Relic

by Douglas Preston

Finally, Smithback heard the voice of D’Agosta coming through the pipe. “Christ, what is that reek?” he muttered to Smithback. “That damned flashlight finally gave out. So I dropped it into the water. Okay, people,” he said in a louder voice, standing up, “I want you to count off.” The sound of dripping water started Smithback’s heart racing until he realized it was simply D’Agosta, wringing out his sodden jacket.

  One by one, in tired voices, the group gave their names. “Good,” D’Agosta said. “Now to figure out where we are. We may need to look for higher ground, in case the water continues to rise.”

  “I’d like to look for higher ground anyway,” came a voice from the darkness. “It stinks in here something awful.”

  “It’ll be tough without light,” Smithback said. “We’ll need to go single file.”

  “I’ve got a lighter,” one voice said. “Shall I see if it still works?”

  “Careful,” said someone else. “Smells like methane, if you ask me.”

  Smithback winced as a wavering yellow flame illuminated the chamber.

  “Oh, Jesus!” somebody screamed.

  The chamber was suddenly plunged into darkness again as the hand holding the lighter involuntarily jerked away—but not before Smithback got a single, devastating image of what lay around him.

  Margo strained ahead in the dimness, slowly moving the flashlight around the hall, trying to keep from deliberately spotlighting the beast as it crouched at the corner, observing them.

  “Not yet,” Pendergast murmured. “Wait until it shows itself fully.”

  [435] The creature seemed to pause for an eternity, unmoving, as silent and motionless as a stone gargoyle. Margo could see small red eyes watching her in the gloom. Every now and then the eyes disappeared, then reappeared, as the creature blinked.

  The creature took another step, then froze again as if making up its mind, its low, powerful frame tensed and ready.

  Then it started forward, coming down the hall toward them with a strange, terrifying lope.

  “Now!” cried Pendergast.

  Margo reached up and fumbled for the miner’s helmet, and the hall was suddenly bathed in light. Almost immediately she heard a deafening WHANG! as Pendergast’s powerful handgun barked next to her. The creature stopped briefly, and Margo could see it squinting, shaking its head against the light. It bent back as if to bite its haunch where the bullet had passed. Margo felt her mind receding from the reality: the low, pale head, horribly elongated, the crease of Pendergast’s bullet a white stripe above the eyes; the powerful forequarters, covered with dense fur and ending in long, rending talons; the lower rear haunches, wrinkled skin descending to five-clawed toes. Its fur was matted with crusted blood, and fresh blood shone on the scales of the hindquarters.

  WHANG! The creature’s right foreleg was yanked behind it, and Margo heard a terrible roar of rage. It spun back to face them and sprang forward, ropes of saliva swinging madly from its jaws.

  WHANG! went the gun—a miss—and the creature kept coming, accelerating with horrible deliberation.

  WHANG!

  She saw, as if in slow motion, the left hind leg jerk back, and the creature falter slightly. But it recovered, and, with a renewed howl, coarse hair bristling high on its haunches, it came for them again.

  WHANG! went the gun, but the creature did not slow, and at that point Margo realized with great clarity that [436] their plan had failed, that there was time for only one more shot and that the creature’s charge could not be stopped. “Pendergast!” she cried, stumbling backward, her miner’s light tilting crazily upward, scrambling away from the red eyes that stared straight into her own with a terrifyingly comprehensible blend of rage, lust, and triumph.

  Garcia sat on the floor, ears straining, wondering if the voice he’d heard was real—if there was somebody else out there, trapped in this nightmare—or whether it had just been a trick of his overheated brain.

  Suddenly, a very different sound boomed outside the door; then there was another, and another.

  He scrambled to his feet. It couldn’t be true. He fumbled with the radio.

  “Do you hear that?” a voice behind him said.

  Then the sound came again, twice; then, a short silence; then again.

  “I swear to God, somebody’s shooting in the hall!” Garcia cried.

  There was a long, dreadful silence. “It’s stopped,” said Garcia in a whisper.

  “Did they get it? Did they get it?” Waters whimpered.

  The silence stretched on. Garcia clutched the shotgun, its pump and trigger guard slick from sweat. Five or six shots, that’s all he’d heard. And the creature had killed a heavily armed SWAT team.

