The rusted iron door hung open at a thirty-degree angle, its lower pipe rim cutting a curved, screeching gouge through twenty years of settled lime dust.
Len Vey approached the dark threshold with slow, measured strides. His jointed sounding pole was held diagonally across his chest in his uninjured right hand. Beside him, Bram Ash lifted the copper-hooded lantern, its olive-tinted beam lighting up the boundary where the rough-hewn limestone bedrock met a stone-built shift so jarring, so fully alien to the heavy-duty excavations of the Quarry Ward, that it stopped Len in his tracks.
Beyond the pitted iron plate lay no rough drift, no splintered cedar wooden props, and no dripping drainage water chute.
It was a narrow, carefully engineered institutional hall four feet wide and seven feet high. It extended thirty paces directly into the bedrock toward the central mountain roots. The walls were not dressed stone. They were fully lined with glazed white baked-clay tiles, four inches square, laid in perfect level courses with hairline joints of waterproof gray lead-mortar.
In the green glare of the copper lamp, the glazed baked-clay surfaces gleamed with the cold, sterile bright glare of a hospital studying room. It reflected the olive light in distorted, repetitive rectangles that looked like rows of polished teeth.
