Cemetery Dance

by Douglas Preston

  “You ever see the driver?”

  “From up here, how could I see anyone inside? But when my window’s open at night, I can sometimes hear sounds from the van. That’s what made me notice it in the first place.”

  “Sounds? What kind?”

  “Bleating. Whimpering.”

  “Animal sounds?”

  “Certainly, animal sounds.”

  “May I?” He indicated the window.

  “And let the cold air in? You should see my heating bills.”

  “Just for a moment.” Without waiting for the woman to reply, he lifted the double-hung—it went up easily—and leaned out. The fall evening was cool and quiet. It was believable she’d hear something in the van, if it was loud enough.

  “Look here, if you need fresh air, do it on somebody else’s dime.”

  D’Agosta shut the window. “How’s your hearing, Mrs. Pizzetti? Do you wear a hearing aid?”

  “How’s your hearing, Officer?” she snapped back. “Mine is perfect.”

  “Anything else you remember telling Smithback—or anything else about the Ville?”

  She seemed to hesitate. “People talk about seeing something wandering around over there, inside the fence.”

  “Something? An animal?”

  She shrugged. “And then they sometimes come out at night. In the van. Gone all night and come back in the morning.”

  “Often?”

  “Two or three times a year.”

  “Any idea what they’re up to?”

  “Oh yes. Recruiting. For their cult.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s what people around here say. The old-timers.”

  “What people, specifically, Mrs. Pizzetti?”

  She shrugged.

  “Can you give me any names?”

  “Oh no. I’m not dragging my neighbors into this. They’d kill me.”

  D’Agosta found himself becoming exasperated with this difficult old lady. “What else do you know?”

  “I don’t remember anything else. Except cats. He was very fond of cats.”

  “Excuse me, who was fond of cats?”

  “That reporter, Smithback. Who else?”

  Fond of cats. Smithback was good at his job, knew how to gain people’s trust, establish a connection with them. D’Agosta recollected that Smithback loathed cats. He cleared his throat, checked his watch. “So the van is due back in an hour?”

  “Never fails.”

  D’Agosta exited the building, breathing deep of the night air. Quiet, leafy. Hard to believe it was still Manhattan Island. He checked his watch: just after eight. He’d seen a diner down the street; he’d grab a cup of coffee and wait.

  The van came right on schedule, a ’97 Chevy Express with windows in front only, deeply tinted, and a ladder running up to the roof. It eased slowly onto Indian Road from West 214th, cruised the length of the block, then turned into the stem road leading to the Ville. It stopped at the padlocked chain.

  D’Agosta timed his steps so that he was just crossing behind the van as the driver’s door opened. A man got out, went up to the padlock, and unlocked it. D’Agosta couldn’t get a clear view in the dim light, but he seemed to be extraordinarily tall. He wore a long coat that looked almost antique, like something out of a Western movie. D’Agosta paused to fish out and light a cigarette, keeping his head down. Chain down, the man came back, got in the cab, drove the van across the chain, stopped again.

  Dropping the cigarette, D’Agosta darted forward, keeping the van between himself and the man. He listened as the man raised the chain again, padlocked it, and returned to the driver’s door. Then, keeping low, D’Agosta slid around to the rear, stepping onto the bumper and grabbing hold of the ladder. This was public land, city land. There was no reason why an officer of the law couldn’t enter, as long as he didn’t trespass inside any private buildings.

  The van crept forward, the driver cautious and slow. They left the dim lights of Upper Manhattan behind and were soon among the dark, silent trees of Inwood Hill Park. Although the windows were closed tight, the sounds Mrs. Pizzetti had mentioned were all too plain to D’Agosta: a chorus of crying, bleating, meowing, barking, clucking, and—even more horrifying—the terrified whinny of what could only be a newborn colt. At the thought of the pitiful menagerie within, and the fate that they seemed all too clearly destined for, D’Agosta felt white-hot anger boil up inside him.

