One of his hands rises. It carries a set of metal knuckles, bladed and rimed with blood. He hangs them from a peg like an ornament and there they sway. He spins around and Simon ducks down and cringes as a footstep once more clatters the grate.
All this while his other arm trembles with the weight of the lantern. His wrist feels stabbed through with hornets and he fears he might lose his grip altogether. When the door closes and the bolt turns, he drops his arm and nearly drops the lantern.
Only then does he look for Ella. She has crept back in the tunnel and lowered the wick on her lantern so it gives off only a little light and makes her look small, a hundred miles away.
He waits a long minute and then pushes aside the grate and pokes his head above the floor. The room is empty. For how long, he doesn’t know. He can see a crack of light under the door.
The bat remains where it was, unnoticed by Slade, propped against the wall by the closet. He checks the door again, the ribbon of light beneath it, and sees no shadows in the hallway, no indication that anyone might be near. He wills his breathing to quiet, but his lungs cannot fill fast enough to satisfy his body.
Across the room he pads, making no sound. He trades the lantern to his good hand and carries it before him, not wanting to set it down for fear he might forget something else in his haste. His free hand—his bad hand—closes around the bat. His grip is not good enough, ruined by the strain of the past few minutes. He makes it a few steps before the bat slips and falls with a clatter magnified by the concrete floor.
He watches it roll in a long parabola, spinning with the slope of the floor, toward the open grate. It catches briefly at the lip—and then falls through, into the dark square.
A long second of silence passes. Then the bat hits the sewer floor with a dong and rattle. Ella does not scream at him, call him a fool, but he knows she will. He can hear her voice call, “Hurry,” can hear the bat scrape when she picks it up. And then he hears something else.
Footsteps. The sound is more than a sound—it is a presence—powerful enough to be felt as well as heard. The very air seems to shake. He knows he cannot escape it. He does not have time to think. If he did, he would not do what he does next. He drags the grate back over the hole and crashes it in place. For a second he stares through the bars at Ella, far below him, her face oranged by her upheld lantern, but before she can question him, he is running for the door, snapping the lock, twisting the knob, yanking it open.
There is only one way to save her. He must steal time, what may very well be his last act as a thief.
When Slade rounds the corner, Simon hurls the lantern at his face and the big man raises an arm to swat it aside, but before he can, Simon has already dropped to the floor in a slide. Slade’s legs are wide enough apart to shoot through, and, once past them, the boy bounces up and into a hard run. All this before Slade knocks the lantern against the wall.
The shattering matches the feeling inside Simon. This might be the one building in the Sanctuary he has never visited—the police headquarters—and he can only guess which way he is going as he negotiates a series of dimly lit corridors. He enters a room of barred cells, and several men reach for him and rattle the bars and moan and cheer. One of them nearly snatches him, a raisin-faced man with black snot bubbling from his diseased gash of a nose. Simon makes it through one doorway, then another. He could turn this corner and just as easily find a closet, but his luck holds out. A stone staircase rises before him.
Behind him Slade does not bellow, does not scream or curse or growl. He merely pursues, all his noise invested in his movement, stomping his feet and crashing into walls and shoving through the doors Simon closes on him in his passing.
They race up the stairs and out of the basement and down a tiled hallway framed by dark wood and festooned with old photos of policemen who watch them forbiddingly. Simon has never moved faster in his life. His feet hit the floor so hard pain rifles up his calves. The ceiling bulges upward, into a meeting hall, where the noise of his footsteps and the footsteps pursuing him multiplies.
He races now toward the entry, where two deputies appear. They drop their hands to their machetes. They call out for him to stop. And he does, skidding, nearly falling. He does not bother turning around, knowing Slade can’t be far behind, but he spies to his left the staircase that leads to the second level, and he hurries there.
Another deputy appears on the landing, close enough to reach a hand and snatch his collar, but Simon twists from his grip, slipping off his shirt altogether and running bare chested down a long hallway.
He has no plan except to avoid the voices that pursue him. Halfway down the hallway, he pushes through the door of an office. He jumps onto the desk, shoves aside the chair, and worms his way out the window. The sill is spiked with nails and glass, but he does not have time to take care. He slices a finger, spikes his palm, when swinging himself over.
He tries to let go, but his hand won’t loosen, his bad hand. It has been run through by a nail. He yanks at it and the pain electrifies him, not from the nail, not yet, but the tendons twisting and snapping in his wrist. His legs dangle in the air, maybe thirty feet between him and the ground.
He feels eyes on him. He hears voices in the street, a gathering crowd.
In his mind, he calls up the vision of Ella—them dancing to the Fran?oise Hardy record—and wishes her face to be the last thing he sees. But it is not. Another appears above him, like a risen moon. Slade is not smiling or frowning. His slitted eyes study Simon with a predatory fascination. Then he takes hold of his hand and pats it comfortingly before dragging it off the nail—and letting go.
Chapter 50