Westfield nodded.
“Tara was that way.”
“You’re saying redheads don’t react to anesthetic like other people?” Chris asked.
“Not quite,” Julissa said. She was looking at her fingernails. “Redheads, a lot of us anyway, are hypersensitive to pain. It’s something to do with pigmentation hormones, I think.”
“That’s what it needs,” Westfield said. “I think it doesn’t just want to kill them and eat them—it wants to get inside their heads while it’s doing it and feel what they’re feeling. It’s not satisfied unless the girl’s suffering enough—enough for it to hit a certain point.”
“Like an orgasm,” Julissa said, quietly.
They sat in silence after that, looking at the cold, soot-blackened fireplace.
After a while, Westfield went to his own room and got into the bed. In spite of all their gains they might never know the final answers. If they were lucky, they would find the thing and kill it, but they wouldn’t learn everything they had to ask. If they were only searching for a man, they would probably be satisfied with that. They could kill a man and wipe their hands, and never wonder much what happened in his childhood, or what part of the country he’d grown up in. Those things wouldn’t matter: he would be just a man who killed women for sport, and men like that weren’t anything special.
Maybe he would be satisfied if he killed this thing but never answered any of the questions. It was still just a thing that killed women for sport; maybe it didn’t matter where it came from. The only thing that really mattered was to kill it.
Westfield went out alone the next morning and walked through the shops of New Town until he found a hardware store that sold brass stock. At a different store nearby he bought a small vise, a set of files, and an electric engraving tool that came with a dozen different bits for carving and grinding. He was back in Chris’s suite by nine in the morning. They pulled a wooden shelf from the closet and used it to mount the vise over the claw-footed bathtub in Julissa’s suite. Julissa had printed the pictures of the key, then used a ruler and a set of precision calipers to create a full-scale line drawing. The three of them worked through the morning, taking directions at times from Chris, who understood locks, but mostly working in concentrated silence. By two o’clock in the afternoon they had a rough cut of the key. Chris and Westfield took turns with an emery cloth, buffing the key to a fine finish, and then they oiled it with mineral oil. When they were done, Westfield held the key and compared it to the pictures.
“You think it’ll work?” he asked.
Chris shrugged.
“It’ll open the door. It’s what happens next that worries me.”
They would leave the hotel after three in the morning, when the last of the pubs had closed and the drunken crowds had finished stumbling home. It would be empty in the Old Town. Westfield watched as Julissa used black electrical tape to fasten an LED flashlight to the barrel of the sub-machinegun. She looked up at him, but there was nothing to say.
They watched the sun trace its long arc across the northern sky, and they waited.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Somewhere in the city a church bell was ringing the hour.
Julissa sat in the chair by the fire and counted to midnight. When the bell tolled the last hour, she rose and stood a moment next to Chris, who was asleep in the other chair, and then she quietly let herself out of his room.
The hallway was empty.
Earlier, she’d seen a janitor’s supply closet at the end of the hall, near the stairwell. It was locked, but poorly. She took her Visa card from the pocket of her jeans and slid it into the doorjamb, twisting the knob to the left while she pressed the card down. The door popped open and she stepped into the closet and turned on the light. After their visit with Stark, Aaron had left the empty Russian syringe in her backpack. She took it out of her pocket now and looked at the jury-rig she’d fashioned from a nylon shoelace and a Velcro strap from her camera bag. It wasn’t much to look at, but it worked, with the shoelace fastened to the thumb-button of the plunger with a couple wraps of duct tape.
She’d practiced with it in the bathroom when Chris and Aaron were finishing the key, and it had worked fine. Now she scanned the shelves in the janitor’s closet, looking for something more potent than the tap water she’d used for practice.
There was a gallon-sized, grimy bottle of industrial drain cleaner on the top shelf. She climbed a stepping stool and took it down, turning it in her hands to read the label on the back. But the label had been dissolved by the contents of the bottle.
That’s gotta be a good sign.