  The van crested a hill, descended, then stopped. D’Agosta heard the driver get out. As he did so, D’Agosta leapt from the rear of the van and sprinted into the nearby woods, diving into the dark leaves. Rolling into a crouch, he glanced back in the direction of the van. The driver was unlocking an old gate in a chain-link fence, and for the briefest of instants the face passed through the glow of the headlights. His skin was pale, and there was something strikingly refined, almost aristocratic, about it.

  The van went through the gate; the man emerged once again and relocked it; then, getting back in, he drove on. D’Agosta rose and brushed off the leaves, his hands trembling with fury. Nothing was going to keep him out now, not with all those animals at risk. He was an officer of the law in performance of his duty. As a homicide detective, he didn’t normally wear a uniform; taking his badge out and pinning it to his lapel, he scaled the chain-link fence and set off down the road, where the taillights of the van had disappeared. The road curved and ahead he could faintly make out the spire of a large, rudely built church, surrounded by a disorganized cluster of dim lights.

  After a minute, he stopped in the middle of the road and turned, peering into the darkness. Some cop instinct told him he wasn’t alone. He pulled out his Maglite and played it about the tree trunks, the dead bushes with their rustling leaves.

  “Who’s there?”

  Silence.

  D’Agosta turned off the Maglite and slipped it back into his pocket. He continued staring into the darkness. There was the faint light of a quarter moon, and the trunks of the beech trees seemed to float in the darkness like long scabby legs. He listened intently. There was something there. He could feel it—and now he could hear it. A faint crush of damp leaves, the crack of a twig.

  He reached for his service revolver. “I’m a New York City police officer,” he rapped out. “Step into the roadway, please.” He left the torch off—he could see farther into the gloom without it.

  Now he could see, just barely, a pale shape moving with a strange, lurching gait through the trees. It ducked into a stand of deep brush and he lost it. A strange moaning floated out from the woods, in-articulate and sepulchral, as if from a mouth yawning wide and slack: aaaaahhhhhuuuu…

  He slipped the torch out of his holster, turned it on, flashed it through the trees. Nothing.

  This was bullshit. Some kids were playing a game with him.

  He strode toward the area of brush, playing the light about. It was a large tangle of overgrown azaleas and mountain laurel stretching for hundreds of feet—he paused, and then pushed in.

  In response, he heard the rustling of brush to his right. He flashed the light toward it, but the bright beam striking the tightly packed brush prevented him from seeing deeper. He switched off the light and waited, his eyes adjusting. He spoke calmly. “This is public property and I’m a police officer—show yourself now or I’ll charge you with resisting arrest.”

  The single crack of a twig came, once again from his right. Turning toward it, he saw a figure rear up out of the bracken: pallid, sickly green skin; slack face smeared with blood and mucus; clothes hanging from knobby limbs in rags and tatters.

  “Hey, you!”

  It reared back, as if temporarily losing its balance, then lurched forward and began to approach with an almost diabolical hunger. One eye swiveled toward him, then moved away; the other eye was hidden in a thick crusting of blood or perhaps mud. Aaaaahhuuuu…

  “Jesus Christ!” D’Agosta yelled, leaping backward, dropping the flashlight and fumbling for his service p
iece, a Glock 19.

  Abruptly, the thing rushed him, bulling through the brush with a crashing sound; he raised his gun but at the same moment felt a stunning blow to his head, a humming sound, and then nothing.

  34

  Monica Hatto’s eyes flew open and she straightened at her desk, squaring her shoulders, trying to look alert. She glanced around nervously. The big clock against the tiled wall opposite her indicated it was half past nine. The last night-desk receptionist in the morgue annex had been fired for sleeping on the job. Adjusting the papers on the desk, she looked about once again, relaxing somewhat. The fluorescent lights in the annex cast their usual pall over the tiled floors and walls, and the air smelled of the usual chemicals. All was quiet.

  But something had woken her up.

  Hatto rose and smoothed her hands down her sides, adjusting her uniform over her copious love-handles, trying to look neat, alert, and presentable. This was one job she couldn’t afford to lose. It paid well and, what’s more, came with health benefits.

