No doubt reinforcements were already on their way. The NYPD were not a force to be trifled with. But by the time they arrived, Plock and his crowd would be inside the Ville and well on their way to accomplishing their objective—routing the murderers and, perhaps, finding the kidnapped woman, Nora Kelly.
The last of the crowd streamed through the gate and massed in the field facing the front entrance to the Ville, spreading out like shock troops. They parted as Plock stepped to the front for a few last words. The Ville itself stood silently in the evening twilight, brooding and monolithic, the only sign of life a few yellow windows high in the fabric of the church. The front door was shut and barred, but it would present no obstacle to the men with battering rams standing silent at the head of the crowd, ready to move.
Plock held up a hand and the crowd quieted.
“My dear friends.” He pitched his voice low, which induced an even deeper silence among the people. “What are we here for?” He allowed a pause. “Let us be clear about that, of all things. What are we here for?”
He looked around. “We are here to break down that door and drive these animal torturers, these murderers, out. We will do it through our implacable moral condemnation, the weight of our numbers. We will press them from the field. We will liberate the animals in that hellhole.”
The police helicopter circled overhead, still broadcasting its unintelligible message. He ignored it.
“One thing of the utmost importance I say to you: we are not killers. We will hold and maintain the moral high ground. But we are not pacifists, either, and if they choose to fight, we will fight. We will defend ourselves and we will defend the animals.”
He took a deep breath. He knew that he wasn’t an eloquent speaker, but he had the power of his convictions and he could see the crowd was stoked.
The police were coming up from the road now, but their numbers were ridiculously small compared with his own and Plock ignored them. He’d be inside the Ville before the police could even regroup. “Are we ready?” he cried.
There was an answering READY!
He pointed. “Go!”
With a single roar, the crowd surged forward toward the main doors of the Ville. They appeared to have been recently repaired and reinforced. The two men with battering rams were at the fore-front, and they hit the doors at a run, wielding their rams, first one then the other, slamming them into the doors. The timbers shivered and split, and in less than a minute they were stove in, the crowd surging forward and pushing the remnants away. Plock joined the masses as they poured into a dark, narrow alleyway lined with listing wooden buildings. It was strangely deserted, no inhabitants to be seen. The roar from the crowd rose like an animal cry, amplified by the narrow confines of the Ville, and they broke into a trot, rounding the corner of the alley and coming face-to-face with the ancient church.
At this the crowd hesitated. The church was forbidding; it stood like a medieval structure of Boschean strangeness, crooked, half timbered with rude-looking buttresses projecting out into the air before stabbing into the ground, bristling and massive. The portal to the church stood in front—a second set of timbered doors, banded and riveted with iron.
The hesitation lasted only a moment. Then the roar went up again, stronger than ever, and the men with battering rams advanced again and stood on either side of the banded doors, swinging the rams in an alternating, asynchronous rhythm: boom—boom! boom—boom! boom—boom! A massive cracking sound announced the yielding of the ancient oak as the relentless pounding continued. These doors were much tougher than the last set, but in the end they gave way with a splintering crash, to the ring of popping iron rivets and bars. They sagged inward, then collapsed under their own weight with a thunderous shudder…
And there in the dimness, blocking the way, stood two men. One was tall and striking, dressed in a long brown cloak, hood drawn back, heavy brows and massive cheekbones almost hiding a pair of black eyes, pale skin glowing in the light of a freshly rising moon, his nose like the blade of a knife, curved and honed. The other man, shorter and coarser looking, was gowned in a fantastically decorated ceremonial gown. He was clearly a holy man of some sort. He stared out at the invaders, his eyes glittering with malice.
The innate force of the taller man instantly subdued the crowd. He held out one hand and said: “Do not proceed.” The voice was quiet, funereal, with a faint accent Plock didn’t recognize—yet it conveyed great power.
Plock shoved forward and faced him. “Who are you?”