She knelt on the floor and poured a tablespoon of drain cleaner into the bottle’s cap. Wisps of smoke rose from droplets that spilled on the concrete floor. She dipped the needle into the cap and drew the fluid into the syringe by pulling back the plunger. She strapped the syringe to her wrist, pulled the sleeve of her sweatshirt over it, and wrapped the shoelace around her finger. Then she put the drain cleaner back on the shelf, switched off the light, and went back down the hall to Chris’s room.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chris woke at fifteen minutes to three, when Julissa put her hand on his cheek. He stood from the armchair and stretched.
“Westfield?” he said.
“Just called him. He’s changing his bandages one more time.”
Chris took Julissa’s shoulders and pulled her to his chest so that he was holding her against him, the soft curve of her breasts against his ribs. He kissed the top of her head, letting his face rest there for a moment in the warmth of her hair. Then he put on his jacket, tucking his pistol into the waistband of his pants.
Westfield was waiting for them by the elevator, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
They walked across the empty lobby and out onto Princes Street. Crossing Waverly Bridge above the train station, they could hear a crew of workmen talking as they coupled train cars on the tracks down below. Then they crossed the cobblestone traffic circle at Market and Cockburn Streets, stepped under the scaffolding of a construction site, and entered the tight confines of Advocate’s Close. They climbed the stone staircase and stopped at the door. Dewdrops in the lichen covering the carved ship glowed in distant light from the street lamps on High Street. Chris took out the key and held it in his left hand, then drew his pistol and held it in his right hand. Julissa turned on a small flashlight and aimed it at the door. He turned and saw it was the flashlight taped to the barrel of the sub-machinegun. Westfield was just behind her and to her right, his pistol drawn but pointed at the base of the door.
“Okay,” Chris whispered.
He fit the key into the lock, slowly, feeling the faint taps as the pin tumblers lifted and settled over the newly filed ridges of the key. Then he turned the key clockwise and felt the lock’s internal plug rotate with it. There was a click, and the door opened inwards an eighth of an inch. Chris put his hand where the creature had put its claws, and he pushed. The door swung on oiled hinges. He felt the rush of cold air coming around his feet and understood immediately, even before Julissa stepped forward and shone her light onto the stairs, that they were standing at the mouth of a cave.
Nothing rushed up to meet them except the dank smell of cold air. There was a smell like roots and earthworms. The stairs went down at a forty-five degree angle inside of a vaulted passageway that was only wide enough to allow them to walk single file. The stones overhead were carved into arches. They were standing in Advocate’s Close with Julissa’s light pointing down the passage. The light was only good for a hundred feet and then it was useless.
Chris pocketed the key and turned on his flashlight. He held it in his left hand with the pistol braced above it in his right hand. He walked down the first three steps and paused when he felt Julissa’s hand on his shoulder.
“I think Aaron should close the door when we’re all inside,” she whispered. “So no one wanders in.”
Chris nodded and walked down another
two steps, then heard the quiet click when Westfield closed the door. With three lights shining down the tunnel he could see farther, but the shadow of the dropping tunnel stretched long past the reach of their light. The beam of his flashlight settled on a black box bolted to the solid rock wall up ahead. As they approached it, all three of the beams focused on the little box.
“Wireless internet repeater antenna,” Julissa whispered. “Probably to bounce the signal around the corner and up to another antenna at street level.”
“Wireless,” Westfield said. “Jesus.”
“All the modern conveniences,” Chris said. He let his light follow the black electrical cable that came out of the box and followed the stairway downwards, secured to the wall at intervals by U-bolts.
Chris knew it wasn’t just an animal they were stalking. It sent emails. It took digital photographs and flew around in helicopters. It had a lawyer in its pocket and a fleet of ships that spanned the globe. But the smell in this cave didn’t tell him they were walking into the penthouse of an international shipping magnate. The stench of rot and mud and old death told him they were walking into something else. This creature could live in their world, but its hand hadn’t shaped it. When they got to the bottom of these stairs, they would see how it lived when it was alone. We’re going into its nest, Chris thought.
Its lair.
