by Tad Williams
“Duster, this is Cash,” I said quietly into my com. “I’m here at Door One. Do you have a handle on the alarm system?”
“Yes. The guard’s just left Oceania, headed downstairs. Do you have the card?” Wendell was sitting in Clarence’s awful Plymouth out in the parking lot adjacent to the main campus auditorium, a couple of hundred yards away from us through the trees. A controversial East Coast academic was giving a talk tonight; lots of people were on campus and in the parking lots, which made better cover. The Stanford campus police don’t like people hanging around for no good reason.
I pulled the smart card out of my pocket. “I’m using it now.”
We were lucky that museums, even nice ones, don’t have quite the same attention to security detail as, say, financial institutions or government labs. Not that the Stanford Museum of the Arts was particularly vulnerable, just that it was a lot easier to steal data from museum employees than NASA scientists. Thus, the card, which had been duped using a real museum curator’s information. Not only would it open any door locks that used cards, it would leave a false and somewhat confusing trail, because the real curator was on duty tonight, helping to set up a big new exhibit in the North American Hall in the main building, not too far below where I stood now. I slid the card. The light went on, the door popped open. “Perfect,” I said. “I’m in.”
I had to admit that if I’d had any doubts about Wendell’s credentials and background, they were gone. He did good, quality work. I still didn’t completely trust him, of course—how could I? But I was at the point where I had to take some things on faith, if you’ll excuse that expression when applied to breaking, entering, and pursuing feuds with powerful angels and demons. Wendell, Clarence, and the Amazons were what I had; without Sam, who still hadn’t called me back, I had no choice but to roll the dice and hope for the best.
Oxana and Halyna reached me a few moments later, followed by Clarence. The stairway down was metal and full of echoes, so we took it slow. At the bottom I had to use the card again, but when the door popped open this time, we were in a service corridor at the outer edge of the North American Hall. I’d warned everybody about the workers just a few dozen yards away, so we all hurried through quickly, then continued through two more security doors (one of which I had to open the old-fashioned way, with lock-picking tools, sweaty fingers, and silent curses) until we were through and alone on the top floor of the Asia wing. We needed to make it through the “Oceania and the Pacific” collection to reach the stairs.
Yes, the place was borderline creepy. If you can think of any people in San Judas less likely to worry about haunted museums than me, I’d love to meet them—I mean, come on, some of my best friends are ghosts, and I’ve been to Hell. Still, even I have to admit that sneaking through pools of shadow and dim moonlight, between frowning ceremonial masks from Melanesia and life-size New Guinea ancestor fetishes with hair and teeth taken from dead people is in fact a bit unsettling. Kind of like I suspect things are at night in the It’s A Small World ride, when all the little figures come to life and whisper about how they’d like to torture and murder all those screaming children and grinning grown-ups in the boats.
The collection here on the top floor also reminded me uncomfortably of Islanders Hall downtown, where I had spent an interesting night of sudden violence, blood, and lots of screaming not too long before. I hoped that wasn’t an omen.
A lot of the creepiest pieces in the museum, by the way, were collected by Elizabeth Atell Stanford herself, which gives you an idea of what she liked.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Pacific Island culture, but when every time you turn around, you get a faceful of bulging, angry eyes and grinning dead-guy teeth, there’s a strong tendency to believe that what happens in Oceania should stay in Oceania.
