Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

And then there was a long, echoing sound, almost like the roar of rolling surf.

A gunshot.

And suddenly she was on her feet, crying out, “Here I am! Help me! Over here! Please! Please! Please! Please!”

Sixty-Nine

W eeks struggled to keep up with Pendergast as the FBI agent hurried through the cave. The way the man flicked his flashlight around, Weeks wondered if he missed anything. Probably not. It felt a little reassuring.

The air of purpose that radiated from the agent had helped steady Weeks’s shattered nerves. He even felt some vestiges of his old aggrieved self returning. And yet he could not get out of his mind the image of the dog being ripped limb from limb by that . . . by that . . .

He stopped.

“What’s that?” he asked in a high, quavering voice.

Pendergast spoke without looking back. “Officer Weeks? I expect you to follow my lead.”

“But I heard something—”

Pendergast’s slender white hand landed on his shoulder. Weeks was about to say more but fell silent as the pressure on his shoulder grew more intense.

“This way, Officer.” The voice spoke with a silvery gentleness, but it somehow chilled Weeks to the bone.

“Yes, sir.”

As they proceeded, he heard the sound once again. It seemed to come from ahead, a drawn-out, echoing noise that reverberated back and forth through the endless caverns, impossible to identify. A scream? A shotgun blast? The one thing Weeks felt sure of was that, whatever the sound might be, Pendergast was going to head directly for it.

He swallowed his protest and followed.

They moved through a narrow warren of passages whose low ceilings were covered with glistening crystals. Weeks scraped his head against the needle-sharp crystals, cursed, and ducked lower: this wasn’t the way he’d come with the dogs. Pendergast’s light moved back and forth, exposing nests of cave pearls clustered together in chalky pools. The sounds had finally died away, leaving only the faint plash of their own steps.

Then Pendergast halted suddenly, his light shining steadily on something. Weeks looked. At first he couldn’t make out exactly what it was: an arrangement of objects on a shelf of flat stone, clustered around some larger central object. It looked like a shrine of some kind. Weeks leaned closer. Then his eyes widened with shock and he stepped back. It was an old teddy bear, furred with mold. The bear was arranged as if it were praying: hands clasped before it, one beady black eye staring out from creeping tendrils of fungus.

“What the hell —?” Weeks began.

Pendergast’s light shifted to what the bear had been praying to. In the yellow glow of the flashlight, it was little more than a mound of silky mold. Weeks watched as Pendergast bent over and, with a gold pen, carefully pulled away the mold, exposing a tiny skeleton underneath.

“Rana amaratis,” Pendergast said.

“What?”

“A rare species of blind cave frog. You will note the bones were broken peri-mortem. This frog was crushed to death in somebody’s fist.”

Weeks swallowed. “Look,” he ventured one last time, “it’s insane to keep going deeper into the cave like this. We should be getting out of here, getting help.”

But Pendergast had returned his attention to the objects around the teddy bear. With care he exposed more small skeletons and partially decomposed insect bodies. Then he went back to the teddy bear, picked it up, brushed off the mold, and examined it carefully.

Weeks looked around nervously. “Come on, come on. ”

He shut up as the FBI agent turned toward him. Pendergast’s pale eyes were distant, focusing on some inner thought.

“What is it?” Weeks breathed. “What does it mean?”

Pendergast returned the bear to its place and said merely, “Let us go.”

The FBI agent was moving faster now, stopping only infrequently to check the map he was carrying. The sound of water was louder now, and they were now wading almost constantly. The air was so chill and damp that their breath left trails. Weeks tried to keep up, tried to keep his mind off what he’d seen. This was insane, where the hell were they going? When he got back— if he got back—the first thing he’d do was put in for disability leave, because he’d be lucky if post–traumatic stress syndrome was all he got from—

Then Pendergast halted suddenly. His light disclosed a body lying on the cave floor. The figure lay on its back, eyes wide open, arms and legs flung wide. The head was strangely elongated, like it had expanded and flattened, and the back of the skull had burst open like an overripe pumpkin. The eyes were bugged out, looking in two different directions. The mouth was wide open— too wide. Weeks looked away.

“What happened?” he managed to say, struggling to hold back the terror.

Pendergast raised his light toward the ceiling. There was a dark hole in the roof of the cavern. Then he let it fall once again to the body. “Can you identify him, Officer?”

“Raskovich. The campus security guy from Kansas State.”

Pendergast nodded and looked back up into the narrow hole overhead. “It would seem Mr. Raskovich had a great fall,” he murmured, almost to himself.

Weeks shut his eyes. “Oh, my God.”

Pendergast motioned him forward. “We must go on.”

But Weeks had had enough. “I’m not going one step more. Just what do you think you’re doing, anyway?” The panic elevated his voice louder and louder. “The dog’s dead, Raskovich is dead. You’ve seen them both. There’s a monster down here. What more do you want? I’m the one that’s still alive. I’m the one you should be worrying about right now. I’m —”

Pendergast turned back. And Weeks stopped in mid-rant, involuntarily, at the steady, contemptuous gaze of the FBI agent.

After a moment, Weeks averted his eyes. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, we’re wasting our time.” His voice cracked. “What makes you so sure this girl is still alive, anyway?”

As if in answer, he heard a response: faint, distorted, and yet unmistakable. It was the sound of someone crying for help.

Seventy

L arssen ran like hell, Brast behind him, holding on to the rope, careering from rock wall to rock wall, somehow managing in his blindness to keep up. It had been a couple of minutes since the screaming had stopped but Larssen could still hear it in his mind, playing over and over again like some infernal recording: the final scream of Cole ending abruptly in the sound of cracking bones. Whatever had done that—whatever was pursuing them now—wasn’t completely human. It really was some kind of monster.

It couldn’t be true. But he’d seen it. He’d seen it.

He paid no attention to where he was going, what tunnel he was in, whether he was heading back toward the surface or deeper into the caverns. He didn’t care. All he wanted to do was put distance between himself and the thing.

They came to a pool, pale, shimmering red in the goggles, and Larssen waded in without hesitation, the icy water eventually reaching his bare chest before shoaling. Brast followed blindly, as best he could. On the far side, the ceiling of the cave became very low. Larssen moved forward more slowly, sweeping his gun back and forth, breaking off the sharp stalactites that hung before his face. The ceiling dropped still farther, and there was an ugly noise, followed by a desperate curse, as Brast hit his head against it.

Then the ceiling rose again, revealing an odd, broken room with cracks leading off in myriad directions. Larssen stopped, looking up and down and sideways, and felt the scrabbling Brast blunder into his back.