FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 1

Locked Gate

"Heavy rain is starting to fall throughout the area, and is expected to continue fairly solidly for the next few days, broken only by a few brief spells of sunshine. There is a strong possibility of it maturing into a full thunder-storm as temperatures and humidity levels continue to rise. Your high for tonight is 15 degrees Celsius - about 59 Fahrenheit - and for tomorrow a stuffy 28 Celsius, or 82 Fahrenheit. That's all your weather for now; next update is at six."

Sarah flicked the radio off with one cursory finger, her attractive, russet-gold face marred by a frown. Thunder-storms. That sounded about par for the course. She let out a lingering sigh, staring out of the windscreen at the ever-growing anvil of dark cloud looming on the horizon, idly fingering the large, circular locket that hung on a gold chain around her neck. "You'd better be there, Gabe. Hell, you'd better have a good excuse for dragging me out here, too. Five hours driving on the contents of a letter. I must be raving mad..."

The vixen's mind ran over the contents of the brief, idiosyncratic note her friend had sent her for what had to be the twentieth time that hour.

Saxon Gate. Urgent. Alone. Ancient Wall. 25 2 5 6 3

Gabe was one of only two people who knew what lay beneath the mask hewn from sarcasm, cynicism and more than a little bitterness that Sarah invariably wore. The other was his lifemate, Bess. Gabe was a little eccentric both in his speech and in the written word, his sentences frequently more truncated and conjunction-free than they needed to be; all in all a trait that took a little getting used to, but after fifteen years of rock-solid friendship Sarah was usually pretty quick at picking up on his meaning. This odd little missive, however, was completely off the beaten track of shared and related experience, and thus remained a riddle to her, and thus refused to be ignored.

Sarah's gangly lupine friend had set off on holiday with Bess a while back, taking a leisurely two-week motoring tour of various places down south, focusing on their shared penchant for history. A full month after their planned return date, with no word of any kind from them and little response from the authorities, the letter came. For a brief instant hope had ignited within her...until she read it.

Confusion had married itself to the concern as she set about making sense of the note. Thorough scanning of a map had turned up a small town called Saxon Gate, the kind of history-soaked locale neither Gabe nor Bess could resist for a moment. A little internet research had thrown up a hotel with the curious name of Ancient Wall, another relic of the many ages the town had seen. That added up nicely enough - they stayed at the Ancient Wall Hotel while exploring Saxon Gate. But why the urgency? And the numbers? Maybe one of them was a room number? If so, how to confirm it?

All these interrelated thoughts and many more besides swirled through the vixen's troubled mind as she guided her rickety hatchback along a surprisingly quiet trunk road, forced to maintain a slow and steady pace through fear of her engine failing. She really needed her monetary fortunes to improve soon, so she could finally ditch the four wheeled rust museum and buy something remotely comfortable. And reliable. Breaking down this close to resolution would be just her luck.

Exactly how close she was became apparent on rounding a corner and topping a slight rise to find the outer reaches of Saxon Gate directly ahead of her. Bland, deeply uninspired 60's terraces, with occasional examples of more modern yet just as unappealing build thrown in completely at random, lined up on either side of the road, each home with its own handkerchief-sized square of garden. Right on cue rain started pattering onto her windscreen, swiftly swelling to a thick downpour that pushed her anaemic wipers to the limit.

"Right, the Gate should be just ahead," Sarah mumbled, consulting her mental map, "and the hotel's to the north-east of it, two junctions up then straight along. Hope it's as quiet as these streets are. Guess no-one here likes the rain."

There were no vehicles at all parked anywhere in sight, and the very few she saw on the move were invariably heading out of Saxon Gate at speeds probably not all that wise in such conditions. That unnerved her slightly. The sight of the ancient fortified wall that gave the town its name unsettled her even more - thirty feet of solid limestone that circled two thirds of Saxon Gate, the only way in or out being via the eponymous Gate itself. Though a replica, it still provided an effective iron-bound barrier that could be swung across the High Street as it squeezed through the wall, but almost never was.