He walked downwards. The stairs were slick with damp and mold, but as they went deeper the air became drier. After six hundred and twenty steps the passageway leveled, curving to the right. There was another wireless antenna. The passage was barely two feet wide and wasn’t high enough to stand up straight. He knew he was so amped up he would probably fire his entire clip if he saw a rat. He paused to steady himself and again felt Julissa’s hand on his shoulder. She didn’t say anything and he didn’t look back. When he started to move again she kept her hand at the small of his back, a light press of her fingers to let him know she was there. When he made it around the curve, the floor dropped away again into another set of stairs. This passage was no wider, but the ceiling here was shorter, made of flat slabs of stone instead of arches. The small pools of light from the three flashlights wavered unsteadily on the ceiling and the steps as they went down.
Chapter Fifty-Six
For Julissa, the strangeness began the moment she stepped off the well-traveled steps of Advocate’s Close and into the tunnel beneath the city. First there was the push of cold air and that smell, like a handful of wet earth taken from the place where a dead thing had been buried long ago. It was a dead smell, but it was more than that. It was sickeningly fecund; something was growing very well down there in the dark. After Aaron closed the door behind them, and the darkness was complete except for the dim circles of their flashlights along the dripping ceiling and mossy steps, something started to grow in her thoughts.
At first it was just a whisper.
Like hearing snatches of a conversation while walking on the streets of a foreign city, the language so different from her own she couldn’t tell where one word left off and the next began. And then it was gone.
She held the sub-machinegun’s pistol grip tightly, but kept her finger away from the trigger. They walked down the steps in silence and when they were deeper under the city, images began to take shape in her mind. She saw a young redheaded woman walking out of the water and onto the wet sand a few moments before sunset. She saw this from inches above the water, charging in towards the shore as if riding a powerful current. The girl turned to look at the waves, one hand behind her neck to feel the knotted strap holding up her bikini. Julissa’s vision liquefied as she went beneath the surface. She saw taloned white hands gripping into the wave-rippled sandy bottom, clumps of Sargasso weed rolling in the current, a sand dollar. She watched the hands claw along the bottom, dragging her towards the shore; she could feel the small humps of sand sliding beneath her belly, the scratch of seaweed rolling down her bare leg.
Ahead of her, Chris stopped and she nearly bumped into him.
The vision in her mind disappeared.
Then, for a second, she saw the inside of Allison’s condominium in Galveston. She saw it from the outside looking in through the third-floor window. She saw her sister pass through the kitchen with a glass of wine, walking towards her bedroom wearing a pair of panties and a tank top. Superimposed over this image of Allison was a pair of glowing yellow eyes, a transparent reflection on the glass of her dead sister’s window.
That image faded too.
They reached the bottom of the staircase and began to walk through a narrow, curving passage. Chris stopped and she put her hand on his shoulder, needing him. He paused and leaned back into her touch to acknowledge it.
She was seeing the creature’s dreams. It must have been asleep or falling back to sleep, its mind wheeling through images and broken thoughts, waiting to settle on something.
She put her hand on the small of Chris’s back and tried to clear her mind. If she could feel its thoughts, maybe it could feel hers. She focused on Chris’s back so she wouldn’t look at the tunnel or the steps. She opened her mind like a blank screen for the creature to cast its images upon, in the hope that none of her own thoughts would flow back out. This was like jumping into deep, cold water: she regretted it right away, but it was too late to take it back. She hooked her finger through one of Chris’s belt loops and let him lead her down the next long stairway.
But she didn’t see the steps at all.
She was kneeling on a ledge at a mountain pass overlooking an ice-bound fjord, shivering in the cold and striking flints together above a small pile of tinder. When a spark smoldered in the tiny nest of shredded birch bark, she was leaning close to it and blowing, adding stripped twigs to the growing flame until the fire caught. She piled on larger sticks from the heap of firewood next to the ring of stones, and knelt by the fire until she knew it needed no more tending. Then she turned and went into the cave behind her, walking through the darkness without any need for light.
