Jenna thought for a moment, and then she said, ‘There was somebody else who picked up on it, too. A Pink Sister from the Convent of Divine Love on Twenty-Second Street. I interviewed her when the first gargoyle dropped out of the sky. She said that she felt the gargoyle fly overhead, even though she never actually saw it, and she said that it felt “dark and cold and evil-hearted”. Those were her exact words.’
Nathan said, ‘This could be what we’re looking for. Three people who are all sensitive to the aura given off by gargoyles.’
‘I don’t think I follow you.’
‘Triangulation, detective. We ask all three of them to point to where they can feel the strongest gargoyle activity. Then we ask your crime scene specialist to draw all three lines on a map, and where they converge . . . that’s where we’ll find Theodor Zauber.’
Jenna said, ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it? But – ah – I don’t think I’ll tell my captain what I’m doing, not just yet. A five-year-old kid and a mentally-challenged gardener and a nun who’s been shut up in a convent for the past seventeen years . . . they’re not your classic reliable witnesses, are they?’
‘How about meeting at Temple University Hospital? We can take the first bearing from Sukie Harris, and go on from there.’
‘OK, Professor. I guess I’ve tried nuttier ways of solving a crime, but I can’t remember what they were.’
Nathan and Jenna met in the hospital reception area. Jenna had brought Ed Freiburg with her. He had been working all night and he looked bug-eyed and exhausted.
Up in the burns unit, Sukie was dressed in a bright red cable-knit sweater and jeans and was all ready to go home. Both Braydon and Melinda Harris were there, as well as Doctor Berman and Doctor Mahmood.
Sukie was coloring a picture of a pony with a pink Cosmic crayon. Jenna hunkered down beside her and said, ‘How are you feeling, Sukie?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘She had no nightmares last night,’ said Doctor Mahmood. ‘I don’t know if there is any significance to this, in the light of what has happened.’
Nathan said, ‘She doesn’t know about it, does she?’
Melinda shook her head.
‘Maybe there is a connection,’ said Nathan. ‘I believe that those creatures that attacked the city last night were the same creatures that Sukie has been having nightmares about. The Spooglies. In reality, they’re gargoyles.’
‘I do not understand you,’ said Doctor Mahmood. ‘Gargoyles are made of stone, are they not?’
‘Well, yes, they are normally. It’s a little too complicated to explain right now, but take it from me that they are gargoyles, and that we need very urgently to find out where they’ve been hidden. What happened last night, we don’t want that to happen again, at any price.’
Jenna said, ‘We need to ask Sukie to point out exactly where she thinks they are.’
‘No,’ said Melinda. ‘Absolutely not. Don’t you think she’s been through enough?’
‘Ma’am,’ Jenna retorted, ‘three hundred thirty-four innocent people were killed last night. Torn to pieces, all of them. What do you think they went through?’
Braydon laid his hand on Melinda’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Melinda. These people are asking for our help. It was my fault that Sukie got burned, but Professor Underhill here, didn’t he fix her up? I’ve learned a hard lesson out of this, and that’s to swallow my pride and listen to other people’s advice and allow other people to help me. The least we can do is help them in return.’
Melinda looked across at Sukie, sitting at the table by the window, the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth, trying not to crayon over the lines.
Braydon said, ‘I don’t know how it all got so hostile between us, Melinda. Maybe you don’t want us to get back together, but at least let’s be friends, for Sukie’s sake. Or at least let’s pretend to be friends.’
Doctor Berman stepped forward and laid a hand on each of their shoulders. ‘In my entire career, I have never seen a patient with third-degree burns to the face heal as quickly and as perfectly as Sukie. Maybe it’s not my place to say so, but I do think you both owe Professor Underhill a serious debt of gratitude.’
Melinda remained tight-lipped for a moment, but then she said, ‘Very well. You can ask her, so long as you don’t upset her.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jenna. ‘This could save a whole lot of lives.’