I checked my watch. If everything was on schedule, we had a good ten minutes before the guard finished his rounds of the floor below us. We wanted to get in as soon as he left, because that was the part of the museum we really wanted to explore, so we hunkered down near the stairwell and waited until Wendell, watching it all with the museum’s own security cameras, sent me the all-clear. Clarence’s man-friend had picked out some really nice communications gear, stuff Orban had accepted from a drug dealer who couldn’t pay his armored car bill because of a slight downturn in the crack market. Halyna and Oxana both wore tanks on their backs, Halyna’s part of an old Russian flamethrower, Oxana’s an industrial sprayer full of pressurized silver nitrate solution. The women were also sporting infrared goggles, which Clarence and I didn’t need because we had angel vision; we can do a pretty good job at night without artificial help. Looking at the stuff we were all carrying—silenced assault weapons, coils of rope, grappling hooks, pry bars—you’d have thought we were carrying out a raid on an Al Qaeda stronghold in the Spin Ghar mountains instead of crouching next to a mannequin that was rocking a gorgeous cloak of bird of paradise feathers. (The cape actually looked really nice. I felt sorry it was so dark that I couldn’t see the colors properly, even with angel eyes.)
When Wendell finally told us to move, we made our way quietly down the stairs, then waited at the bottom for his signal. The museum is laid out more or less on a geographic model, so we had to work our way across Japan, China, Korea and Southeast Asia before we reached the West Asian section where Edie had received those powerful impressions. Was the horn’s hiding place something small, like a bootlegger’s stash? Or, if it was something bigger, had the museum’s bosses known about it from the start? It seemed like it would take quite a juggling act to steal enough space to add something that significant without everyone knowing, but who knew how far the archangelic power to cloud men’s minds could get you?
We made our way quick-file through the cases of Tanagra statuettes and Chinese gilt-work. I looked at least briefly into every display I passed, not that I expected to see anything useful—even the craziest, most suicidal angel in Heaven would think twice about hiding a demon’s horn in plain sight in a public museum, and Anaita had lasted a long time as a major player in a place that, at least for subtlety, made the Forbidden City look like Sesame Street.
“We’re almost there, Duster,” I whispered into the walkie-talkie as we reached the Western Asia section. “Do you copy? Where are the guards?”
“Not sure right now,” came back the answer. “But I don’t see any movement in your wing. Cash, you are good to go.”
Now, I’m not totally a museum guy in the first place, and we were there in the middle of the night with malicious intent (not to mention in semi-darkness) and under clear threat from angry angels, but I still have to say the stuff in the Persian section was beautiful. Most of the exhibits dated from the heyday of their empire, about twenty-five centuries earlier—imperial drinking horns shaped like bulls, gorgeous carpets with repeating patterns of silver and gold sketched in silk thread, like John Coltrane blowing in full mathematical freefall, so intricate and charming that I wanted to stop and look at all of them. Not that we had the time—which was a big part of the problem. Now I was getting worried all over again.
What if the horn was here, but instead of stashing it in an office safe, Anaita really had stashed it in plain sight? There were hundreds and hundreds of exhibits just in this wing created by her donations, and at least half of them could have hidden something that size. Even if I limited my search to things that looked like horns, there were so many—animal horns, demon horns, drinking horns, hunting horns!
Worse, what if Anaita had stuck it downstairs in the back of the Iroquois Long House in the North American section, or in the pocket of a Boston whaling captain’s jacket? I wished I could have brought Edie Parmenter along to help locate it, but endangering armed Amazons was bad enough without dragging in school children. No, our only real hope of coming away with anything useful was to find out whether there really was a hidden safe or stronghold and then get into it. So that was w
hat we were going to do. It was only a matter of time until one of the security people did something unexpected, or one of the curators in the other wing suddenly remembered she needed a stapler that she’d left next to the Thai baskets. Or maybe the Angel of Moisture herself liked to pop in at night and look around at what her money had wrought. Wouldn’t that just be perfect?
Which is when I noticed something very like Anaita standing right in front of me.
I will confess that even though I knew almost instantly it was only a mosaic made of glass and semi-precious stones, it still gave me a thump to the heart that I could taste in my mouth.
