Текст книги "Dance Of Death"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

THIRTY-ONE

margo made the final correction to the last page of the bluelines for Museologyand laid the proof aside. I'm probably the only editor in the country who still works with hard copy,she thought to herself. She settled back into her chair with a sigh and glanced at the clock: 2 a.m. exactly. She yawned, stretched, the old oaken chair creaking in protest, and rose.

The offices of Museologywere located in a stuffy set of rooms half a flight up from the fifth floor, jammed under the eaves of the museum's west wing. A dirty skylight provided illumination during the day, but now the skylight was a rectangle of black, and the only light came from a feeble Victorian lamp that sprouted from the ancient desk like an iron mushroom.

Margo slipped the corrected bluelines into a manila envelope and wrote a quick note to the journal's production manager. She would drop them off at the museum's printing office on her way out. The journal would be printed first thing in the morning, and by noon proof copies would be going out by hand to the museum's president, the dean of science, Menzies, and the other department heads.

She shivered involuntarily, experiencing a moment of self-doubt. Was it really her duty to mount this crusade? She loved working again at the museum-she could see herself working here happily for the rest of her life. Why mess it up?

She shook her head. It was too late now, and besides, it was something she had to do. With Menzies behind her, it was doubtful they'd fire her.

She climbed down the metal stairs and entered the enormous fifth-floor corridor, stretching four city blocks, said to be the longest horizontal corridor in all of New York City. She walked along its length, heels clicking on the marble floor. At last, she stopped at the elevator, pressed the down button. A rumble sounded in the bowels of the building as the elevator rose. After about a minute, the doors opened.

She stepped in and pressed the button for the second floor, admiring as she did so the once-elegant elevator, with its nineteenth-century brass grille and fittings and its ancient bird's-eye-maple paneling, much scarred by time and use. It creaked and groaned its way back down, then stopped with a jolt, the doors rumbling open again. She made her way through a succession of old, familiar museum halls– Africa, Asian Birds, Shells, the Trilobite Alcove. The lights in the cases had been turned off, which gave them a creepy aspect, the objects inside sunken in shadow.

She paused in the gloom. For a moment, memories of a terrible night seven years earlier threatened to return. She pushed them aside and quickened her step, arriving at the unmarked door to the printing division. She slipped the bluelines into the slot, turned, then made her way back through the echoing, deserted galleries.

At the top of the second-floor stairs, she paused. When she spoke to the Tano elder, he'd told her that, if the masks hadto be displayed, they must be placed facing in the proper directions. Each of the four masks embodied the spirit of a cardinal direction: as a consequence, it was critical that each faced its respective direction. Any other arrangement would threaten the world with chaos-or so the Tanos believed. More likely, it would threaten the museum with even more controversy, and that was something Margo was most anxious to avoid. She had forwarded the information to Ashton, but Ashton was overworked and snappish, and she had little faith he'd carried it out.

Instead of descending the stairs to the employee security entrance, Margo turned left, heading for the Sacred Images entrance. In a few moments, she arrived. The door to the exhibition had been designed to look like the portal to an ancient Hindu tomb of the Khmer style, the carved stone lintels depicting gods and demons engaged in a titanic struggle. The figures were in violent motion: flying apsaras, dancing Shivas, gods with thirty-two arms, along with demons vomiting fire and cobras with human heads. It was unsettling enough that Margo stopped, wondering if it wouldn't be better to call it a night and do this errand in the morning. But tomorrow the hall would be a madhouse again, and Ashton would be there, impeding her and– in the wake of her editorial-perhaps even denying her access.

She shook her head ruefully. She couldn't just give in to the demons of the past. If she walked away now, her fears would have won.

She stepped forward and slid her magnetic card through the reader beside the entrance door; there was a soft click of well-oiled steel disengaging, and the security light went green. She pushed the door open and entered, carefully closing it behind her and making sure the security LED returned to red.

The hall was silent and empty, lit softly by exterior spots, the cases dark. Two o'clock was too late for even the most dedicated curator. The air smelled of fresh lumber, sawdust, and glue. Most of the exhibits were in place, with only a few remaining unmounted. Here and there a curatorial cart stood loaded with objects not yet in place. The floor was strewn with sawdust, lumber, pieces of Plexiglas, and electrical wires. Margo looked around, wondering how they could possibly open in three days. She shrugged, glad the opening was Ash-ton's problem and not hers.

