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Chapter Three

Running Deep

"Here we go - Room Twenty-f..." Patch froze, gazing askance at the traffic lights set in the door. "Why are there lights in the door?"

"They keep you safe," the snow leopard cub replied, matter-of-factly.

"From what?"

"Everything."

A heavy, uneasy silence followed this unnervingly calm statement. Sarah broke it.

"Then let's get the safe side of them." She clicked the key the snow leopard had given her into the lock and twisted it, no hesitation in her actions at all.

Room 25 was a double, which merely meant a double bed in place of a single one, with every other fixture and fitting utterly identical to those of every other room in the hotel. The condition of the room, however, was markedly different - someone had been using it.

The sheets of the bed were massively rumpled and creased, the chair had been shifted so anyone sitting in it could clearly see both window and bed, two of the drawers of the chest were half-open, and a large black attaché case rested on the bedside table. Sarah recognised it instantly as Gabe's. She would have made a beeline for it if it wasn't for the snow leopard cub suddenly latching hard onto her arm, small body trembling.

"W-where's Andrew?" she quavered.

"Andrew?" The vixen had a horrible feeling she'd met him already. "What does he look like?"

"He's a squirrel. Very strong. Very dark tail tip. He protects me. He should be here. Where is he?"

Sarah's ears sagged. "I think... I think..." She swallowed, knowing she'd have to tell the cub, have to break it to her, but hating it all the same. "I think he's dead. I think someone killed him."

The cub's pretty face crumbled, her head shaking slowly, erratically from side-to-side in denial. "No...nonono...He-he can't be...He can't!"

Sarah dropped to her knees and gathered the cub to her, stroking the back of her head. "I found a body that looks exactly like you described him. If it's not him, then..."

"Where? Show me!" the cub demanded, still not giving in.

"All right...all right..." Sarah acquiesced, very reluctantly. She stood up, took the snow leopard's paw, and led her slowly into room 26. One look at the battered form on the bed and the cub buried her face in the vixen's chest, sobbing wretchedly. Sarah picked her up, carried her back to room 25, and settled on the bed with her, cradling her tightly. Her gaze quickly alighted on Gabe's attaché case. "Open it, please, Patch. Code's 2563."

The cat nodded, took the case from the table, rested it on the bed, and unlatched it. "Let's see - traffic-light pendant on a silver necklace, glowing green; sheath of newspaper cuttings, all dating from the sixties; sheet of hand-written notes, in shorthand of some kind; hand-drawn map of Saxon Gate; pair of scarlet sashes; two flashlights with spare batteries; and two loaded handguns with two spare clips. It looks like Gabe and Bess knew what they were getting into." To all that he added Gabe's letter and the tag and photos Sarah had found.

Naomi, sitting on the chair with a sleeping Pete in her lap, took the map, casting her eyes over it. "This looks pretty much identical to the one I got from the station, except that one didn't mention slums. Nor did it have these little triple-teardrop markings..."

"Pelt Building?" Patch's eyebrows rose. "Pelt Street? You'd think they'd met our kind before..."

"They may well have." Sarah, the feline cub now slumbering in her arms, was poring over the yellowed newspaper cuttings. "Or creatures very like us, at least. According to the local rag repeated sightings of four-foot-tall walking animals were reported here from 1955 to 1962. Most people said they were foxlike, some insisted they were mice, all said they saw them flitting around the slums and the Christie Building, a former mill that was home to a local construction company called Christie & Sons. The latter was renamed the Pelt Building in 1958, though the owner, Robert Christie, never explained why. Nor was the renaming of the street a year later explained, but then no-one really asked - they were all too busy dealing with the aftermath of, and I quote 'a four-week reign of terror by a ruthless killer that saw twelve young boys brutally murdered'."

"Please tell me that's a tabloid exaggeration." Patch's eyes widened incredulously.