“My name is Bossong. And it is my community you are desecrating with your presence.”
Plock drew himself up. He was fully aware that he was half his opponent’s size and twice his width. Nevertheless, when he replied, his voice crackled with conviction: “We will proceed and you will step aside. You have no right to be here, vivisector.”
The men stood stock-still, and to his surprise Plock could see, standing in the red dimness behind him, at least a hundred people.
“We do no harm to anyone,” Bossong went on. “We only want to be left alone.”
“No harm? What do you call slitting innocent animals’ throats?”
“Those are honored sacrifices, a central tenet of our religion—”
“Bull! And what about the woman you kidnapped? Where is she? And where are the animals? Where do you keep them? Tell me!”
“I know nothing of any woman.”
“Liar!”
Now the priest abruptly held up a rattle in one hand and a strange-looking bundle of feathers in the other, and broke into a loud, quavering chant in some foreign language, as if casting a curse on the invading force.
Plock reached up and slapped the bundle out of his hand. “Get that mumbo-jumbo out of my face! Step aside, or we’ll run you down!”
The man stared, saying nothing. Plock stepped forward as if to walk through him, and the crowd behind him responded with a roar and surged forward, propelling Plock against his will into the priest and driving him back, and in a moment the man was down, the crowd pouring around him into the dark church, Bossong pushed rudely to one side, the congregants inside grown hesitant at the sight of their fallen priest, crying out in fear and anger and outrage at the violation of their sanctuary.
“To the animals!” Plock cried. “Find the animals! Free the animals!”
67
Pendergast’s clothes were torn and bloody and his ears still rang from the attack. He propped himself up and rose unsteadily to his feet. His encounter with the man-beast had knocked him senseless for a few minutes, and he’d come to in the dark. He reached into his suit coat, removed a tiny LED light he carried for emergencies such as this, and shined it around. Slowly, methodically, he searched the damp floor for his gun, but it was nowhere to be seen. He could make out faint signs of struggle, with what were evidently D’Agosta’s fleeing footprints, the barefooted painted man in pursuit.
He flicked it off and remained in the dark, thinking. He made a quick calculation, a swift decision. This creature, this zombii, had been possessed by his minders of a terrible and murderous purpose. On the loose, he presented a grave threat to them both. And yet Pendergast had confidence in D’Agosta—a confidence almost amounting to faith. The lieutenant could take care of himself if anyone could.
But Nora—Nora still awaited rescue.
Pendergast flicked the light back on and examined the next room. It was a veritable necropolis of wooden coffins laid out on rows of elevated stone pedestals, some stacked two and three high, many collapsing and spilling their contents to the ground. It appeared as if many of the basement spaces of the Ville, originally built for other purposes, had been converted to storing the dead.
But as he turned away, preparing to renew his search for Nora, he caught a glimpse of something at the very head of the room—an unusual tomb. Something about it arrested his attention. He approached to examine it more closely, and then, making a decision, laid a hand on it.
It was a coffin, made of thi
ck lead. Instead of being set on a bier like the others, it had been sunken into the stonework of the floor, only its top projecting above the ground. What caught his eye was that the lid was ajar and the vault within had clearly been looted—very recently looted.
He examined it more intently. In past centuries, lead had often been the material of choice for interring an important person because of its preservative qualities. Playing the light over it, he noted just how carefully the coffin had been sealed, the lead lid soldered firmly to the top. But someone had hacked open the lead cover with an ax, chopping violently through the seal and prying the lid off, leaving a ragged, gaping hole. This had been done not only recently, but in great haste. The marks in the soft metal were bright and shiny, showing no signs of dulling or oxidation.
Pendergast looked inside. The body—which had mummified in the sealed environment—had been roughly disturbed, something wrenched out of its crooked hands, the ossified fingers broken and scattered, one arm torn from its dusty socket.
He reached inside and felt the corpse dust, gauging its dryness. This had happened so recently that not even the damp air of the room had had time to settle inside the coffin. The looting must have occurred less than thirty minutes ago.