The traffic lights before the Gate flashed to green on her approach, allowing her to drive through without pause. A glance in her rear-view mirror showed her a burning red light blurred by the rain and the dark bulk of the Gate swinging slowly, heavily, inexorably shut.

"What the fuck?" Sarah braked hard and flung her door open wide, scrambling out into the downpour and breaking into a wild run across glistening tarmac, yelling all the way. "HEY! STOP!"

The Gate closed with a series of sharply reverberant and metallic sounds before she was even half way to it. The harsh, atonal growl of her own car's engine revving up had her spinning back round, to watch in horrified disbelief as it raced along the road and down a left-hand street, dark water spraying from under the tyres, a low and distorted silhouette hunched over the steering wheel.

"Okay," Sarah told herself, fighting to retain some semblance of calm. "Someone wants to keep me in here. I-I can live with that. They can't keep that gate closed forever, and there have to be other exits. Just need to find my car and my lug..." A roaring, echoing explosion put paid to her personal pep talk. "No... Oh, fuck, no..."

Frenetic, fearful feet carried Sarah deeper into the town, searching for the source of a growing pall of dark smoke. She soon discovered the shattered corpse of her car smashed completely through the window of a newsagent, shop and vehicle consumed in a furnace of roaring flames. A tall lupine body sat at the wheel, fur blackened, skin blistering, a grisly meal for the voracious and merciless fire that had engulfed it.

Her heart lodging itself in her throat she strained to get a closer look, trying to spot the telltale signs that this was indeed who she feared it was. The relief upon noticing this wolf was still in possession of all of his fingers was palpable, but short-lived; in her efforts to get a clear look at the corpse she'd gotten much too close to the conflagration, giving her barely enough time to dodge when a gout of flame flared abruptly toward her.

She staggered away from the shop in a blind panic, which only got worse on discovering her clothing had caught alight in several places. The whole situation was more than enough to send her mindlessly frantic for an instant, tearing every last garment from blouse to shoes from her body as she stumbled dementedly back out into the street and flinging them away with all her might. Then the mania subsided as abruptly as it had seized her and, shell-shocked, she slumped into sitting in the middle of the road, head buried in her paws, entire frame shaking with sobs.

It was fully fifteen minutes before she lifted her face up again, fresh determination burning in dark amber eyes. She stood up, suddenly aware of the state she was in. Naked bar the locket, her fur wringing with rainwater, her tail a stringy, sodden ribbon, she looked like she'd spent a week under a waterfall.

As she silently built up her mental reserves once more, she began to notice just how extraordinarily quiet Saxon Gate was. Gazing round her through the curtains of rain, Sarah suddenly began to understand how Joseph Moore must have felt on entering the lighthouse of Eilean More on Boxing Day, 1900, less than two weeks after the light went out. Something looked to have swept an entire town clean of its residents, leaving no trace of how or why, and all she could do was wonder at it, and worry even more about Gabe and Bess.

Seeking out the still-smoking remnants of her trousers she removed the thankfully intact note and her small bundle of house keys from the left pocket, staring intensely at the former item even as the ceaseless downpour slowly but surely made mulch of it. Eventually she folded up and tucked the soggy paper into her locket, and clipped the keys to the latter's chain.

"I'm gonna get you out of this lousy ghost town, Gabriel," she vowed. "You and Bess both. Now where's that damn hotel...?"

As her physical map had burned with everything else she owned, bar the barely anything she stood up in, she had to resort to her patchy mental one. Backtracking revealed she was on Warrior Street, so by her reckoning heading north along it would bring her to the Ancient Wall Hotel. She was almost right. The letters across the top of the grubby five-storey block of a Georgian building she ended up outside confirmed its identity, but as a few of them remained stubbornly unlit, another possibility was apparent.

