Chapter 23: The Gate, the Creature, and the Leap Holmes Cannot Deduce

The smell hit him first.

Not the cold mineral trace he had catalogued in Mirkwood, not the ozone precursor he had learned to associate with the creature's proximity, but something beneath both of those — older, he thought, though he recognized immediately that the concept of age applied to a place that existed outside sequential time was probably incoherent. Still. The smell was old. It was the smell of a room that had not been opened, of water that had not moved, of air that had been breathed by nothing and had therefore forgotten what breathing was for.

The gate was in the sub-basement, behind a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL in stenciled red that had been partially melted from the inside.