Coincidence? Certainly not.
Pendergast turned his attention to the dead body itself. It was a remarkably well-preserved corpse of an old man with a full white
beard and long white hair. Two golden guineas were pressed on its eyes. The face was shriveled like an old apple, the lips drawn back from the teeth by desiccation, the skin darkened to the color of fine old ivory. The body was dressed in simple, Quaker-like clothes—a sober frock coat, shirt, brown waistcoat, and pale breeches—but the clothes around the chest had been ripped open and disarranged by the looting, buttons and bits scattered about in what appeared to have been a frenzied search of the corpse. On the man’s disarranged chest, Pendergast could see pressure marks on the clothing of what had evidently been a small, square container—a box.
That, along with the broken fingers, told a story. The looter had wrenched a box from the corpse’s dusty grasp.
On the floor behind the coffin, Pendergast spied the broken remains of what could only be the very box, the dry-rotted top wrenched off. He leaned over and examined it more closely, sniffing it, noting its dimensions. The faint smell of vellum confirmed his initial impression that the box had held a quarto-size document.
Slowly, deliberately, Pendergast walked around the coffin lid. At the top end, stamped into the lead, he could see an inscription, obscured by whitish blooms of oxide. He wiped the oxide away with his sleeve and read the inscription.
Elijah Esteban
who Departed this Life Novbr 22d 1745
In his 55th Year
How doleful is the Sound,
How vaft the Stroke
which maketh the Mortall Wounde.
Ye living,
come View the Ground
Where ye muft shortly lie.
Pendergast stared at the name on the tomb for a long time. And then, quite suddenly, everything fell into place and he understood. His face darkened as he thought of the catastrophic mistake he had made.
This looted coffin wasn’t a coincidence, an irrelevant sideshow—it was the main event.
68
The creature was gone—somehow, D’Agosta had outrun it or it had given up the pursuit. Although the latter didn’t seem likely: the thing might be a shambling zombii, but it had the tenacity of a pit bull. Maybe, he thought, its absence had something to do with a faint commotion he had heard from above, like a stampede. He sagged against the damp stone, half stunned, gasping for breath, the roar in his head gradually subsiding. He could still hear the faint hubbub coming from the church above.
He sat up. As he did, pain shot through his right forearm. He probed gingerly with his left hand, felt the bone grinding on bone. It was obviously fractured.
“Pendergast?” he spoke into the dark.
No sound.
He tried to orient himself, to place himself in the welter of tunnels, but it was pitch-dark and the flight had disoriented him. It was impossible to know how far he’d run, or where he’d gone. Wincing with pain, he tucked his broken arm into his shirt, buttoned it snug, and then crawled over the ground until the hand of his good arm found a brick wall. He pulled himself to his feet, feeling nausea wash over him. The voices continued above, overlaid now with another, much closer noise: cries and yells that echoed toward him from somewhere else in the basement, approaching rapidly.
So he was still being hunted, after all.
He called out as loudly as he dared. “Pendergast!”
No reply.
His flashlight was gone, but he remembered the old Zippo lighter he carried in his pocket, a habit from his cigar-smoking days. He took it out and flicked it on. He was in a small room, with an arched doorway opening into a brick tunnel. Moving slowly so as not to aggravate his pain and nausea, he staggered to the archway and looked around. More brick tunnels.
The heat from the lighter began to burn his finger and he let it go out. He had to make his way back, locate his gun and flashlight, find Pendergast. And, above all, they had to locate Nora.
He cursed out loud and flicked the lighter back on. Trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his arm, using the brick wall for support, he moved into the main tunnel. He didn’t recognize it—it looked like all the others.
He staggered along slowly. Had they traveled down this tunnel? In the wavering glow of the lighter, he could see fresh marks on the wet, muddy floor, but were they his? Then he spied a large, splayed print of a bare foot. He shuddered.
