Forever Odd

chases that might be my way out of the Panamint.
        The five-foot-square shaft, lined with metal-skinned fireboard, continued four stories above my position. Below, it dwindled into darkness that my flashlight could not fully probe.
        Such a roomy chimney would have been a vertical superhighway easily accommodating me, if not for all the pipes and conduits that lined three and a half of its walls. Bolted to the one otherwise clear section of wall, a ladder offered not just rungs, but four-inch-wide treads that provided surer footing.
        This chute did not lie near the elevator shafts. If Datura or Andre listened at that location, they would not hear me as I made my way down this vertical chase.
        Additional handholds and steel rings to receive the snap links of safety tethers bristled from among the pipes and conduits on the other three walls.
        Fixed at the top of the building, a half-inch-diameter nylon line, of the type employed by mountain climbers, hung loose down the center of the shaft. Massive knots, spaced at one-foot intervals, could serve as handholds. This appeared to have been replaced after the fire, perhaps by rescue workers.
        I deduced, perhaps incorrectly, that if in spite of the generous steps of the ladder and the ubiquitous anchor points for tethers, you took a plunge, the plumb-bobbed rope was a lifeline to be seized in free fall.
        Although I had fewer monkey genes than these conditions implied were necessary to transit the service well, I saw no alternative but to make use of it. Otherwise, I could wait for the mothership to beam me up-and one day be discovered here, all bones and jeans, in the rat graveyard.
        The beam of my flashlight had dimmed. I replaced the batteries with spares from my backpack.
        Using the spelunker’s Velcro cuff, I fixed the light to my left forearm.
        I put the folded fishing knife in one of my pockets.
        I drank half of the bottle of water that I hadn’t left with Danny, and I wondered how he was doing. The shotgun fire would have scared him. He probably thought I was dead.
        Maybe I was, and I just didn’t know it yet.
        I considered whether I needed to pee. I didn’t.
        Unable to find any further reasons to delay, leaving my backpack behind, I went into the vertical chase.

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    FIFTY
        
        ON A HIGH-NUMBER CABLE CHANNEL THAT I THINK IS called Crap That Nobody Else Will Show TV, I once saw an ancient movie serial about these adventurers who descend to the center of the earth and discover an underground civilization. It’s an evil empire, of course.
        The emperor resembles Ming the Merciless from those old Flash Gordon festivals of hokum, and he intends to make war on the surface world and take it over as soon as he develops the right death ray. Or when his immense fingernails grow long enough to be appropriate for the ruler of an entire planet, whichever comes first.
        This underworld is populated by the usual thugs and knaves, but also by two or three kinds of mutants, women in horned hats, and of course dinosaurs. This film masterwork was made decades before the invention of computer animation, and the dinosaurs were not even stop-motion clay models but iguanas. Rubber appliances were glued to the iguanas to make them appear scarier and more like dinosaurs, but they just looked like embarrassed iguanas.
        Descending the vertical chase, careful step by careful step, I reran the plot of that old serial in my mind, striving to focus on the absurd mustache of the emperor, on the particular race of mutants that looked suspiciously like dwarfs outfitted with rubber-snake headgear and leather pantaloons, on remembered bits of the hero’s dialogue marked by a wit that crackled like cream cheese, and on those campily amusing iguanasaurs.
        My mind kept drifting to Datura, that dependable spike through the foot: to Datura, to reverse psychic magnetism, to how unpleasant it would be when she disemboweled me and fished her amulet out of my stomach. Not good.
        The air in the service well proved not to be as savory as the soot-scented, toxin-laced air in the rest of the hotel. Stale, dank, alternately sulfurous and mildewy, it gathered substance as I went down into the hotel, until it seemed thick enough to drink.
        From time to time, horizontal chases entered the well, and in some instances, drafts flowed from them. These