Ancient ---- H--el

"How apt," Sarah observed, with a deep, almost bitter sarcasm born of her flagging mood. "How wonderfully, spectacularly apt. Spell it out for me, why not. Wonder if you've been good enough to leave the door unlocked, too?"

She strode up to the hotel's main entrance to find it was indeed open, allowing her access to a short corridor, at the end of which was a small, dingy atrium that looked like it hadn't seen a guest in decades, matching passages leading to left and right. The closer she got, the less she felt like checking in. The carpets and curtains were worn, the patterned wallpaper peeling, the strip light across the stippled white ceiling dead, and the dark wooden counter caked with dust.

A selection of yellowing postcards was arranged neatly in a small rack perched on the far left of the desk. Next to that was a second rack overflowing with tourist leaflets, maps, guides and public transport information slips, all of which were massively out-of-date. A dull, golden bell and a chunky monster of a 60's cash register took up the rest of the space. On the wall behind the desk was a green board sporting no less than fifty key hooks, barely half of which still bore a key. On the stool behind the desk a thick towel was neatly arranged. The whole strange scene was smothered in a silence so deep as to make her heightened heartbeat sound like a drum tattoo.

"Damn..." Sarah breathed, stepping round the counter to collect the towel, leaving a broad trail of soggy carpet in her wake. "Hotelis interruptus."

Once she'd rubbed enough of the water from her fur to feel vaguely comfortable she pulled the note from her locket, relieved to discover it was still, just about, readable.

"Number 25..." she murmured, searching the ranks of hooks, "...is not there. Shit. Just gotta hope, then."

A stroll down the short corridor to the left, wet footfalls echoing far more than they ever should have, brought her to a tiny, tinny-looking lift and a set of narrow, carpeted stairs. No amount of dabbing, tapping, or hitting of the 'up' button brought the elevator to her, leaving the vixen to conclude it was as dead as the décor. Grumbling to herself, Sarah started up the steps.

Two landings later she was pacing past a black-and-white plastic sign carrying the legend '21-30' and into a long, regular passage, the grimy windows at either end providing only a dim, unhealthy light that almost faded out at the mid-point. Naturally, that was where Room 25 was to be found. Sarah shrugged and kept walking.

Her already punch-drunk mind reeled again upon reaching the plain white door - sunk into the raised wood between the top two of its four indented panels, just beneath the golden number 25, was a small (six-inch by two-inch) jet-black set of traffic-lights, exactly like those employed at road works, the red bulb glowing steadily. Incongruous wasn't the word. Unsurprisingly, the door proved to be firmly locked.

"Agh! Bloody hell!" She rattled the handle and the door itself several times, but to no avail. "Gabe! You in there? Gabriel!"

Silence was the only, worrying response. She considered shoulder-charging the door, but the possibility of a broken shoulder and a breaking-and-entering charge didn't exactly enamour her of the idea. On the other hand, how else could she possibly get in there? She couldn't exactly call on a porter or the hotel manager, and she was sure as hell not gonna search five floors of hotel for a single key. But if Gabe or Bess were lying badly hurt beyond that slab of wood...

"Ah, what the hell..." She backed off a step or two, then slammed her shoulder into the door. It didn't budge in the slightest, even after two more equally vicious hits. Sarah slumped against it, massaging her throbbing shoulder and employing some of the more colourful curses she knew. Once she'd calmed down enough to think, another option presented itself to her.

"Okay then. Maybe I can pick this bloody thing." She spent several moments exploring the corridor looking for anything she could use as a pick, only to come up dry. "Or maybe I can't. Damn it all." Her ill-tempered eyes quickly came to rest on the traffic lights, still set to that unwavering red. She couldn't help but feel someone was spiting her.

