“What are you doing?” Sorcha asked.
Fox dismounted. “This won’t take long. We’ve got a little while before they discover you’ve gone and when they do they’ll assume you’re on foot and won’t have got this far.”
“Why here?” she asked, noticing the small hut.
He walked to the center of the clearing. “I need to show you something before we head off. I want another witness to this.” He bent down and began digging with his hands, scooping away the soft earth.
Sorcha gasped in shock when his digging revealed a skull and bones. “What is this place?” she said.
“It’s where your Indigo Family disposes of its dead. I saw the big guy you knocked out burying something here. When I dug around I found loads of human bones: adults, children and babies. Deformed babies.” Sorcha remembered Eve telling her how Delaney had tried for more violet children with Aurora but all had been stillborn. Fox pointed up at one of the trees. “He brought the bones down from up there.” He told her about the platform on the roof of the forest where bodies were placed to be picked clean by the birds. He walked a few feet across the clearing and dug another small hole, revealing more bones. “This whole area is a shallow bone pit.”
“But there are so many bodies. How can so many people from the settlement have died in the last few years?”
“I don’t think they all just died. It looks like some were murdered. Possibly in some kind of ritual. One of the fresh bodies I saw up there had been strangled with a ligature.” Sorcha shuddered when he told her about the hoop earrings on the female body. As she looked down on the bones discarded in this unmarked pit a heavy guilt pressed down on her. And shame. At his moment she wished she were still Jane Doe, with no knowledge of her past life or her family and its terrible legacy.
“I need you to tell me something, Nathan.”
He looked at her. “Yes?”
“The man I fought just now, the man you saw burying the bones, was the killer in Portland.” Fox nodded like he’d guessed that already. She swallowed hard and continued. “He’s also my half-brother.”
As Fox absorbed what she’d said she searched his face for shock or disgust but saw no sign of either, only a quizzical frown. “Do you know why he killed them?”
“No, but my father knew about the killings. He strangled Eve. It was her body you found up there. I saw him do it. My family professes to be descended from angels but they’re demons. We are demons.” She pointed down at the bone pit. “My family’s responsible for this.”
Fox placed a hand on her arm. “You aren’t, though.”
She shrugged his hand away. “How do you know? How do I know? I can’t remember anything. Perhaps I knew about all this. Perhaps I was part of it before I ran away. IF I didn’t know about it I should have. Something terrible happened in that tower that changed my life. Something I desperately need to remember. I might not want to remember it but I need to. I have no memory, no identity, nothing. The only family I have left appear to be monsters. I need to know if I’m like them.”
“You’re not like them.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you.”
“How can you say that? I don’t know me. I’ve no idea who I was or who I am.” Needing to make some connection with the dead and perform some penance, she bent down to the pit and reached for an adult skull. She hoped the intensity of its death echo might somehow purge her guilt and shame. But the echo was faint, as if its life energy had departed at the time of death, leaving only a vestigial trace in the desiccated bone. “Why do this? Why kill these people? How can this possibly help my father’s Great Work?”
She sensed Fox kneeling down beside her. “I don’t know,” he said gently. “But we’ll find out. Come, it’s getting late and we need to tell Jordache about this.”
“About what? He didn’t believe you before, why should he believe you now?”
Fox took the skull from her, returned to the pit and replaced the soil. “We’ll tell him about his place.”
“Jordache will say it’s a private graveyard. And if we tell him about Kaidan we can’t prove my half-brother was the killer or that he was even in Portland. I saw him in my death echoes but that’s legally irrelevant. Besides, even if Jordache does believe us, by the time he brings the police back here my father and Kaidan will have realized I got away and removed any incriminating evidence.” She thought of her mother and a surge of panic gripped her. “My locket’s in the tower. I must get it back.”
“We’ll get it when we return with Jordache and his men.”
“It might not be there then.”
“It’s just a locket, Sorcha,” he said gently.
