Douglas Preston: Crimson Shore

As the rotting piers came into view, McCool heard a sound behind him and turned to find the man approaching him at a determined rate. And now he noticed what a peculiar and frightening figure this was: with a strangely warped face, a Brillo-brush of wiry red hair, disturbing wet lips thicker on one side than the other, a splotch of diseased-like freckles, a three-pointed beard, and a projecting brow with a single bushy eyebrow straight across. McCool thought he knew everyone in town, but he had never seen this fellow before. He was the stuff of nightmares.

He carried a bayonet in one hand, which — as he approached with fast stride and gleaming eyes — he unsheathed with a zing of steel.

With an involuntary cry of confusion and fear, McCool turned and ran toward the old piers. His pursuer also broke into a run, keeping pace, not closing in or dropping behind, almost as if driving him forward.

McCool cried out for help once, then again, but he was far from the town and his voice was swallowed by the vast marshlands beyond the rotting piers.

In an effort to escape his pursuer, he plunged off the trail, scrambled up an embankment above the first pier, vaulted over a stone foundation, and clawed his way through a thicket of raspberry bushes. He could hear his pursuer crashing along behind.

“What do you want?” McCool cried, but received no answer.

The brambles tore at his pants and shirt, scratching his face and hands. He burst out the other side of the thicket and continued along the contours of the embankment, stumbling past a rotting, caved-in fish house and a tangle of rusted cables and chains.

This was insane. He was being pursued by a lunatic.

He sobbed in panic, gasping, sucking in air. In his terror he tripped over another broken foundation and rolled partway down the embankment, regained his feet, then sprinted into a broad area of marsh grass. Maybe he could lose the man in the grass. He pushed forward, pinwheeling his arms, pressing through the thick grasses. He glanced back; the red-haired lunatic was still following, eyes like coals, sweeping effortlessly along, bayonet in hand.

“Help!” he screamed. “Someone help me!”

A flock of blackbirds burst upward from a swath of cattails in a mass of beating wings. There was no way to outrun this dogged pursuer. He was just being pushed deeper and deeper into the marsh.

The water. If he could just reach the water. He was a strong swimmer. The lunatic might not swim as well.

He veered left, toward the heart of the marsh. Now the grass was so high he couldn’t see ahead, and he stumbled forward, bashing aside the sharp grass with his arms, barely noticing the cuts and slashes it inflicted. On and on he plunged, hearing the crash and swish of his pursuer, now only a dozen feet behind. The bay or a marsh channel would be ahead somewhere. Something, for God’s sake, something ...

And suddenly the grasses ended and he burst onto a mudflat, stretching ahead fifty yards to a swift-flowing channel of water.

No help for it; he leapt into the mud, sinking to his knees. With a cry of fear, he struggled, flopping and sucking and flailing through the muck. He turned and saw the red-haired freak standing at the edge of the grass, bayonet in hand, his entire face distorted into a grotesque grinning visage.

“ Who are you?! ” he screamed.

The man melted back into the grass and disappeared.

For a moment McCool stood in the muck, gasping for breath, coughing, his hands on his knees, feeling as if his lungs might fall out. What to do now? He looked around. The channel lay fifty feet farther on, a muddy stream going out with the tide. On the far side was more endless marsh.

Never would he go back into that nightmare of grass: not with that maniac lurking in there. Never. And yet the only way out of this hell was back through the grass, or else to take to the water and drift out with the tide.

He stood there, heart pounding. The light was fading; the water ran on and the blackbirds wheeled about, crying.

He slopped his way toward the water channel. The mud grew firmer as he approached the edge, where he paused. The mud was cold — and the water, he knew, would be colder still. But he had no choice.

He waded in. It was very cold. He pushed off, letting the current take him, and he began to swim downstream, burdened by the tweed jacket and mud-soaked trousers and heavy leather shoes. But he was an experienced swimmer and kept himself above water, taking long strokes, making fast time, the marsh grass slipping by. The channel narrowed, the current growing swifter, the grass closing in on both sides. He was heading toward the sea. That was all he could focus on. Thank God, he would soon see the beach, where he could climb out and get back to the safety of the Inn.

As he rounded another bend in the channel, swimming frantically, he saw the wall of grass part to reveal a figure: red hair, distorted grinning face, blazing yellow eyes, gleaming bayonet.

“God, no. No! ” he screamed, making frantically for the far shore of the channel even as the current swept him toward the embankment where the figure stood — even as the figure leapt like a raptor into the water, crashing down on him — even as the thrust of cold steel felt like a sudden icicle piercing his guts.

Indira Ganesh had received the small bone late the previous evening and had worked on it all night and throughout the day. It was now ten PM and she’d been working nearly thirty hours straight, but she hardly felt tired. She liked working at night, when her lab, at the Peabody Museum on Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, was as quiet as a temple. In such an atmosphere, the work was like meditation or even prayer. When people were around she was never so productive.

And this little bone was just the sort of puzzle she liked. Absolutely no information had come in with it — not even identification that it was human. She had no idea who needed the analysis or why. Only that Howard Kress, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and her boss, had personally brought her the bone and said, in mysterious terms, that if he could have a complete and total analysis by the morning after next, he would consider it the greatest personal favor.

She had all the equipment and machines she needed at her disposal and she’d gone right to work. Identifying the bone as the right distal phalanx of a human index finger had been easy. From there the questions grew deeper and harder to answer. She always felt as if the bones she studied were whispering to her, eager to tell their stories. Now she had the story of this little bone — or at least, all that she could coax from it in thirty hours.

As Ganesh hunched over her computer, preparing to type up the preliminary report, she had a strange feeling of something behind her, the almost psychic pressure of a person’s gaze on her back. She turned and gasped: a tall, pale man with a striking face stood in the doorway.

“Dr. Ganesh? I’m so sorry to disturb you. The name is Pendergast. I am the one interested in the finger bone.”

She put her hand on her chest. “You gave me such a start.”

“May I take a seat?”

When she hesitated, he reached into his jacket pocket, removed the shield of a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Please,” she said, indicating a chair. “But how did you get in here? The museum’s closed.”

“Someone must have left a door unlocked. Now, if you don’t mind, could we chat about the bone?”

“I was just writing up the results.”

The man waved his hand. “I’d much rather hear it from you directly. I’m in something of a hurry.”

“All right.” She paused, recovering from her surprise, collecting her thoughts, determining where to start. “First of all, the size and robustness of the bone suggests a male. Someone with big, strong hands. The muscle attachments were so pronounced that I can say with confidence this person performed daily work, hard manual work, involving grasping and holding.”