Next, Melinda turned to Braydon. ‘Yes,’ she said, as if she had just swallowed a mouthful of white wine vinegar. ‘I can pretend to be friends.’
Jenna said, ‘Sukie, will you do something for me? Will you show me again where the Spooglies live?’
Sukie nodded, without looking up from her coloring. Ed Freiburg opened his satchel and took out a Coherent laser compass, a yellow box about nine inches long and six inches wide.
‘This man is called Ed. Ed has this really cool light. He’s going to shine a light along your arm so that we can find out exactly where the Spooglies are.’
Sukie put down her crayon. ‘Are you going to put them in prison?’ she asked.
Ed said, ‘No, we’re not. We’re going to send them off to Disney World, that’s all, so that they never come back and give you nightmares, ever again, because they’ll be having too much fun with Winnie the Pooh.’
Without hesitation, Sukie pointed to the south-west. ‘They’re there,’ she said, emphatically. Ed switched on his laser, and a narrow beam of green light shone along her arm toward the opposite side of the room.
Jenna looked at Nathan. She said nothing, but they were both praying that this triangulation was going to work.
They drove to Bartram’s Gardens and managed to catch Andy Fisher as he was leaving to go home. The wind was rising and the sky had turned charcoal-gray and they could hear thunder in the distance, like the cannons of an approaching army.
‘Andy,’ said Jenna. ‘Can you feel where the Spooglies are hiding?’
Andy blinked at her, and then looked at Nathan and Ed. ‘The Spooglies – they killed all of those people last night.’
‘We know they did,’ Jenna told him. ‘That’s why we need to find out where they are. We want to stop them from killing any more people.’
‘I don’t know where they are,’ Andy told her. ‘And if I knew where they were, I wouldn’t go there, ever.’
‘But do you know which direction they’re in?’ asked Nathan. He pointed to the north, and then to the east, and then to the south. ‘Are they over that way, or that way, or that way?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Andy, wringing his hands together.
‘You don’t know?’ Nathan retorted, with mock impatience. ‘What are you, stupid or something?’
‘I’m not stupid! You can’t call me stupid! You’re not allowed!’
‘What do you mean, I’m not allowed? If you’re stupid I can call you stupid! All I’m doing is telling the truth.’
‘It’s discrinimation.’
‘Oh! It’s discrinimation, is it? Thank God I’m not guilty of discrimination!’
Andy clenched his fists in distress. ‘If I tell you – if I tell you – they’ll come find me! They’ll come find me, and they’ll tear me to pieces, the same way they did all of those other people!’
Nathan went up to Andy and put his arm around his shoulders. ‘Andy,’ he said, ‘they won’t find you. You know where they are but they don’t know where you are. They don’t even know you exist.’
‘That Spoogly opened its eyes and it saw me.’
‘Maybe it did and maybe you were just imagining it. Whichever it was, that particular Spoogly is all locked up in the CSI laboratory now and its wing is broken off and it’s not going to come and find you, I promise.’
Andy’s eyes darted from side to side. ‘I’m scared of them,’ he said. ‘If they don’t come find me for real, they’ll come find me in my nightmares.’
Nathan hugged him even tighter. ‘Andy, they won’t. I promise you.’
; ‘You said I was stupid.’
‘Yes. That’s because you won’t tell me where they are. So I want you to prove that you’re not stupid.’
Andy sniffed, and nodded. ‘OK.’
Nathan waited for almost half a minute, but Andy said nothing. All he did was repeatedly sniff.
‘Andy,’ said Nathan.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘The Spooglies, Andy!’ Nathan roared at him. ‘Where the fuck are they?’
Andy made a whinnying noise like a nervous foal and pointed in a westerly direction, toward Elmwood and the Holy Cross Cemetery.
‘That’s terrific,’ Nathan told him. ‘Now keep your arm as still as you possibly can while Ed lines up his laser.’