Sarah brought the letter out again, noting the remaining numbers - 2, 5, 6, 3. Maybe one of the corresponding rooms held a clue. Maybe she was seeing connections that just weren't there. Maybe, but she didn't have anything better to do. The vixen set off back to the stairs, hustling all the way down to the first floor, and Room 2.

Sparse was probably the best word to describe the chamber. Spartan was another good choice. One single bed, one small wardrobe, one bedside cabinet, one tiny chest of drawers, and one chair by the only window. A small door led into the most cramped en-suite bathroom she'd ever clapped eyes on, a claustrophobic cuboid that somehow managed to contain toilet, sink and shower. Wallpaper, carpeting and curtains were identical to that of every other room and passage she'd seen. Variety didn't seem to be an option in this place.

"Is it just me," she asked the deathly still air around her, "or is the entire damn hotel stuck in a 60s time warp? Hello - maybe I'm not so mad after all..."

She padded across to the bedside table, having spotted a simplistic 'traffic-lights' symbol carved into the top drawer. Sliding it open revealed a single, solitary coin - a two pence piece with the number '2' etched into the tails side of it. The other drawers yielded nothing.

"Someone's been playing too many video games," Sarah opined, making for the door. "So what's gonna be waiting for me out here? Crows? Undead killer canines? Maybe I'll be really lucky and get horribly eviscerated by a licker. Yeah, that's it! That's my luck. Licked by a licker. Hope he chokes on me."

By the time she'd finished talking to herself - an old habit, and one that showed no signs of ceasing, even when her voice resounded through the hush around her - she'd traversed the completely empty corridor and entered Room 3. Precisely as expected the identical bedside table bore the exact same mark, and contained a two pence coin, this one with a '3' scratched into it. Sorties into the remaining rooms produced two more coins, bearing a '5' and a '6' respectively. The cabinet in Room 6 had also coughed up an old black and white photograph depicting, of all things, the dated cash register on the counter in the atrium.

"That's my next stop, then," Sarah reasoned, adding the coins and the picture, the latter carefully folded, to the impromptu stash in her pendant.

She jogged back to and down the stairs, mind working at full tilt, and just the tiniest hint of adrenaline making itself known. Once in the reception area she fell to examining the outmoded register. Three things grabbed her attention: the cash drawer was completely empty, a scrap of paper was pinned under the front edge of the register (which, on being pulled free, turned out to be a receipt dated 13th August 1962) and scuffs and scratches could be seen on the surface of the desk immediately behind it. It proved too heavy to lift even when empty, so she reverted to doing exactly what someone else had evidently done not too long ago - pushing it back.

Initially all her efforts revealed was a square of wood much darker than the surface around it, the register having spared it from the fading effect of constant light. She slid the fingers of one hand over it, noting as she did so an even smaller area - a rectangle about two inches across by six inches long - that felt fractionally elevated. She pressed firmly down on it, getting a sharp click in response, the sound of a latch unlocking. Now the rectangle jutted up enough for her to grip it and swing it open.

"Re-sult," she grinned, taking in the neat little cubby-hole now exposed, and the quartet of flat, coin-sized slots set in one side of the compartment. "Let's see what this unlocks..."

One by one Sarah dropped the coins into the slots, the switches they activated triggering the release of another latch. A drawer had appeared, almost as if by magic, in the left-hand side of the counter. Pulling it fully open revealed a small, bronze-coloured key. She snatched it up in triumph, and was about to stuff it into her pocket, when the number embossed on it caught her eye.

'26'.

"What?! You mean I... Ah, damn it!" Frustration saw her slam a bunched fist down on the cash register, which promptly rang up £25.25. "Ack - they'll charge you for anything now!" She dissolved into a rueful chuckle. "If I didn't know better, I'd say Gabe got all this ready for me. Damn my love of a good puzzle. Ah, well. Room 26, here we come..."

The key firmly in hand she retraced her steps to the third floor and approached Room 26. Her manner verging on the casual she slipped the key into the lock, twisted the handle, and pushed the door open, idly wondering what quirky little object she'd find next. More coins? A statuette? A tiny stone plaque covered in mysterious markings?