  “Did they get it?” Waters asked again.

  Garcia listened intently, but could hear nothing from the hall. This was the worst of all: the brief raising, then sudden dashing, of his hopes. He waited.

  There was a rattling at the door. “No,” whispered Garcia. “It’s back.”

  = 61 =

  “Hand me that lighter!” D’Agosta barked. Smithback, falling blindly backward, saw the sudden spark of the flint and instinctively covered his eyes.

  “Oh, Christ—” he heard D’Agosta groan. Then Smithback jerked as he felt something clutch his shoulder and drag him to his feet.

  “Listen, Smithback,” the voice of D’Agosta hissed in his ear, “you can’t crap out on me now. I need you to help me keep these people together.”

  Smithback gagged as he forced his eyes open. The dirt floor ahead of him was awash in bones: small, large, some broken and brittle, others with gristle still clinging to their knobby ends.

  “Not twigs,” Smithback said, over and over again under his breath. “No, no, not twigs.” The light flicked out again, D’Agosta conserving its flame.

  Another yellow flash, and Smithback looked wildly around. What he had kicked aside was the remains of a dog—a terrier, by the looks of it—glassy, staring eyes, [438] light fur, small brown teats descending in ordered rows to the torn-out belly. Scattered around the floor were other carcasses: cats, rats, other creatures too thoroughly mauled or too long dead to be recognizable. Behind him, someone was screaming relentlessly.

  The light went out, then reappeared, farther ahead now as D’Agosta moved forward. “Smithback, come with me,” came his voice. “Everybody, stare straight ahead. Let’s go.” As Smithback slowly placed one foot in front of the other, looking down just enough to avoid stepping on the loathesomeness beneath, something registered in his peripheral vision. He turned his head toward the wall to his right.

  A pipe or duct had once run along the wall at shoulder height, but it had long since collapsed, its remains lying broken on the floor, half buried in offal. The heavy metal supports for the ductwork remained bolted to the wall, projecting outward like tines. Hung on the supports were a variety of human corpses, their forms seeming to waver in the dull glow of the flame. Smithback saw, but did not immediately comprehend, that all of the corpses had been decapitated. Scattered on the floor along the wall beneath were small ruined objects that he knew must be heads.

  The bodies farthest from him had hung there the longest; they seemed more skeleton than flesh. He turned away, but not before his brain processed the final horror: on the meaty wrist of the nearest corpse was an unusual watch in the shape of a sundial. Moriarty’s watch.

  “Oh, my God ... oh, my God,” Smithback repeated over and over. “Poor George.”

  “You knew that guy?” D’Agosta said grimly. “Shit, this thing gets hot!”

  The lighter flicked out again and Smithback immediately stopped moving.

  “What kind of a place is this?” somebody behind them cried.

  “I haven’t the faintest,” D’Agosta muttered.

  [439] “I do,” Smithback said woodenly. “It’s a larder.”

  The light came back on and he started forward again, more quickly now. Behind him, Smithback could hear the Mayor urging the people to keep moving in a dead,
mechanical voice.

  Suddenly, the light flicked out again, and the journalist froze in position. “We’re at the far wall,” he heard D’Agosta say in the darkness. “One of the passages here slopes down, the other slopes up. We’re taking the high road.”

  D’Agosta flicked on the lighter again and continued forward, Smithback following. After several moments, the smell began to dissipate. The ground grew damp and soft beneath his feet. Smithback felt, or imagined he felt, the faintest hint of a cool breeze on his cheek.

  D’Agosta laughed. “Christ, that feels fine.”

  The tunnel grew damp underfoot, then ended abruptly in another ladder. D’Agosta stepped towards it, reaching up with the lighter. Smithback moved forward eagerly, sniffing the freshening breeze. There was a sudden rushing sound and then a thud-thud! above, and a bright light passed quickly above them, followed by a splash of viscous water.

  “A manhole!” D’Agosta cried. “We made it, I can’t believe it, we fucking made it!”

  He scrambled up the ladder and heaved against the round plate.