She shook her head angrily. Why didn’t he understand? “It’s not just a locket. It’s my past. It’s my mother. It’s all I have. It’s who I was and who I am. I have to get it back.” She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. “I need to get into the tower. Now. Not just to get the locket but also to find out what happened to my mother and uncover the truth about the Great Work before the Seer has a chance to dismantle or hide what he’s been doing in there. What he’s still doing in there.”
“It’s too dangerous, Sorcha. Let the police handle this. I came here to take you to safety.”
“There’s no such thing. I’ll never have safety. Not until I know why I originally ran away.” She pointed down at the bones in the earth. “I don’t deserve safety until I know why my father and half-brother are doing this and what my role in it was. Once I’m inside the tower I hope I’ll recover my memories. It’s the one place that contains all the answers: to my past, my mother’s fate, my father’s Great Work and the part he wants me to play in it.”
“You identity isn’t defined by your past or your memories, Sorcha, and certainly not by what your family may have done,” Fox said quietly. “What defines you is what you do and the choices you make now. You decide who you are. You and fate determine your future. No one else does.”
“In that case I choose to go back into the tower. I’ll hide until it gets dark and then go in.”
Fox shook his head. “I didn’t come all this way just to watch you walk back into the dragon’s lair.”
“You haven’t got to come with me, Nathan,” she snapped. “You prefer avoiding the place that changed your life, and putting your head in the sand might work for you. But not for me.”
Fox glared back at her and for a while neither spoke.
She softened her voice. “Please, Nathan, I need to walk back into the dragon’s lair, if only to discover if I’m one of the dragons. It’s not just about the locket.” She reached into her jeans back pocket and pulled out the iPhone Fox had given her. “This has got a camera. I’ll take pictures of what I find, show them to Jordache and then we’ll have all the proof we need.”
Fox said nothing for a moment, then he sighed. “How are we going to get in? The tower’s locked.”
“We?”
“Of course. I didn’t come all this way for the fun of it. How are we going to get back in there?”
She smiled. “I think I know a way.”
Chapter 49
That evening it began raining hard. In the forest, the trees provided some shelter from the summer storm but the temperature dropped rapidly. Fox gave Sorcha his fleece and waterproof jacket and donned the oilskin provided in the saddlebag. As Fox had expected, the riders searching for Sorcha had assumed she was on foot and confined their search efforts to the area near the settlement. It had been relatively easy to keep out of their way and now the rain made it easier. The downpour washed away their tracks and drowned out their sound, and as night fell they could see the searchers’ sputtering torches illuminating the forest.
As Fox and Sorcha rode from one sheltered vantage point to another, they pooled their information, but it didn’t help them divine the true nature of Delaney’s Great Work or Sorcha’s role within it. In the moments of silence Fox found himself reflecting on their earlier exchange. Sorcha’s ad
amant decision to return to the tower to recover her locket and confront her past had forced Fox to re-examine his own reluctance to re-enter the Chevron garage where his family had been murdered.
The longer they waited, the more he hoped Sorcha might still change her mind and return to civilization with him. Whatever her doubts about herself, Fox was convinced Sorcha had had nothing to do with her father’s and half-brother’s crimes. The fact that she had risked her life to enter the basement of the Russian Mafia’s house in Portland to break out the caged girls told him all he needed to know about her character and values. He suspected, however, that nothing was going to convince her to come back with him now. Especially when he watched the sodden, torch-bearing riders return to the settlement. “Why’ve they given up so quickly?” he whispered in the dark. “If you’re so damn important to your father, why aren’t they out searching all night?”
Sorcha shrugged. “They cans see much in this rain and it’s dark and cold. If they think I’m on foot with no food or proper clothing they probably assume I’ll have to stop and find shelter for the night. They can track me better tomorrow.”