As she walked through the initial room of the exhibition, her curiosity rose despite the sense of unease. Last time, she'd been looking for Nora and hadn't bothered to pay much attention to the surroundings. Even in its unfinished state, it was clear this was going to be an exceptionally dramatic exhibit. The room was a replica of the burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertari, located in the Valley of the Queens in Luxor. Instead of depicting the unlooted tomb, the designers had reconstructed what the tomb might have looked like just afterbeing looted. The enormous granite sarcophagus had been broken into several pieces, the inner coffins all stolen. The mummy lay to one side, a gaping hole in its chest where the looters had cut it open to steal the gold and lapis scarab that lay next to the heart as a promise of eternal life. She paused to examine the mummy, carefully protected by glass: it was the real McCoy, the label identifying it as belonging to the actual queen herself, on loan from the Cairo Museum in Egypt.

She continued to read the label, her mission temporarily forgotten. It explained that the tomb had been robbed not long after the queen's burial by the very priests who had been assigned to guard it. The thieves had been in mortal dread of the power of the dead queen and had tried to destroy that power by smashing all her grave goods in order to purge the objects of their sacred power. As a result, everything not stolen had been smashed and was lying about helter-skelter.

She ducked under a low stone archway, its dark surfaces busy with graven images, and found herself suddenly plunged underground into the early Christian catacombs beneath Rome. She was in a narrow passageway cut into the bedrock. Loculi and arcosolia radiated outward in several directions, niches in their sides packed with bones. Crude inscriptions in Latin graced some of the niches, along with carved crosses and other sacred Christian imagery. It was disturbingly naturalistic, down to the models of rats scampering around the bones.

Ashton had gone for the sensational, but Margo had to admit it was effective. This would definitely pack in the crowds.

She hastened on into a completely different space that depicted the Japanese tea ceremony. There was an orderly garden, the plantings and pebbled walkway in meticulous order. Beyond lay the sukiya,the tea room itself. It was a relief to enter this open, orderly space after the claustrophobia of the catacombs. The tea room was the living embodiment of purity and tranquillity, with its polished wood, paper screens, mother-of-pearl inlays, and tatamis, along with the simple accouterments of the ceremony: the iron kettle, the bamboo dipper, the linen napkin. Even so, the emptiness of it, the deep shadows and dark spaces, started to unnerve Margo again.

Time to wrap up this errand and get out.

She walked briskly through the tea room and wound her way deeper into the exhibition, passing an eclectic parade of exhibits including a dark Indian funerary lodge, a hogan filled with Navajo sand paintings, and a violent Chukchi shamanistic rite in which the shaman had to be physically chained to the ground to keep his soul from being stolen by demons.

She finally arrived at the four Kiva Society masks. They stood in a glass case in the center of the room, mounted on slender rods, each facing in a different direction. Around the circular walls had been painted a magnificent depiction of the New Mexico landscape, and each mask faced one of the four sacred mountains that surrounded Tanoland.

Margo gazed at them, awestruck anew by their power. They were amazingly evocative masks, severe, fierce, and yet at the same time overflowing with human expression. Although they were close to eight hundred years old, they looked modern in their formal abstraction. They were true masterpieces.

She glanced at her notes, then walked to the nearest wall map to orient herself. Then she moved around the central display, checking each mask-and was surprised to find that they were, in fact, facing the correct directions. Ashton, for all his bluster, had gotten it right. In fact, she grudgingly had to admit he'd put together an outstanding exhibition.

She stuffed the notes back in her purse. The silence, the dimness, was starting to get to her. She'd take in the rest of the show some other time, in broad daylight, when the halls were bustling with people.

She had just turned to retrace her steps when she heard a loud clatter, like a board falling, in the next room.

She jumped, heart suddenly pounding in her ears. A minute passed with no further sound.

Her heart slowing again, Margo advanced to the archway and peered into the dimness of the exhibit beyond. It was a depiction of the interior of Arizona's haunting House of Hands Cave, painted by the Anasazi a thousand years ago. But the room was empty, and the quantity of cut lumber still lying around indicated that what she'd heard was just a propped-up board which had finally gotten around to falling.