  “It’s fastened down,” he grunted. “Twenty men couldn’t lift this. Help!” he started calling, clambering up the ladder and placing his mouth close to one of the pry-holes, “Somebody help us, for Chrissake!” And then he started to laugh, sinking against the metal ladder and dropping the lighter, and Smithback also collapsed to the floor of the passage, laughing, crying, unable to control himself.

  “We made it,” D’Agosta said through his laughter. “Smithback! We made it! Kiss me, Smithback—you [440] fucking journalist, I love you and I hope you make a million on this.”

  Smithback heard a voice above them from the street.

  “You hear somebody yelling?”

  “Hey, you up there!” D’Agosta cried out. “Want to earn a reward?”

  “Hear that? There is somebody down there. Yo!”

  “Did you hear me? Get us out of here!”

  “How much?” another voice asked.

  “Twenty bucks! Call the fire department, get us out!”

  “Fifty bucks, man, or we walk.”

  D’Agosta couldn’t stop laughing. “Fifty dollars then! Now get us the hell out of here!”

  He turned around and spread his arms. “Smithback, move everybody forward. Folks, Mayor Harper, welcome back to New York City!”

  The door rattled once more. Garcia pressed the buttstock tight against his cheek, crying quietly. It was trying to get in again. He took a deep breath and tried to steady the shotgun.

  Then he realized that the rattling had resolved itself into a knock.

  It sounded again, louder, and Garcia heard a muffled voice.

  “Is anyone in there?”

  “Who is it?” Garcia answered thickly.

  “Special Agent Pendergast, FBI.”

  Garcia could hardly believe it. As he opened the door he saw a tall, thin man looking placidly back at him, his pale hair and eyes ghostly in the dim hallway. He held a flashlight in one hand and a large pistol in the other. Blood trailed down one side of his face, and his shirt was soaked in crazy Rorschach patterns. A shortish young woman with mousy brown hair stood beside him, a yellow miner’s lamp dwarfing her head, her face, hair, and sweater covered with more dark, wet stains.

  [441] Pendergast finally broke into a grin. “We did it,” he said simply.

  Only Pendergast’s grin made Garcia realize that the blood covering the two was not their own. “How—?” he faltered.

  They pushed their way past him as the others, lined up under the dark Museum schematic, stared, frozen by fear and disbelief.

  Pendergast indicated a chair with the flashlight. “Have a seat, Ms. Green,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Margo, the miner’s light on her forehead bobbing upward. “Such a gentleman.”

  Pendergast seated himself. “Does anyone have a handkerchief?” he asked.

  Allen came forward, pulling one from his pocket.

  Pendergast handed it to Margo, who wiped the blood from her face and handed it back. Pendergast carefully wiped his face and hands. “Much obliged, Mr.-—?”

  “Allen. Tom Allen.”

  “Mr. Allen.” Pendergast handed the blood-soaked handkerchief to Allen, who started to return it to his pocket, froze, then dropped it quickly. He stared at Pendergast. “Is it dead?”

  “Yes, Mr. Allen. It’s quite dead.”

  “You killed it?”

  “We killed it. Rather, Ms. Green here killed it.”

  “Call me Margo. And it was Mr. Pendergast who fired the shot.”

  “Ah, but Margo, you told me where to place the shot. I never would have thought of it. All big game—lion, water buffalo, elephant—have eyes on the sides of their head. If they’re charging, you’d never consider the eye. It’s just not a viable shot.”

  “But the creature,” Margo explained to Allen, “had a primate’s face. Eyes rotated to the front for stereoscopic vision. A direct path to the brain. And with that incredibly thick skull, once you put a bullet inside the [442] brain, it would simply bounce around until it was spent.”

  “You killed the creature with a shot through the eye?” Garcia asked, incredulously.

  “I’d hit it several times,” Pendergast said, “but it was simply too strong and too angry. I haven’t had a good look at the creature—I think I’ll leave that until much later—but it’s safe to say that no other shot could have stopped it in time.”

