I ran.
Before my pursuers could even storm the stage, I was out of the service hallway and past the kitchen. I didn’t know where Sarah and West were, and I wasn’t about to leave them as hostages to the Horned God, but I knew we would all do our damnedest to get to the car, so that’s where I headed.
Once I’d cleared the doorway, I hauled a heavy wagon in front of the door, blocking it from opening. That would hold, even if several men at once tried to force the door open. But it only provided a delay, since the mob would quickly reverse course and come through the front doors, then around the side.
I pulled my handgun and sprinted toward the Duesenberg, not surprised that I had beaten my friends to the mark. Voices and footsteps carried on the night air as pursuers came around on the Pagoda’s right-hand side, and I drove them back with shots meant to warn, not wound.
Sounds from the other direction made me fear that I’d been flanked. Instead, more gunfire helped to send the mesmerized mob scrambling away from the road, and I knew West and Sarah had caught up.
“Get in!” Sarah shouted, already behind the wheel of the Duesenberg. West and I both squeezed off warning shots to force the mob back, and for good measure, I hit a front tire on each of the two closest vehicles to slow down pursuit.
We dove into the back seat, nearly crashing into each other, as Sarah took off with a squeal of tires.
“Hang on!” she yelled, and I did, because I had ridden with her before and knew that she could challenge any Grand Prix driver for skill and daring.
I braced myself but managed to twist enough to look out the back, expecting gunshots to shatter the glass or the headlights of pursuers. I saw only darkness.
“Whatever spell Hanussen put on them, I don’t think the hoi polloi of Reading are going to chase us down the mountain,” West observed, flinging out a leg and an arm to keep himself from being tossed around as Sarah slalomed the Duesenberg down the curves of Duryea Drive.
I fought the urge to close my eyes as Sarah took the bend wide, hoping we would not plow into oncoming traffic. I never doubted Sarah’s grit, or her ability behind the wheel, although at this moment, I had second thoughts about her sanity. On the way up the mountain, I had noted the sheer drop along one side, and the guard rails that seemed unlikely to restrain a car from plunging into the forest.
“Veles,” I said, holding tight to keep from being thrown against West as we took another curve at breakneck speed. “Hanussen channeled Veles. The Horned God. God of the underworld. Sworn enemy of Krukis.”
West raised an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s how he sensed you.”
I nodded. “I felt Veles’s presence right before everything went to hell. Or, rather, Krukis did.”
West cleared his throat. “Is he…still with you?”
“No. He left me when the car doors slammed.” Bulletproof skin would have been a big help had we needed to stand and fight, but I knew from experience that Krukis only lent me his magic when what I needed surpassed what I could do for myself. Apparently, the heavy steel body of the Duesenberg was shield enough.
“Good. Because I wouldn’t know what to say to a god,” West replied. “I’d have to be polite.”
“Perish the thought.”
Sarah slowed as we reached the foot of the mountain. By the time we pulled out onto the main road, we matched the speed of the vehicles around us. Still, a bright red Model J wasn’t exactly designed for blending in, and I didn’t know whether any of the mob at the Pagoda had phoned accomplices in the city to hunt for us.
“Did the other guests know who you were?” I asked West. I felt certain he’d given an alias, but I wasn’t sure whether Sarah was acquainted with any of the attendees.
He shook his head. “No. Our names were as phony as our interest in underwriting Hanussen’s crazy scheme. And we registered under yet another set of names at the hotel.”
West and I might butt heads now and again, but he’s good at what he does.
I glanced out the window and realized Sarah had taken us downtown. Before I had my bearings, she gunned the engine, and we slewed into a darkened parking lot in the shadow of Pomeroy’s Department Store.
“I’ll have someone get the car tomorrow,” Sarah said, switching off the ignition and jumping out as if it had all been a planned romp. “We can leg it to the Hotel Berkshire from here—it’s only a few blocks.”
West and I exchanged a glance, then shrugged, neither of us able to fault Sarah’s impeccable plan.
