‘Clear,’ Jackson hissed.
‘Struggle?’ Karina whispered, looking at the files and sheets of paper scattered across the entire room.
Ethan shook his head in confusion, as did Donovan. If there had been a struggle, he would have expected to see files dropped in one particular area as the person holding them, presumably the clerk, had dropped them in favour of defending herself. But the papers, thousands of them, coated the entire floor like a sea of trash.
Donovan backed out and headed further down the corridor, with Karina alongside him. Lopez shadowed her closely as she raised her rifle, the flashlight beam slicing into the darkness ahead and reflecting off something metallic at the far end.
Ethan, just behind the team, hesitated as something odd began nagging at him. A strange sensation washed across his skin, as though static electricity was flaring off the walls and lifting the fine hairs on his body. He felt his ears twitch involuntarily, as though he were trying to listen to something behind him as a powerful compulsion to look over his shoulder swept through his awareness.
The corridor behind them was pitch-black, a mysterious void. Ethan was about to whisper a warning to the team when Karina’s voice called out huskily.
‘I can see someone.’
The flashlight beams caught on a face at the end of the corridor, somebody kneeling on the ground. Karina broke into a run, followed quickly by the rest of her team as they dashed to the elevator, the white beams of light dancing and reflecting off the doors.
Karina aimed her beam straight at a human face.
‘Jesus!’
Karina staggered to a halt and collapsed backwards, landing hard on her butt on the carpeted floor of the corridor as her flashlight illuminated a face crushed between the warped and mangled elevator doors.
The features of a once-pretty blonde girl of maybe twenty-five were twisted sideways, her jaw shattered and yanked up across the side of her face. One of her eyeballs had burst inside her fractured skull, an arm dangling down to brush the floor beneath her.
‘Goddamn,’ Donovan said.
Glen Ryan played his beam over the elevator. The shaft itself was clearly visible around the elevator, which dangled from its cables within the shaft instead of hugging the walls. The entire car was crushed like a packet of potato chips, the metal warped and crunched as though hammered in a giant’s forge.
‘What happened here?’ Karina gasped.
Ethan looked at the shattered hulk of the elevator. ‘That must have been what the guard thought was gunshots,’ he guessed. ‘Somebody must have taken power tools to it.’
‘Question is, who?’ Lopez said, ‘And where are they?’
Ethan felt again the overpowering desire to look over his shoulder. On impulse, he whirled, staring into the deep blackness behind them. Karina’s flashlight beam spun to slice into the corridor, and, as Ethan glanced at it, he saw a galaxy of dust motes suddenly whorl away from them as though somebody had sprinted past.
‘There’s somebody behind us,’ Ethan said.
26
The team’s flashlights all spun and pierced the gloom back down the corridor. Ethan saw Karina point at the whirling cloud of dust motes.
‘There,’ she said.
Donovan aimed his rifle down the corridor, but the beam picked up nothing except the silent and empty spaces behind them.
‘There’s nobody there,’ he said. ‘We don’t have time for this crap.’ He turned back to the ruined elevator and then looked at Jackson. ‘Call for back-up to sweep the rest of the building, and get forensics up here as soon as you can. We need this area sealed off until we can figure out what the hell happened.’
Ethan heard Donovan’s words but they trailed off in his mind as he edged back down the corridor. Something in the air around him seemed off, a tension that charged his senses. He glimpsed Lopez alongside him, walking slowly and also gazing into the darkness. In the sweeping beams from the flashlights behind, he saw thin slivers of Lopez’s long black hair dancing upward.
Ethan reached out and touched her shoulder.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Static electricity,’ Karina said from behind them. Ethan looked at her as she followed them, her flashlight glowing through Lopez’s hair. ‘It’s making your hair stand on end.’
Ethan searched the gloomy shadows. ‘You can smell the charge,’ he said, sensing a stale note on the air around him.
Karina gripped her rifle tighter. ‘What the hell is going on here?’
Ethan shook his head as they crept forwards, sensing but not seeing. On impulse, he closed his eyes and stopped moving, just letting the strange, charged air settle around him. The darkness seethed and he felt something surge as though a live current had danced past high on his left. A brush of bitterly cold air seemed to suck the life out of the atmosphere.
Ethan’s eyes flicked open as he turned and stared up into the corridor.
‘It’s up there,’ Lopez whispered, looking in the same direction.
Ethan took a pace closer, the blackness as deep and featureless as anything he had ever known, and reached out.
A crash reverberated through the corridor as the crushed elevator suddenly tilted wildly and smashed into the shaft wall. Ethan’s heart slammed inside his chest as he whirled to see the ruined car suddenly vanish from sight as it plunged downward through the shaft with a screech of metal scraping along metal. The elevator crashed into the basement, the sound of battered metal echoing up and down the shaft and corridor.
Ethan saw Neville Jackson staring at the shaft in disbelief.
‘The cables were already severed,’ he said.
‘It must’ve been wedged in there somehow,’ Glen guessed.
Ethan had only a moment to wonder how that was possible when the ceiling lights suddenly flickered into life and filled the corridor with blessed, warm light. Ethan looked around them as a sudden weight seemed to lift from his shoulders and the bitter chill vanished. He couldn’t explain it even to himself, but a tension vanished from his chest as though somehow with the return of the light it had become easier to breathe. He looked at Lopez, whose dark eyes were shadowed with concern.
‘Tell me I was just imagining all of that,’ she said.
Ethan shook his head slowly and glanced at Karina. ‘You, too?’
Karina nodded. ‘Felt like somebody was standing on my shoulders. What’s going on?’
Ethan turned, as Donovan, Jackson and Glen Ryan strode past, heading for the stairwell. ‘Follow me, Karina!’ Donovan shouted.
Ethan watched as Karina dutifully dashed away, then turned to Lopez.
‘Something else is going on here, Nicola,’ he said. ‘I didn’t imagine what I just saw and neither did you.’
Lopez shook her head as she gazed around the corridor. ‘Damn straight. It’s gone now, but that wasn’t like anything I’ve felt since El Museo des las Momias back in Guanajuato.’
‘The what?’ Ethan asked.
‘It’s a museum back home in Mexico,’ she explained. ‘Whole bunch of bodies interred a couple of centuries ago in a cemetery where the families had to pay a tax to keep the bodies there. Nobody really paid, so the bodies were dug up. Some of them were mummified and were put in the museum. Point is, nobody goes in there, man, it’s like a freak show. Disembodied voices, things moving about, you name it.’
Ethan felt a chill tingle across his shoulders.
‘Your hair stand on end there, too?’
‘No,’ Lopez said with a slight smile, ‘but myself and a few friends snuck in there one night and we snuck out again pretty damned quick. There are some things you don’t mess with, and whatever was in this corridor felt just like that museum, Ethan, something that you want to get away from.’