by Alex Archer
It wasn’t the first time that the old man had led their way into darkness.
26
The lights of the castle caused its walls to cast dark shadows into the streets below.
Roux led the way unerringly to his intended destination. It was obvious he had walked this way before.
Annja hurried to keep up with him. Garin brought up the rear.
Roux ignored the great gates that were set into the high stone wall and the small door set into the doors, and continued past them, until he found what he was looking for: a grille set in the ground at the foot of the great wall.
“It’s already been opened,” was all he said.
“What has?” Annja asked.
Garin produced a flashlight and played it over the metal grille. The metal had rusted in place, but still looked as solid as the day it was cast. It gave little resistance as Roux swung it up on hinges that showed no signs of decay. A passage led down into the darkness beneath the wall.
This was clearly part of their joint history.
“It shouldn’t go anywhere,” Roux said. “At least not anymore. It used to lead beneath the wall and into a storage cellar. We sealed it a long time ago. But surprise, surprise, it looks as if Garin was prepared for a little trip underground.”
Annja stared into the abyss. “You think the killer is down there?” It was a simple yes or no question, but the point of it wasn’t to generate any great insight, merely to stop the simmering anger from spilling over into a full-blown fight.
“It would still be down there if someone hadn’t released it,” Roux said, chest rising and falling rapidly. She didn’t like the flush of color in his cheeks.
Garin somehow resisted coming back with a petty rejoinder.
“But you’re sure that he’s down there now? Is there another way out?”
“Unless Garin has provided it with a five-star suite in the castle, I would say so.”
“There’s no other way out,” Garin said.
Roux glanced up at him from where he crouched over the opening in the ground.
“There’s nothing to say that it’s down there. Yes, it hides in darkness by day, but there’s nothing to say that it isn’t prowling the streets in search of its next victim.”
Something was niggling away at Annja—the constant use of the impersonal pronoun it. She’d seen the killer on the rooftop. Big, bulky, clumsy, but surely it was a man, even if a giant one?
“I saw a man running across that rooftop back in the city. We aren’t hunting some wild animal.”
At last Roux broke the silence. “This thing is no man. It may look like a man, but it’s not human. If you’ve seen it, you know that it’s considerably larger than the average man. It is also much stronger than a man. This thing will take some stopping even when we find it. That’s why it should never have been let out of there. I’ve got no idea how it survives, but I know that it doesn’t need to eat or sleep.”
“It should have been left alone,” Garin agreed, earning a withering look from the old man. “We should have razed this place to the ground and been done with it.”
“So, then, what is it?”
“The…golem,” Garin said.
Here it was, finally, Annja thought. Was she about to go head-to-head with the monster, proving its existence without Lars’s camera and the inevitable massive-ratings footage that would save the show? This was everything the suits could have dreamed of for their live broadcast, and no one was ever going to know about it. The irony wasn’t lost on her. She made a decision. She wasn’t about to let that happen. It might not be the media spectacle the network wanted, but it wasn’t going unrecorded.
“If it’s down there, it’s cornered.” Annja pulled out her phone, its backlight illuminating her face as she swiped across the screen to waken it.
“Please don’t tell me you’re thinking about calling your favorite policeman, Annja,” Garin said. “He won’t believe you. This is our mess. We have to take care of this ourselves.”
“He’s right for once,” Roux agreed. “This is our mess.”
“I’m not calling the police, the militia, the army or anyone like that. I’m calling my cameraman. He can tape some of this.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Roux protested. “Recording this is the last thing we want to do. Forget it.”
“I wasn’t aware that I needed your permission, Roux. You two may have enough money for you to be able to go anywhere and do anything. We don’t all have the same luxury. I have a job to do and I happen to enjoy it. My show is called Chasing History’s Monsters, in case you’d forgotten, and that is exactly what we are doing right now. I am not about to let a bunch of micromanaging penny-pinchers take it away from me.”
“There will be other jobs,” Roux said. “Better jobs. And if it’s a case of money…”
“I don’t want your money, Roux. I’ve built this career on my own. This is mine. No one else’s. Mine,” she said, ignoring the slightly raised eyebrow. She knew that she owed a lot to him, but this was different. Chasing History’s Monsters was her baby. She’d given the best part of a decade to it. She’d worked for every little glimmer of success she’d had. If there was a way that she could give the studio executives what they wanted without compromising the integrity of the show she believed in, she would do it. This was the chase coming alive. All she needed to do was get Lars out here with his camera.
“You really are joking, aren’t you?” Garin added. “Please tell me this is just a deliberate attempt to screw with us.”
Annja said nothing.
“Annja?”
Still she said nothing.
“The last thing we want to do is try to deal with this thing with one hand tied behind our backs. And risking someone else’s life? It’s madness.”
“Then it’s a good job we’re all in this together, isn’t it? All for one and one for all.”
Garin shook his head. “Uh-uh. Not happening.”
“Sorry,” Roux said. “I’m not becoming a TV star to keep your boss happy. I’m not about to have my face plastered across the screen for tens of millions of people to gawk at.”