She took a deep breath. The watchful stillness, the spookiness of the exhibition, had finally gotten to her. That was all. Don't think about what happened before. The museum's changed since then, changedutterly She was probably in the safest place in New York City. The security had been upgraded half a dozen times since the debacle seven years ago. This latest system-still being finalized-was the best money could buy. Nobody could get into this hall without a magnetic key card, and the card reader recorded the identity of each person who passed through, as well as the time.

She turned again, preparing to walk back out of the exhibition, humming to herself as a defense against the silence. But before she had even crossed the exhibit, she was stopped again by the clatter of lumber-this time from the room ahead of her.

"Hello?" she called out, her voice unnaturally loud in the quiet hall. "Somebody there?"

There was no answer.

She decided it must be the guard making his rounds, tripping over loose boards. In the old days, the guards, having discovered the tanks of grain alcohol preservative stored in the Entomology Department, were sometimes found drunk at night. I guess some things never change.

Once again, she headed back in the direction of the entrance, wending her way through the dark exhibits, walking briskly, her heels making a reassuring click-clickon the tiled floor.

With a sudden snap!,the exhibition was plunged into blackness.

An instant later, the emergency lights came to life, rows of fluorescent tubes set in the ceiling, popping and humming as they winked on, one by one.

Once again, she tried to calm her wildly beating heart. This was silly. It wasn't the first time she'd been in the museum during a power failure; they happened all the time in the old building. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to worry about.

She had barely taken another step when she heard yet another clatter of lumber, this time from the room she had just passed through. It sounded almost deliberate-as if someone were deliberately trying to spook her.

"Who's there?" she asked, whirling around, suddenly angry.

But the hall behind her-a crimson-painted crypt arrayed with the cruel trappings of a black mass-was empty.

"If this is some kind of joke, I don't appreciate it."

She waited, tense as a spring, but there was no sound.

She wondered if it was just a coincidence: another board falling on its own, the exhibition settling down after a hectic day. She reached into her handbag, feeling around for something she might use as a weapon. There was nothing. In years past, following the trauma of the museum killings and their aftermath, she had taken to keeping a pistol in her bag. But this was a habit she'd dropped when she left the museum and went to work for GeneDyne. Now she cursed herself for letting down her guard.

Then she spied a box cutter, sitting on a worktable on the far side of the exhibit. She ran to it, snatched it up, and-holding it out aggressively before her-resumed her walk toward the entrance.

Another clatter, this one louder than the others, as if someone had tossed something.

Now Margo was sure there was someone else with her in the exhibition: someone deliberately trying to scare her. Was it possible it was somebody who objected to her editorial and was now trying to intimidate her? She'd find out from security who else had been in the hall and report them immediately.

She broke into a trot. She passed through the Japanese tea room and had just entered the looted Egyptian tomb when there was another sharp snap!This time the emergency lights went out and the windowless hall was plunged into total blackness.

She halted, almost paralyzed by sudden fear and a chilling sense of déjà vu as she recalled a similar moment in another exhibition, years earlier, in this same museum.

"Who is it?" she cried.

"It's just me," a voice said.

THIRTY-TWO

Smithback froze, all senses on high alert. He looked left and right, eyes straining in the greenish dark. But there was no sound; no figure rushing toward him, black upon black.

Must be my imagination,he thought. The creepy place was enough to give anybody the heebie-jeebies.

Much as he hated to leave the faint light of the boiler room, he knew he had to move on. He needed to find the loading dock and– just as important-a good hiding place nearby. If the last ten minutes were any indication, it might take him a while.

He waited a good five minutes, listening, making sure the coast was clear. Then he crept back out of the vast room and, turning, began making his way toward what he thought must be the back of the mansion. The pale light faded away and he once again slowed his pace, putting his arms out in front of him, shuffling his feet gingerly so as not to bark his shins a second time.

He paused. Was that another sound? Was somebody down here with him?

Heart still hammering uncomfortably in his chest, he stopped to wait again. But he heard nothing but the faint squeak of mice and, after another minute, resumed his slow progress.