The sounds from above were louder: yells, the squawk of a bull-horn, a crash. It didn’t sound like a ceremony anymore. It sounded like the protesters had arrived.
Was that why the thing had vanished? Nothing else made sense.
“Pendergast!”
Suddenly, he saw lights in the darkness and a group of congregants appeared at a bend in the tunnel ahead of him. They were cowled and robed. Some held flashlights and torches in their hands, others an assortment of weapons, shovels, pitchforks. They numbered twenty, perhaps twenty-five.
D’Agosta swallowed, took a step back, wondering if they had spotted him in the dark.
Crying out with what seemed a single voice, the group charged toward him.
D’Agosta turned and ran, tucking his broken forearm against his chest, fleeing as best he could down the darkened tunnels, the lighter flickering and bluing in the draft. It went out and he paused to flick it on, took his bearings, began running again. He turned a corner and found himself in a dismal basement crowded with rotting stacks of lumber. At the far end was a door. He ran through the doorway and slammed the door behind him, then leaned against it, gasping. The pain in his forearm made him feel light-headed. The Zippo had guttered in his headlong run, and when he flicked it back on he found himself in what appeared to be another large storage room. He looked down at his feet—and his heart froze in his chest.
Not five feet before him was a pit, faced in stone. It was clearly an old well, with slick, rock-mortared walls. He approached it gingerly, held his lighter over its dark maw. It appeared bottomless. All around were stacked heaps of ancient furniture, broken ceramic tiles, moldy books, and other junk.
He cast about desperately for a hiding place. There were plenty, but none would last long if these freaks on his tail were to search every nook and cranny. He circled the ancient well, then ran on, knocking over an old cane chair in his flight, which broke and tangled around his foot. He shook it off violently, then ducked beneath an archway at the far end of the storage area. He now found himself in a vast, crypt-like space, with ancient stone columns and groined ceilings. He flashed the lighter around: it was another crypt, different from the first, its walls and floors laid with marble slabs carved with crosses, weeping willows, and skulls, birth and death dates crudely carved into them. There were also rows of cru
de wooden sarcophagi. It was a mess, everything covered in dust, the stone walls bulging and collapsing. This was beyond ancient: it had to predate the Ville’s occupation by decades, maybe centuries. Overhead, the voices had swelled: it sounded like the beginnings of a confrontation, if not a riot.
He heard the door of the well-room roughly opened behind him, heard the running of many feet.
Spying an arched passageway at the far end of the crypt, he ran for it, dashed along its length, turned at an intersection, chose another tunnel at random, then another. This one was cruder but seemed to date to a later time, more like a catacomb dug out of the ground, with niches carved into the hard clay walls, the tunnel cribbed with old timbers. Here, voodoo imagery reigned, with moth-eaten bags, bundles of decaying feathers, strange constructions and graffiti, and the occasional oddly shaped shrines.
Crawling through a low archway, he found himself in a chamber whose walls sported floor-to-ceiling niches, each one of which held one or more skeletons. Without thinking, he forced his way into the biggest niche, favoring his broken arm, pushing the bones aside, wriggling as far to the back as he could, and then awkwardly scraping the bones back around with his feet to form an obscuring wall.
Then he waited.
The searchers were closer now: he could hear their voices echoing strangely through the underground spaces. This was no good: they were going to find him eventually. He examined the niche with his lighter and discovered it retreated still deeper into the earth. By squirming he could wedge his way farther in, all the while sweeping back with his legs the bones he’d pushed aside. Fortunately, dampness kept any telltale dust from rising from his efforts, although an unpleasant moldy, decaying stench now enveloped him. Some of the corpses still sported shreds of clothing, hair, belt buckles, buttons, and shriveled-up shoes. It seemed that the occupants of the Ville placed the corpses of their dead in these deep niches—and just kept shoving the old corpses back as new ones were placed inside.
Cemetery Dance Page 32
