Coldmoon didn’t need to ask whether the two had ever corresponded again—the hunger in Dr. Quincy’s eyes for any crumb of information about the woman made it clear they never had.
53
WELLSTONE, HIS CAMERA PRESSED against the grille, shot video of the whole sorry scene: the smoke machines, the shenanigans with the dowsing rod, the phony photographing with the box camera, the orders from Betts between each take—Do this, Don’t do that. It sickened him a little to see how disrespectful all this was to the dead. He noticed there was actually a skull lying on the floor. That had been someone’s mother or father, for heaven’s sake, not some prop. But he’d make sure this desecration would be just another nail in the coffin for Betts’s reputation.
The viewpoint he had wasn’t optimal, so he snuck around to the front of the mausoleum and, staying low and in darkness, filmed through the open door. The door he was crouching next to was bronze, and he noticed that its heavy hinges had been broken by force, and recently, as the metal was shiny and fresh in places. He briefly wondered who had done it and why: pulling off that door must have been no mean feat. Then he shrugged and returned his attention to the fake horror show.
From this vantage point, he could now see there was another staircase, leading down to a lower level. He wondered what an elaborate tomb like this would be doing at the far end of the cemetery, so utterly neglected and forgotten. It must have once been an important Savannah family, no doubt now extinct. He would have to find out something about their history. That would be part of the story, part of the outrage. He squinted and looked through the long lens, trying to read the last names on the crypt doors. He could just make them out, with an inscription below.
Hewitt Hunnicutt III
B. 1810
D. 1910
Thus says the Lord God to these bones:
“Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. ”
He captured that on video, too.
They had finished filming in the outer chamber of the tomb, and he waited as Betts and Gannon gave orders for the breaking down and moving of equipment to the lower level. He was almost seen when someone emerged to spool out more cable from the generator. But it was an overcast night, and he managed to retreat into the darkness in time. He shivered, feeling a chilly wind picking up, stirring the invisible leaves above his head, the whispery sound rising and falling, almost like the breathing of ghosts. Why would a tomb have two levels, anyway? He recalled an H. P. Lovecraft story in which a fellow was working in a sub-basement, or something, and broke through the floor into a passage that had been carved up from below…
He put this out of his head. Now even he, the skeptic, was getting spooked.
There was a break in the action, and he took the opportunity to switch out the SD card in his camera, which was almost full.
All the lights, smoke machines, everything was now being moved down the stairs to the lower level. He waited, watching from the darkness, until they had vacated the upper chamber. As risky as it was, he realized he would have to get inside the tomb if he wanted to continue filming. The big event was evidently going to occur on the lower level, and that was something he couldn’t miss. It occurred to him that, if he was caught, the first thing they would do would be to confiscate his camera’s memory card. He plucked the full SD card from his pocket and hid it in his shoe.
At the opportune moment, when everyone’s attention was occupied, he ducked through the doorway into the mausoleum itself, crossed the upper chamber, and pressed himself against the wall next to the stairs that went deeper into the tomb. He could hear Betts’s voice coming up from below, telling Moller how they were going to work the next shot.
Crouching, practically on his belly, Wellstone crept into the doorway, edging the human skull aside so he could peer down the stairs. A humid, unpleasant smell rose up—not surprising, considering what was stored down there.
He raised his camera to his eye and once again began shooting.
54
IT WAS THE CRAZIEST thing, Gannon thought as she surveyed the lower level of the tomb. It had originally been a rather small room, not unlike the crypt above, lined with marble. The walls and ceiling were built from blocks of carved stone, damp and slimy with age. If anything, the crypts down here seemed even older than the ones in the upper chamber. The vandals had really gone to town: many of the crypts were smashed open, pieces of marble and bones strewn everywhere, along with rotten bits of clothing, shriveled ladies’ button-up boots with bones still inside, a pair of eyeglasses, and a mummified head swathed in gleaming long blond hair done up in braids, with two rotten ribbons.
But even more than that, it was what lay beyond that really struck her. Someone had torn down the back wall of the crypt, exposing an earthen passageway that—against all reason—went on into darkness, like a tunnel. It wasn’t a well-finished tunnel, either; it looked more like something picked or clawed out of the earth. Roots dangled down from above, and the floor was a sea of mud. Deep in the tunnel, she made out what appeared to be faint lights—like the glow of fireflies, only stationary. What the hell was that—some sort of glowing fungus?
The more she looked, the more inexplicable this find seemed to be. No mere vandals would have taken the time and effort to dig so long a passage, or one that tunneled so deep. Was it some sort of unfinished construction site, the crude first step toward enlarging the mausoleum to accommodate more dead? That hardly seemed likely. Besides, if someone had dug this tunnel, where had the earth been put?
“This is messed up,” Craig, the primary camera operator, muttered into the headset. “We shouldn’t be down here.”
Gannon didn’t answer. She could feel his nervousness. More than that: she shared it. Even macho-man Gregor was subdued and sweating. The air was close and foul.
