Jayne Castle - After Glow

Emmett looked at the broken glass on the floor. "What happened in here, Benny?"

Benny followed his gaze with a jerky movement of his head. "The movers are responsible, sir. When they picked up the coffin and its lid, they accidentally banged one corner into that display case. Nothing's missing, though. I checked."

Emmett took his foot down off the rim of the pool and crossed to the broken display case. Several tomb mirrors were clustered inside.

"I told you, nothing was stolen." Benny grabbed the edge of the pool and hauled himself to his feet. He started to put one foot over the side but stopped when Verwood moved toward him. "The sarcophagus was an authorized transfer. The museum got a lot of money for it."

Emmett glanced down at the pile of glittering glass shards that Benny had succeeded in assembling with his broom. Here and there in the sparkling slivers he caught the unmistakable gleam of polished amber.

He took one of the tomb mirrors out of the display case and used the handle to stir the chunks of glass. Two oval-shaped beads appeared. He picked them up and examined them in the light.

"They were made for a necklace," he said to Verwood.

"Whoever busted the case must have broken a string of beads at the same time." Verwood pointed toward the foot of a nearby pedestal. "There's another one. And I see a couple more over there by that table."

"That's one possible explanation." Emmett rose to his feet and turned toward Benny. "The other is that the necklace was broken in the course of a struggle."

Benny blanched. "No," he whispered. "Nothing like that happened, I swear it."

Verwood picked up the headphones that the guard had ripped off a few minutes earlier. A long cord connected them to an audio player. He held the right phone up to his ear.

Emmett watched him. "Music?"

"Nope." Verwood lowered the headphones, his expression grim. "Don't think you're gonna like this, Boss. It sounds like one of those Thirteen Steps to Bliss lectures. Lot of stuff about that Amatheon guy."

"Wo." Benny gave a choked cry and leaped out of the quartz pool.

He dashed toward the entrance of the gallery.

Emmett stuck out a foot and grabbed his arm as he went flying past. Benny stumbled and went down heavily. Verwood moved in to anchor him to the floor.

Benny thrashed violently. Verwood was obliged to use some force. In the course of the struggle, the buttons of the guard's uniform gave way.

A string of amber beads gleamed on Benny's hairy chest.

Emmett walked forward and stood looking down at him. "Let's try this again from the top, Benny. I'll run through it. You tell me if I get anything wrong. Those Greenies kidnapped Lydia this evening, didn't they? Took her out of here in that damn sarcophagus."

Benny's eyes darted from side to side. He twitched a few times but he held his silence.

"You were the inside man, weren't you, Benny?" Emmett continued gently. "You turned off the alarms. The paperwork that authorized the transfer of the coffin was supposed to let you off the hook if anyone got suspicious, wasn't it? Your alibi was going to be that you were busy supervising the loading of the relic when Lydia disappeared."

"It wasn't… it wasn't like that," Benny squeaked.

"But something went wrong. Lydia wouldn't have gone without a fight. In the process, the case got broken and somebody lost his amber necklace."

Benny just stared at Emmett, mouth open, bottom lip trembling.

Verwood was staring, too. "Well, damn," he declared. "If that don't beat all. Only other hunter I've seen pull a ghost this far outside the Wall is Mr. Wyatt."

Emmett became aware of the tiny wisps of psi energy snapping and cracking in the air around him. A small ghost had coalesced. It promptly disintegrated only to reform and fall apart over and over again. He was standing in the center of a light shower of green fireworks.

Benny finally pulled himself together. "It's a trick."

Emmett glanced at the small ghost hovering off to his left, exerted enough concentration to keep it together for a moment, and sent it floating toward Benny.

"No, please." Benny tried to scuttle backward but Verwood pinned him. Sweat bathed his forehead. "Stop it. Stop it. Don't let it touch me."

Emmett tightened the grip on the urgency and rage that was fueling his para-rez abilities. There was no point terrorizing Benny. The guard was barely out of his teens, a young man who somewhere along the line had been emotionally or physically damaged to such an extent that he had become easy prey for a cult.

It was unlikely that Benny knew anything helpful, anyway. He was obviously a low-ranking member of the organization. No one would have entrusted him with hard information.

Annoyed with himself, Emmett de-rezzed the ghost.

Verwood tilted his head slightly, angling his gaze up at Emmett. "Guess we go talk to that guy who runs the Greenies, right, Boss?"

"That's one approach," Emmett said, thinking about other possibilities.

Benny shook his head. "You can't just go barging in on Master Herbert. He spends most of his time meditating and communicating with the spirit of Amatheon. It requires a tremendous amount of his time and an enormous degree of psychic energy. He needs rest between his sessions with the Philosopher. Nobody gets to see Master Herbert without an appointment."

Emmett closed his fist around the amber beads. "Don't worry, Benny. Got a hunch Master Herbert will see me this evening."

Lydia opened her eyes to the familiar green light of the catacombs. Relief swept through her. A moment ago, when awareness had begun to creep back, she had been terrified that she was coming awake inside a closed coffin. In those first few seconds all she could think about was how long it would take her to go mad.

She had a feeling that the image of the lid of the sarcophagus descending downward, blotting out the light and sealing her into the quartz burial box, would provide her with an ample supply of nightmares for the rest of her life.

As if she didn't have enough weird dreams already.

She sat up cautiously. Her stomach swam and her head spun. Whatever they had used to put her out had some unpleasant side effects. Just like last time .

After a moment she decided that she was not going to throw up. Her head cleared a little. She started to shift positions again and discovered that she was on a pallet, not the hard quartz floor of the small chamber.

The space in which they had confined her was about the size of her office at Shrimpton's. But given that it was a lot bigger than the sarcophagus she decided that she would not complain too loudly about the accommodations. At least not yet.

There was a comforting familiarity about the chamber. She had spent a lot of her professional life underground in these catacombs. The walls, ceiling, and floor were oddly proportioned to the human eye but they were not uncomfortable. Every surface in the space glowed with a soft green radiance just like all of the other passages and chambers and hallways that the aliens had built below ground. As with the proportions, the light took some getting used to but after a while it felt natural, like sunlight or moonlight.

The experts had never been able to figure out the source of the luminous glow. It seemed to be a property of the particular type of green quartz that had been used to construct the catacombs. So far as anyone knew, the illumination had never so much as flickered or dimmed anywhere in the endless miles of underground corridors that had been explored thus far. Nevertheless, para-archaeologists, hunters, ruin rats, and everyone else who went down into the tunnels always carried spare flashlights, just as they carried spare amber and spare water.