Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

And that’s when Corrie finally understood. He was playing hide-and-seek.

She swallowed, trembling, tried to find her voice. “You want to play with me?”

He paused, then squealed a laugh, his wispy beard waggling, his thick lips wet and red, the two-inch nails flashing as his hands alternately opened and clenched. “Pway!” he cried, advancing toward her.

“No!” she screamed. “Wait! Not that way—!”

“Pway!” he roared, spittle flying, as he drew back a massive hand. “Pway!” Corrie shrank back, waiting for the inevitable.

And then, suddenly, the thing turned his head. His grotesque eyes swiveled wetly in their orbits, long brown lashes blinking. His hand hovered in the air as he looked off into the darkness.

He seemed to be listening.

Then he picked her up, slung her over his shoulder, and once again began moving with fearsome speed. Corrie was only dimly aware of the confusing procession of galleries and chambers. She closed her eyes.

And then she felt him stop. She opened her eyes to a small hole, a mere black tube at the base of a limestone wall. She felt herself sliding off his shoulder, felt him pushing her feet into the hole.

“Please, don’t—” She tried to grab on to the sides, clutching and scratching, nails tearing against the stone. He placed his hands on her shoulders, gave a brutal thrust, and she slid downward, falling the last few feet and landing hard on the stone floor.

She sat up, dazed and bruised. He leaned in from above, holding the lantern, and for an instant she had a glimpse of the smooth glassy sides of the pit that surrounded her.

“Hooo!” he called down, and puckered his lips grotesquely at her.

Then his head vanished with the light, and Corrie was left at the bottom of the pit, in utter darkness, alone in the wet, cold silence of the cave.

Sixty

P endergast slipped silently through the dark galleries of stone, moving as quickly as possible, following the faint worn marks of a trail.

The cave system was enormous and his map showed only a sketchy outline of its true complexity. The map was wrong in many particulars, and there were entire levels of the cave not shown on it at all. The cave system was folded in over itself in exceedingly complex ways, making it possible for someone familiar with its secrets—the killer—to move in mere minutes between locations that on the map appeared to be a thousand linear yards apart. Still, despite its drawbacks, the map was a remarkable piece of work, proving what even the U.S. Geological Survey maps didn’t show: that Kraus’s Kaverns was the mere tip of a subterranean iceberg, a vast cave system that honeycombed the depths beneath Medicine Creek and the surrounding countryside—of which one node connected with the Ghost Mounds.

Ahead, Pendergast could hear the sound of water. Another minute brought him to the spot. Here, a phreatic passage, formed ages before by water under great pressure, cut laterally through the limestone cavern he was following. Along its floor ran a swift-moving underground stream, the lone remaining vestige of the forces that had originally sculpted these strange, deep corridors.

Pendergast paused at the water, knelt, scooped up a handful, and tasted it.

It was the same water he’d drunk at the Kraus mansion—the water the town tapped into. He tasted again. It was, as he’d expected, the very water Lu Yu’s Ch’a Ching, the Book of Tea, considered perfect for brewing green tea: oxygenated, mineral-laden water from a free-flowing underground limestone stream. It was that tea, and the water, that had triggered the revelation that Kraus’s Kaverns must be more extensive than the small portion open to the public. The trip to Topeka had proven him right, had armed him with the map he now held. But the knowledge had come at a cost. He had not anticipated Corrie acting on her own, and coming so far in her own deductions—although, in hindsight, it was all too clear that he should have.

He rose from the stream, then paused again. Something lay on the far side at the faintest perimeter of his flashlight beam, a canvas knapsack, torn apart roughly at the seams. He crossed the stream and knelt, taking a gold pen from his pocket and using it to pull apart the edges of the cloth. Inside was a road map, a couple of trowels, and several spare D batteries, the kind used in heavy flashlights and metal detectors.

Pendergast let his light play around the bag. Arrowheads and potsherds were scattered on the ground beside it. An old parfleche was decorated in the same Southern Cheyenne style he’d seen in the burial chamber beneath the mound . . .

. . . And then, a few feet away, his light stopped at a ragged clump of hair, bleached-blonde with black roots.

Sheila Swegg. Digging in the Mounds, she had accidentally come across the rear entrance to the cave. It was well hidden, but easy enough to access if one knew which rocks to move. She must have been astounded at the burial chamber where the Ghost Warriors were entombed, and she’d then gone deeper into the cave, looking for even more treasures.

She found something else instead. She found him . . .

There was no time for additional examination. Taking one final look at the pathetic remnants, Pendergast turned and followed the small river along the smooth curves of the phreatic passage.

Within a few hundred yards, the river dropped away into a deep hole, filling the cave with a wash of mist. Here, Pendergast went upward, through narrower tubes and pipes. Now the faint marks made by the long-term passage of feet were becoming stronger: he was approaching the inhabited region of the cave.

Pendergast had believed from the beginning that the killer was local. His mistake had been in assuming the killer was a citizen. But no, he was not somebody to be found on Margery Tealander’s tax rolls: he lived with them yet not among them.

From this realization, it was a relatively simple matter to determine the identity of the killer. But along with that determination came an understanding—or the beginnings of an understanding—of just how malformed and amoral a creature they were dealing with. He was a killer of extraordinary dangerousness, whose actions even Pendergast, with his long study of the criminal mind, could not predict.

He arrived at another narrow corridor. Along the floor, the calcite flow had recrystallized, forming a shimmering, glowing, frozen river. In the center, the soft flow had been worn down several inches by the passage of feet over a great many years.

At the end of the corridor the tunnel began to branch repeatedly, each branch showing signs of having been traversed many times. Narrow crawlspaces and vertical cracks also showed signs of passage: a delicate crystal crushed here, a smear on an otherwise snowy white dripstone there—the variety of ways a human could betray his movements through a cave were almost infinite. In the labyrinth of passages Pendergast lost his way—once, twice—each time managing to guide himself back with the aid of the map. As he rejoined the central trail the second time, his flashlight caught a glimpse of color: there, on a high shelf of dripstone, was a collection of Indian fetishes, left hundreds of years before.

Added to the fetishes were others of more recent vintage, made of bits of string and bark, gum, and Band-Aids.

Pendergast paused just a moment to examine them. They were strange, crude, and yet made with loving care.

Pendergast forced himself to hurry on, trying always to follow the most traveled route. Infrequently he would stop to jot something on the map or simply to fix in his mind the growing three-dimensional layout of the cave system. It was a stupendous maze of stone, with passageways twisting in every imaginable direction: splitting, joining, splitting again. There were shortcuts here, secret passageways, tunnels, stopes, and drifts that would take many years to explore and learn. Many years indeed.