One Door From Heaven

where she could more easily work with it. On second thought, she knocked it off the table with a sweep of her arm.
        The shade smashed, and the bulb, as well, casting this length of the labyrinth into deeper gloom. Shards of glass clinked and rattled as they spun across the floor.
        For a moment, Micky froze, listening intently. The breaking lamp had been unnervingly loud in the tomb-still house. She half expected to hear heavy and ominous footsteps, to be set upon by a mazekeeper straight out of Tales from the Crypt, a livid-eyed undead bureaucrat dressed in ragged gravecloth and displeased about being interrupted in its dinner of dead beetles. But if a mazekeeper arrived, he would exceed in grisliness the darkest imaginative efforts of those writers who created the Crypt, for he would be Preston Maddoc, not shudder-evoking in appearance, but harboring the father of all monsters under his skin.
        She stooped in the shadows, cautiously explored the floor, found a few large shards, gingerly tested them against her thumb, and found one sharp enough. When she sat on the table, it held her weight.
        Sawing with the glass edge, Micky worked first on the length of cord that connected her wrist restraints to those that bound her ankles. The plastic cut easily, and because copper was a soft metal, the twist of wires at the heart of the cord offered only slightly little more resistance than did the coating.
        Thankful that she had remained limber by faithfully adhering to an exercise regimen while in prison, she pulled her feet up onto the small table and set to work on the loops of cord that trammeled her. In a few minutes, her feet were free.
        As she puzzled over how to hold the cutting edge of the glass to best apply it to her shackles without slicing her wrists, she heard faint noises elsewhere in the house. Then a loud thud was followed by a slamming door.
        Maddoc had returned.
        SLUMPED in a grungy armchair, Leilani didn't know where she was or how she had gotten here, but though her thought processes remained frayed at the edges, she had no illusions that a maid would appear at any moment with a pot of Earl Grey and a tray of tea cakes.
        Wherever she might be, the place reeked more nauseatingly than the worst of old Sinsemilla's toxin-purging baths. In fact, the stink was so offensive that perhaps this was where the years and years of dear Mater's extracted toxins had been shipped for disposal. Maybe this foul miasma was what the wizard-baby breeder would smell like if she hadn't soaked away her sins on a regular basis.
        Leilani slid to the edge of the chair, stood up-and fell down. The stench at floor level motivated her to get a grip on herself and concentrate to expel the haze that clouded her thoughts.
        Her brace had been taken. She'd been mere steps from freedom, from a Fleetwood full of aliens. Boy, dog, Amazons, and the prospect of great adventures without evil pigmen. Now this. The work of the doom doctor was evident. Tiny bird skulls staring with empty sockets.
        THE HAND'S USELESS nature, her pathetic dependency, her deep genetic corruption squirmed across every plane and curve and crook of the steel brace as surely as bacteria swarmed the surfaces of a public toilet.
        A highly educated man, Preston knew that her uselessness and her dependency were abstract qualities that left no residue on things she touched, and he knew that her genetic corruption could not be passed along like a viral disease. Nevertheless, his right hand, in which he held the brace, grew sticky with sweat, and as he roamed the maze in search of the Slut Queen, he became convinced that the girl's hideous residues were dissolving in his perspiration and that they would seep deep into him through his traitorous pores. In the best of times, his sweat distressed him no less than did the urine and the mucus and the other offensive products of his metabolism, but in this instance, as his hand grew slimier, his antipathy to the girl swelled into a ripe disgust, disgust into a bile-black hatred that should have been beneath an ethical man like him. With each step that he took into the stinking bowels of the labyrinth, however, what he knew became less important than what he felt.
        HANDS STILL BOUND, holding the wicked shard of glass in front of her as though it were a halberd, Micky eased to an intersection of passageways, keeping her back