“Gannon! You awake? Let’s get these lights set up.”
She looked up as Betts came over.
“This place is a gold mine,” Betts told her. “That tunnel over there, for example—it’s like a gift dropped into our laps. If I dug the thing myself, I couldn’t have made it look better. Worse, I mean. Anyway, here’s the plan: Moller’s going to move from the bottom of the stairs, over there; pick his way through all these bones and stuff; and head for the opening to that tunnel. I want some shots of all this stuff on the floor—especially, oh shit, is that some girl’s head? What a find. Get a good close-up. Think you can handle that?”
“Sure.” She swallowed. “Listen, I’m a little concerned.”
“About what?”
“This doesn’t feel right. I mean, is it even legal for us to be in here? Look at all these bones. Somebody trashed this place. Desecrated it. We can hardly move around without stepping on bones.”
Betts glared at her, then tilted his head back and laughed. “O-ho! This is a fine place to find your conscience, in the middle of a shoot a hundred feet deep into a tomb.”
“Have you considered that what we’re doing might be illegal?”
“Of course I’ve considered it! Look, we didn’t break in. The door was open. The cemetery is a public venue. We have permission to be here. Even if we didn’t, we’re a documentary news team. We have a first amendment right to follow a news story, even onto private property.”
“But this isn’t really a news story.”
“Are you kidding? Moller’s going to find something down here. Something newsworthy. This is the first time I’ve seen the guy actually look excited.” He pointed toward the ragged mouth of the tunnel. “He says the source of the evil turbulence is down there, and when we reach it, he’s going to photograph it with that special camera of his.” He grasped her shoulder. “Gannon, this is no time to get cold feet. In for a penny, in for a pound. Am I right?”
“Right.” And he was right—sort of. This wasn’t like her. She’d shot footage at car accidents, fires, suicides, murder scenes, and she’d never flinched. But this…this was different. The bones, the tunnel, and the awful smell
that clung to everything had spooked her.
She took a deep breath and went back to work, briskly telling Gregor where to put the lights, repositioning the fog machine, working out her exposures. Gregor was unusually cooperative and subdued, and she could see that he was genuinely spooked. This, if nothing else, was a refreshing change. Maybe he should be scared more often. The only one who seemed unaffected, in fact, was Pavel, the Steadicam operator. He looked, as always, as if he was on the verge of falling asleep. Staring at his heavy-lidded, drooping eyes helped to calm her down—if only a little.
55
THE REST OF THE story can be quickly summarized,” Constance said. “She didn’t tell me how she spent the two decades between her Midwest sojourn and coming to Savannah, but by the time she arrived here, she was wealthy. She told me she liked the idea of rescuing a historic building and restoring it into an upscale hotel. On a visit to Savannah she fell in love with the city and found the right building. She bought the abandoned factory and rebirthed it as the Chandler House. It would be a place where she could indulge in her love of books, paintings, and music. She became an imperious and eccentric proprietress, brilliant and commanding. She continued to make profitable trades but never let herself become seduced by the machine. She realized that it would be dangerous to push the technology further, even as computing power vastly increased over the years. She made just enough money to live well and have all she wanted, but not beyond. She naturally kept the device secret.”
“Who could you trust with it?” Coldmoon mused.
“Precisely the conundrum,” said Constance. “So the years passed. And passed. And passed. Eventually, she felt age beginning to creep up on her.”
She fell silent for a moment, and the moment lengthened. Confused, Coldmoon looked from Constance to Pendergast and back again.
“More and more,” she resumed, “she began turning to Patrick Ellerby, her hotel manager, for help. He had started as assistant manager, a handsome and somewhat roguish fellow. Exactly how the two became so close is something Frost refused to discuss. It’s clear she felt a genuine affection for him. I think to some degree he served as a replacement for Dr. Quincy: empathetic, a little awkward perhaps, independent, fond of poetry and mathematics. But unlike Quincy, Ellerby wasn’t an honorable man. He saw in Frost a route to a comfortable existence for himself. Perhaps he began to work upon her in the mode of The Aspern Papers, ingratiating himself, romancing her, gaining her trust. In time, she shared her deepest secret with him: the machine she had secretly set up in the basement, and just as importantly, the physics behind how it operated. This is, essentially, the same information she gave me in response to our third question: How can this machine see into the future? And this provided a lot of the science underpinning what Aloysius has just explained, along with—”
Abruptly, Constance paused again.
“Are you all right, my dear?” Pendergast asked after a moment.
“I’m fine.” She took a breath. “As I was saying, eventually Frost turned over the operation of the device to Ellerby, since she was increasingly confined to her fifth-floor rooms.”
At this she turned to Pendergast. “Tell the rest, please.”
Pendergast shifted position. “Here, a new element enters the picture. Ellerby studied the device and the schematics that came with it, and he apparently realized—with advances in computational hardware, software, and a deeper knowledge of quantum mechanics and brane cosmology—that the device, now almost fifty years old, could be made more powerful. Much more powerful. And he had the mathematical and computer skills to, ah, ‘goose’ it, as the saying goes. Ellerby was confident that by increasing the machine’s power, he could look not one minute into the future, but thirty minutes, maybe even an hour. That’s enough to make billions.