  Pendergast adjusted his tie knot with two slender fingers—unusually fastidious, Margo thought, considering the blood and bits of gray matter covering his white shirt. She would never forget the sight of the creature’s brain exploding out of the ruined eye socket, at once a horrifying and beautiful sight. In fact, it was the eyes—the horrible, angry eyes—that had given her a sudden, desperate flash of an idea, even as she’d scrambled backward, away from the rotting stench and slaughterhouse breath.

  Suddenly, she was clutching her sides, shivering.

  In a moment, Pendergast had motioned to Garcia to give up his uniform jacket. He draped it over her shoulders. “Calm down, Margo,” he said, kneeling at her side. “It’s all over.”

  “We have to get Dr. Frock,” she stammered through blue lips.

  “In a minute, in a minute,” Pendergast said soothingly.

  “Shall we make a report?” Garcia asked. “This radio has just about enough juice left for one more broadcast.”

  “Yes, and we have to send a relief party for Lieutenant D’Agosta,” Pendergast said. Then he frowned. “I suppose this means talking to Coffey.”

  “I don’t think so,” Garcia said. “Apparently, there’s been a change of command.”

  Pendergast’s eyebrows raised. “Indeed?”

  “Indeed.” Garcia handed the radio to Pendergast. [443] “An agent named Slade is claiming to be in charge. Why don’t you do the honors?”

  “If you wish,” Pendergast said. “I’m glad it’s not Special Agent Coffey. Had it been, I’m afraid I would have taken him to task. I respond sharply to insults.” He shook his head. “It’s a very bad habit, but one I find hard to break.”

  = 62 =

  Four Weeks Later

  When Margo arrived, Pendergast and D’Agosta were already in Frock’s office. Pendergast was examining something on a low table while Frock talked animatedly next to him. D’Agosta was walking restlessly around the office, looking bored, picking things up and putting them down again. The latex cast of the claw sat in the middle of Frock’s desk like a nightmare paperweight. A large cake, purchased by Frock in celebration of Pendergast’s imminent departure, sat in the middle of the warm sunlit room, the white icing already beginning to droop.

  “Last time I was there, I had a crayfish gumbo that was truly magnificent,” Frock was saying, gripping Pendergast’s elbow. “Ah, Margo,” he said, wheeling around. “Come in and take a look.”

  Margo crossed the room. Spring had finally taken hold of the city, and through the great bo
w windows she could see the blue expanse of the Hudson River flowing southward, sparkling in the sunlight. On the promenade below, joggers filed past in steady ranks.

  [445] A large re-creation of the creature’s feet lay on the low table, next to the Cretaceous plaque of fossil footprints. Frock traced the tracks lovingly. “If not the same family, certainly the same order,” he said. “And the creature did indeed have five toes on the hind feet. Yet another link to the Mbwun figurine.”

  Margo, looking closely, thought the two didn’t seem all that similar.

  “Fractal evolution?” she suggested.

  Frock looked at her. “It’s possible. But it would take extensive cladistic analysis to know for sure.” He grimaced. “Of course, that won’t be possible, now that the government has whisked the remains away for God only knows what purpose.”

  In the month since the opening night disaster, public sentiment had gone from shock and incredulity, to fascination, to ultimate acceptance. For the first two weeks, the press had been abuzz with stories of the beast, but the conflicting accounts of the survivors created confusion and uncertainty. The only item that could settle the controversy—the corpse—was immediately removed from the scene in a large white van with government plates, never to be seen again. Even Pendergast claimed to be ignorant of its whereabouts. Publicity soon turned to the human cost of the disaster, and to the lawsuits that threatened the manufacturers of the security system and, to a lesser degree, the police department and the Museum itself. Time magazine had run a lead story entitled “How Safe Are Our National Institutions?” Now, weeks later, people had begun to view the creature as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon: a freak throwback, like the dinosaur fishes that occasionally showed up in the nets of deep-sea fishermen. Interest had started to wane: the opening-night survivors were no longer interviewed on talk shows, the projected Saturday morning cartoon series had been cancelled, and “Museum Beast” action figures were going unsold in toy stores.

  [446] Frock glanced around. “Forgive my lack of hospitality. Sherry, anyone?”

  There were murmurs of “No, thanks.”

  “Not unless you’ve got a 7-Up chaser,” D’Agosta said. Pendergast blanched and looked in his direction.