Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

First things first. He picked up the phone, pressed the scrambler option, punched in a number with the area code of Cleveland, Ohio. The ring was answered immediately, but it was several seconds before a voice of exceeding thinness spoke.

“And?”

“I thank you, Mime. The Cayman Islands number did the trick. I expect the target to experience more than a few sleepless nights.”

“Happy to be of assistance.” There was a click.

Pendergast replaced the receiver and examined the map again, looking more closely at the complex subterranean labyrinths it exposed.

“Excellent,” he murmured.

The memory crossing had not failed. Instead, as the map confirmed, it had succeeded beyond his highest expectations. He had merely failed to interpret it properly. He rolled up the survey and inserted it back into the tube, capping it with a deft tap.

Now he knew exactly where the Ghost Warriors had come from—and where they had gone.

Forty-Five

I n New York City, it was a warm, brilliant late afternoon. But in the strangely perfumed vaults that lay deep underneath the mansion at Riverside Drive, it was always midnight.

The man named Wren walked through the basement chambers, thin and spectral as a wraith. The yellow light of his miner’s helmet pierced the velvety gloom, illuminating a wooden display case here, a tall metal filing cabinet there. From all corners came the faint sheen of copper and bronze, the dull winking of leaded glass.

For the first time in many days, he did not carry the clipboard beneath his arm. It sat beside his laptop, half a dozen vaults back, ready to be taken upstairs. Because Wren, after eight weeks of exhausting, fascinating work, had at last completed the cataloguing of the cabinet of curiosities that Pendergast had charged him with.

It had proved a remarkable collection indeed, even more remarkable than Pendergast had intimated it would be. It was full of wildly diverse objects, the finest of everything: gemstones, fossils, precious metals, butterflies, botanicals, poisons, extinct animals, coins, weapons, meteorites. Every room, every new drawer and shelf, had revealed fresh discoveries, some wondrous, others deeply unsettling. It was, without question, the greatest cabinet of curiosities ever assembled.

What a shame, then, that the chances of the public ever setting eyes upon it were vanishingly small. At least, not in this century. He felt a pang of jealousy that it should belong to Pendergast, all of it, and nothing for him.

Wren walked slowly through the dim chambers, one following upon the next, looking this way and that, making sure that all was in order, that he had overlooked nothing, left nothing behind.

Now, at last, he reached his final destination. He stopped, the beam of his light falling over a forest of glass: beakers, retorts, titration setups, and test tubes, all returning his light from long dark rectangles of a dozen laboratory tables. His beam stopped at last on a door set into the far wall of the lab. Beyond lay the final chambers, into which Pendergast had expressly forbidden him entrance.

Wren turned back, gazing down the dim, tapestried chambers through which he had just passed. The long journey reminded him, somehow, of Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero had arranged for his masked ball a series of chambers, each one more fantastic, bizarre, and macabre than the one before it. The final chamber—the chamber of Death—had been black, with blood-colored windows.

Wren looked back into the laboratory, shining his light toward that little closed door in the far wall. He had often wondered, during his cataloguing, what lay beyond it. But perhaps, in retrospect, it was best that he not know. And he did so want to get back to the remarkable ledger book that awaited him at the library. Working on it was a way to put these strange and disturbing collections behind him, at least for a while.

. . . There it was again: the rustle of fabric, the echo of stealthy tread.

Wren had lived most of his working life in dim, silent vaults, and his sense of hearing was preternaturally acute. Time and again, as he had labored in these chambers, he’d heard that same rustle, heard that furtive step. Time and again he’d had the sense of being watched as he pored over open drawers or jotted notes. It had happened far too often to be mere imagination.

As he turned and began moving back through the shadowy rooms, Wren’s hand reached into his lab coat and closed over a narrow-bladed book knife. The blade was fresh and very sharp.

The faint tread paced his own.

Wren let his gaze move casually in the direction of the sound. It seemed to be coming from behind a large set of oaken display cases along the right wall.

The basement chambers were vast and complex, but Wren had come to know them well in his two months of work. And he knew that particular set of display cases ended against a transverse wall. It was a cul-de-sac.

He continued walking until he was almost at the end of the chamber. A rich brocaded tapestry lay ahead, covering the passage into the next vault. Then, with sudden, ferretlike speed, he darted to the right, placing himself between the set of display cases and the wall. Pulling the scalpel from his pocket and thrusting it forward, he shone his light into the blackness behind the cases.

Nothing. It was empty.

But as he slipped the book knife back into his pocket and moved away from the display case, Wren heard, with utter distinctness and clarity, a retreating patter of steps that were too light, and too swift, to belong to anybody but a child.

Forty-Six

C orrie drove past the Kraus place slowly, giving the ugly old house a good once-over. A real Addams Family pile if ever there was one. That meddlesome old woman was nowhere to be seen, probably taken to bed sick again. Pendergast’s Rolls was still gone and the place looked abandoned, sitting all by its shabby self in the stifling heat, surrounded by yellowing corn. Overhead, the great anvil-shaped wedge of the storm was creeping farther across the sun. There were now tornado warnings on the radio from Dodge City to the Colorado border. When she looked to the west, the sky was so black and solid it seemed to be made of slate.

No matter. She’d be in and out of the cave in fifteen minutes. A quick check, that was all.

About a quarter mile beyond the Kraus place, she pulled onto a dirt track heading into the nearby fields. She parked her car in a turnaround where it couldn’t be seen from the road. Over the tops of the corn to the east, she could just make out the widow’s walk of the Kraus place; if she took a shortcut through the corn, nobody would see her.

She wondered briefly if it was such a good idea to be out in the corn like this. But then she remembered Pendergast being quite positive the killer worked only at night.

Pocketing her flashlight, she got out of the car and closed the door. Then she pushed into the corn and walked down the rows in the direction of the cave.

The heat of the corn pressed down on her almost to the point of suffocation. The ears were drying out—gasohol corn was harvested dry—and Corrie wondered mildly what would happen if the corn caught fire. She enjoyed that thought until she reached the broken-down picket fence that separated the Kraus place from the surrounding fields.

She followed the line of the fence until she was behind the house. She glanced back quickly, just in case the old lady had appeared in one of the windows, but they all remained dark and empty, like missing teeth. The house gave her the creeps, frankly: standing against the cruel-looking sky, rundown and alone, a couple of gnarled, dead trees at its back. The weak rays of the sun still illuminated its mansard roofs and ocular windows. But even as she watched, the shadow of the approaching front crept across the corn like a blanket and the house darkened against the background sky. She could smell ozone on the air, and the mugginess grew even more suffocating. The storm was worse than it had seemed from inside the trailer—far worse. She’d better hurry before all hell broke loose.