“Don’t dally—we have a visitor waiting for us,” Sarah admonished, striding off in her black opera cloak like a creature of the night. How she managed to do that in heels, I’d never know, but I’d seen her turn stilettos into weapons on more than one occasion, so I had no intention of arguing.
To my relief, we reached the well-appointed lobby without incident. Neither hell spawn nor bewitched scions of industry tried to stop us. The doorman nodded to Sarah as she swept by, gave a deferential nod to West, and eyed me like I might make off with the silverware. I held my head high and followed Sarah as if I belonged in such a swanky joint.
If the elevator operator wondered why West and Sarah had their driver accompany them upstairs, he was too well-trained to ask. I couldn’t wait to get out of the wool uniform and back into my own clothing. We reached our floor, and West poked his head out to assure the way was clear, then motioned for Sarah and me to follow. I didn’t want to guess what sort of clandestine affair the elevator operator might imagine, but it would be a less fantastic tale than the truth.
Sarah opened the door to her room, while West and I entered into his adjacent room, for propriety’s sake. We quickly unbolted the connecting odor and joined Sarah and a slightly built, dark-haired stranger in her suite.
“This is Mrs. Yoshida,” Sarah said. “And these are my colleagues, Mr. West and Mr. Mack.” If Sarah introduced us by our real names, I figured Mrs. Yoshida could be trusted.
She and our visitor took seats on the sofa in the sitting area, while West and I each appropriated an armchair. The scale of the graceful furnishings felt all wrong for my bulk, but I did my best to wedge my large frame into the seat and hoped it wouldn’t snap beneath my weight.
“Mrs. Yoshida is well-known for her bonsai trees and her work with the Reading Garden Society,” Sarah explained. “She knew my mother because of their shared interest in saving rare varieties of flowers, and we’ve kept in touch over the years.”
Sarah’s personal network of connections was vast and varied, ranging from mobsters to millionaires. More than once, her social circle had saved our asses, so I wasn’t about to complain.
“It is very good to see you,” Mrs. Yoshida said, and Sarah clasped the woman’s thin-boned hand between both of her own.
“Thank you for meeting us on short notice,” Sarah replied. “I trust they took good care of you while you waited for us?”
Mrs. Yoshida smiled and patted Sarah’s hand. “Oh, yes. They brought me all the tea and cakes I wanted and tried to feed me dinner. I am very happy.”
Sarah gave me a look, and I pulled the parchment with the rubbing of the bell’s inscription from its safe place inside the jacket. Sarah passed it to her visitor.
“I’m hoping you can translate this,” she said. “I apologize for the poor copy, but we were rather in a hurry.”
Mrs. Yoshida lifted the reading glasses that hung from a gold chain around her neck and shifted to get better light. She studied the paper, then frowned.
“Where did you get this?”
“It’s the inscription on the bell in the tower of the Pagoda,” Sarah replied. “We think it may have something to do with a…situation we’re trying to resolve.”
Mrs. Yoshida sighed and shook her head, but with a fond expression. “Always the sleuth, like in those Christie books you read.”
If Agatha Christie had ever tackled Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, it was news to me, but I remained silent.
“Can you read it?” Sarah
leaned forward, eyes bright with excitement.
“I will do my best,” her guest replied. She murmured under her breath in Japanese as she made out the characters. After several moments, she looked up.
“It’s a very odd inscription. Not exactly a poem. ‘Down in the valley the gong resounds low and deep…with the moon on high it sounds clearly in the heavens…with the flowers into the land of the dead.’”
I felt a shiver go down my spine. The words sounded more like prophecy than poetry, and eerily applicable to our current situation.
“Yes, I think that sounds exactly right,” Sarah replied. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry to have brought you out from your home for this.”
“That’s quite all right,” Mrs. Yoshida assured her, handing back the parchment. “I can use a bit of excitement from time to time. Keeps me young.”
West and I retired to his room while the ladies chatted for a bit and changed back to normal clothing. He poured us both a slug of scotch from a decanter on a sideboard and raised his glass in a toast.
“To getting out in one piece,” he said, and I lifted my glass in salute.
