Or had that already happened?

She was losing track of things again, and that was a sure sign that a chapter was ending. Whatever had happened, whatever events had stirred her to action and pulled her forth from her cozy, untidy nest in the heart of Munchkin Country, had drawn to a close. Now it was time for her to rest and recover, and to wait until she was needed again.

She went over to the toilet and lifted the lid, then pulled the jar of water out of her jacket. She held it up in front of her face and examined its occupant, who gazed back at her with one unblinking eye and then the other as she rotated the jar in her hands.

“Fishy,” she said, smiling. She twisted the top off the jar and dumped the contents into the bowl, then watched Herman get his bearings. He was a very old fish, and she didn’t like to move him too much or too often… but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him behind, either. Not when somebody was looking for her, somebody who would almost certainly want to kill her now.

Had that already happened?

It seemed like something that would be worth knowing…

Of course, there were other, equally weighty questions weighing on Woe’s mind at that moment. She picked up the canister of fish flakes and stared at it, considering. Had she fed Herman recently? She thought that she might have but she wasn’t sure. Well, she hadn’t kept a goldfish alive for fourteen years by overfeeding him… she’d play it safe and wait a few days.

She peed in the corner, shifted some books off of the rug, laid down, and went to sleep.

She said absolutely nothing as, sobbing, he let the bundle of string fall and went over to Karrie, to kneel down and feel her cooling skin, looking for a pulse he knew he wouldn’t find.

“Try your phone,” Woe said gently. “As far as I know, it should work.”

“I can’t get a signal down here,” Nick said numbly.

“If you say so,” Woe said. “Um… you have things to do… and so do I, I guess. So… goodbye?”

Nick didn’t respond. He didn’t look up. The girl’s stocking-covered feet made no sound as she departed. For all that Nick could tell… for all that he cared… she might as well have just turned sideways and disappeared. One moment she was there, and the next he was alone… alone in the underground garage which smelled like someone had pissed in it with the body of his daughter, his beautiful Karrie Anne, who was gone before her time.

Gone? No, taken from him… taken by drugs and a man he knew only as the name “Reggie” and a face with a teardrop tattoo. Nick would find Reggie, and Reggie would pay for what he’d done.

Somehow.

Eventually.

But, Nick realized, there were other culprits as well… those who bore equal responsibility to “Reggie” but might fall more easily within his grasp. For one, the little green-haired bitch of a witch who’d stopped him from running to Karrie’s side the moment he’d seen her, who’d prevented him from calling for help, who’d all but shoved him into some kind of dark closet to grope around in during what must undoubtedly have been his daughter’s last moments on earth. Her, and her con artist sister, “Madame Wow“… and the homeless matriarch Judith Nussbaum, AKA “Mama.”

“Karrie?” he said into the darkness. There was no answer. “Karrie Anne? Baby?”

He said the words. He did not shout. He could barely manage to speak out loud at all, to raise his voice above a strangled whisper. Why? Just as some people cannot help talking to themselves when they are alone, some people are utterly unable to speak to an empty room, and Nick was one of them.

He knew it now… he could not deny it. He had left her lying on the floor of the garage while he stumbled about in a place that was clearly as “Employees Only” as a place could be. He was a fool… a damned fool. And Karen… the bitch would never let him live this down.

Somehow, it would be his fault.

Somehow…

Somehow, that didn’t matter. His Karrie Anne, the little baby girl he’d once held in his arms, was gone, and no so-called witch with a magic string could change that.

He stumbled forward anyway, only for his hand to run almost immediately into the cold, rough surface of a wall. He followed it one direction, and then the other, and found it joined with another only a few yards in either direction. He was at the dead end of a corridor.

He began to reel the thread in, wrapping it around his hand so that it was taut enough to easily follow in the darkness, and began to make his way back. He’d only turned one corner when lights came on ahead of him, and he saw the door, and beyond that, the garage.

Obviously, he’d been stumbling around in circles in the dark for a while.

Obviously, he’d been confused… confused and desperate enough to imagine he was hearing Karrie’s voice, to be swept up in the madness of a brain-damaged, green-haired girl.

Obviously.

