“We have to work together if we’re going to get out. Understand? Everyone join hands and move toward the exit! Do not run or push! Follow me!”
To her amazement and relief, her little speech seemed to have a calming effect. The cries lessened further, and she felt Viola grasp her hand.
The fog was now up to her chest, its surface roiled and tendril-strewn. In a moment, they would be covered, blinded.
“Pass the word along! Keep holding hands! Follow me!”
Nora and Viola moved forward, guiding the crowd. Another enormous boom that was more a sensation than sound-and the crowd surged again in utter panic, abandoning any pretense to order.
“Hold hands!” she cried.
But it was too late: the crowd had lost its mind. Nora felt herself borne along, crushed in the press, the air literally squeezed from her lungs.
“Stop pushing!” she cried, but no one was listening any longer. She heard Viola beside her, also calling for calm, but her voice was swallowed up in the panic of the crowd and the deep booming sounds that filled the tomb. The strobes kept flashing, each flash causing a brief, brilliant explosion of light in the fog. And with each flash, she seemed to feel stranger, heavy… almost drugged. This wasn’t just fear she was feeling: it was something else. What was happening to her head?
The crowd surged toward the Hall of the Chariots, possessed by a mindless, animal panic. Nora clung to Viola’s hand with all her might. Suddenly a new sound cut in over the deep booming-a high keening at the threshold of audibility, rising and falling like a banshee. The razor-sharp shriek seemed to riddle her consciousness like a shotgun blast, increasing the strange sensation of alienness. Another surge in the crowd caused her to lose her grip on Viola’s hand.
“Viola!”
If there was an answering cry, it was lost in the tumult.
All of a sudden, the pressure around her relented, as if a cork had been released. She gasped, sucking air into her lungs, shaking her head in an attempt to clear it. The fog without seemed mirrored by another fog, growing within her mind.
A pilaster loomed into view through the gloom ahead. She clung to it, recognized a bas-relief: and suddenly knew where she was. The door to the Hall of the Chariots was just up ahead. If they could just get through it and away from the infernal fog…
She flattened herself against the wall, then felt her way along it, keeping out of the panicked crowd, until she could make out the door ahead. People were squeezing through, fighting and clawing, ripping at one another’s clothes, forming a bloody bottleneck of insanity and panic. More grotesque, deep groaning from the hidden speakers, along with an intensification of the bansheelike wail. Under this assault of noise, Nora felt a sudden vertigo, as if she were sinking; the kind of awful swoon she sometimes experienced in the throes of a fever. She staggered, fought to keep her feet: to fall now might mean the end.
She heard a cry and saw, through the swirling mist, a woman nearby, lying on one side, being trampled by the crowd. Instinctively, she bent forward, grabbed an upraised hand, and hauled her to her feet. The woman’s face was bloody, one leg crooked and obviously broken-but she was still alive.
“My leg,” the woman groaned.
“Put your arm around my shoulder!” Nora yelled.
She forced herself into the stream of people and the two were borne along through the doorway into the Hall of the Chariots. A dreadful, growing pressure… and then suddenly there was space, people milling about, disoriented, their clothes torn and bloody, weeping, shrieking for help. The woman sagged on her shoulder like a dead weight, whimpering. At least here they would be rid of the murderous barrage…
And yet, strangely, they were not. She had not escaped the sound, or the fog, or the strobe lights. Nora looked around, disbelieving. The fog was still rising fast, and more lights flashed from the ceiling-relentless, blinding bursts that each seemed to cloud her brain a little further.
Viola’s right, she thought in a vague, confused way. This was no malfunction. The script didn’t call for strobes or fog in the Hall of the Chariots; only in the burial chamber itself.
This was something planned-deliberate.
She clutched her throbbing head with one hand, urging the woman along, plodding slowly forward toward the God’s Second Passage and the tomb exit that lay beyond. But once again, a seething mass blocked the narrow door at the far end.
“One at a time!” Nora screamed.
Directly ahead of her, a man was trying to beat his way through the crowd. With her free arm, she seized him by his tuxedo collar, yanking him off balance. He looked around wildly, took a swing at her.
“Bitch!” he yelled. “I’ll kill you!”
Nora backed off in horror and the man turned back, grabbing and tearing at the people before him. But it wasn’t just him: all around, people were screaming, boiling with rage, eyes rolling in their sockets-utter bedlam, a Boschean vision of hell.
She felt it even within herself: overwhelming agitation; a muddy, unfocused fury; an impending sense of doom. Yet nothing had actually happened. There was no fire, no mass murder-nothing to justify this kind of mass insanity…
Nora spotted the museum’s director, Frederick Watson Collopy. His face looked shattered and he was staggering forward toward the doorway, one dead-looking leg trailing behind him: Draaaag-thump! Draaaag-thump!
He spied her and his ravaged face grew bright and hungry. He staggered toward her through the crush. “Nora! Help me!”
He seized the injured woman. Nora was about to thank him for his help, when he tossed her roughly to the ground.
Nora looked at him in horror. “What the hell are you doing?” She stepped forward to help the woman but Collopy seized her with incredible force, his hands clawing and grasping at her like a drowning man. She tried to twist free, but his desperate strength was shocking. In his frenzy, he twisted one arm around her neck.
“Help me!” he screamed again. “I can’t walk!”
Nora jabbed him in the solar plexus with her elbow and he staggered, but still clung to her.
There was a sudden flash by her side and Nora saw Viola, kicking Collopy fiercely in the shins. With a shriek, Collopy released his grip and collapsed to the floor, writhing and spitting curses.
Nora grabbed Viola and together they backed away from the writhing crowd, staggered toward the rear wall of the Hall of the Chariots. There was a crash and the sound of shattering glass as a display case toppled over.
“My head, my head!” Viola groaned, pressing her hands to her eyes. “I can’t think straight.”
“It’s like everyone’s gone crazy.”
“I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“I think it’s the strobe lights,” Nora said, coughing. “And the sounds… or maybe some chemical in the fog.”
“What do you mean?”
And then a swirling image appeared above them-a huge three-dimensional spinning spiral. With a thudding groan of sound, it twisted slowly… and then a piercing tone sounded, and another a quarter tone away, and another, throbbing and beating in dissonance, as the spiral began to rotate faster. Nora stared at it, instantly mesmerized. It was a holographic projection, it had to be. And yet it was real… it was like nothing she had ever seen before. It drew her forward, sucking her in, pulling her down into a maelstrom of insanity.
With a huge effort, she tore her eyes away. “Don’t look at it, Viola!”
Viola trembled all over, her eyes still fixated on the swirling image.
“Stop it!” Nora slapped her across the face with her free hand.
Viola just shook her head to clear the blow, her eyes wild, still staring.
“The show!” Nora said, shaking her. “It’s doing something to our minds!”
“What…?” Viola’s voice sounded drugged. And when she looked at Nora, her eyes were bloodshot-just like Wicherly’s had been.
“The show. It’s affecting our minds. Don’t look at it, don’t listen!”