Is this what he died for? Was this what he’d been asking for all along? Was this what Tomasz and Regine and the Driver and all the convenient things had been leading him to?
Do I want this? he thinks.
Do I still want this?
And he realizes that he doesn’t really know for sure.
Here is the chance –
Here is the doorway.
He lifts his hand and reaches through.
46
The surge of light is so bright it’s almost a physical assault. He squeezes his eyes shut like he’s been punched and stumbles back down into the square, ready to run –
But not quite yet.
He holds up a hand to shadow his eyes and opens them into the tiniest slits he can manage. The doorway, so solidly dark just seconds before, is now equally solidly white.
No. Not quite solid.
There’s something just inside.
Another door. A second door. Made of milky-white glass.
And it’s open.
Seth cautiously goes back to the front steps. The light seems to radiate not from any particular source but from every surface inside: the inner door itself, the walls beyond, and he can also now see the stairway going down from it deeper inside. All white, all seemingly made of glass.
It is absolutely nothing like the insides of the buildings around it.
He can hear something now, too. A hum of . . . what? Electricity? It must be, to generate a light this powerful. But also more. A hum suggesting further power, coming from down those stairs, but like the silent door opening, like the engine of the van, it’s a clean sound, sleeker and newer than any power source he’s ever heard.
Seth stops at the outer threshold. He leans down and reaches in a hand, touching the floor. It feels exactly how it looks, like a white pane of glass, and the air inside is cooler than out here.
He stands. The light is so naked, such an unmistakable signal in this dark night, he feels dangerously exposed. He looks around nervously. Surely some alarm must have been tripped. Surely the Driver must be making its way back here even now.
But he only hears the low hum. Nothing else.
No sound of the engine.
And without another thought, without letting himself disappear into another self-debate, he steps through the outer doorway.
Nothing happens. No sounds, no blaring sirens objecting to his presence, nothing. He looks back out onto the square, floodlit by all this brightness. Whatever he’s going to do, he needs to hurry.
It’s two steps to the inner door, and he takes them. Nothing still happens. The white glass stairs beyond it go down a flight and turn back on themselves, heading farther down. He can just about see the bottom of the second flight, where they reach what could possibly be another corridor.
Again, it’s nothing like the rest of the prison. It’s like he’s stepped into an entirely different building, an entirely different place altogether. Even the door has no latch, no way to open or shut it, or lock it either. It’s essentially just a panel on invisible hinges, unlike any door he’s ever seen. Except maybe on television. In shows about the future.
He puts a foot inside the second doorway. Nothing changes. He takes the first step down. Then another, and another. He glances back into the darkness, but there’s still nothing. He keeps going, trying to make his footfalls as quiet as he can, listening for any other sounds.
But there’s only him, and that low hum.
He pauses at the turning. The same white walls and steps lead down to a short corridor with a door at the end. It’s closed. Seth continues on toward it, noticing that the underside of the stairwell is made of the same glassy material as everything else. This whole room could have been carved out of one solid block of milk-colored glass. He reaches the bottom and stops before the door. It’s like the one above, flat, featureless, and generating its own light.
He reaches out, but before he even comes into contact with it, it opens. He jumps back, but stops as he sees that it’s merely sliding smoothly into the wall, as if it’s simply responded to his presence by performing the most likely task he might ask of it. Beyond it, there’s just another white corridor with a turn at the end.
But the hum is louder.
He waits for another moment. Then another. But still, nothing happens. No one comes. He sees that the light down the new hallway is different, more than just the glow from the walls. Something changes beyond the turn.
Seth swallows. He swallows again.
Now or never, he thinks.
It doesn’t work. He doesn’t move.
It’ll be nothing, he thinks. It won’t be what Tomasz and Regine think. It won’t be what I imagine. It won’t be stupid aliens, that’s for sure.
But he’s afraid, more than he was outside.
Because something is clearly down here.
He steps through the door.
He moves down the corridor.
He turns the corner.
And looks out.
Over a vast, vast room, as deep as an airplane hangar.
Which contains hundreds, thousands of shiny black coffins.
47
The room doesn’t match the stairwell. The walls and floor are a kind of polished, shiny concrete that looks spotlessly clean. Milky panels of light shine down on the coffins at intervals from the ceiling.
Over an area that stretches farther than he can see.
He’s on a rise, a small platform edging out from the door slightly above the floor of the larger room. Beyond, there are rows upon rows upon rows of coffins. They pull away from him, pushing into the distance, carrying on through faraway passageways into suggestions of deeper, even larger rooms beyond.
This place is much bigger than the prison above it. There are wide aisles down the center of the room, stretching as far into the depths as the coffins. Wide enough for a van to drive through, Seth thinks. Well, they had to get the coffins down here somehow, didn’t they? There could be any number of unknown doors back there, opening out at different points into the world above, but . . .
“How can this be?” he whispers. “How?”
The hum comes from here. He can see no source for it, no cables along the floor or any kind of separate machinery that’s not a coffin, but the sound is certainly this place, these things, operating however they’re supposed to be operating.
With people inside. Asleep.
Living their lives.
The platform he’s standing on has a short staircase at one end. He makes his way down to the shiny concrete floor, again expecting an alarm to warn him away or someone demanding to know what the hell he’s doing here.
He approaches the nearest coffin. It’s shut tight. He half expects it to pop open under his touch, like the door did, but nothing changes. He has to look for several long moments to even find the seal. The metal feels cool, but neither artificially cold nor hot. He moves around it, but everything’s the same as the one at his house, including – he kneels down to check – a small tube in the middle disappearing into the shiny concrete floor.