The darkness was so complete that it was hard to believe the lighted corridor was behind him. He almost turned around to check, but stopped. He feared two things. One was that if he looked behind and saw the light, he’d turn and abandon his quest. The other was that he would turn back and not see it… he didn’t know what he’d do then.

“Daddy?” came the cry from further on.

“I’m here,” Nick said. “Keep talking, sweetheart… I’ll find you.”

“I’m scared,” Karrie’s voice said. “It’s getting darker, and… and I’m scared.”

“It’s not getting darker, Karrie… it’s pitch black already,” Nick said. “It doesn’t get darker than that.”

“It does,” she said. “So much darker…”

He shivered. The temperature in the tunnel had been so completely neutral… but now there was a distinct chill to it.

Nick had his hands out in front of him as he walked, but he had yet to bump into a wall. Neither had his foot caught on a protruding pipe. Was he still in the tunnel?

“Keep talking, sweetheart,” he said again, reassured by the sound of his own voice.

“Where’s Reggie?” Karrie asked.

“Reggie’s not here,” he told her, fumbling onward in the direction he thought the sound came from. “You don’t have to worry about Reggie ever again.”

“I love him,” she said. “He loves me. We’re going to get married.”

Not on my watch, Nick thought, but what he said was, “He doesn’t love you.”

“He does!” Karrie replied from out of the darkness. “You don’t know him. You never gave him a chance.”

“A chance?” Nick repeated, cold anger rising up within him. “You gave him a chance, and look what happened!“

“What… what do you mean?“

“He killed you,” Nick yelled… screamed, really. “He killed you, you dumb bitch!”

Then…

“Daddy?”

The voice was faint, distant, and echoing… coming out of the dark corridor that had been the left-hand path as he’d made his way inward. If the tunnel hadn’t been so completely silent, he might have missed it. As it was, he still halfway thought he’d imagined it, but then it came again.

“Daddy?”

“Karrie, baby, is that you?”

“It’s me… where’s Reggie?” Karrie called. “Is he with you? He said he was going to help me…”

Reggie… was that the son of a bitch’s name? He filed it away. The bastard would get his, to be sure, but first things first. He had to get Karrie to safety.

“Reggie’s not here, sweetheart,” Nick said.

“Where’s Mom? Is she with you?”

“Your mother’s not here, either,” Nick said. “It’s just me… just Daddy. I’m going to help you, okay? I’m going to take you back to your… back out of here.”

“It’s dark…”

“Stay there,” he said, thinking. He had the string, so he couldn’t really get lost. “Stay where you are. I’ll come to you. Just… don’t go any farther, okay?” he called, not sure why he was specifying this. Farther what… farther in, farther on, father away? He had no idea. It just seemed very important. “Whatever you do, do not go any farther.”

He had become so accustomed to the lights flickering to life before him that he noticed instantly when they failed to respond to his first step forward.

“Daddy?” the voice called again, plaintively.

Nick hesitated. He swallowed. He closed his eyes, to see if that would make stepping from the light into the darkness any easier. Realizing it wouldn’t, he opened them.

“Daddy?”

“Coming, sweetheart,” he replied, but it was still an uncomfortably long time before he managed to take the first step.

As soon as he made that decision, the flickering lights came up on a blank wall yards ahead of him.

“Shit!” he said, then felt stupid when he heard his voice echoing off the walls, then even stupider for feeling stupid when there was nobody to hear him… except for maybe the person he was looking for, and after all, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to let her know that daddy was coming?

He was about to try an experimental “Karrie Anne?” when the stupid-feeling caught up with him again. He’d seen her, lying on the pavement in the garage. How could she answer him, when she was out there… and so still, so awfully still. He was a fool, and he knew it… letting that crazy little “witch” convince him to drag a piece of string around a maintenance tunnel–in which he was doubtlessly trespassing–instead of getting his baby girl the help she needed.

Well, no more of that. He turned around and began to head backwards, winding the string up as he went.