Suddenly, his hands encountered another wall: rough stone, slick with moisture. Following it to the right, he encountered a perpendicular wall, with what felt like a steel door bolted into it. His fingers probed along the jamb until they found the handle. He seized it, turned.

The handle refused to move.

Taking a deep breath, he yanked with all his might. No good: the thing wouldn't budge.

With a curse, he went back along the wall in the other direction. After about twenty paces, the wall ended and his hands groped once again on open space. He turned the corner, then stopped, his heart in his throat.

There was a sudden glow of light ahead, framing a turn in the corridor. Someone had just turned on the lights up ahead. Or had they been on all this time?

Smithback paused, frozen with indecision. That was the way he had to go, he was sure of it, and the light was welcoming. But was anyone waiting up there for him?

He crept forward, keeping close to the wall, and peered around the corner.

The corridor ahead was lit by a string of dim bulbs hanging from the ceiling. They were few and far between, and the light they shed was feeble, but at least he'd be able to see where he was going. Best of all, the corridor was empty. Nobody had turned on the lights, Smithback decided-they'd been on all along. He just hadn't noticed them at first. Or maybe he'd been too far away to catch their light.

He walked slowly down the stone corridor. On both sides, ancient doors lay open, yawning gulfs of barely penetrable murk. He paused to look into a few. A wine cellar, rows of bottles and heavy oaken kegs covered in dense cobwebs. An old storage room, wooden file cabinets bursting with yellowing documents. A billiard room, the felt of its table torn and curled. Just what you'd expect in a manor house that had been converted into an insane asylum for the rich.

Smithback walked on, confidence returning. It was a good plan.

The basement couldn't go on forever. He had to be getting near the loading dock. He hadto…

There it was again: that nagging sensation he was being stalked; that someone was deliberately trying to conceal the sound of their footsteps with his own.

He stopped abruptly. He couldn't be certain, but he thought he'd heard the sound of an interrupted tread, as if someone in the darkness behind had frozen in the act of taking a step. He wheeled. The corridor, at least the lighted part, stretched empty behind him.

Smithback licked his lips. "Pendergast?" he tried to say, but his throat was thick and dry and his tongue didn't want to work. Just as well, because he knew in his gut there wassomebody back there, and it wasn't Pendergast; oh, God, no, it wasn't Pendergast…

He began walking forward again, heart pounding furiously. Suddenly, the pools of faint light were no longer a godsend. They were treacherous, revealing… And he was suddenly terribly certain somebody hadturned on the lights, the better to see him with.

There is a killer after you. A supremely dangerous killer of almost supernatural ability…

He fought against the instinct to run. Panic wasn't the answer here. He needed to think this through. He needed to find a dark corner, a place where he could hide. But first he had to be sure. Absolutely sure.

He passed quickly beneath another bulb and into the interval of darkness beyond. He slowed his pace, trying to get the timing right. Then, tensing, he turned abruptly.

Behind, a dark form-cloaked, strangely muffled-shrank back from the light into the dark oblivion of the basement.

At this sight, expected yet unutterably awful, Smithback's failing nerves deserted him. He turned and ran like a frightened rabbit, tearing down the corridor, heedless of any hidden obstacles to his escape.

The sound of heavy boots closing in from behind spurred him on.

Lungs burning, Smithback tore down the corridor, beyond the last of the hanging bulbs and back into absolute, endless, protective darkness…

And then something cold and unyielding slammed up against him, stopping him dead. A savage pain tore through his head and chest; white light exploded in his skull; and, as consciousness fled away and he sank to the ground, his last impression was of a claw-like grasp, hard as steel, fastening onto his shoulder.

THIRTY-THREE

"who?" Margo almost shrieked, holding the box cutter toward the sound, swinging it back and forth. "Who is it?"

"Me."

"Who is 'me' and what the hell do you want?"

"I'm looking for an honest man… or woman, as the case may be." The voice was small and almost effeminate in its exactitude.

"Don't you come near me," she cried, brandishing the box cutter in the blackness. She tried to calm her pounding heart and focus. This was no joker: she sensed instinctively that this man was dangerous. The emergency lights would come back on shortly; they must-it was automatic. But as the seconds ticked by, she felt her terror continue to escalate. Had the man himself cut the emergency backup? It didn't seem possible. What was going on?