  There was a muffled sound, almost like a commotion, somewhere upstairs. A “mort” was on its way, perhaps. Hatto smiled to herself, proud of her growing command of the lingo. She slipped a makeup mirror from her handbag and touched up her lips, adjusted her hair with a few deft pats, examined her nose for that horrid oily shine.

  She heard a second sound, the faint boom of an elevator door closing. Another once-over, a dab of scent, and the mirror went back into the bag, the bag back over the arm of her chair, the papers once more squared on the desk.

  Now the sound of pounding of feet came, not from the bank of elevators, but from the stairwell. That was odd.

  The feet approached rapidly. Then the stairwell door flew open with a crash and a woman came tearing down the corridor, wearing a black cocktail dress, running in high-heeled shoes, her copper hair flying.

  Hatto was so surprised she didn’t know what to say.

  The woman came to stop in the middle of the annex, her face gray in the ghastly fluorescent light.

  “Can I help you—?” Hatto began.

  “Where is it?” the woman screamed. “I want to see it!”

  Monica Hatto stared. “It?”

  “My husband’s body! William Smithback!”

  Hatto backed up, terrified. The woman was crazy. As she waited for an answer, sobbing, Hatto could hear the rumble of the slow, slow elevator starting up.

  “The name’s Smithback! Where is it?”

  On the desk behind her, a voice suddenly bawled out of the intercom. “Security breach! We’ve got a security breach! Hatto, you read?”

  The voice broke the spell. Hatto punched the button.

  “There’s a—”

  The voice on the intercom overrode hers. “You got a nutcase coming your way! Female, might be violent! Don’t engage her physically! Security’s on its way!”

  “She’s already—”

  “Smithback!” the woman cried. “The journalist who was murdered!”

  Hatto’s eyes involuntarily flickered toward Morgue 2, where they had been working on the famous reporter’s cadaver. It was a big deal, with a call from the police commissioner and front-page stories in the newspaper.

  The woman broke for the Morgue 2 door, which had been left open by the night cleaning crew. Too late, Hatto realized she should have closed and locked it.

  “Wait, you’re not allowed in there—!”

  The woman disappeared through the door. Hatto stood, rooted by panic. There was nothing in the employment manual about what to do in this kind of situation.

  With a ding! the elevator doors creaked open. Two portly security guards came huffing out into the annex. “Hey,” gasp, “where’d she go—?” gasp.

  Hatto turned, pointed mutely to Morgue 2.

  The two heaving guards stood for a moment, trying to catch their breath. A crash came from the morgue, the slamming of steel, the screech of a metal drawer being flung open. There was a tearing sound and a cry.

  “Oh, Jesus,” one of the guards said. They lumbered back into motion, across the annex toward the open door of Morgue 2. Hatto followed on unwilling legs, morbid curiosity aroused.

  A scene greeted her eyes that she would never forget as long as she lived. The woman stood in the center of the room, her face like a witch’s, hair wild, teeth bared, eyes flashing. Behind her, one of the morgue drawers had been pulled out. She was shaking a body bag, bloodied and empty, with one hand; the other hand held up what looked like a small bundle of feathers.

  “Where’s his body?” she screamed. “Where’s my husband’s body? And who left this here?”

  35

  D’Agosta parked the squad car under the porte-cochere of 891 Riverside Drive, got out, and pounded on the heavy wooden door. Thirty seconds later it was opened by Proctor, who gazed at him silently for a moment and then stood aside.

  “You’ll find him in the library,” he murmured.

  D’Agosta staggered down the length of the refectory, across the reception hall, and into the library, all the while pressing a cloth tight against the cut on his head. He found Pendergast—and the strange old archivist named Wren—sitting in leather wing chairs on either side of a blazing fire, a table between them laden with papers and a bottle of port.

  “Vincent!” Pendergast rose with haste and came over. “What happened? Proctor, the man needs a chair.”

  “I can get my own chair, thanks.” D’Agosta sat down, dabbing gingerly at his head. The bleeding had finally stopped. “Had a little accident up at the Ville,” he said in a low voice. He didn’t know what made him angrier: the thought of those animals being butchered, or the fact that he’d allowed some wino to get the drop on him. At least, he sure as hell hoped it was a wino. He wasn’t prepared to think about the alternative.

