The room now appeared smaller still.
Chiun pressed his hand to his forehead. Beads of perspiration had formed there. They mingled with the drying blood and rolled onto his palm. He closed his hand delicately around them.
Something was wrong. A Master of Sinanju does not perspire without cause.
The walls continued to close in.
It could not be mechanical, this closing inward. The Master of Sinanju felt no vibration of gears grinding. He did not discern the walls moving toward him. Yet they were close enough that he could have reached out and touched them with his bloodstained fingers.
If this was some diabolic trap, whoever had engineered it had forgotten one thing.
He had forgotten to close the only door.
The Master of Sinanju padded out into the hallway. He was free.
When he looked back into the room, the walls had returned to the positions they had occupied when he first opened his eyes.
Chiun nodded to himself. There was no doubt now. The Leader's poison. It was the only explanation. His mind was playing tricks on him. It would cleanse itself soon enough.
The hallway was cast in a deep gloom. There were no lights on, and beyond the windows it was dark. Chiun did not know where such sparse light as there was originated.
He sharpened his senses. There was no one else nearby. He expanded his awareness. The entire building was empty.
At the end of the hall was a long wooden staircase. Padding to the top step, he descended this to the ground floor.
The stairs creaked beneath his feet.
That should not be. He was a Master of Sinanju.
Taking a sip of reviving air, Chiun took a cautious step. Still, the stair creaked in complaint. And it seemed as if there were more of them now. They stretched limitlessly into some infinite abyss below.
Something was desperately wrong. He continued, humiliation burning with every betraying creak.
Chiun touched his neck once more. The wound was as fresh as the moment it had been opened. It felt larger now. Even his neck felt larger. As if it too were growing to accommodate the expanding injury.
Suddenly, the stairs ended and Chiun found himself standing at the sterile entrance to Folcroft Sanitarium. The door was open, and the chill air of night blew in around Chiun's ankles.
He looked back. It was no longer the staircase behind him, but the door to Folcroft. Somehow he had ended up outside, beyond the door, and the door was closed.
He was being taunted. Tested.
But he did not fear. Fear he had banished long ago.
The Master of Sinanju tucked his hands into the sleeves of his kimono and disappeared into the gathering dark, where owls stared and called their eternal question.
"His neural activity just went off the charts!" Dr. Lance Drew studied the brain-wave monitor screen next to The Master of Sinanju's bed. On the screen a series of gently flowing waves had become a collection of sharp, almost vertical lines. They shot up, dropped down, and shot up again. Several disappeared off the top of the monitor, as if to escape their own frenetic energy.
A second doctor and three nurses had joined Dr. Drew at Chiun's bedside. Frantically, they pored over printouts and EKGs.
"What is it?" Remo asked anxiously. Smith lay docile where Remo had laid him, on the room's spare bed. Chiun's condition had gone critical just as Remo entered the room.
"I don't know," Dr. Drew said. "He was stable until just this minute. Now . . ." He shook his head. "I don't know what it is." He noticed Smith's prone form for the first time.
"What's the matter with Dr. Smith?" he asked.
"Same thing that's wrong with him," Remo said, nodding to Chiun.
One of the attending physicians went to Smith, checked his vital signs, and said, "He'll keep."
"Then give me a hand here," the doctor said, shaking his head. "We're in for a rough night."
A crisp professional voice interjected itself. "Doctor . . ."
It was one of the nurses. Chiun's face had twitched slightly, then returned to its parchment calmness. It resembled a death mask.
The doctor examined the monitor. The lines continued to spike dangerously. "If this keeps up, we're going to lose him," the doctor warned, glancing up at his colleagues. "He could burn out his entire nervous system."
Remo stood helplessly at Chiun's bedside. One of the nurses attempted to shepherd him to one side, but it was like pushing smoke. Each time he somehow shifted away without, apparently, moving his feet. She spoke gently of the need to give the physicians room to work. Two thick-wristed hands grasped hers and clapped them together. Not hard. But she couldn't separate her palms afterward.
She hurried off to her jeweler. Surely he would know how to un-weld her wedding ring from the one on her right ring finger.
"His heart rate's increased," the other doctor was saying.
"Respiration, too."
Remo hovered over Chiun's bedside, a spectator to a battle he could barely understand. The Master of Sinanju's life hung in the balance. Now Smith's as well. He'd probably be next.
"If only we knew what kind of infection we're dealing with," the doctor lamented at one point, "we'd have something to go on."
"It's Chinese," Remo said.
"Can you do better than that?" Dr. Drew demanded, not looking up.
"No," Remo admitted. What could he tell them that would help? They wouldn't believe the truth. And if they did, so what? Vampirism had no cure. Its victims were neither dead nor alive.
Remo's anxious eyes went to his mentor's face.
The Master of Sinanju was peaceful in repose. It was as if the medical team had forgotten there was a patient in the room, so busy were they monitoring their equipment. Languishing amid this nest of high-tech machinery, surrounded by white-clad Folcroft doctors and nurses, Chiun looked old and frail.
His face twitched spasmodically once again, then settled back into its normal pattern.
"If this is good-bye, Little Father," Remo said softly, "I swear no gyonshi will celebrate this day."
"What's that?" Dr. Drew asked distractedly. No answer. He looked up to see the door swinging shut behind Remo's resolute back.
After Remo had gone, Harold W. Smith sat up stiffly in bed. The pain in his stomach and throat were gone, although there was a slight tightening in his chest.
"Dr. Smith!" Dr. Drew exclaimed. "Please do not exert yourself! We will get to you in a moment!"
"Nonsense," Smith croaked, tightening the knot of his Dartmouth tie. "I feel fine."
"But the young man who brought you in here . . ."
"Do not concern yourself," he insisted, waving his hand in dismissal. "He is too prone to worry. I feel fine. Now if you will excuse me, I have a telephone call to make." He slid from the bed and stepped briskly from the room.
One of the nurses cocked an eyebrow. "Did he sound strange to you?" she asked the others.
"He always sounds strange," said the other nurse.
"Actually, that was the first time he ever sounded normal to me," said Dr. Drew. "And I've been on staff ten years."
"Why do you suppose he kept rubbing his fingernail?" the first nurse whispered to the second, as they resumed ministering to the old Korean.
He did not know why he had come here. He only knew that he had felt compelled to do so.
The night air was heavy with moisture. The dampness clung to his kimono. The dew on the freshly mowed grass collected in dollops on the tops of his feet.
Long Island Sound stretched out into infinity behind the sanitarium. No boats bobbed on its surface. No lights were visible. No starlight reflected in the lapping waves. The Sound was totally black, like spilled crude.