Struggling to master herself, she inched forward as silently as possible, sliding her feet along the floor, stepping carefully over objects as she encountered them, poking the box cutter out in different directions. She had a vague idea of where the entrance was, and for now the man seemed to have shut up-perhaps as confounded by the darkness as she was. She reached the far wall and began feeling her way along it. Then her hands encountered the cool steel of the security door. With a flood of relief, she felt for the handle, found the card reader, pulled her card from her bag, and swiped it through.

Nothing.

As quickly as it had come, the relief ebbed away, replaced by a dull, pounding fear. Of course:the magnetic lock was electric and the power was off. She tried opening the door, rattling the knob and throwing her weight against it, but it didn't budge.

"When the power goes off," came the thin voice, "the security system locks everything down. You can't get out."

"Get close to me and I'll cut you!" she cried, spinning around and putting her back to the door, brandishing the box cutter at the darkness.

"You wouldn't want to do that. The sight of blood leaves me faint… faint with pleasure."

In the clarity of her fear, Margo realized that she had to stop responding. She had to go on the offensive. She fought to control her breathing, control her fear. She had to do something unpredictable, surprise him, turn the tables. She took a noiseless step forward.

"What does the sight of blood do to you, Margo?" came the gentle whisper.

She inched toward the voice.

"Blood is such a strange substance, isn't it? Such a perfect, exquisite color, and so teeming with life, packed with all those red and white cells and antibodies and hormones. It's a living liquid. Even spilled on a dirty museum floor, it lives on-at least for a time."

She took another step toward the voice. She was very close now. She braced herself. Then, in one desperate motion, she sprang forward and brought the box cutter around in a slashing arc; it contacted something and ripped through it. As she jumped back, she heard a stumbling noise, a muffled sound of surprise.

She waited, tensing in the blackness, hoping she'd opened up an artery.

"Brava, Margo," came the whispery voice. "I'm impressed. Why, you've ruined my greatcoat."

She began circling the voice again, intending to strike a second time. She had himon the defensive now. If she could wound him, preoccupy him, she'd buy herself enough time to run back into the exhibition. If she could do that, put half a dozen rooms between herself and this evil, disembodied voice, he'd never find her in the blackness. She could wait for the guards to make their next set of rounds.

There was a low, breathy chuckle. The person seemed to be circling her at the same time. "Margo, Margo, Margo. You didn't really think you'd cutme?"

She lunged again, her arm sweeping only air.

"Good, good," came the voice with another dry chuckle. The chuckle went on and on, hanging in the blackness, circling slowly.

"Leave me alone or I'll kill you," said Margo, surprised at how calm her voice sounded.

"What spunk!"

Instantly, Margo tossed her purse toward his voice, heard it strike, and followed up with a lightning-fast slash that met with just enough resistance to let her know she'd struck home.

"My, my, another good trick. You are far more formidable than I had supposed. And now you havecut me."

As she turned to run, she felt, rather than heard, a sudden movement; she threw herself sideways, but the man seized her wrist and-with one terrible twist that cracked her bones-sent the box cutter flying. She cried out, struggling despite the unbearable pain shooting up her arm. He twisted again and she screamed, lashing out with her foot, landing a punch with her free hand, but the man pulled her up against him in a brusque, horrid movement that almost caused her to faint from the pain to her broken wrist. His hand was like a steel manacle around her arm, and his hot breath, smelling faintly of damp earth, washed over her.

"You cutme," he whispered.

With a hard shove, he released her, stepping back. Margo fell to her knees, close to blacking out from shock and pain, holding her shattered wrist close against herself, trying to gather her wits, to determine where in the darkness the box cutter had fallen.

"Although I am a cruel man," came the voice, "I will not let you suffer."

There was another swift movement, like the rush of a giant bat above her. And then she felt a stunning, searing blow from behind that dropped her to the ground. And as she lay there, she realized, with a sense of strange disbelief, that he had driven a knife into her back; that she'd been given a mortal blow. Yet still she clawed the floor, trying to rise, the sheer force of her will bringing her to her knees. It was no use. Something warm was running down her arm now, running onto the floor, as a different kind of blackness rushed in on her from all sides. The last thing she heard, coming from a great distance as if in a dream, was a final astringent chuckle…