A child. A girl. A ten-year-old snow leopard cub wearing just lush silver-and-black fur, and sitting on the edge of a pristine single bed, her small legs kicking and swaying, a tatty, well-loved teddy bear cuddled to her pure white chest, her eyes gazing dreamily out of the window. At the sound of Sarah's approach she looked over her shoulder, her beautiful, delicately-patterned face breaking into a beaming smile of delighted welcome, even as the vixen gazed back at her in silent, stunned disbelief.

"Hello!" the cub chirped, cheerfully. "I see you found my towel. You're still a mess, though."

"Your towel?" Sarah asked, pacing into the room, still struggling to accept what her eyes were showing her.

"Yes, mine," the cub confirmed, nodding gaily. "We saw you coming. Thought you might need it. Can I have it back?"

"Well, I...I'm afraid I left it at the entrance. I..."

"That's OK!" the girl interrupted. She bounded off the bed, zipped past a bewildered Sarah and darted out the door, talking all the while. "I'll go get it. I need to go look for my friend, anyway; he should have been here hours ago. See you in Gabe's room at eight."

"Gabe's room...? How does she...? Wait!"

In scrambling after the little snow leopard Sarah stumbled over her own feet, losing her balance completely and crashing heavily into the front of the wardrobe. The cupboard rocked backwards under the force of the impact, then settled back down with a thump, its doors clattering open, both from momentum and something falling through them. The unclothed, battered, blood-caked body of a young male squirrel, a garrotte wire buried in his neck, toppled out and right onto the screaming vixen.

She kicked and struggled until the corpse rolled off of her, then scrambled frantically away from it until her back thumped up against the wall beneath the window. It didn't take too long to get her nerves under control, and quieten her pounding heart, though she remained distinctly on edge. Silently, she surveyed the body, feeling a pang of sympathy at the sight of the rodent's pained, confused and miserable face. She knew how he must have felt. He looked a few years younger than her, and a good deal fitter, and his luxuriant tail sported a tip that darkened almost to the colour of red wine; he was probably quite a handsome young squirrel before an untimely and incredibly violent (the wire had been tightened so ferociously it had cut through to the spine in more than one place) death overtook him.

"Damn," she sighed, shuffling over to kneel by the body. "Someone here really doesn't like visitors."

She quickly discovered a slip of paper tied loosely to his toe. It bore the single, crisply-typewritten phrase 'NUMBER 19' on one side.

Sarah folded it into her locket, fighting the urge to shudder. "Please don't tell me I'm trapped in here with a maniacal serial killer..."

She rolled him carefully onto his back, then worked her arms under his knees and shoulders. Buckling slightly under his weight she carried him steadily across to the bed. Once he was laid atop the sheets her fingers gently closed his eyes, and brushed the fur between them.

"Rest in peace." She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, straightened up and turned away. "All right, then - there should be something in here..."

Sarah let her eyes travel around the room, seeking out the symbol she knew had to be etched somewhere. She spotted it on the left door of the wardrobe. Inside she found nothing but congealing blood and clumps of fur. Either the killer had taken whatever had been hidden in there, or...

"You hid it somewhere else." The vixen paced back across to the corpse, a picture slowly forming in her mind. "Either you didn't want me to find it, or you didn't want anyone but me to find it. I hope you left a hint."

It wasn't long before her roving eye was caught by a faint blood fingerprint near the edge of the bed sheet, by the pillows. Pulling back the sheet revealed a single word very roughly scrawled in blood on the fabric of the one beneath - 'bath'. Sarah caught hold of both the squirrel's paws, carefully examining the fingers. The middle left one was steeped in scarlet to the first joint. Not conclusive, but good enough for her. She followed the clue's lead, heading straight for the en-suite bathroom. On the plastic floor of the tiny shower cubicle was a photograph, a monochrome scene of lift doors with part of a plastic sign to one side, and a large, detailed painting to the other.