"Yes, but only a slight one, for once," Sarah quietly responded, a certain hollow quality creeping into her voice, one that grew steadily more pronounced as she went on. "It says here it started when a man came to open the newsagents early one morning and found a body in amongst the bins in the service yard, a fourteen year old boy who'd been...gagged, beaten and garroted. Two days later a ten year old boy is found in the lane behind the Hotel, in the same state. Three days after that two boys, one fifteen and one just nine are stumbled upon in the lane between the theatre and the cinema.

"It goes on - an eighteen year old found in the graveyard, another ten year old in the rough ground by the petrol station, two fifteen year olds behind the central apartment building, an eight year old behind the hospital. All this culminated with the discovery of three victims in different areas of the park, one aged seventeen, one eleven...and one just five. All had been treated the same way, all had a tag tied to their toe - 'NUMBER 1', 'NUMBER 2', and so on."

"Wait, isn't..." a deeply shaken Naomi started to interject.

"Yes..." Sarah already had the tag in her paw, gazing intently at it. "Suddenly this little thing looks a whole lot different..."

"Aye." Patch nodded, a shiver running through him. "Suddenly I'm almost glad Gabe left us the guns..."

"True. Anyway..." Sarah shook away a quiet, niggling worry and returned to the article she'd been summarising. "The police didn't even get close to catching the killer, no matter how many officers they crammed into the walled town; he slipped right past them every time. The near total lack of clues didn't help, either - beyond a smattering of spectacularly vague sightings of suspicious figures lurking in the vicinity and, of all things, scatterings of fur found at every single crime scene they had zip to go on. Nor could they even begin to work out a plausible motive - he was just a faceless, vicious psychopath.

"As for the townspeople, widespread hysteria seems to have been the order of the day, unsurprisingly, as well as endless increasingly wild speculations. The notes naturally set people to wondering if the killer had a target number he was aiming for, or was just going as high as he could. As for who he was, the local urban legends were the most popular choice of culprit for the townspeople, to the degree that gangs of mostly young men roamed the slums like lynch mobs looking for them. One group of six even stormed the Christie Building, though what, if anything, they found there is anybody's guess - the gang kept silent on the matter.

"It is notable, though, that the Park trio were found the day before, and there were no murders afterwards. The Saxon Strangler, as he'd come to be known, had vanished completely, just melted back into whatever shadows he'd come from, leaving, surprise surprise, not a single, solitary trace behind, no matter how thoroughly the authorities searched. At the time of this article it had been five months since the last killings and things were almost back to normal."

"That obviously didn't last," Naomi remarked, darkly.

"Obviously not, if poor Andrew's any guide," Sarah agreed. "It's just a question of whether it's the same killer or a copycat."

"Well, the original's gotta be pretty old by now," Patch reasoned, "so I'd have to lean toward a copycat. You never know, though."

"Maybe it's the original's son," Naomi suggested. "Carrying on where he left off."

"Hereditary homicide. Lovely," Sarah drawled. "And Gabe and Bess chose to walk right into the midst of it. Why didn't they tell me?"

"I guess they didn't want to put you at risk unless they had to," Patch suggested.

"Makes sense," Sarah agreed. "Give me those notes, will you?"

Patch obliged. Sarah's brow furrowed.

Don't assume. Open mind. Multi-layered.

Watch all. Numbers safe. Lights safe. Pendant safe. Be safe.

Start basement. Follow trail. Follow blood.

Release the faceless empty trapped.

Love you.

"Can't make sense of it?" Patch asked.

"Oh, no - it makes sense...except..."

"Except...?"

"Except the 'faceless empty trapped' bit. I have no idea how to read that. It could be an allegory, a metaphor, an oblique reference... It could even be literal." She sighed. "How I'd love an internet-ready laptop right about now..."

"How about," Patch suggested, "we go raid the hotel kitchens and possibly the convenience store marked here" - he tapped the map - "to see if there's any edible supplies? We might make more sense of all this on a full stomach."

