Douglas Preston - Crimson Shore

His reverie was interrupted by a growl. Aubrey had stopped, staring ahead into the darkness, his hair bristling.

“What is it, boy?”

Another low growl.

This was unusual. Aubrey was probably the friendliest dog in town, who posed a danger to burglars only by virtue of tripping them in the dark. He would greet the grim reaper himself with a wagging tail.

Aubrey took a step back, stiff with fear, the growl turning into a whine.

“Easy now, there’s nothing there.” Bud shone the light around, but it didn’t penetrate far into the swirling murk.

Now the dog was shaking and cringing, the whine increasing in intensity. Suddenly Bud smelled a dreadful odor — the stench of shit and blood — and with a yelp the dog pulled back abruptly, a puddle of urine appearing on the ground beneath it.

“What the hell?” Bud backed up as well. “What’s that?” he called into the darkness.

With a screech of terror Aubrey jerked back on the leash, pulling it out of his hands and hightailing it down the street, leash dragging behind him.

“Hey, boy!” Bud watched the dog tear off into the darkness. This was the craziest thing. He heard a noise behind him and turned back to see something that at first he could barely comprehend: a stringy, naked, oddly elongated figure emerging from the darkness.

“What the hell —?”

The figure lunged forward and Bud felt the hot, gurgling breath of it, the stench of the slaughterhouse, and with a muffled shriek of terror he turned to flee when a pain he could never have imagined suddenly tore through his vitals; he looked down with surprise and horror to see a glabrous pate buried in his gut, streaming red with blood, muscled jaws working, apparently eating him to death...

Constance emerged from the last line of dunes, skirted a half-buried sand fence, and came out on the beach. The surf was tremendous, massive curlers collapsing far offshore, driving in as a line of boiling water and breaking a second time and thundering up the beach to the foot of the dunes. Until this trip to Exmouth, Constance had never seen such an angry ocean, and — with her inability to swim — she found the sight unsettling. It was easy to see how a ship would be pounded to flotsam in a sea like this in very little time. Her flashlight beam barely penetrated ten feet into the murk.

She looked back. The Exmouth Light was just visible, blinking away steadily despite the blackout. She recalled the old maps she had looked at in the Historical Society. The ruins of Oldham couldn’t be much farther to the south. Sure enough, as she continued on, she at last made out the stubs of pilings poking out of the sand as the shore curved into the estuary that formed the end of Crow Island and the former Oldham Harbor. A few more minutes brought her to a granite seawall, built of huge blocks that had once protected the opening to the harbor.

She skirted the seawall and walked inland. The dune area gave way to hard ground, scrubby pines, and stunted oaks. And there were house foundations here: cellar holes of stacked granite stone, full of oak leaves and drifted sand. It wasn’t hard to make out where the single street had passed through town, cellar holes on either side, along with the odd piling or rotten wooden beam.

A map of Oldham she’d examined at the Historical Society had indicated the town’s only church stood at the far end, where the street divided, so to be visible the length of town in a traditional New England arrangement. And sure enough, as she moved along the long-abandoned road, she found a larger, deeper foundation at the far end, in somewhat better condition than the other ruins, consisting once again of hand-cut and stacked granite blocks. A stone staircase led down into the remains of a basement.

Constance stood at the top of the stairs and looked down. There was nothing visible but sand and rubble. What was she expecting to find here? The futility of her plan struck her. Despite the remoteness and the desolation, these ruins had no doubt been picked over by beachcombers and other people in the many decades since Oldham was abandoned. What could she possibly find — especially when she didn’t know what, precisely, she was looking for?

She felt another surge of humiliation, chagrin, and anger. Against her better judgment she walked down the granite steps and into the open cellar. Here, within the shelter of the hole, the wind subsided. She shone her light around. The cellar was about thirty feet by forty, with a central stone structure that supported the remains of two fireplaces on the first floor. Those fireplaces could still be seen, of mortared stone, falling apart, a partial chimney sticking up like a hollow stub. The wooden part of the church was mostly gone, with only a few heavy, worm-eaten beams lying here and there, as soft as punk. Oak leaves lay piled up in the corners and against the back part of the central chimney. Bayberry bushes grew thickly along the north-facing stone wall, and a large stained canvas — it looked like an old sailcloth — lay rotting against it.

Constance finished a circuit of the cellar. If there was some dark secret hidden in this town, it would probably be here, in the church. But what? She brushed aside the leaves here and there, uncovering only broken glass, rusted nails, and bits of crockery. The wind picked up and she moved into the shelter of one of the walls. The sailcloth she had noticed was sprawled in the dead weeds. She grasped one end of it and pulled, dragging it back. A foul smell arose, like that of a dead animal, and instinctively she let the canvas fall back. She hesitated, grasped it again, and this time dragged it out of the way, back from the wall. The stench rose again. Shining her light, she saw that the sailcloth had been concealing a small, four-foot-square iron plate in the stone of the rear wall. The plate appeared to be covering a niche. The smell was awful, but no dead animal could be seen — in fact, the smell seemed to be coming from behind the plate.

She knelt and, breathing through her mouth, looked closely at the plate. It was rusted but not, it seemed, as rusted as it should have been. It looked like the entrance to a root cellar. The plate was hinged, the hinges oiled and suspiciously operable.

Her heart beat faster. There was something behind here; she was sure of it.

She shone the flashlight around the space, checked to make sure her stiletto was still tucked into the folds of her dress. Then, quietly and carefully, she lifted the iron plate — which moved easily on its hinges — revealing not a root cellar but a low tunnel, a descending stone staircase. A horrible smell came drifting up: a mingling of feces, urine, and rotting meat. She ducked through the opening and began descending the stairs into darkness.

At the bottom she paused, listening. The storm above was now greatly muffled, and she could hear a faint, intermittent sound ahead: the sound of childlike weeping.

Gavin sat in the back room of the station house, staring glumly at the checkerboard. Once again the chief was winning, and it galled him no end to be beaten in checkers by a person who was in every way his intellectual inferior. How did Mourdock do it? He’d probably read a book and learned some cheap tricks, like those guys who played ten-second chess for money in Boston Common.

He finally made his move.

“King me,” the chief said, his plump fingers moving a piece into the back row.

With ill-disguised annoyance Gavin stacked on a second chip. He was going to lose this one, too.

What made it worse was that the chief, insufferable at the best of times, had become puffed up like a toad since his triumph that afternoon, where he’d basically hogged all the credit for solving the case, when it was Pendergast and Constance Greene who had done all the work. Gavin couldn’t understand why Pendergast had just stood at a distance during the press conference while the chief monopolized the limelight. At least, he thought, the case was over. He couldn’t get out of his memory those two corpses, obscenely carved up with the Tybane Inscriptions, and it had been a tremendous relief to learn it was just those dumbass Dunwoody brothers trying to divert suspicion from their own criminal bullshit. It was like he’d been telling everyone from the very beginning: The carvings were only a red herring. No witches or witchcraft was involved at all — a ridiculous false alarm.