13 Time Thieves by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Ace Double 00990
Published: 1972-09-16T05:00:00+00:00

IX & X

He was thankful for the recent balmy weather which had given the city clear skies for several days.

The run-nels were dry, or nearly so, and they presented no hazard more nerve-wracking than occasional patches of slick, wet mud. He fell on a few of these, skinning both knees and both elbows. His clothes were damp in many places and smeared with a rich, black soil; chewing gum wrap-pers stuck to his trousers; his face was filthy; the left sleeve of his shirt was torn from cuff to elbow. He didn’t curse once.

Nor did he wish he was out of that place and under an open sky, for all these bothersome details were far more desirable than capture.

His eyes had somewhat adjusted to the gloom, though he could see very little, no more than a few feet. There was no sign of movement behind, no light to show the triplets the way.

He began to walk rather than run any farther. His chest ached; his calves and thighs felt strained and loose. As he walked, he held a hand over his heart, as if clutch-ing it, feeling the beat of it and wishing there were some way to slow the tempo. He took turn after turn in the sub-terranean network; each twist into a new branch of the drainage system was one more obstacle to anyone who might be trying to follow him.

Ahead, concrete steps, fortified with flagstone insets, led up into more darkness. The city was built on two hills and in the valley between; necessarily, there would have to be different levels in the drains.

Weak, blue light, fil-tering down from above, showed him the way. He climbed the steps, avoiding the soggy clumps of rotting, dead leaves that clung in all the corners of the risers.

At the top of the stairs, he found a landing from which two tunnels bored away in opposite directions.

Directly in front of him, in the blank stone wall, there was a heavy, metal door, painted gray with the number 17 stenciled on it in white. A blue safety bulb burned in a wire cage above the door. He crossed to it, tried the handle, and found the door locked.

“Hello in there!” he called without response.

He pounded on the door, sure that he had found a maintenance area of some sort. It was sturdily hinged and reverberated only slightly, despite the force of his knocking.

“Hey, in there!”

Still no answer.

He turned away from it and went back to sit on the first step of the stairway. Instead of thinking about his plight, his mind traveled to thoughts of Della, where it dwelled for long, pleasant minutes.

He tried to picture her, lying in bed yet, warm, curled up, one hand drawn to her mouth, almost as if she would begin sucking her thumb. It was how she always slept; he had little trouble envisioning her.

But he could do better than that. He bored a hole in the obsidian walls around his mental landscape and pro-jected a beam of cognition, seeking her.

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