"4..." the vixen muttered, noting the only number visible on the sign. "That's got to be the top floor. Bloody typical. It couldn't be right next door - no, no, no! It had to be two entire levels away. And yet, I find myself compelled to trek all that damn way..."

Pausing only to glance one more time at the corpse of the young squirrel she strode from the room and back to the well-worn stairs. Halfway up the final flight she found numerous shards of glittering glass scattered across waterlogged steps, along with almost as many jagged splinters of wood. Carefully picking her way to the top, grimacing at the wind and rain blowing right into her face, she examined what was left of the window there, finding no blood but plenty of other evidence that something large had broken through it. Odd, though, that most of the glass had sprayed down the stairs, and very little into the corridor.

Not willing to get any wetter than she already was Sarah moved hastily from the window and focused on the lift. The outer doors were jammed open, leaving a perfect view of the cold metal walls of the lift shaft and a trio of thick, truncated cables. Closer inspection confirmed that they'd been cut. A sick feeling growing in the pit of her stomach the vixen let her gaze drop down to the bottom of the shaft. It was immediately apparent the lift car had fallen almost as far. It looked, from that height, like a drinks can someone had casually crushed, except they didn't normally have the top half of a corpse rotting amongst the wreckage. From what was left of it, it had been a rat, and female. A nauseous Sarah could only assume she had been crawling into or out of the lift when something cut the cables.

Turning quickly away to prevent herself throwing up she noted the sign next to the lift doors - 'Rooms 41-50' - and more importantly the painting beyond that, the same painting as the one in the photograph. It depicted, in impressive detail, the very corridor it was hung up in, from a viewpoint about level with its position. An indecipherable signature huddled in the bottom left corner, along with a date - 1962. Apparently the building hadn't changed at all since then, hadn't been refurbished or reworked once in the intervening decades.

"Commemorative of the opening, I suppose," Sarah reasoned, her whispers seeming to fill the musty corridor. "But how does it help me find the key to Room 25?"

She stared thoughtfully along the fusty passage, then back at the painting. Her ears abruptly shot up. Something didn't quite match up. It wasn't long at all before her keen mind worked out what. In the painting, all the visible door numbers were a rich gold. Those on the real doors still were. Except one. The digits identifying Room 44 were of a plainer yellow hue. Not much to go on, but better than nothing. If it proved to be a wrong turn, she simply had to study the painting a little more.

Sarah padded up to Room 44 and tried the handle. Though it proved unlocked, caution heightened by the discovery of the broken body at the bottom of the lift shaft ensured she pushed the door open with her fingertips, tensed for flight, preferring to look inside the room before entering it. A creak, a click, a rush of air, and the dulled blade of a massive pickaxe swung hard and fast at her head. She ducked around it, falling heavily against the wall to the left of the door in her haste to avoid a skewering.

"Shit!" she husked, shaking and gasping as she took in the foot of curved, blemished metal now jutting out into the corridor. "Shit, shit, shit. I was almost a bloody shish kebab."

Once her heart had ceased trying to thump its way out of her throat she got slowly to her feet and eased past the trap, examining its workings as she did so. A switch sat atop a metallic pole to one side of the door, perfectly positioned to be activated when the latter was opened. A wire led directly upwards, to a small box nailed to the ceiling, from which hung a simple two-clawed grasping mechanism, currently fixed open. The axe itself was attached to a broad hinge above the door. It was straightforward, viciously effective, and most definitely not an original feature. In fact, it looked brand new, like it had only just been pulled from its packaging, something that sparked a chain of thought which did her already jangling nerves no good at all.