“I think you seriously overestimate just how popular her show is.” Garin chuckled.
Annja ignored the pair of them and called up her cameraman’s number. Her finger paused for a moment before she tapped the screen to make the call. The cell phone at the other end rang five times before Lars Mortensen eventually answered it, his voice barely coherent.
“Annja?” he muttered.
“Who else calls you in the middle of the night?”
“What time is it?”
“The middle of the night,” she repeated. “I need you to get your backside in gear. I need you and your camera out in Benátky.”
“Benat-where-ey?”
“Less than an hour from where you are. Be at the castle before first light. I think we’ve got the story the suits back home are looking for.”
She could hear doubt down the line. “But we can’t set up a live feed just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Not if we want to have the kind of audience participation that they are after. That takes a media campaign, planning.”
“Let me worry about that, you just focus on getting out here.”
“But I don’t have a car.”
“Improvise. If we pull this off, Doug won’t be worried about signing off on your expenses.”
“What about Turek? Is he with you?”
“Not at the moment.”
“But you are going to let him know what’s going down? You promised he’d be a part of the story.”
“Of course,” she said, not actually knowing if she was lying or not.
After she had hung up, she held a phone in front of her, her thumb hovering over Turek’s number.
She knew that she should call him. She’d given the journalist her word. She wasn’t the kind of person who broke promises. But if they weren’t going in until sunrise there was no rush, was
there?
The iron grille was open; everything else was conjecture.
Were they standing at the entrance to the killer’s lair?
She looked at Roux, then at Garin.
“I want the truth. Now spill.”
Garin shrugged as if to say to Roux, This is your show. The old man’s brow furrowed. He looked down at the hole in the ground, then out over the rooftops of the town below.
Finally he said, “All right. I surrender. I think my car is the closest. It’s certainly the most comfortable. Let’s wait there. We should be able to see the brute if it returns. Meanwhile, I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
He lowered the grille back into place.
27
The daylight disappeared as Roux descended into the darkness.
Each handhold took him deeper into the grip of the abyss.
Only the wavering flicker of the lantern hooked onto Garin’s pack offered any kind of illumination, casting monstrous shadows beneath him.
The floor took him by surprise, coming without warning as he put his right leg down feeling for the next foothold that wasn’t there. Roux stumbled in a clumsy dismount. He counted down the remaining steps for Garin, steering him off the ladder so the noise didn’t startle the brute, alerting it to their presence.
There was barely time to glance back up at the patch of blue above, and then they were moving, deeper into the pit, the sky left behind.
Garin released the lantern from his pack, and passed it forward to Roux. The old man raised it, walking forward with the lantern in one hand and his sword drawn in the other.
Garin had taken to using a flintlock pistol, an affectation Roux had never cared for. A pistol would be of little use in the confines of the subterranean warren. If he missed with his single shot, there wouldn’t be time to reload before their quarry was on them. The sword was far more practical and deadly.
Roux was not sure what he had expected to discover at the bottom of the shaft—a beast’s lair? A makeshift bed made from a bundle of rags? The fixings of a burned-out fire?—but it hadn’t been the maze of tunnels that spread out into the black.
He thought grimly of the Minoan Minotaur’s prison as he ventured deeper into the tunnel, going beneath the wall as it branched into two and then two more passageways. There was nothing to indicate which path the killer had chosen. They took the right-hand path, which only led into dead ends filled with empty bottles and debris. A metal gate lay at the far end of the second branch, but that was securely locked, and Roux could make out no obvious indications that the lock had been tampered with in a very long time. Without a key they weren’t getting through it. Not that they intended to. The killer hadn’t gone that way.
They retraced their steps and started again down the second fork; it bent farther to the left before branching again.
Roux felt a breeze against his face, meaning there was an opening to the elements somewhere else.
He tried to place their whereabouts beneath the wall and the main building of the castle, getting his bearings as he shuffled forward in the near-absolute dark. The shadows cast by the flickering light disguised their direction. Again the branch they chose led to another dead end, though this time the storage cellar held only half a dozen barrels.
“Brandy?” Garin suggested, already at the barrels to examine them more closely. “No, not brandy. Gunpowder.” He sounded disappointed.
It made sense.
The castle no longer needed to defend itself from invaders, but how did one go about disposing of so much black powder? Better to keep it close at hand, but also out of harm’s way, in case need for it should arise again someday. It wouldn’t spoil, after all.
“There’s no telling how long it’s been down here.”
Roux hadn’t noticed at first, but there was no other way out of this cellar, no direct route into the castle itself.
He led the way out of the room, back to the last branch they had encountered. There were more turns, more twists in the tunnels, each of them leading to another dead end. Of all the chambers and tunnels they had checked only the first offered any sort of access to the castle itself, and even that was secure against intrusion. That meant that the killer had to be here somewhere, down in the labyrinth, and all they had to do was keep on looking.
Sooner or later they would find it.
Roux held up his hand to stop Garin.