They waited another hour, until they were certain the riders had gone, then moved closer enough to look down on the settlement. By midnight the last of the lights had dimmed from the windows, save a lone glow in the gatehouse by the bridge. Fox glanced at Sorcha. “Ready?”
She nodded, lips trembling with cold. “Ready.”
In a dense part of the forest, sheltered and screened by massive ferns, they tethered the horse to a tree. Near the bone pit, it was far enough from the settlement to avoid attracting attention but close enough for them to get back and ride away. “Let’s keep this simple,” whispered Fox as they headed down the path to the settlement, shielding their rifles from the rain. “We get inside the tower, find your locket, photograph any evidence of your father’s Great Work and then get out. Whatever else we find, we don’t hang about. We get out of here and let Jordache handle the rest. OK?”
Sorcha nodded but didn’t look at him. Just stared ahead into the dark. As they carried on in silence, all he could hear was the falling rain and the squelch of their wet footsteps in the soft, waterlogged earth. When they reached the settlement the rain suddenly stopped and the moon appeared through the storm clouds. Although it wouldn’t be full until tomorrow, it looked plump and round and Fox felt more conscious of its unblinking scrutiny than that of the sinister eye on the tower. When Sorcha made a move he held her back. Only after the clouds again obscured the moon’s gaze did he release her arm and follow her across the dark settlement to the door of the tower.
“Put your ear against it and listen for any movement inside,” Fox said.
Sorcha shook her head. “You do it,” she hissed. “I’m not touching that door.”
“Why not?”
She pointed to the mosaic of embedded rubble fragments. “Those stones are toxic.”
“What do you mean?”
“Each one must have come from a place of death. When I touched them yesterday, I got a jumble of echoes.” Fox remembered Connor telling him how his brother Regan used to collect random pieces of rubble to fashion into odd sculptures and mosaics. Perhaps they weren’t so random. He put his ear to the door and listened. “It sounds quiet inside.” Then he turned to her and asked the question she hadn’t answered till now. “How are we going to get in?”
Sorcha didn’t answer because, despite all her bravado about returning to the tower, she wasn’t yet sure her plan was going to work. The idea had come to her only a few hours earlier, when she had ‘seen’ the sound of the lunch bell as a cascade of colors. She studied the keypad: twelve keys configured in three columns and four rows. Those on the top three rows were marked 1 to 9, those on the bottom ) * #. Ignoring the markings, she closed her eyes and systematically pressed each individual key, listening to the unique sound it made — and the color it flashed up in her mind’s eye. As each color appeared she compared it with those she had ‘seen’ when overhearing the code being entered yesterday.
“Good idea. Visual memory is more precise than aural,” she heard Fox say when he realized what she was doing. It took her less than twenty seconds to match the colors to the correct combination of keys and unlock the door. ‘Impressive,” said Fox.
She shrugged. “If I’ve got this goddamn mothú I may as well use it.”
Fox waited, allowing her to lead the way, but she hung back, suddenly nervous, so he stepped confidently into the dark interior. It impressed her that, although he refused to enter the garage where his family had died, he had the courage to lead her, without any hesitation, into a place of genuine danger.
As she followed him inside, the door closed behind her, engulfing them in total darkness. Immediately she sensed something in the building. It was an indistinct murmuring but it filled her with dread and made the fine hairs on her forearm stand on end. Thankfully, an automatic sensor turned on a series of concealed lamps, bathing the interior in a low atmospheric light. They were in the base of the round tower. The walls were rough stone and the floor tiled with slate. A faint smell of pine disinfectant hung in the air. A thick pillar stood in the center of the circular chamber with two partitions extending to the external wall, creating an internal pie slice of a room. The door to this section was closed. A second door in the outside wall evidently connected directly to Delaney’s quarters. In the central pillar was another door, which presumably led to the stairs. The door had been painted with the now-familiar Vitruvian man, complete with its shadow twin and chakras up the spine.
“Recognize any of this?” whispered Fox.