He stopped at the first intersection, though. It hit him that the dead end had appeared right when he’d thought about it… just as the intersection had… and he had also thought that he would take the first left, when it happened. Shouldn’t he? Was he supposed to? Anyway, what had he been thinking, going right all this time? This was his Karrie he was chasing after… she hadn’t gone right once in her life. Why would she make things easy on him now?

“Karrie?” he called, a little timidly, down the left fork. Then, louder, “Karrie Anne?”

Was this bizarre hallway or tunnel or whatever responding to him? Was it, in some way, being created by him? If that was the case… then all he would have to do to find his Karrie Anne would be to…

No. It couldn’t be that simple. He shook his head, angry at himself for getting caught up in all this mumbo-jumbo. He was a grown up, an educated man… a lawyer, for Christ’s sake! He didn’t believe in magic mazes beneath the city that sprang from your imagination. The smart thing for him to do would be to turn around, follow the string back through the one lane labyrinth and call an ambulance for his daughter.

Yeah.

The smart thing.

He looked left. He looked right. He looked left. He thought he remembered reading once that people would most often turn in the direction of the hand they favored, unless they didn’t want to be found… then they’d go the “wrong” way to throw off pursuit.

Did Karrie want to be found, though?

And for that matter, was she even right-handed, or left?

Chances were she was right-handed, and chances were she would want to be found. If he was even remembering what he had read correctly, and if it was even true.

He decided to act under the assumption that he had remembered it, that it was true, that she was right handed, and she’d want him to find her. In any event, he certainly didn’t know otherwise… so… it should work, right?

That’s it, Nicky boy, he thought to himself. Drink the nice man’s Kool-Aid, and it’ll all be over soon.

He continued on with growing trepidation… about what, he couldn’t exactly say. He realized when he turned the second corner that the new expanse of hallway, which was longer than the first, should have led right back into the garage, but it didn’t.

Well, he must have made a mistake, then. The second stretch of hall had gone on further than he’d thought, or the door had been closer to the end of the wall. He must be traveling parallel to the garage.

Though, why there should be a hall like this which circled around an underground parking complex…

Well, obviously there was a reason for it. It wouldn’t have been built if there wasn’t one! Probably, it was some kind of utility tunnel, carrying pipes and wires and fiber optic cables beneath the city streets. Yes, he thought, that had to be it. It certainly explained the pipes and things on the walls.

Except, it didn’t look like a utility tunnel… it looked like a hallway lined with pipes and things.

That was silly, he thought to himself. How could he know what a utility tunnel was supposed to look like?

Except… hadn’t he spent a lot of time, when he was younger, exploring the secret highways and byways that lay beneath Jericho? Hadn’t he wormed his way through plenty of claustrophobic little passageways, tight even for young Nicky Brown, which had sneaked and snaked their way throughout the city’s underbelly?

Yes, he had… but that had been a life time ago, and anyway, he couldn’t convince himself he’d seen every sort of maintenance line and access tunnel that had ever been in use. The fact was, this hallway or tunnel or passage existed, so it had a purpose.

He looked back through the door at Woe, who gave a little nod, and then he headed onward. As soon as he stepped from the light into the darkness, there was a click from further on, and then a hum, and a row of strangely sickly-looking fluorescent lights came on overhead. He jumped in surprise, and turned once again to look back at Woe, to see if this development had surprised her… but to his shock, the area outside the door had gone as dark as the hallway had been.

“Hello?” he called back. “Woe? Are you there?”

He got no answer. He almost went back through the door to try to find her, but two things stopped him.

One, she had told him he only had one shot at this, whatever “this” was, and he felt that once he passed through that door again, it would all be over. He’d have missed his chance.

Two, it would mean leaving the light and passing once more into the darkness. Could he expect the garage lights to reappear? Maybe. Could he count on it, though?

The walls of the hallway were made of concrete blocks that were darker, dirtier, and larger than the ones which had formed the walls of the parking garage. In fact, he couldn’t say for sure that they were concrete, and not stone. Aside from the lights which ran the length of the ceiling, there were copper pipes and black plastic tubes which snaked their way up and down the walls. The passage ran for about twenty yards and then turned right. The light stopped just before the elbow bend, but he could see that the fluorescent tubes continued around the corner, unlit.

He set off down the hall.