Coma

At the bottom of the stairs Susan turned sharply to the left and ran through a small archway. Quickly she opened the door to the quad outside, but she did not exit. Instead, she let the hydraulic hinge begin to close the door. She turned and passed through the door into the adjacent wing of the dorm, shutting that door after her. She could hear feet running on the landing of the second floor.

Avoiding the noise her shoes would make if she ran normally, Susan moved down the ground-floor hall of the adjacent dorm, keeping her legs relatively stiff. She moved quickly but silently, passing the Student Health Office. At the end of the hall she opened the stairwell door quietly and allowed it to close behind her without a noise. She found herself on a stairway to the basement level and wasted no time in descending.

D’Ambrosio was tricked by the slowly closing door to the quad but not for long. D’Ambrosio was no novice at pursuit and he knew just how much time Susan was ahead of him. As he ran into the quad, he knew immediately that he had been duped. He would have been, except there were no other doors close enough for her to have got back into the building.

D’Ambrosio darted back through the door he had just opened. There were only two alternate routes. He chose the nearest door and ran forward down the hall.

Susan entered the tunnel connecting the dorm with the medical school.

She was sure she must be in the clear. The tunnel proceeded straight for twenty-five or thirty yards, then twisted out of sight to the left. Susan moved ahead as quickly as she could: the tunnel was fairly well lit by bulbs in open wire cages.

At the end of the tunnel she reached for the handle on the fire door and opened it. A breeze of air hit her as she went through. A sinking feeling passed over her as she realized that could mean only one thing.

The door behind her had to be open at the same time! Then she heard the unmistakable heavy footsteps of a man running in the tunnel.

“My God,” she whispered in a panic. Perhaps she had misjudged. She had left a dorm full of people, even if asleep, for the labyrinthine spaces of a dark, deserted building.

Susan rushed up the stairs ahead, feeling a sense of helplessness as she remembered the strength of D’Ambrosio. Quickly she tried to think of the layout of the building she was now in. It was the Anatomy-Pathology Building, which had four floors. There were two large lecture amphitheaters on the first floor as well as several ancillary rooms. The second floor had the anatomy hall with a number of smaller labs. The third and fourth floors were mostly offices, and Susan was not familiar with them.

She opened the door onto the first floor. Unlike the tunnel, the building was totally dark except for light from the street-lamps filtering through infrequent windows. The floor was made of marble and it echoed with her footsteps. The hall followed a circular pattern as it skirted the pit of one of the amphitheaters.

With no particular plan in mind, Susan rushed up to one of the wide but low doors leading into the first amphitheater. It was the door through which patients were wheeled for demonstrations. As Susan closed the door she heard running footsteps on the marble hall behind her. She moved away from the low door into the center of the amphitheater. The banks of seats rose in regular tiers until they were lost in darkness. She mounted the steps leading up one aisle from the pit.

The footsteps got louder and Susan hurried upward, afraid to look back.

The footsteps passed and became less audible. Then they stopped altogether. Susan moved higher and higher. Behind her the pit of the amphitheater became more and more difficult to distinguish. Susan reached the upper tier of seats and moved laterally along it. She heard the footsteps on the marble again. She had a few moments to think. She knew there was no way she could cope with this man directly; she had to lose him or hide long enough so that he would give up and leave. She thought about the tunnel to the Administration Building. But she wasn’t one hundred percent sure that it would be open. Occasionally it had been locked when she tried to take that route home from the library in the evening.

She froze as she heard the door open into the pit of the amphitheater.