Ed Freiburg shone his green laser beam along Andy Fisher’s arm and took a note of the compass bearing. ‘OK then,’ he said, ‘that’s two readings. That’s enough for a rough triangulation, but I think we ought to go for the third, just to make sure. These two kids only had to waver their fingers a couple of inches and our final reading could be miles out.’
‘You’re sure they won’t come find me?’ asked Andy.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ said Nathan.
‘But I don’t want to die!’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle came along the long echoing corridor to greet them. She looked even paler than she had when Jenna had first talked to her, and there were plum-colored circles under her eyes.
‘You wanted to see me again?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Sister. This is Professor Nathan Underhill and this is Ed Freiburg, one of our criminologists.’
‘How can I help?’ asked Sister Mary Emmanuelle. ‘I’m afraid I have nothing more to add to what I told you before.’
Jenna said, ‘You look like you haven’t been sleeping very well, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle crossed herself. ‘I’ve been having nightmares. It’s like a moral struggle inside my mind. I believe that God is testing me.’
‘Nightmares about what?’ Nathan asked her. ‘Nightmares about creatures like gargoyles?’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle nodded. ‘I know that they are nothing more than a metaphor for evil, but the nightmares have seemed very real.’
Jenna said, ‘Do you know what happened last night?’
‘No. I was praying from midnight until four in the morning.’
‘What happened last night was that hundreds of gargoyles attacked the old part of the city and killed over three hundred innocent people.’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle stared at her. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? It really happened?’
‘Somebody has found a way to make stone gargoyles come to life,’ Nathan told her. ‘We need to find that somebody urgently, before any more people get killed. Those nightmares, Sister – you weren’t just going through a personal moral struggle. You were seeing what really happened. You sensed it. You know that feeling you had when the gargoyle first flew over the convent? That feeling of coldness? Do you have any of that feeling right now?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘Let me put it this way. When you think about those creatures in your nightmares, those demons or gargoyles or whatever they are, can you sense where they’re hiding?’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle opened and closed her mouth, and then she said, ‘Yes. I thought I was being neurotic. I thought it was lack of sleep, or because I’ve been fasting. I’ve been fasting, you see, to purify my body, and thus to purify my mind.’
‘It’s not you who’s evil, Sister, it’s those gargoyles, and the man who’s been reviving them. The evil isn’t inside your head. It’s out there someplace, and we have to find it. Do you think you can point to where you can feel it?’
Without another word, Sister Mary Emmanuelle turned around and pointed westward. Ed Freiburg took out his laser compass and said, ‘You don’t mind, do you, Sister?’
‘Of course not. If you can find those creatures, and exorcize them, I will do anything to help you.’
Ed leveled his laser along Sister Mary Emmanuelle’s arm, and it shone directly on to a painting of Jesus on the opposite wall, a brilliant green dot of light directly between the Saviour’s eyes. Ed jotted down the compass bearing and then said, ‘God bless you, Sister.’
‘And God bless you, too. All of you.’
Back in his van, Ed Freiburg opened his laptop and brought up a map of Philadelphia and its western suburbs. He tapped in the compass bearings that he had taken, and three red lines converged on Clifton Heights, less than eight miles to the west.
‘Got him,’ he said. He magnified the map and brought up the street view. It showed a single-story concrete building with a double garage door at one side. ‘Thirty-three East Baltimore Avenue. It’s an abandoned factory where they used to repair fire extinguishers.’
Jenna said, ‘Right. This is where I have to explain everything to my captain and ask for some serious backup. I just hope that he believes me.’
‘After what happened last night, Detective, I don’t think he has much alternative, do you?’
‘Well, we’ll see. Wish me luck, won’t you?’
‘Before you do that,’ said Nathan, ‘I think I know a way in which we can destroy those gargoyles once and for all. But I’m going to need you to trust me and give me some support. Believe me, if you go in there with all guns blazing, Theodor Zauber will have every chance of reviving at least some of his gargoyles and it could be a massacre.’
‘So what are you suggesting?’ asked Jenna. ‘You go in alone and appeal to his better nature?’
