"Don't go tharn now, you're almost home free," he said, and his words echoed back, flat and strange. He hadn't meant to speak aloud, and that made it worse.
He turned to the right, setting his back to the library wing, walked past more offices, came to another corridor, and turned down that. He began to look behind himself frequently, assuring himself that no one - Elder, maybe - was following him, but unable to believe it. The hallway ended in a closed door that said RADIOLOGY. A hand-lettered sign hung on the knob: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE RANDALL.
Stu went back and peered around the corner and back where he had come from. The dead body in the white-suit was tiny with distance now, hardly more than a speck, but seeing it there so changeless and eternal made him want to run away as fast as he could.
He turned right, setting his back to it again. Twenty yards farther up, the corridor branched into another T-junction. Stu turned right and went past more offices. The corridor ended at the microbiology lab. In one of the lab carrels a young man clad in jockey shorts lay sprawled over his desk. He was comatose, bleeding from the nose and mouth. His breath rattled in and out with a sound like October wind in dead cornhusks.
And then Stu did begin to run, turning from one corridor to another, becoming more and more convinced that there was no way out, at least not from this level. The echo of his footfalls chased him, as if either Elder or Vic had lived just long enough to put a squad of ghostly MPs on his trail. Then another fancy crowded that out, one he somehow associated with the queer dreams he had been having the last few nights. The idea grew so strong that he became afraid to turn around, afraid that if he did he would see a white-suited figure striding after him, a white-suited figure with no face but only blackness behind a Plexiglas plate. Some dreadful apparition, a hit-man from beyond sane time and space.
Panting, Stu rounded a corner, sprinted ten feet before he realized the corridor was a dead end, and crashed into a door with a sign over it. The sign read EXIT.
He pushed at the bar, convinced it would not move, but it did, and the door opened easily. He went down four steps to another door. To the left of this landing, more stairs went down into thick darkness. The top half of this second door was clear glass reinforced with crisscrossed safety wire. Beyond it was only the night, the beautiful mellow summer night, and all the freedom a man ever dreamed of.
Stu was still staring out, transfixed, when the hand slipped out of the darkness of the stairwell and grasped his ankle. A gasp tore at Stu's throat like a thorn. He looked around, his belly a freezing floe of ice, and beheld a bloody, grinning face upturned in the darkness.
"Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful," it whispered in a cracked and dying voice. "It's soooo dark - "
Stu screamed and tried to pull free. The grinning thing from the darkness held on, talking and grinning and chuckling. Blood or bile was trickling from the corners of its mouth. Stu kicked at the hand holding his ankle, then stomped it. The face hanging in the darkness of the stairwell disappeared. There was a series of thudding crashes... and then the screams began. Of pain or of rage, Stu could not tell. He didn't care. He battered against the outside door with his shoulder. It banged open and he tottered out, whirling his arms to keep his balance. He lost it anyway and fell down on the cement path.
He sat up slowly, almost warily. Behind him, the screams had stopped. A cool evening breeze touched his face, dried the sweat on his brow. He saw with something very like wonder that there was grass, and flowerbeds. Night had never smelled as fragrantly sweet as this. A crescent moon rode the sky. Stu turned his face up to it thankfully, and then walked across the lawn toward the road which led to the town of Stovington below. The grass was dressed with dewfall. He could hear wind whispering in the pines.
"I'm alive," Stu Redman said to the night. He began to cry. "I'm alive, thank God I'm alive, thank You, God, thank You, God, thank You - "
Tottering a little, he began to walk down the road.
BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIPS Chapter 30-32