“Of course, he tried to conceal these ambitions from Frost—but she was too shrewd a judge of character not to have understood what he was up to. As the financial logs and computer forensics show, he suddenly began to make money—vast amounts of money. Two hundred million dollars in three weeks. All perfectly legal and aboveboard. Because, you see, there are no laws against using a time machine to play the market. It was around this point that Frost took the extraordinary step of leaving her rooms and investigating the basement—where she found Ellerby doing the one thing she’d expressly forbidden. This led to their infamous argument, which was overheard by half the staff. But in her elderly state, she could do nothing to stop him.”
“So you’re saying Ellerby found a way to increase the machine’s power,” Coldmoon asked, “to poke a bigger hole in that parallel universe?”
Pendergast nodded. “Your analogy to poking a hole is apt. Because that’s where Ellerby’s story ends—and our murder inquiry begins. And that is where my fourth and last question comes into play.”
“Which was?” Coldmoon asked.
“Was Ellerby’s death connected to the device in the suitcase?” Pendergast replied. “But here we move into more speculative territory that Frost refused to explain to Constance. But it stands to reason that the ‘hole’ Ellerby poked became larger and larger as the machine grew more powerful; Ellerby made more and more money on the market…and then it happened.”
“It?” Coldmoon repeated.
“The hole grew big enough for…” He paused and fixed both of them with glittering eyes. “Something to come through it.”
“Something? What do you mean? From where?”
“From the other side.”
He rose. “But I think the time for explanation is over. It’s time to see this for ourselves.” He glanced toward Constance. “If you’d lead the way, please?”
56
LYING PRONE AT THE top of the steps leading to the tomb’s lower level, Wellstone shot clip after clip with his camera, trying not to fill up his second—and last—SD card. Damn, he should have brought more…but then, he’d had no idea he would strike gold like this. And gold was exactly what it was: that last bit, with Betts reassuring the DP and squashing her objections—that little conversation alone was going to hang Betts. There were so many things wrong with this: paranormal fraud, trespassing, and a disgusting lack of respect for the dead. He could even hear footsteps from below crunching the bones from time to time as they dragged power cables back and forth and set up the lights and fog machine.
But what the hell happened in here? he wondered as he waited, camera at the ready. This went beyond mere vandalism. Somebody—more than one person, probably—had gone to a lot of trouble and effort to break up these crypts, haul out the remains, and scatter them around. That wasn’t the work of idle, drunken teenagers. It seemed more like a deliberate attempt to desecrate the resting place of the Hunnicutt family.
Now, down below, they began shooting again. The lighting in the lower level raked into the artificial fog, creating a glowing mist, low-lying and swirly, as Moller continued his charade with the silver wand and obsidian glass. He also had his phony camera out again. Christ, Wellstone wished he’d managed to get his hands on that. But he reminded himself that now, the point was moot: the footage, stills, and audio he’d captured in the last half hour would sink Betts deeper than the Mariana Trench.
A movement of air, foul as if it had emerged from the throat of a ghoul, was drifting up from below. What were they disturbing down there that would exude such a nasty smell? The eddies from below continued, making the atmosphere around him even closer than it already was. It felt almost viscous. Unbidden, images came to Wellstone’s mind: rotting bodies, decaying crypts, the suppurating flesh of the dead exhaling corpse gas. He tried breathing through his mouth.
Now, it seemed, Moller’s bullshit device was leading them toward something inside the slimy mouth of that strange tunnel Wellstone could just make out at the far end of the lower level. And Betts, it seemed, wanted to set up his next shot inside it.
But, Wellstone saw, the crew had finally had enough. There was reluctance—even resistance—to this suggestion. The
muscleman spoke up, and Wellstone could hear his words, echoing and distorted within the enclosed space. He didn’t want to go into the tunnel. It was ankle-deep with mud. You could hardly breathe down here. As it was, they’d only be able to fit the Steadicam inside. The DP was backing him up, saying it was dangerous to drag cables through an area with so much water.
Betts argued with them, cajoled them, sweet-talked them. Moller, for his part, remained silent, his equipment at the ready. Gannon continued arguing, saying it was risky; that they shouldn’t be down there, returning to her earlier concern that this could land them in serious trouble.
It didn’t seem that Betts was making any headway. Wellstone moved back a little from the steps, preparing to get out of the mausoleum fast if there was a mutiny.
Betts turned to Moller to draw him into the argument.
Wellstone strained to hear the notes of Moller’s deep, German-accented voice rising up from below. He advocated entering the tunnel. That, after all, was where the source of evil was. The indications were clear, and his instruments were in agreement. This was what they had come to find; this was what they were risking everything to achieve…and if they turned back now, it would all be thrown away, a huge opportunity missed.
Bloodless Page 25