The panel on which it hung (because the mosaic was set in what looked like a delicate plaster matrix, protected by a sheet of glass or heavy plastic) stood against one of the side walls, near the end of the Persian part of the Western Asia collection. The goddess was winged and crowned, flanked by two fierce lions. The card said the mosaic was third century, from the palace of Bishapur. It didn’t say it was Anaita, but I recognized my enemy instantly. The smile on her mosaic face was a bit disturbing, though: she had the serene look of someone who was three or four steps ahead of anyone who might be thinking about trying to take her down. Anyone like me, for instance.
Clarence, Halyna, and Oxana were creeping quietly through the exhibit hall, testing walls with a stud finder, looking for anything hidden. There were a few doors and a couple of small corridors that led to the public restrooms and the fire control equipment, and even a small curator’s office. I carded the door to the office and went in, but though I checked every wall for hiding places or secondary doors, I couldn’t find anything suspicious, and a search of the desk and cubbyholes didn’t turn up anything, either.
As I got back out to the main floor, something clicked in my earbud.
“Cash, this is Duster. Copy?”
“Got you, Duster.”
“Something . . . weird is going on.” Wendell sounded calm, but there was an edge I didn’t like. It was the vibration of somebody trying to hold it together when things were threatening to come apart. “There’s a guard above you. Do you copy? I think it’s a guard. In the Oceania exhibit.”
“Shit.” We had developed contingencies for this, so it could have been worse. “He’s a little early, but we can hide in the—”
“No. Listen. He’s down.”
“What? Try that again, Duster. Did you say ‘down’? What do you mean?”
“He’s lying on the floor. I’m looking at him, and I can only see the bottom half of him, but he’s lying on the floor near the stairwell where you came in. Did you do it?”
“What, club a guard? Hell no. Are you sure it’s not just a shadow or something?”
“Cash, he is down and I think I see blood. A big puddle, getting bigger. Time to abort.”
“Shit. Copy.” I thumbed off the walkie-talkie and hurried to find Clarence and Oxana, who were down at the far end. I signaled for Halyna to come with me, but when I looked back she was still staring at the mosaic of Anaita. I knew she hated the immortal bitch, but this was a really bad time to be dwelling on it. I hurried back to get her.
“We’ve got a problem,” I whispered. “We have to get out of here.”
“Something is wrong with that picture,” Halyna said as if I hadn’t spoken. She took off her infrared goggles, stared at the eight-foot tall mosaic, then put them back on again. “There is a big cold place in the middle of it.”
“We don’t have time right now,” I said. “We have to get to an exit. We may have to make an exit.”
Halyna stepped forward, still not paying any attention to me, and began sliding her fingers up and down the slab, reaching up as high as she could, then down to floor level. She moved to the other side and did the same thing. She must have touched something hidden, because suddenly Anaita took wing.
Well, at least that’s what it looked like when the goddess Anaita and her big kitty-cat companions rose into the air. They kept on until they’d risen six or seven feet straight up the high wall, revealing a door that had been hiding behind the mosaic slab. It had a card reader, but I was pretty certain that the poor slob of a curator whose information we’d stolen didn’t know anything about this particular door and had no privileges for it. I slid the card in the slot several times, but I was right: no good.
Clarence and Oxana rejoined us.
“What’s going on?” Clarence asked.
“Emergencies and craziness all over the fucking place,” I said in a low voice. “Wendell says there’s a guard down on the floor above us, and he thinks he can see blood. But look what Halyna just found.”
“Is that . . . ?”
“It was behind that mosaic. What do you think? As for me, I think we’ve got about zero time left, but we’re here, and I can’t just walk away. How do we get this door open?” I got on the walkie to Wendell and told him what we’d found. “Any more information on that guard?”
“Nothing. He’s still not moving. I’ve got a real bad feeling, Cash.”
“So do I, Duster, but I’m making a command decision. Whatever happened to the guard, no one else has noticed yet. Are you still looping the security cam footage?”
“Yes, but maybe that’s why he showed up. People notice eventually . . .”
“Any suggestions for getting this door open, Duster? Any magic passwords you’ve been keeping in reserve?”
