Crude Sunlight 1 Read Free Page A

there, staring out of the TV screen at Thomas. He looked excited, eyes wide, a black hood falling back off his head, exposing his tousled mop of black hair. He reached up, pulled the hood down and then grabbed the camera. The point of view swung around, and then they were running, ladder abandoned. The massive building loomed high above them, looking like a fort, a castle, something improbably old and European. The terse, quick breathing of people running. Someone made a joke, people laughed, were hushed. Finally they reached the building's base, lined up against the wall, and the camera panned up and across.
    It truly was huge. Made of brick, thick-walled with tall, narrow windows that were choked full of broken glass behind the wire mesh that covered them. Two huge towers rose into the night like the horns of a gazelle, their points capped with verdigrised copper, gleaming eerily in the moonlight.
    "C'mon, it's around here somewhere," somebody said, quiet and authoritative. The group moved along the base of the building, walking quietly in single file for about a minute till they rounded a corner and stopped before a huge crack in the wall. It was as if someone had pulled a seam apart, had burst open the bricks so that it gaped, empty and dark like a wound in the side of the building.
    The camera focused on the interior but it was too dark within to make anything out. Quiet whisperings, and then everybody drew flashlights. One by one they slipped inside and one of the guys whispered a warning about pigeon shit, something about gas. Henry went last, and then the flashlights were switched on, their broad bright discs swarming across the walls, ceiling, floor. The room was large, empty, the wallpaper bulging with fist sized cysts, the pattern long faded and leached of color by washes of filthy water that had stained it to brown. Crown moldings topped off the walls, giving the place an air of regal desolation.
    There were more excited whispers, and then one of them turned to the camera, holding the light beneath her chin, illuminating her face from below as if she were around a campfire and about to tell a ghost story.
    Julia , thought Thomas again, definitely . Her face was brilliantly lit, the base of her chin, the underside of her nose, the under swellings of her cheeks, her brow and forehead glowing an incandescent whitepink. The rest dimmed to darkness, but her lips were pulled back in an ironic smile, and Thomas saw that she wasn't beautiful, not exactly, but instead incredibly striking, her hair cut short almost like a boy's, her features sharp and betraying a certain harshness. She smiled and then turned back to the darkness.
    They moved through the room, shoes crackling on the detritus strewn across the floor, and out into a large hallway. It had the look of a hospital, the corridor wide and box shaped, long and lined with doors. An old hospital, from the looks of it, with the moldings around the doors artfully done in dark wood. It looked damned spooky, Thomas decided, sitting back and shaking his head. There was no way that he'd ever go in there.
    Some of this must have been felt by Henry and his companions, for they quieted and began to file down the corridor, the sound of their feet loud in the echoing silence. There were a few old leather and wood wheelchairs abandoned in the hallway, large clunky devices that must have been at least fifty years old. They paused before them and whispered comments to each other, snapped off a few photographs. They paused before each door, flashing their lights inside, seeing little more than broken glass, random pieces of furniture knocked down and destroyed, the walls covered by mostly obscene or drug-related suggestions in spray painted letters.
    The end of the corridor opened into a shoebox-shaped hall with a staircase on one end and a large arched entrance leading out into a dark room beyond. They paused, discussed options and as one turned toward the steps. They stopped at the