Douglas Preston - Relic

“Let’s go this way,” said D’Agosta.

Hamm passed the leashes to his assistant, who started walking ahead, the hounds nosing the ground.

Next, the hounds had bayed up a storage room full of mastodon bones, and the paradichlorobenzene preservative that poured out when they opened the door had caused a half-hour delay while the hounds recovered their sense of smell. And that was just the first of a series of storage rooms full of animal pelts, gorillas in formaldehyde, a freezer full of dead zoo specimens, a whole vault full of human skeletons.

They came to an archway with an open metal door [47] leading onto a descending stone stairway. The walls were covered with a crust of lime, and the stairway was dark.

“That must be the dungeon,” one of the policemen said, with a guffaw.

“This goes to the subbasement,” D’Agosta said, consulting the blueprints. He motioned to one of the officers, who handed him a long flashlight.

The shallow stairs ended in a tunnel made of herring-bone brickwork, its arched ceiling barely the height of a man. The tracker moved forward with the dogs, D’Agosta and Hamm behind. The two policemen came last.

“There’s water on the floor,” said Hamm.

“So what?” D’Agosta said.

“If there’s been any water flowing through here there won’t be any scent.”

“I was told to expect puddles of water down here,” D’Agosta replied. “It only floods when it rains, and it hasn’t rained.”

“That’s reassuring,” said Hamm.

They reached a place where four tunnels came together, and D’Agosta halted to consult the blueprints. “Somehow I thought you’d need to look at that,” Hamm said.

“Oh, yeah?” D’Agosta said. “Well, I’ve got a surprise for you. These blueprints don’t cover the subbasement.”

When one of the dogs whined and began furiously sniffing, Hamm came suddenly to attention. “This way. Quick.”

The dogs whined again. “They’ve got something!” said Hamm. “It’s a clear scent, it must be. Look at their hackles rise! Keep the light up here, I can’t see a blessed thing.”

The dogs were straining, pulling forward, noses up and sniffing the air ahead.

“You see, you see!” Hamm said. “It’s an air scent. [48] Feel the fresh air on your cheek? I should have brought the spaniels. They’re unbeatable with an air scent!”

The policemen slid past the dogs, one beaming his flashlight, the other carrying his shotgun at the ready. Ahead the tunnel forked again, and the dogs lunged to the right, breaking into a trot.

“Hold it, Mr. Hamm, there might be a killer out there,” D’Agosta said.

The dogs suddenly broke into a deafening baying. “Sit!” cried the assistant. “Heel! Castor! Pollux! Heel , damn you!” The dogs lunged forward, paying no attention. “Hamm, I need a hand here!”

“What’s gotten into you?” cried Hamm, wading into the frantic dogs, trying to grab their collars. “Castor, heel !”

“Shut them up!” snapped D’Agosta.

“He’s loose!” cried the assistant, as one of the dogs bolted into the darkness. They rushed after the retreating sound of the dog.

“You smell it?” Hamm said, stopping short. “Christ Jesus, you smell it?”

A pungent, goatish odor suddenly enveloped them. The other dog was frantic with excitement, leaping and twisting and suddenly breaking free.

“Pollux! Pollux !”

“Wait!” said D’Agosta. “Forget the fucking dogs for a second. Let’s proceed with a little order here. You two, get in front again. Safeties off.”

The two men pumped their shotguns.

In the echoing darkness ahead of them, the barking faltered, then stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then a terrible, unearthly shriek, like the screeching of tires, leapt from the inky tunnel. The two police officers looked at each other. The sound ended as suddenly as it began.

“Castor!” Hamm cried. “Oh, my God! He’s been hurt!”

“Get back, Hamm, goddammit!” barked D’Agosta.

[49] At that moment a shape suddenly hurtled at them from the darkness, and there were two stunning blasts from the shotguns, two flashes of light accompanied by deafening roars. The rumble echoed and died in the tunnel, and there was an intense silence.

“You fucking idiot, you just shot my hound,” said Hamm quietly. Pollux lay five feet from them, blood pouring freely from his ruined head.

“He was coming right at me …” began one of the officers.

“Jesus Christ,” said D’Agosta, “Stow that shit. There’s still something out there.”

They found the other dog a hundred yards down the tunnel. He was torn nearly in half, guts strung out in crazy patterns.

“Jesus, will you look at that,” said D’Agosta. Hamm said nothing.

Just beyond the body the tunnel branched. D’Agosta continued to stare at the dog. “Without the dogs, there’s no way of knowing which way it went,” he said at last. “Let’s get the hell out of here and let forensics deal with this mess.”

Hamm said nothing.

= 9 =

Moriarty, suddenly alone with Margo in the cafeteria, seemed even more uncomfortable. “So?” Margo prompted, after a brief silence.

“Actually, I really did want to talk to you about your work.” He paused.

“You did?” Margo was unused to anyone showing interest in her project.

“Well, indirectly. The primitive medicine cases for the exhibition are complete, except one. We’ve got this terrific collection of shamanistic plants and artifacts from the Cameroons we want to display in the last case, but they’re badly documented. If you’d be willing to take a look ...?”

“I’d love to,” Margo said.

“Great! When?”

“Why not now? I’ve got some time.”

They left the staff cafeteria and moved down a long basement hall lined with rumbling steam pipes and [51] padlocked doors. One of the doors bore the label DINOSAUR STOREROOM 4—UPPER JURASSIC. Most of the Museum’s dinosaur bone and other fossil collections were stored here in the basement, since—she had heard—the great weight of petrified bone would cause the upper floors to collapse.

“The collection’s in one of the sixth-floor vaults,” Moriarty said apologetically as they entered a service elevator. “I hope I can find it again. You know what a warren of storage rooms they’ve got up there.”

“Have you heard anything more about Charlie Prine?” Margo asked quietly.

“Not much. Apparently he’s not a suspect. But I don’t think we’ll see him back here for quite a while. Dr. Cuthbert told me before lunch that he was severely traumatized.” Moriarty shook his head. “What an awful thing.”

On the fifth floor, Margo followed Moriarty along a wide passageway and up a flight of metal stairs. The narrow, labyrinthine catwalks that made up this section of the sixth floor had been built directly underneath the Museum’s long pitched roofs. On either side were rows of low metal doors, behind which lay the hermetically sealed vaults of the perishable anthropology collections. In earlier times, a poisonous cyanic compound had periodically been pumped into the vaults to kill vermin and bacteria; now, artifact preservation was handled with subtler methods.

As the two threaded their way along the catwalks, they passed a number of objects stacked against the walls: a carved war canoe, several totems, a row of slitted log drums. Even with one million square feet of storage space, every square inch had been utilized, including stairwells, corridors, and the offices of junior curators. Of fifty million artifacts and specimens, only about 5 percent was on exhibition; the rest was available only to scientists and researchers.