"The cat talks sense." Sarah flashed him a smile. "Who wants to go?"

"You two girls go," Patch insisted. "I'll keep the kids company."

"You good with that, Naomi?"

"Fine." The dark vixen gently deposited a still fast asleep Pete on the bed, collected one of the flashlights, and stood up. "Let's try not to be long, though. Just grab what we need and hare it back here."

"Definitely." Sarah slipped away from the bed and the leopard cub, Patch taking her place. She took one of the sashes, tied it round her waist, and tucked one of the handguns and one of the clips through it, pinning them to her hips. The key to the room she slipped into a pocket stitched into the sash, and the traffic-light pendant she hung about her neck with her locket. "We'll be half an hour, maximum."

"See you soon, then."

"Very soon."

Sarah led the way out of Room 25's relative security and into the pitch black corridor; the night had set in quickly. She locked the door behind them, whereupon the lights set in it changed smoothly to red, a strangely reassuring sight. Setting a brisk pace, the torch lighting the way, the vixens headed along the hallway and down the stairs, their senses strained, their nerves taut.

Just as their toes were coming into contact with the bottom step of the first flight the lower pane of the window immediately to their right exploded, splintered glass spraying across both sets of stairs as the vixens instinctively flung themselves down, scrambling up against the wall directly underneath the window, arms shielding their heads. The cause instantly became apparent as two not-terribly-distant gunshots rang out in rapid succession, one bullet splintering the banister at the point it curved round between flights and the other slamming into the floor less than two feet ahead of them.

"Fuck!" Sarah husked, heartbeat thumping in her ears. "Not fucking good. Not fucking good at all."

Tugging the handgun from her sash she turned round so she was crouching under the window and very cautiously lifted her eye line above the sill. The rain had all but ceased, affording her a clear view of the flat, expansive concrete rooftop that abutted the hotel and was cluttered with rusty air-conditioning equipment stretching out before her, the roof of the museum if her mental map was correct. About fifteen feet across the rain-slick rooftop from her a stocky, broad-shouldered, balding human grasping what looked very like a wartime revolver was sprinting toward a rusty metal hatch in a wild panic, babbling nonsensically. Before she had a chance to open her mouth and call to him he practically fell down the exit, slamming it shut behind him.

"What in Mother's whiskers...?" Sarah stood up, bewildered eyes fixed on the hatch, along with the muzzle of her weapon.

"I have a feeling he's been here too long," Naomi murmured, getting to her feet behind the lighter vixen, a distinct tremor in both her voice and her body. "He's pretty much snapped. I mean, he was ranting about a clown, of all things..."

"A clown?" Sarah asked, slipping her gun back under her sash and turning to her companion with an eyebrow raised. She rested a hand on the darker vixen's shoulder, both as a reassurance and a means of guiding her toward the stairs. "As in, a specific clown?"

Naomi nodded, trembling less with every step. "That's certainly what it sounded like. I didn't catch a name, though..."

"Pennywise, maybe," Sarah suggested, hoping a little humour would lighten the atmosphere enough to breathe properly. "Too much late night Stephen King for his own good."

Naomi giggled softly. "Somehow I doubt it. I'm guessing he just got spooked by an over-zealous one as a child and for some reason that's all he can think of now he's trapped here."

"Makes sense," Sarah concurred, her attention switching back and forth between her companion and the windows they were passing, noting with quiet unease a fog was growing quite rapidly outside, the buildings appearing fainter and hazier almost every time she looked. "Hope we don't end up like that..."

"As long as we stick together, we should be all right." Naomi flashed a smile, though whether she was trying to reassure her companion or herself was far from plain. "It's loneliness that does that more than anything. Hey, who...?" One hand gravitating to her chest, the other between her hips, she sidled closer to Sarah, eyes widening.

The lighter vixen felt a sudden pang of self-conscious anxiety, too, as on stepping down in to the ground floor passage they found a pair of figures walking rapidly toward them, staring right at them.