But as the Gravedigger reached out for the man who’d promised him the world, he only saw a repeat of his dream. This time, when the white-hot light flashed in his face, it wasn’t from the explosion of a bullet. It was the last gasp of a dying mind.
The Gravedigger was dead, and in his place was a man whose grief had given way to rage. Hints of his blond hair showed through the blackness. The contact over one of his eyes was gone. The stains on his blackened teeth were rubbed away, and all that remained was reality.
Lance Griggs smiled as his eyes went vacant. He’d soon be with his wife after all.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” said a robed man who’d appeared, as if from thin air, and was standing in the doorway of the dimly lit room. “He’s not the one you wanted. I am.”
Mann thought he recognized the voice. Sandy didn’t.
“Don’t move,” she said, leveling her weapon as she and Mann walked up the incline.
The man stood there, calmly waiting for them to reach him. When they did, Mann and Sandy looked around and saw that they were in a crypt. Unlike the tunnels, it had walls of marble and concrete. There were metal drawers that looked as if they contained remains. And at the far end of the room, there appeared to be a door.
“Put your hands where I can see them,” Sandy said as she pointed the gun at the man in the robe.
The robed figure complied. Then the light from the room washed over his face, and Charlie Mann and Sandy stared in disbelief.
John Wilkinson stared back at them without a hint of fear or apprehension. “Welcome,” he said with an easy smile. “We were just finishing the ceremony.”
“What ceremony?” Charlie asked. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“Then maybe you should meet the other believers.”
Lily Thompkins and Violet Grant emerged from the recesses of the room and stood near a candlelit altar with a yellowing parchment in the middle.
As Mann and Sandy watched, Lenore Wilkinson emerged from the shadows as well. John was about to walk back toward the altar when Sandy raised her gun.
“Stop right there!” she shouted. “Nobody moves unless I say so.”
John’s face creased in a relaxed smile. “I’m afraid you’re not in charge, Lieutenant Jackson. Now that Lenore has deciphered Poe’s secret, we answer to a higher authority. That’s what the cryptogram was about. It’s what the map was about. It was all for this time and this place. After a year of tunneling and searching for the truth, we finally found it here, and Lenore’s gift was the key to it all.”
Charlie looked at Lenore. “Is this true?”
“Of course it’s true,” she said with a patronizing smile. “Out of everything I allowed you to see about me, it might be the only thing that’s true. Well, that and the fact that I came here to find my purpose. And now that I’ve found it—now that I’ve deciphered Poe’s secret—no one can take that power. Not even you.”
“Is that why Clarissa and Workman died?” Charlie Mann asked while moving closer to John. “So you could have this power?”
“They died because they wanted to share it with the world,” Violet said.
“And frankly, we don’t share,” Lily added.
“That’s why when Lance Griggs came to us and asked if he could use the power to bring back his wife, we gave him conditions,” said John. “We told him he’d have to kill Clarissa and Workman and anyone else who got in his way. Then he’d have to wait until we found the parchment and had Lenore decipher it. Of course, it was all a lie. We knew he couldn’t bring his wife back, but we also knew Lance was a loose cannon who wouldn’t make it to the end, and tonight he proved us right.”
Charlie grabbed John’s arms as Sandy pointed her weapon at his head. “You’re all under arrest for murder,” Mann said calmly.
He pulled John to the door at the other end of the room as Sandy followed with gun in hand. Charlie tried three times to open it, but the door was sealed shut.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you leave,” John said as he focused his mind on the walls of the crypt. “In fact, I can’t let anyone leave. You see, now that Lenore has deciphered the parchment, I don’t plan to share this power with anyone. Not Violet, not Lily, not even Lenore.”
Just as he’d done before, John used his mind to make the ground rumble and the walls shake. Sandy’s gun flew out of her hand and discharged into the ceiling. Charlie Mann was thrown against the altar, causing the candles to fall.
Violet and Lily dove for the parchment as it began to burn, but the flames leaped onto their robes and lit their bodies like oil-soaked rags. They tried to focus their minds as John had done, but their power was weak. John’s mind was much stronger than theirs.
As the two women screamed in agony and Charlie and Sandy were pinned to the floor by John’s powerful thoughts, Lenore lashed out against her husband’s betrayal. She knew she was the only one who could stop him, so she closed her eyes and tapped into the power she’d always had inside.
Lenore’s face turned a deep crimson as the veins in her forehead bulged. When she opened her eyes and looked at her husband, there appeared to be a fire within.
The crypt began crumbling and cracking as John was slammed into the wall. Rocks and dirt rained down from above them as the room fell quickly apart. Drawers flew open and bones were scattered and beams fell down from the ceiling.
The smell of burning flesh filled the room, along with smoke from the robes and the parchment. As John’s power was overcome by Lenore’s, his grip on Mann and Sandy was loosened. They scrambled to their feet while the room shook violently, causing the door to the crypt to swing open.
The distraction was enough to break Lenore’s concentration, and when John’s limp body fell down from the wall, a beam came down as well. It landed squarely on Lenore, knocking her to the floor, and as the flames began licking at the beam’s dry wood, the room was filled with black smoke.
Mann scrambled across the floor, tripping over Violet’s and Lily’s dead bodies as the macabre scene grew more grisly.
“Sandy!” Mann yelled.
She didn’t answer, but he heard a cough near the far wall, and he jumped the beam to get to her. He groped in the darkness until he found her and slung her over his shoulders. He stepped over bodies and rocks and beams to get to the door of the crypt. By the time he stumbled out into the graveyard, the smoke had seared his lungs to the point where he couldn’t breathe.
He made it another twenty feet before he dropped to the ground with Sandy still draped around his shoulders. The faint sounds of firefighters and sirens filled his semiconscious mind, and as he looked up through bleary eyes, he saw the one cop whose presence mattered most.
“Charlie!” Coletti shouted as he jogged across the graveyard. “Charlie, I’m coming!”
Mann smiled faintly as the old man approached. But then he saw Coletti’s facial expression change from gladness to fear. The old man’s eyes grew wide, and the sounds of the sirens and voices seemed to fade. Coletti was shouting something. Mann couldn’t hear it, but he could see the warning in Coletti’s eyes.
He watched as his partner reached into his shoulder holster and grabbed his gun. Then everything seemed to slow down. The firefighters in the background looked faded and gray. The dome lights on the cars stopped flashing and were still. The look on Coletti’s face seemed frozen in time.
Mann turned and saw John Wilkinson a few feet away. His body was in flames. He was holding Sandy’s gun. He was aiming for Charlie’s head.
He turned again and watched as Coletti stopped and fired. John Wilkinson hit the ground, the flames ignited the dry autumn grass, and in that moment, for Charlie Mann, everything in the world went black.
That was when the power of his mind took over. He saw Lance Griggs and Irving Workman, smiling as mentor and student. He saw Violet Grant and Lily Thompkins, their eyes filled with history’s wonders. He glimpsed John and Lenore in the days when their love was new, and above it
all, soaring high against the sky, he saw the raven. Its wings stretched wide as it was lifted toward the clouds, toward the sun, toward the heavens.
When the raven disappeared in the distance, Charlie Mann knew that the parchment and its secret were gone forever. Just as it had always been, the power of the mind could be used for good or for evil, and the secret Lenore had deciphered in the crypt would stay there to emerge nevermore.
ALSO BY SOLOMON JONES
Bridge
Ride or Die
C.R.E.A.M.
Payback
The Last Confession
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE GRAVEDIGGER’S BALL. Copyright © 2011 by Solomon Jones. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN 978-0-312-58081-0
First Edition: October 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-8101-9
The Gravedigger's Ball Page 23