She had left her prey back there, on a stone shelf at the far end of the cave. She gathered up the child and walked back to the fire. The child was already dead, its skull crushed. This was one of a pair that she’d caught; she’d already eaten the other. It was still wrapped in a swaddling cloth made of the skin of some animal. A bear, maybe. She removed the animal skin and threw it off the edge of the cliff and took one of the bigger branches from the wood pile to make a spit to cook the child. She sharpened the stick with the edge of a broken rock, skewered the child, and propped the stick next to the fire so the meat was close to the flames but not in them.
From her spot on the ledge she could look down and see the squalid encampment on the bank of the fjord where she had taken this prey, but she knew the small band would move on when they discovered they were being hunted.
It was no matter. She could follow them from a distance if she wanted to. She could track them through the mountains in the snow and pick them off one by one whenever they strayed from each other; she could rush into their camp in the middle of the night and take them all at once. It didn’t matter if they threw stones or spears. She was too fast for them.
Or, if she felt like it, she could crawl into the back of her cave and make a bed of pine needles and skins, and seal herself up with a wall of rocks and sleep until spring or the spring after that and then come out to see if the world had brought better pickings. Or see if any of the Others had returned. She watched the child cook next to the fire and watched the thin lines of smoke rising from the camp far below her and listened to the howls of wolfs rising from the ledges behind her. The wolves could smell the meat cooking, but they could also smell her own scat and they knew better than to approach. She liked the lonely sound the wolves made, and the way the meat smelled when it sizzled, and the memory of catching this child and its older brother in the snow. She wondered if there was Another somewhere in the mountains on the far side of the ice, looking down on the same camp from its own fire and i
ts own prey.
Julissa bit her tongue until it bled, and by doing so finally shut out the dream.
She swallowed a mouthful of hot blood and spit, unhooked her finger from Chris’s belt, and felt in the darkness along the stock of the sub-machinegun, switching its safety off. She felt her pockets for the extra clips and swept her light around, seeing this part of the passage for the first time. She still felt cold from the dream, numb from the glacial wind of whatever place and time she had just escaped. She looked around.
Here and now, they were coming towards the end of this tunnel. She felt the gun again with her fingers to be sure it was set for automatic fire. The dream had been pounding at her with such ferocity when she finally closed it out that she knew they were almost on top of it. There was a chamber up ahead; she told herself that she was not afraid, that she was here with people she loved. They had come to settle a very old account.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
When they reached the bottom of the second set of stairs, Chris thought they might have come down as much as a thousand feet. Because the curve between the flights of steps had led them to the west, he thought they were probably directly underneath the castle. Ahead of him the passageway appeared to open into a chamber. He walked until he was five feet from the end of the narrow passage and waited to feel Julissa behind him. Then he stepped into the chamber, swept his light to the left and saw Julissa rush out to cover the right. Westfield came last, his light searching the high ceiling.
They were in its dining room, or perhaps its dining room from a thousand years ago. A waist-high flat rock took up the middle of the long rectangular hall. The vaulted ceiling reached up fifty or sixty feet above them at its peak, carved from solid rock. The walls were lined with stone pillars. But it was the floor that held Chris’s attention. It was littered with bones: rib cages and skulls and individual leg bones, all of them gnawed and broken in pieces to get at their marrow, whole femurs split lengthwise down the middle and gnawed apart at either end as if by a dog. A few of the skulls still had locks of long red hair hanging from patches of dry scalp, and there were braids and plaits of red hair swept along the base of the table stone in the middle of the room. A cast iron brazier sat on the middle of that stone, its cold ashes littered with chunks of half-cremated bones. In the corner farthest from where they had entered was a pile of discarded corsets and petticoats, moldering woolen and silk dresses, tartan hoop skirts, cotton bloomers, and leather shoes, all of them ripped and shredded and stained. There was even an age-yellowed wedding dress, slashed across the middle where it was stained black with the blood of its last occupant now dead a century or more. The far side of the room opened to another passage, this one wider than the one from which they had entered.
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