There was a wooden staircase on the far side of the boiler room, going up. She took the flashlight from the crate and went up it. At the top there was a door, and she opened it into a long dark hallway lined with closed doors, and at the end of the hallway another door with a pane of pebbled glass in it, and light behind the glass, a yellow wavering light, and the radio, and the voices. The voices stopped. The radio did not.
She pushed open the door.
It had been the lobby of the Carrigan Rooms once, a long, high-ceilinged room with a tile floor in a pattern of little black and white hexagons and a front desk of dark varnished wood with pigeonholes behind it for the mail and the keys. A blanket had been hung over the front door. There were three big cast-iron radiators along the walls, and they were all hissing, a soft, steady, comfortable hiss, like a kettle a long way from boiling, and the room was warm. Warm the way a barn is warm with cattle in it. Two kerosene lamps were burning on the front desk. There were three mattresses dragged in from the rooms upstairs, laid on the tile in front of the radiators with blankets and quilts piled on them, and a card table with a cribbage board on it, and a row of canned goods along the desk, soup and Spam and sardines and Saltines and a coffee can, and in the coffee can, Lauren saw, a little heap of grape jelly packets.
And three old men. They were looking at her.
One of them was sitting up in a wooden armchair beside the biggest radiator with a quilt over his knees and a woman's black wool coat around his shoulders, a good coat, with a little fur collar, and he was the oldest-looking man Lauren had ever seen, older than her father had been at the end, so thin that his head on his neck looked like a stone balanced on a stick. He was breathing the way her father had breathed. She knew the sound before she knew anything else. A short, tight, sucking pull of air, and a pause, and a long thin whistle out, and a pause, and a short tight pull again. He did not take his eyes off her.
One of them was sitting at the card table, very straight, with his big hands flat on either side of the cribbage board, and his face turned not quite toward her but a little to the side of her, toward the door frame, and she saw that his eyes were milky, both of them, gone white in the middle like the eyes of a fish on ice.
The third one was standing. He was standing in front of the other two, between them and her, on one leg and a pair of aluminum crutches, with the other leg of his trousers folded up and pinned at the knee, and he had a coal shovel in his right hand, held out from his body, and he was looking at her the way a dog looks at a stranger in his yard.
"Who are you," he said. "And where'd you get the light."
"My name's Lauren," Lauren said. "I work at the Gallus Frame, on Park. Johanna gave me the key."