Moments later, we heard Sarah and her guest leave their room; I figured Sarah intended to see Mrs. Yoshida safely to a cab. Before long, she returned and came through the unlocked connecting door. West pressed a glass of scotch into her hand.
“I thought we made a hell of a team tonight,” Sarah announced, toasting us. “This was so much fun; I can’t wait to see how the next part goes!”
6
Sarah’s admirable enthusiasm aside, I felt like tonight had upped the stakes.
“Veles knows I’m here—and that Krukis knows what’s afoot,” I said, peeling off my jacket. I withdrew the parchment, the himmelsbrief, and the copy of The Long Lost Friend, and put them with my coat, not wanting to chance leaving them behind. “That’s going to force his plans. I think we need to go to the mines tonight.”
“I agree,” West said.
“And we’re coming with you.” Sarah had a defiant look I knew from past experience made it futile to argue. I glanced at West, who shrugged.
“We need different clothing,” I pointed out.
“Not a problem. We packed for every possibility,” Sarah assured me. I didn’t doubt her.
“What do you make of the prophecy?” West asked. “And how does Veles play a part in this?”
I leaned against the wall, feeling more confident in it holding my weight than I did any of the furnishings. “Veles likes conflict,” I explained, “conflict kills people, he gains more souls in his realm. So he’d be willing to nudge guys like Hans and Jakob and the Free Society to raise the Vril-ya from the depths because when blood runs in the streets, he wins.”
“Lovely,” Sarah remarked drily.
“With Hanussen, I’ve got to figure that Veles has some purpose in wanting his ideas to gain traction—or maybe, it’s the money he raises here that will set something in motion back in Germany.”
“Why didn’t he come after us at the Pagoda?” West questioned, swirling his scotch.
“Veles is an instigator, not a hands-on kind of god. Not like Krukis. Hanussen isn’t Veles’s champion. He’s just the schmuck Veles is manipulating to get what he wants,” I replied. “The Free Society sees him as their high priest, but I doubt Hanussen is courting the rabble and the swells at the same time. I don’t think he’ll want to be in town when the Vril-ya rise. So I’m betting he isn’t part of their scheme and that Hans, Ernst, and Jakob thought it up all on their own.”
“Do you think Veles will try to stop us?” Sarah asked, sounding remarkably cool about going up against a god.
“I get the impression that Veles is constantly running around lighting fires, figuring that a couple of them will blow up into something big, but not caring which ones. We all go to him in the end.” Or at least, everyone who wasn’t immortal would. I had already seen far too many friends age and die. I thought vengeance would balance my grief, but it never did.
“I need to go rouse Dr. Ziegler. He’s our guide. If his abilities are as good as I think they are, he’s probably already waiting at the rooming house,” I told them. “And we’re going to need some dynamite.”
West grinned. “Never travel without it. We’ve also got extra guns and ammunition. The benefits of traveling by private rail car.”
“Then let’s get changed. We’ve got a busy night ahead of us.”
I felt better just wearing my own clothes again. I carefully tucked away the items I didn’t dare lose and slipped my Colt into my waistband. West changed into a dark shirt, black work pants, sturdy boots, and a heavy canvas coat, looking more like a second-story man than a secret agent. Sarah joined us, dressed in boots, practical pants, a dark shirt, and a short black wool coat. Her hair was pulled up in a sensible knot beneath a close-fitting knit cap, and all traces of makeup were gone, along with her jewelry. She looked like a spy. I probably just looked like a common ruffian.
“Ready?” West had already distributed some of the useful goodies he’d brought, which we stashed in the small rucksacks we all wore. Matches, candles, helmets, miners’ lanterns, fuses, and explosives, plus other handy items.
“It’s only a few blocks. We can walk. The fewer people who see us, the fewer who can remember us,” I said as we slipped down the back steps of the hotel and out the delivery door into the alley.
When we reached the rooming house, we came around to the kitchen side, slipping from a dark alley through the gate. I tapped on the window to get Mrs. Kemmner’s attention. She hurried to the door.