“No. And I suggest you leave it alone. You can always come back.”
“I don’t think so. Not before shit goes completely vertical in my world, with me at the bottom. Cash out.” I turned to face the others. “This is kind of like the Gordian Knot,” I said.
“Is not what?” Oxana asked.
“History lesson later,” I said. “Now, problem-solving.” And then I pulled out my new suppressed Glock and blasted the shit out of that card reader with some of the special ammo Orban had thrown in with the silencer. The subsonics were impressively quiet—I doubted anyone outside the hall heard a thing. I reached in through the smoking wreckage and started pulling bits out, then grabbed the pry bar Clarence had strapped to his pack frame and put all of my not-inconsiderable strength to it.
Clarence was getting a bit panicky. The bullets had been quiet, but the pry bar was making noises like the world’s biggest gopher chewing metal vegetables with metal teeth. “I thought we had to get out of here—shit, Bobby, I thought we weren’t going to make a mess!” He really was upset. He hardly ever swore.
“Plans change, my friend.”
I don’t know what I did, but something shifted inside the door lock and the thing popped out. The door slid about six inches to one side, enough for me to feel a waft of cool, air-conditioned air rolling out. No wonder Halyna had seen a cold spot with her infrareds. I got my hands into the opening and started pulling. After a moment Clarence realized I wasn’t going anywhere without getting past that door, so he leaned in to help, and together we dragged it open against the heavy inertia of the mechanism.
What we found on the other side was a dark stairwell. I went down it, and as I hit the bottom step a light came on above my head. The door in front of me was ordinary wood, with a latch but no electronic paraphernalia. Could it really be this simple? I clicked the latch down and pushed. The door swung open and a light came on inside. My comm-link made a scratchy, staticky noise in my ear, but I couldn’t understand anything Wendell was saying.
I had about five seconds to look around before Oxana, who was closest to me on the stairs, said, “Bobby . . .”
“Just a second,” I said. “We’re in.”
And in my earpiece: “Cash, this is Duster! Cash, please acknowledge!”
“Not now, Duster.”
“The hell with that,” Wendell was almost shouting. “Abort the mission! Abort the mission!”
“What are you talking about, Duster?” But I couldn’t raise him a
gain—the signal was all noise now. I assumed the guards were coming, but I was damned if I was going to run when I had finally found what we were looking for. I’d think of some way to stall them. “Duster, please repeat . . .”
“Bobby.” Now it was Clarence calling to me from the top of the stairwell. “I really think you’d better come up here.”
I was losing my shit. “Will everybody just give me—”
“Now!”
I’d never heard that tone from Junior before. I legged it back up, pushed past Oxana and then stopped, amazed, beneath the mosaic that hung over the doorway.
The entire floor of the West Asian hall was alive with Nightmare Children. Dozens of the swastika-shaped things, hideous and hairy, scurried around and over the exhibits toward us like they were army ants and we were made of sugar.
“This is bad,” was all I could think of to say. Not my most original line. I’ll try to do better next time I’m about to be devoured in a museum in the middle of the night by a couple of hundred monstrous, spidery crawlers with babies’ fingers.
And another thing. When a bunch of them got together, you could hear the Children breathing. They hissed quietly, like poison gas spewing from the vents at Bergen-Belsen.
twenty-nine
jam today
“OXANA!” I shouted. I should have been using code names, but since it was in the heat of the moment and we were about to be overrun by hand-spiders, I think I can be forgiven. “Hurry up and spray that shit!”
The first burst of silver nitrate solution came out in spatters, but the results were instantaneous. The Nightmare Children nearest us erupted in flame, like origami in a grease fire, and the air was suddenly filled with a howling so high-pitched I could barely hear it, like dozens of microscopic dental drills. Sadly, though, the swastikids were too basic or too brutal to be deterred by their burning comrades; the rest kept coming, although they avoided the bubbling wreckage of those the spray had hit.