  Pendergast bent over to examine the cut but D’Agosta waved him away. “It’s only a scratch. Heads always bleed like a stuck pig.”

  “May I offer you some refreshment? Port, perhaps?”

  “Beer. Bud Light, if you’ve got it.”

  Proctor left the room.

  Wren was sitting in his wing chair as if nothing untoward were happening. He was sharpening a pencil by hand with a tiny pocketknife: examining the tip, blowing on it, pursing his lips, sharpening a bit more.

  The frosty can soon arrived on a silver salver, along with a chilled glass. Ignoring the glass, D’Agosta grabbed the beer and took a long pull. “Needed that, big-time,” he said. He took another pull.

  Pendergast had returned to his own wing chair. “My dear Vincent, we are all ears.”

  D’Agosta told the story of his interview with the woman on Indian Road and the events that followed. He didn’t mention the fact that he’d almost walked into the Ville single-handedly in his rage—something he’d thought better of upon reviving. Pendergast listened intently. Vicent also decided to bypass the fact that he’d lost his cell phone and pager in the attack. When he had finished, a silence gathered in the library. The fire crackled and burned.

  At last, Pendergast stirred. “And this—this man? He moved erratically, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he was covered with blood and gore?”

  “That’s what it looked like in the moonlight, anyway.”

  Pendergast paused. “Was there a resemblance to the figure we saw in the security video?”

  “Yes, there was.”

  Another pause, longer this time. “Was it Colin Fearing?”

  “No. Yes.” D’Agosta shook his throbbing head. “I don’t know. I didn’t see the face all that well.”

  Pendergast was silent for a long time, his smooth forehead creasing slightly. “And this happened when, precisely?”

  “Thirty minutes ago. I was only out for a moment. Since I was uptown already, I came straight here.”

  “Curious.” But the expression on Pendergast’s face wasn’t curious. It looked more like alarm.

  After a moment, Pendergast glanced toward the wiz
ened old man. “Wren was just about to share the fruits of his recent research on the very place you were attacked. Wren, would you care to continue?”

  “Delighted,” said Wren. Two heavily veined hands reached into the pile of papers and deftly extracted a brown folder. “Shall I read from the articles—?”

  “You may recapitulate succinctly, if you please.”

  “Of course.” Wren cleared his throat, carefully arranged the papers in his lap, sorted through them. “Hmm. Let us see…” Shuffling and examination of papers; many eyebrow movements, grunts, and tappings. “On the evening of June eleven, 1901…”

  “Succinctly is the operative word,” murmured Pendergast, his tone not unfriendly.

  “Yes, yes! Succinctly.” A great clearing of phlegm. “It seems that the Ville has been, shall we say, controversial for some time. I have collected a series of articles from the New York Sun, dating from around the turn of the century—the turn of the twentieth century, that is—describing complaints of neighbors not dissimilar to the ones being made today. Strange noises and smells, headless animal carcasses found in the woods, carryings-on. There were many unconfirmed reports of a ‘wandering shadow’ divagating about the woods of Inwood Hill.”

  The liver-spotted hand removed a yellowed clipping with exquisite care, as if it were the leaf of an illuminated manuscript. He read.

  According to sources this paper has spoken with, this apparition—described by eyewitnesses as a shambling, seemingly mindless being—has been preying on Gotham citizenry unlucky or unwise enough to be caught in the environs of Inwood Hill after dark. Its attacks have often been lethal. The corpses that have been left behind have been found draped in dreadful attitudes of repose, mutilated in the most grievous manner imaginable. Others have merely disappeared—never to be seen again.

  “How exactly were they mutilated?” D’Agosta asked.

  “Disemboweled, with certain digits cut off—most frequently, middle fingers and toes—or so the paper says. The Sun, Lieutenant, was not known for its probity. It was the originator of ‘yellow journalism.’ You see, it was printed on yellowish paper, as it was the cheapest available at the time. Bleaching and sizing added a good twenty percent to the cost of newsprint in those days—”