There were pictures on the windowless walls, but like everything else in the room, they looked as if they'd been cast off-some because the broken frames' contents weren't worth refraining, others because what they depicted could only have looked good in the tourist traps where they'd originally been sold. But all of them had one thing in common: they displayed some sort of landscape, as if the pictures were serving as windows to an imagined world on the surface. One showed a meadow in springtime with deer feeding on its lush grass. Another depicted a sylvan wood, foliage ablaze in autumnal glory, with a preternatural shaft of light piercing the forest's canopy as if God Himself were smiling down from the unseen sky.

In contrast to the fanciful pictures, the drab reality of the room was revealed by two old and crooked floor lamps, both in need of shades.

Most surprising was a television set, droning softly in the corner, tuned to CNN.

"You like my place?"

Jeff tore his eyes away from the TV screen.

The woman who was smiling at him looked to be in her sixties. Only a little more than five feet tall and heavy, her body was made to appear even larger than it was by the bulk of the clothes she wore. Her skirt was a paisley pattern in brilliant shades of scarlet, purple, and green. The bottom two inches dragged on the floor, causing the hem to be frayed and blackened with grime. Her blouse of deep burgundy velvet had rusty-looking streaks running through it, and a large, greasy-looking stain covered one side of her ample bosom. At least a dozen bracelets in as many styles jangled on her forearms, and countless necklaces and chains hung from her neck.

Her face was thickly coated with makeup that was caked in the deep crevices of her cheeks, and a blood-red shade of lipstick highlighted the wrinkles in her lips. A copper-colored wig couldn't quite contain the wisps of gray hair that curled over her forehead.

A tattered black shawl missing most of its fringe hung over her shoulders and trailed down below her waist. "Not bad, eh?" she asked, waving in an expansive gesture that took in the entire room. The long ash of her cigarette fell to the floor as she sucked in an enormous lungful of smoke.

"If the smoke don't get me, the cancer will," she cackled, her eyes twinkling as she gave Jeff a gap-toothed smile. Her gaze shifted from Jeff to Jagger, and her smile-along with the twinkle in her eye-faded. She stabbed her cigarette in his direction. "Don't remember invitin‘ you in."

Jagger's hand tightened on the rusty railroad spike.

"It's okay, Tillie," Creeper said quickly. "They won't be staying long."

"They won't stay at all if I say so," the woman retorted, her eyes still fixed on Jagger.

"Come on, Tillie," Creeper wheedled. "Didn't you just say they could have something to eat?"

"That was before I saw ‘em," Tillie snapped back. Her cigarette jabbed at Jagger again. "Now I've seen him, I don't want him. So get him out of here."

Jeff could feel the tension building in Jagger.

"Maybe I don't want to leave," the big man growled.

Tillie's eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips, smearing her lipstick even more. "I guess you can eat," she said. "Then we'll see." Her eyes shifted back to Jeff, and she jerked her head toward an opening in the far wall. "There's a place you can wash up back there," she said. "Just make sure you put the lid back on the can if you use it. Don't like to stink up the place."

With Jagger right behind him, Jeff made his way through the gap in the wall.

"What is this place?" Jagger muttered as he gazed around.

On a battered table sat a chipped enameled pan-exactly like one Jeff's family had used on the camping trips they'd taken when he was a little boy-and matching pitcher. A towel, not terribly dirty, hung from a bar that had been precariously mounted in the concrete of the wall.

A naked lightbulb, hanging from a cord strung along the ceiling, filled the room with light.

On the wall above the table hung a cracked mirror, and for the first time since he'd left his cell in the Tombs, Jeff was able to see his own reflection. As he gazed at the image reflected in the glass, he barely recognized himself.

His skin was streaked with grease and grime, and his hair hung lank, heavy with its own oil.

His eyes were bloodshot, and dark circles had formed beneath them.

His forehead had broken out with pimples, and a cut on his chin-a cut he hadn't even known was there-looked like it was starting to fester.

Still staring at his own image, Jeff finally answered Jagger's question. "It's their home," he said. "This is where they live."

In the mirror, Jeff could see Jagger glancing speculatively around. In yet another chamber beyond the one in which they stood, he could see a few mattresses scattered on the floor- one of them even seemed to have box springs under it, and all of them had blankets.

Blankets and sheets.

The exhaustion Jeff had been holding at bay as they'd made their way through the darkness of the tunnels until they'd stumbled across Creeper suddenly overwhelmed him, and all he wanted to do was disappear into that next room and collapse onto one of the beds.

"And now it's where we live," Jagger said. Then he winked at Jeff. "Beats the hell out of Rikers, huh?"

Jeff said nothing, looking in the mirror once more.

But what he saw was no longer a reflection of himself.

What he saw was a derelict.

The kind of person he'd long ago learned to simply ignore.

Or even turn away from, as if to deny their very existence.

Malcolm Baldridge, who had been known simply as "Baldridge" for so many years that few people except himself even remembered he had a first name, reached deep in his pocket for the single key that was never kept on the large ring that hung inside his private pantry.

His innate obsession with detail, the obsession that made him perfect for his job, caused him to check the door for any sign of tampering. As always, there was none. He slipped the key into the lock, turned it, pushed the door open, then closed it behind him before turning on the lights. One of the tubes in the overhead fixtures flickered a few times before settling in to join the others in flooding the room with a bright white light-a light that Baldridge had insisted be matched to that of sunlight.

It was a matter of aesthetics, and aesthetics were important to Baldridge.

Indeed, his sense of aesthetics was another of his prime qualifications for his job.

Before he did anything else besides pull on a pair of the thin latex gloves he always wore when he worked in this room, he went to one of the supply closets, took a replacement tube from the stock on the top shelf, and replaced the offending tube in the overhead fixture.

No sense being needlessly distracted from his work if the faulty tube began flickering again.

Then he set to work.

As always, the carcass was precisely where the team left it on nights when the hunt was successful: laid out on a gurney in the walk-in refrigerator. The refrigerator had been expensive, and the renovations required for its installation even more so, but Baldridge had insisted on it. "The odor can sometimes become offensive," he'd explained, "and far more quickly than you might think." Also in accordance with Baldridge's precise instructions, nothing at all had been done to the carcass. "Restoration is my job," he'd explained. "It's best left to experts." Baldridge's own expertise was unquestionable. He'd apprenticed under his uncle, who was still working up in New Hampshire, and gained further training in a funeral home in California, moving to New York at the same time his employer in California moved across the border to Arizona in hopes of escaping prosecution for certain irregularities, only a few of which had taken place in Baldridge's area of the operation.