Frankenstein

rings?”
    “Don’t answer it.”
    “What if the phone rings?”
    “Don’t answer it.”
    “What if Mrs. Trudy LaPierre comes back?”
    “She won’t.”
    “What if—”
    Mr. Lyss turned on Nummy, and his face twisted up so he looked every bit like the worst kind of bad man that he claimed to be. “Stop badgering me! Stay away from the windows and sit somewhere with your head up your butt till I tell you to take it out, you clueless, useless, fumbling, flat-footed
retard!
”
    The old man stepped into the bathroom and slammed shut the door.
    For a moment, Nummy stood there, wanting to ask a couple of questions through the door, but he decided that would be a bad idea.
    Instead, he went into the kitchen. He circled the room, studying everything.
    He said aloud, “Faster is disaster. Easy and slow makes it all go just so. Think it through double, you’ll stay out of trouble.”
    The phone didn’t ring.
    Nobody rang the doorbell.
    Everything was going to be all right.

    
chapter
37

    When Bryce came out of Room 218, no one manned the nurses’ station. Her back to him, Doris Makepeace proceeded to the farther end of the main wing and disappeared into a patient’s room.
    No other nurse, orderly, or maintenance person could be seen. Even for a hospital, the long hallway struck him as uncannily quiet.
Especially
for a hospital. The impression of serious understaffing seemed to confirm that the remaining nurses were making a pretense of normalcy to conceal some unpleasant and perhaps alarming truth.
    With the nurses’ station unattended, the moment had come for Bryce to get to a staircase without being noticed. He wanted to check out lower floors to learn if the conditions here were universal.
    The building was shaped like a squared-off C, with three wings of equal length, one running north-south and two running east-west. The main wing offered central stairs and elevators, and the east-west wings each provided a staircase. The hallway at the south end of the building was the nearer of the two, and he headed for it.
    As he passed rooms where doors stood open wide, he glanced at thepatients. For this time of day, an unusual number appeared to be asleep. Few TVs were on. He saw a couple of visitors sitting at bedsides, waiting for the sleepers to wake.
    He should have told Travis to pretend to take any pill a nurse might bring, to hold it under his tongue and spit it out the moment she left the room.
    In the south hall, he went to the west end, where an exit sign identified the emergency stairs. He descended two flights to the ground floor.
    This was the main level, with the lobby and gift shop, with the labs and surgeries. It also provided additional patient rooms.
    Bryce cracked the door, peered out. As he remembered, before him lay the technical wing, where MRIs, X-rays, and other tests were performed. To meet requirements of the hospital’s liability insurance, a patient here would always be in a wheelchair, being taken to and from his room by a member of the staff.
    If Bryce was going to risk being stopped and escorted back to his room, he preferred first to have a glimpse of the lowest floor, the basement. The voices that he’d heard in the return-air duct had seemed to come from a distance even greater than the basement, but they had certainly originated below the main floor.
    He eased the door shut and descended two flights to the bottom of the stairwell. The basement door bore the same stern notice that had appeared on upper doors— THIS FIRE EXIT MUST REMAIN UNLOCKED AT ALL TIMES —but it would not open. He tried the lever again, with no success.
    Then he heard someone insert a key in the lock.
    With the instinct of a rabbit stalked by a wolf, Bryce turned and bounded up the stairs two at a time to the landing. Out of sight ofanyone who might enter below, he snatched off his slippers because they made too much noise.
    As the lower door opened, Bryce continued climbing, soundlessly now, to the ground-floor landing, where he paused with one hand on the lever of the exit door.
    He heard no footsteps ascending, but neither did he hear the basement door close. The person down there must be holding it open.
    Whoever ordered the door to be illegally locked had not trusted in the lock alone. A guard apparently had been stationed on the other side.
    Bryce held his breath, listening to the sentinel who listened for movement in the silent stairwell.
    From somewhere in the basement came a stifled cry