“Hans and Jakob aren’t here. They never came back, although their things are still in their rooms,” she told me. I beckoned for Sarah and West to join me. She gave them the once-over, locked eyes with Sarah and seemed to approve because she gave a no-nonsense nod.
“Dr. Ziegler has been fretting in the parlor for at least an hour. I haven’t been able to get him to stop pacing,” she told me, leading us toward the front of the house. She offered us food, but we declined. I didn’t know about the others, but my stomach was too tight with worry about the night’s work to be able to keep anything down.
Ziegler brightened a bit when he saw us, as much as his hound dog countenance could. “Joe, I was worried. I have seen things that must not come to be.” He looked past me at Sarah and West, uncertain.
“You can trust them. This is Sarah and Jack.”
I noticed that Ziegler was dressed differently than I had seen him before. Gone was his jacket, starched shirt with stiff collar, and dress shoes. His worn and stained pair of miner’s overalls with a work shirt, sturdy woolen jacket, and boots meant he was dressed for action. I wondered what amulets or relics he might have hidden about his person and saw that he had the good sense to bring both a helmet and a Colt 1911 like my own.
“We need to get into the mines—the old portion, under the city,” I told him. We gave him a bare-bones recap about the allure of Vril power and the Vril-ya race of “servants,” and I could see that he was quick to understand where it would all go terribly wrong.
“The section beneath the city is the oldest and deepest of all the shaft mines in the area,” Ziegler told us. “There are miles of closed and abandoned tunnels. But the original part of the mine is below Eckert Avenue. We can get there through the mechanical room for the fountain in Penn’s Commons.”
West did a slow blink, absorbing that fact. “Through the mechanical room?”
“It goes down pretty far to connect to the water mains,” Ziegler replied with a shrug. “Some of the brewery tunnels connect, and the oldest sewer and stormwater lines run through spaces that were originally mining tunnels.”
“So if they summon the Vril-ya from the deepest point, it has a ready-made subway to go pretty much everywhere in the city?” I said, horrified.
Ziegler nodded, managing to look more glum than usual. “Yes. If these creatures escape the deep pit, we won’t be able to bottle them up again.”
<
br /> “Once we’re inside the old mine, under the fountain, where do we go?” I asked. The idea of wandering around a long-abandoned mine full of monsters didn’t sound like a good idea to me.
Ziegler pulled out a large sheet of paper that had been folded many times.
“I found this map. It was made when the fountain and the sewer lines were run through the top level of the old mine. It’s not a map of the entire mine, but it wouldn’t be wise to try to go down into the depths—for a lot of reasons. Aside from any monsters, I wouldn’t trust the steps or the lifts. But…there are two shafts that go down to the very heart of the mine,” he added, looking up with eyes alight. “The sections above the cave-in that shuttered the mine originally.”
I remembered the ghosts telling me how they had set off that blast intentionally to seal the monsters inside. Over the course of a century, the Vril-ya had worked their way loose. Maybe we could seal them up for another hundred years, if destroying them was not a possibility.
“One is the main elevator shaft that brought up the loads from each of the horizontal corridors. The other is the western air shaft. As far as I can tell, they both go nearly all the way to China.” Ziegler went on, not appearing to notice that I’d taken a mental detour along the way.
I felt better realizing that we had an option to avoid rickety stairs and deathtrap elevators. “What’s at the bottom?” I asked.
“The original mine,” Ziegler replied. “They sank the shaft a little farther than they expected to dig. Then they worked their way up, digging out tunnels that ran perpendicular to the shaft. No one’s had reason to be down there for a very long time. The mine closed after a cave-in when the city expanded, so it’s been abandoned for around a hundred years.”
“There are mines all through this area. What’s special about this one, that the Vril-ya are here?” Sarah asked, leaning over the map.
“I fear it has to do with my vision about the ‘black spot’ on the mountain,” Ziegler said. “Long before Reading became a city, the tribes and traders who passed through here spoke about a ‘darkness’ that haunted the mountain. Some said it was bad luck, or an ill omen, while others claimed they had seen creatures or heard screaming from inside the mountain.”
Black Sun Page 9
