heels clicking rapidly against the marble. On both sides of the aisle, the shelves were covered with bones stacked like cordwood, each with a yellowing tag tied to its end. The tags flapped and fluttered in the dead air stirred by her passage. The place was like a crypt. Amid the silence, the darkness, and the ghoulish specimens, it was hard not to think about the set of grisly murders that had occurred just a few years before, within this very subbasement. It was still the subject of rumor and speculation in the staff lounge.
The aisle ended in another jog.
Damn it, thought Nora, looking up and down the long rows of shelving that vanished into the gloom. Another welling of anxiety, harder to fight down this time. And then, once again, she heard—or thought she heard—a noise from behind. This time it wasn’t a pattering, so much as the scrape of a foot on stone.
“Who’s there?” she demanded, spinning around. “Mr. Puck?”
Nothing save the hiss of steam and the drip of water.
She began walking again, a little faster now, telling herself not to be afraid; that the noises were merely the incessant shiftings and settlings of an old, decrepit building. The very corridors seemed watchful. The click of her heels was unbearably loud.
She turned a corner and stepped in another puddle of water. She pulled back in disgust. Why didn’t they do something about these old pipes?
She looked at the puddle again. The water was black, greasy—not, in fact, water at all. Oil had leaked on the floor, or maybe some chemical preservative. It had a strange, sour smell. But it didn’t look like it had leaked from anywhere: she was surrounded by shelves covered with mounted birds, beaks open, eyes wide, wings upraised.
What a mess, she thought, turning her expensive Bally shoe sideways to find that the oily liquid had soiled the sole and part of the stitching. This place was a disgrace. She pulled an oversized handkerchief from her pocket—a necessary accoutrement to working in a dusty museum—and wiped it along the edge of the shoe. And then, abruptly, she froze. Against the white background of the handkerchief, the liquid was not black. It was a deep, glistening red.
She dropped the handkerchief and took an involuntary step back, heart hammering. She looked at the pool, stared at it with sudden horror. It was blood—a whole lot of blood. She looked around wildly: where had it come from? Had it leaked out of a specimen? But it seemed to be just sitting there, all alone—a large pool of blood in the middle of the aisle. She glanced up, but there was nothing: just the dim ceiling thirty feet above, crisscrossed with pipes.
Then she heard what sounded like another footfall, and, through a shelf of specimens, she glimpsed movement. Then, silence returned.
But she had definitely heard something. Move, move, all her instincts cried out.
Nora turned and walked quickly down the long aisle. Another sound came—fast footsteps? The rustle of fabric?—and she paused again to listen. Nothing but the faint drips from the pipes. She tried to stare through the isolated gaps in the shelves. There was a wall of specimen jars, snakes coiled in formaldehyde, and she strained to see through. There seemed to be a shape on the other side, large and black, rippled and distorted by the stacks of glass jars. She moved… and it moved in turn. She was sure of it.
She backtracked quickly, breath coming faster, and the dark shape moved as well. It seemed to be pacing her in the next aisle—perhaps waiting for her to reach either one end or the other.
She slowed and, struggling to master her fear, tried walking as calmly as she could toward the end of the aisle. She could see, hear, the shape—so near now—moving as well, keeping pace.
“Mr. Puck?” she ventured, voice quavering.
There was no answer.