Fortunately the room didn't seem to contain any more blood-letting surprises so Sarah headed for the bedside cabinet, assuming the next crumb on the scarlet-stained trail she was following would be waiting inside it. The traffic-light symbol adorning the top of the cabinet backed her guess up but the rough, hurried way it was slashed into the wood, and the dried blood adhering to the splintered edges of the design started the nausea brewing again. She pulled each of the drawers sharply open, to be greeted by nothing but empty space.

She sat on the edge of the bed, holding back the urge to scream in pure frustration. Her eyes inevitably fell on the cabinet, glaring at it like it alone was responsible for the worsening situation she'd been caught up in. Her ire dissipated when it struck her that the still jutting-out drawers were a good couple of inches less deep than the shell they slid into. She pulled the cabinet away from the wall, to discover the back panel was set in by less than half an inch, lips running round the top and sides.

Sarah let the cabinet fall forward with a resounding bang then knelt down in front of it and ran her fingers round the lip, searching for any kind of catch or prying point. She turned up nothing, but the lack of a bottom lip allowed for one more possibility. She pressed both hands to the back panel and pushed them away from her body. It slid smoothly out under the pressure, revealing a very neat cubby-hole, inside which resided a third monochrome photograph. It depicted yet another plastic lift-side sign, very heavily stained and scratched, and reading 'BASEMENT'.

"Shoulda known I'd be heading down there at some point," Sarah groaned. "Ten to one I find Norman Bates' mother."

Adding the photo to those already stuffed inside her crowded locket she slipped back past the axe, momentarily wishing it wasn't so firmly fixed to the wall, and returned to the stairs. On the way down she reached up to the house keys clipped to her locket chain and detached the tiny penlight that always hung amongst them. With any luck she wouldn't have to make use of it, for the light it gave out didn't even qualify as feeble, but she wasn't about to take any chances, either.

Back on the ground floor Sarah crossed the deserted atrium and headed down the right-hand corridor, at the end of which lay a broad set of double-doors, the words 'Dining Room' printed on a smart sign above them. Pushing through she was confronted by rank upon rank of bare wooden tables and thinly-upholstered chairs, stretching back the entire depth of the hotel, a row of picture windows visible at the far end. Also visible at the far end were a second set of double doors, set in the right-hand wall, the sign above them reading 'Hotel Staff Only'.

"That needs to be changed," Sarah opined, moving swiftly across the restaurant, and through the doors. "I think 'Deranged Vixens Only' suits the situation better, for deranged is definitely what I'll be if I have to go through much more of this. Hello - looks like the decorator ran out of wallpaper..."

The short passage she now found herself in was the definition of generic, a plain white oblong with a trio of plain white doors, each neatly labelled with a plain white sign, the kind of corridor that had been standard in places ranging from office blocks to hospitals since time immemorial. The first door she came to had a wide glass panel set into it, giving her a perfect view of the room beyond, a sizeable space filled with industrial-scale culinary equipment, and painted the same monotonous white as the corridor. The plaque identifying it as the Kitchen suddenly seemed quite superfluous.

The next door waited several feet further on, set into the opposite wall, bearing the simple name 'STORES'. That, Sarah deduced, was where the entrance to the basement would lie. For sake of being thorough, however, she padded down to the final door, discovering, exactly as expected, it opened onto an area that was half office, half relaxation room for the staff. This place, at least, had a carpet, if a bland grey one, but the walls were still white, the décor still dull and dated. The vixen felt sure the atrium lay beyond the far wall, yet oddly there was no door through to it. Everything else about the hotel suggested a practical, if unimaginative, mind had been behind its design, so why had that most obvious and convenient of details been overlooked?

It was such a bizarre omission it dominated her mental landscape the whole way to the storeroom, only toppling from view when she pushed past the door and found herself looking at a completely empty space. More than empty - sterile; the kind of total sterility of a room that had never once been used, of a room in a building only just built, and waiting patiently to be opened. With not even a speck of dust to hold her gaze it inevitably drifted to the only other way out - a lift.