He listened to the silence, trying to make out any undercurrent or vibration that shouldn’t be there. Nothing. Not even the shallow rise and fall of their own breathing. They continued on, deeper, utterly lost now.
As they walked the passageways, Roux felt the air around them grow colder. The stub of candle in the lantern flickered, threatening to fail and plunge them into darkness. At last Roux heard the sound of movement, a faint scuffing, but it was enough to send his heart racing. He fought the urge to run toward it, certain that his search was at an end. He had found the monster.
Roux led the way, edging forward carefully as he placed his feet down, so as not to betray their presence. Even so, the lightest of footsteps echoed around the walls. It was impossible that their quarry hadn’t heard them.
Another sound: shifting and shuffling.
Garin urged Roux to go faster.
Roux touched his fingers to his cheek. The chill was noticeably worse.
“There’s another way out,” he said. “Feel the air.”
“Then we take it before it can reach it.”
They shouldn’t have worried.
Even in the near-darkness as the candle stub burned down to nothing, Roux saw the shape in the corner the moment that the tunnel opened into a wider cellar.
He was a bear of a man, much bigger than either of them, but he barely moved as they approached.
Six steps.
That was all it would take.
Six steps and Roux could slide the cold steel of his sword between the killer’s ribs.
Six steps and their quest would be over.
Six steps, then at last Roux would be able to sleep. Six steps and Garin wouldn’t have a reason to moan about being dragged across Europe and could focus on what was important to him. Sex. Money. Money. Sex.
Six steps.
But he lingered too long to take the first one.
The brute was on his feet before Roux realized that he was even awake.
It might have been a colossus, but it was agile and it was shockingly fast.
The shadow moved in a blur, swinging an arm even as Roux raised his sword in readiness to deflect the blow. Steel made contact with the sleeve of the brute’s heavy coat, the blade biting into the heavy material before being swatted aside harmlessly.
Roux took a stumbling step back, trying to dance out of the man’s reach. He thrust the lantern toward Garin. The brute struck again before he could make the handoff, and the glass lantern went spinning to the floor. The window shattered and the candle snuffed out as the stub came loose.
For a long sliding second the world seemed to fall into absolute darkness, but a moment later there was light once more.
The flame had caught hold of straw strewed across the floor and now the ground beneath their feet was burning.
The big man swung again, oblivious to the danger that Roux’s sword represented.
Roux grasped the hilt with both hands and swung as hard as he could.
This time the blade dug deep, slicing through the heavy layers of coat into the flesh of the brute’s upper arm and striking bone. Roux’s arms shuddered with the impact. There was a heartbeat when they were locked together before Roux yanked the blade free.
That moment proved costly.
The killer swung with his other clubbing hand, the blow slamming into Roux’s temple, the sound of thunder detonating inside his skull.
Roux’s grip on his sword relaxed, his reflexes reacting automatically to the skull-shattering impact. He staggered, dropped to one knee, but somehow managed to keep one hand firmly on the
hilt as the tip of the blade struck the burning floor.
Roux lowered his head, willing the killing blow to fall.
He had no fight left in his old bones.
But the killing blow never landed.
Roux looked up as his senses were assailed by the smell of brimstone.
The brute fell backward.
He collapsed into the burning straw as the fire spread with alarming speed into old packing cases stacked unevenly against the wall.
Gunpowder.
“Up, old man. We’ve got to get out of here before the whole place blows,” Garin barked, hauling Roux back to his feet. Garin’s flintlock pistol still smoldered in his other hand.
The brute wasn’t down for long—and most certainly not out. It struggled back to its feet, coat ablaze, smoke wreathing its giant frame and transforming it into a beast stepped straight out of his nightmares, as Roux caught a glimpse of its face for the first time.
Its features were out of proportion, too large for its face, unfinished. They shifted in the firelight and shadow, seeming to melt.
No matter what this creature was, it was less than human.
Around them the flames rose, the heat coming off them ferociously. Flame shot up the walls of the cellar. Stone and mortar groaned and wooden supports creaked and snapped as the moisture was leeched out of them by the blaze, adding to the conflagration.
“Now!” Garin demanded, dragging Roux back into the tunnel. “I’m not dying here, old man. I’m not ready!”
Fragments of stone crashed from the ceiling, sending a thick black cloud of smoke and choking devils of dust that poured back to fill the corridor. The flames turned the cramped tunnel hellish. They covered their mouths as they stumbled away from the heat, knowing they had seconds before the flames bit through the barrels and ignited the black powder.
Roux had no recollection of how they had come, which branches in the tunnel would lead them toward the shaft back up to daylight. The choking smoke made it impossible to tell where the walls began and ended. All they could do was chase the flicker of breeze, hoping it brought them to the light. They stumbled along in the darkness, fumbling their way along the walls, the heat in the stone scorching their hands as a deep grumble formed in the belly of the subterranean lair. The grumble deepened, resonating through the walls, filling the tainted air. Dust fell around them, clogging the air, making it harder to see and to breathe in the darkness.