‘No . . . I want to take my colleagues in with me. But that’s all. No SWAT team. No tear gas. No guns.’
‘I don’t think I can allow that, Professor. If anything goes wrong—’
‘If anything goes wrong, it will be my own fault, Detective. But my colleagues and I are the only people who have the knowledge and the means to destroy these gargoyles so that they never come back to plague us again.’
‘I really don’t know,’ said Jenna. She puffed out her cheeks in indecision. ‘If you or your colleagues get yourselves killed, I’m going to lose my shield for sure.’
Ed said, ‘What’s your gut feeling, Jenna? Remember what I said to you before, when you didn’t believe that statues could fly?’
‘You said that I should trust my instinct, once in a while.’
‘And your instinct in this particular case is what?’
Jenna checked her wristwatch. ‘I’ll give you two hours, Professor. If you haven’t managed to find Zauber and finish off his gargoyles by then, I’ll have to call for backup. But let me tell you this: if you die, I’ll kill you.’
THIRTY-NINE
Tuesday, 2:07 p.m.
By the time Aarif and Kavita arrived at 33 East Baltimore Avenue, ragged black clouds were sailing in from the west like a fleet of pirate ships with torn sails, and lightning was flickering on the horizon. The wind was getting up, so that dust devils whirled up all around them and sheets of newspaper came tumbling down the street.
Nathan and Jenna and Ed Freiburg had parked their car and their van two blocks away, outside a tired-looking convenience store called Skippy-Save. The former fire-extinguisher factory looked deserted. There were no vehicles outside it, and all of the windows were covered with corrugated iron, except for two grimy wired-glass windows in the front door.
Aarif and Kavita pulled their red Explorer into the parking lot and climbed out. Aarif was still wearing a blue Band-Aid across the bridge of his nose, and both of his eyes were still rainbow-colored. Kavita was wearing a brown headscarf that made her look even more Mohawk than usual, a tight black sweater and black jeans, with black thigh-boots.
‘So this is where our villain is hiding out?’ asked Aarif.
‘We don’t know for sure,’ Nathan told him. ‘But it looks to me like a pretty likely location to hide a couple of hundred gargoyles.’
Jenna checked her wristwatch again. ‘Can w
e move this along?’ she said, impatiently. ‘I’m this close to changing my mind and calling my captain.’
‘Go on,’ Nathan told Aarif, with a nod, and Aarif went around to the rear of the Explorer and lifted the tailgate. Between them, he and Kavita lifted out a large bell-shaped object covered with a black cloth. As they slammed the tailgate shut, there was a screaming sound from inside the cloth, like a frustrated child.
‘What the hell have you got in there?’ asked Jenna.
‘That, Detective, is our secret weapon. Show her, Kavita.’
Kavita lifted up the cloth to reveal Torchy, his feathers gleaming so brightly he looked as if he had been fashioned out of twenty-four karat gold. He was warbling indignantly and jerking his head from side to side as if he refused to look at any of these humans who were treating him with such disrespect.
‘That’s the bird from your laboratory,’ said Jenna.
‘That’s right. The mythical phoenix. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it takes one myth to fight another myth.’
‘Are you going to explain to me exactly how you think you can stop Zauber with a bird?’
‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘For beginners, I don’t have any idea if this is going to work or not. But we won’t know for sure until we try. Are we ready to go over and pay Theodor Zauber a visit?’
Ed had armed himself with a crowbar and a pair of bolt cutters. ‘Let’s just hope he’s really in there, and that this isn’t a wild phoenix chase.’
They skirted around the side of the factory in case Theodor Zauber was keeping a watch on the street outside through one of the two small windows in the front door.
Jenna went first, with her gun drawn, followed by Ed and Nathan and then Aarif carrying the phoenix cage, and Kavita bringing up the rear. Torchy, under his black cloth, was unusually silent, as if he could sense that there was something evil and dangerous very close by.
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