She approached it in a circumspect fashion, the image of half a rat projected across the inside of her brain. Her uneasiness was not helped on discovering this elevator somehow still had power, as evidenced by the call button glowing a steady, sickly orange. To her, that screamed just one word - TRAP. As if the idea of exploring the basement wasn't unappealing enough already...

However, the possibility that Gabe and Bess might be trapped down there, maybe even hurt, overcame just enough of her trepidation for one finger to reach out and dab the button. Broad white doors slid open with a muted whoosh, revealing quite possibly the largest lift Sarah had ever clapped eyes on; she estimated it could comfortably swallow two entire rugby teams and still have room to stage a game or two. Still, its impressive dimensions were actually something of a comfort. The main hotel lift had been a petite creation, needing only quite thin cables; this enormous elevator would need cables like a suspension bridge, which wouldn't exactly be easy to cut through.

Taking a deep breath the vixen squared her shoulders, stepped smartly into the lift, and pressed the 'B' button. The doors sighed shut and the elevator car started to descend, quietly, smoothly, swiftly. Sarah tested her penlight, ensuring the batteries weren't flat or the bulb broken, as well as keeping her mind occupied. What almost certainly lay in wait was something she most definitely did not want to think about until the last possible millisecond. Why she harboured such a crushing fear of the dark she could never understand, and had never been all that interested in finding out.

The lift eased to a halt and the doors yawned wide, revealing nothing but endless, inky black. Now she understood why. Mother only knew what lay in wait in the depths of that impenetrable dark...

Forcing herself to think of Gabe and Bess she held her penlight out in front of her and stepped out of the lift. The floor beneath her shuffling, uncertain feet was concrete. She couldn't see the walls. The air was still and stale. The silence was so heavy she could almost feel it. Her breath and her footsteps sounded like they belonged to a giant rather than a bedraggled vixen on the verge of breaking into full-blown panic. One tiny little prod was all it would take to send her screaming over the brink...

Her left foot pressed down onto something slick with a sickening, squelching, sucking sound. She slipped on it, her foot whipping backwards, the rest of her body plunging forwards. She landed awkwardly and painfully in a pool of the cold, congealing substance, her penlight jolted from her fingers. Scrambling, slithering and sliding across the floor she managed to pick it up and point it downwards, and realised she was swimming in a sea of blood...

A gurgling moan rose from her lips as she fought to haul herself back onto her feet, but just kept slipping and falling, slowly coating her furry form in the horrible scarlet, some of it splashing into her mouth and eyes. The moan became a scream when her flailing paw came to rest on a shattered bone, fingers trailing through the ragged flesh still attached. The scream became a tortured howl as a severed feline head appeared in the faint penlight beam, lolling in the sea of red, pieces of broken skull showing through where the skin and the flesh and the muscles and the sinew had been torn away...

Then something slammed fiercely into her frantically thrashing body, knocking her face-first into the blood. It clung to her, screaming and sobbing and howling as much as she was. Its body was sticky with gore, its fur matted with crimson, its grip that of the creature clinging to life with every ounce of strength left in their body. Quite a small body, some tiny part of Sarah that was still clinging to sanity realised. She managed to wrest herself around and angle the penlight to get a look at it...

The cub...

The girl...

Her beautiful face was a mess of blood and tears and crippling fear, but it was her. That one part of Sarah still functioning properly managed to galvanise the rest of her into finally breaking free of the horrible pool and sprinting for the lift, the snow leopard held tightly in her arms. She actually ran into the doors, losing her footing in the process. One paw managed to locate the call button and hammer at it, bringing forth the welcome sight of light spilling into the basement as the elevator opened up. Sarah flung herself inside, punched the 'S' button, then huddled into a corner, her arms clamped around the shuddering, whimpering cub. As the doors hissed closed a guttural, gurgling growl rose from the depths of that butcher's yard basement, a sound that proved to be the last she heard for some considerable time...