Nick tried the door. It opened. It seemed that luck was on his side tonight.
He stepped inside and quickly fumbled on the lights. He could feel his heart thumping frantically.
There was no Brooklyn. Instead, a white snow leopard was lying on the ground. Its breath
was shallow.
Nick, with trembling hands, slowly moved forward. Stifling a scream, he caught hold of
himself. He saw a wide tear in the stomach of the leopard. Blood was gushing out.
The wound was fresh. Someone knew he was here.
Why kill an innocent beautiful creature? Softly, he brushed and kissed the fur of the leopard.
He could see the golden yellow eyes staring at him, reflecting the hurt in its body. After a while, it
closed its eyes.
A wave of nausea and pain clouded his vision.
The smooth marble tiles made the floor hard and cold under Nick’s feet. The soles of his feet
felt as if they had turned blue.
“What did they do to you?” whispered Nick, warm blood trickling down his trembling fingers.
He had come all the way here for nothing. And the snow leopard would be here forever,
forever trapped, forever alone.
Why does this feeling seem so familiar?
He leaned against the wall. Almost instantly, there was a loud grinding noise of stone
shifting. An area of the wall had disappeared. Instead, a dark passage appeared. He must have
activated a button somewhere in the wall.
Nick slowly peered into the dark passage.
He made up his mind. There was no going back now.
Nick took one last look at the leopard, and immersed himself in the tunnel of cold. Nick felt
an unpleasant tingling down his spine, and for the first time, he wondered why he’d come to this
place alone. Behind him, the light was growing fainter. He checked his watch nervously. It was
already ten minutes past one. Nick took a deep breath and tried to calm down.
It was then that he realized he was not alone inside the chamber. He could hear a faint sound,
the cry of children. It seemed to be coming from deep inside the chamber, only it wasn’t nursery
rhymes or laughter he heard, but the terrible shrieks of hundreds of children.
Nick broke into a run, feeling cold sweat on his back. After running for about a hundred
meters, he arrived, panting, at a large, cavernous room.
With trembling hands, Nick raised his flashlight high in the air. The flickering beam
cast hazy shadows across the dark room. Nick looked around him, thinking he must be
hallucinating. Embedded in the walls were hundreds of glass cages, each one containing
children, real living children. Agony was shown on the faces of the dozens of those who were
trapped inside the glass cages.
Nick examined one of the cages closely. The girl inside had her eyes closed, her face
expressionless. She had a large bruise on the side of her cheek. He knocked on the thick glass.
The girl opened her eyes and stared directly at Nick’s.
Her eyes were blood-streaked, which seemed to glow in the dark.
Those eyes.
He suddenly remembered the luminous, reddish eyes that he had seen. Just the eyes, wild, inhuman.
He remembered something else----a small voice at the back of his mind, whispery, but
intense: “I am the devil. I like the taste of blood.”