She pointed to the Vitruvian man. “That’s on the doors of the Great Hall and on a tapestry in my father’s quarters. But nothing else is familiar.”
Fox tried the door in the partition wall but it was locked. Sorcha reached for a small keypad, tried the same code she had used earlier and the door opened. Inside was an Aladdin’s cave of high-tech equipment and a large safe. There was no sign of her locket. One wall was covered with monitors displaying images from various closed-circuit television cameras around the settlement. This was clearly where Delaney spied on his flock. “When he told me he had eyes and ears everywhere he wasn’t lying,” she said.
“Perhaps this is why he calls his tower the Observatory,” Fox said, taking pictures with his BlackBerry. “His cynical way of controlling his flock and convincing them of his spiritual gift — his third eye.” Sorcha sensed relief in Fox’s voice. “Perhaps this is all there is?”
Sorcha knew differently and felt herself drawn to the door in the central pillar. Close up, the painting of the Vitruvian twins was subtly different to the similar images she had seen earlier. The colored chakras running up the spine, which had been depicted as spiral vortices, were stylized lotus flowers here. The biggest difference, though, was how the physical body and its spiritual twin had been inverted. In the other images the physical body had been painted in bold color, with the astral spirit body a ghosted shadow in the background. In this image, the spirit body had become the vibrant, dominating entity and the physical body the pale shadow.
Leaving Fox alone, she opened the door and stepped onto the stone steps of a spiral staircase which led up into the dark. The sense of muted whispers was stronger here — louder. She swallowed hard and vaguely heard Fox calling after her, telling her to wait, but the tower’s siren call was too strong. Ignoring Fox, she climbed the dark stairs, triggering sensors that turned on soft lights as she ascended.
Arriving at the first landing she didn’t register the details of her physical surroundings. She was almost swamped by the echoes now bombarding her senses. What was this place? What had happened here? She tried to remember what Fox had taught her and let the various visions, smells and sounds flow past her. But this was much more intense than anything she had experienced at Tranquil Waters, or at the crime scenes.
She entered a room on her right and then immediately stepped out again, carefu
l to stay away from the walls, fearful that if she touched anything she would be overwhelmed. As she hurried back to the stairs, every room she glanced in was physically empty — and yet brimming with menace. On the stairs, every step that took her higher ratcheted up her dread, but she couldn’t stop. Like a shark, she had to keep moving or die. Breathing hard, she climbed to the next level, then the next. As if she were running an invisible gauntlet, the sensory onslaught intensified the higher she rose, forcing her to move still faster.
Regardless of the level, every empty room she glanced in looked the same but felt totally distinct. As she hurried up the tower she realized she was in one of her recurring nightmares: running through a deserted hotel filled with vacant rooms, occupied only by the ghosts of the dead. She tried to reach back to other memories, from before her amnesia, to the day she had fled this place. She sensed them hiding in the recesses of her mind, still too frightened to break cover and make themselves known to her.
Running past a room on the sixth level she suddenly stopped dead. For a second she didn’t know why. Then she saw the locket hanging casually on the door handle like a Do Not Disturb sign. She replaced it around her neck and held it tightly, as if to ward off the ghosts swirling around her. Taking a deep breath, she entered the empty room and pressed her hand hard against the wall. As soon as her flesh touched the stone she cried out like an animal in pain. The experience was so intense and visceral that any attempts to distance herself from the images, sounds and smells were futile. Holding her hand against the stone made her doubt all that Fox and his aunt had told her. This was no neutral echo or residual imprint but a soul in torment — a soul she knew. As if in a trance she reached into her pocket and found the photo Eve had given her of her mother. She didn’t need it to match her mother to the death echo, though, because Aurora’s face looked just like her own. Even more shocking, Sorcha didn’t see only her mother in the death echo. She also saw her father. How could Delaney have done this to a woman he professed to love? Then she remembered what he had done to Eve and knew the answer.
Colour of Death, The Page 25
