by Alex Archer
The ghost of a breeze seemed to guide them to safety as it was sucked back toward the shaft they’d descended, billowing up into the daylight as they hauled themselves gratefully up the ladder set into the shaft’s wall.
Roux closed his eyes as he emerged.
Alive.
Still.
“I guess it’s all over,” Garin said, climbing up behind him.
“Anything but,” Roux said, choking back bitterness, dust and smoke.
He sank to his knees.
Bile rose in his throat. He leaned forward and spit on the ground.
He felt the explosion ripple through the soil beneath his hands, the dirt undulating like the skin of a storm-tossed lake.
A second explosion, more savage than the first, sent a rumble through the earth before the shaft gouted dust and flame through the vent in the ground.
Nothing could have survived that.
28
“And you are sure it was dead, whatever it was?” Annja asked, pressing home the point.
The three of them sat in the car waiting. She really hated waiting.
“Nothing could have gotten out of there, believe me. After the second explosion the tunnel began to collapse,” Garin said. “Even if the fire hadn’t killed it, or my gunshot and blood loss, it wasn’t getting out of that hole in the ground.”
“And yet it must have,” Roux growled. “Somehow it survived down there until someone dug through the rubble to rescue it.” He turned on Garin. “Tell me, be honest—how long did you wait before you excavated the ground? A week? A month? A year? We both know the thing didn’t need food to sustain its unnatural life. So how long did you wait before you went back to dig it out?”
Garin met the old man’s stare, and rather than defiance there was merely sadness in his expression as he shook his head in denial. “You really are convinced that I’m responsible for this, Roux? Even after everything we’ve been through, you think I’m capable of this?”
“I know you better than you know yourself, Garin.”
“And because of that you’re not even prepared to consider any other possibilities? Like maybe I’ve got nothing to do with this?”
“Don’t waste your time pleading your innocence. Only the two of us knew it was down there. I didn’t liberate it, and now you’re here and it is on the loose again.”
“Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, old man, but you’re out of your mind. This isn’t my fault. I saw the news, realized what it meant, but couldn’t believe it was true, so I came here. I wasn’t the one who cleared the rubble away. I didn’t let it out of there. I came back to end it once and for all.”
As Annja listened to the argument rage back and forth, one thing struck her: they were both working under the assumption that it was the same killer some two hundred years later, which really should have been impossible. She said as much. “Just for a moment, suppose it’s not the same killer. I know you think that what you saw down there wasn’t human, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one, does it? Could there be more of them?”
“A second golem?”
“Even Frankenstein made a mate for his creation,” Annja said. She wondered if the notion had even crossed their minds.
“I’m pretty sure that’s only in the movies, Annja,” Garin said. “And we all know how trustworthy Hollywood is when it comes to the treatment of the truth.”
“Forget what you think you know about the Modern Prometheus,” Roux countered. “Annja may be right, after all. In the Latinate version of the myth, Prometheus made a man from clay and water. A golem. Just as the legend of the Maharal also goes. I have no idea if the author truly knew what she was writing about that summer, but the proximity is uncanny. Victor Frankenstein rebelled against the laws of nature and how life was naturally made, only to be punished by his creation. The monster turned on its maker. Mary Shelley’s story is, of course, a tragedy. The monster is immortal. Death, you see, is a gift of the gods.” There was a wistfulness to the old man’s voice as he said this. “Mary called him Adam. Does this sound familiar?”
Annja thought about the ramifications of that name. “Where there is an Adam, surely there is an Eve?” she offered, using his arguments to support hers.
Roux had been so convinced that Garin was the root of all evil. That set him on a train of thought from which he couldn’t break free. There were no certainties beyond the facts, and admittedly those facts were compelling—the entrance to the castle cellars had been cleared; there was a killer on the loose, preying on the most vulnerable members of Czech society; and from her own sighting, that killer was big, ungainly and unnaturally fast, with features like some child’s drawing of a face—but that didn’t mean they were tracking the same killer across two centuries.
Annja’s head was suddenly full of doubts. Occam’s razor came into her thinking: if in doubt, the most obvious answer is usually the right one. But what was the most obvious here? That a man-made creature had somehow woken after two hundred years of hibernation? That didn’t seem obvious at all.
She checked her watch. Half an hour had passed since she’d called Lars. At the earliest he wouldn’t be there for another half an hour or so. She thought about calling Turek again, to see if he’d come up with anything at the border, but before she could the shadow just beyond the reach of a streetlight seemed to change, becoming darker for a moment. It wasn’t a trick of the light. She saw it move again and was sure.
“Over there,” she whispered, indicating the thicker shadow with a slight nod. The shape burst from the shadows, running straight through the pool of light. She didn’t get a good look at its face because a hood shrouded it.
“Time to put our differences aside. We both want the same thing here,” Garin whispered. He leaned forward from the backseat so he could watch between them.
“Two hundred years,” Roux said.
“Feels like yesterday, doesn’t it?” Garin stated.
Annja watched as the figure strode across the road. She shrank in her seat in case it chanced to glance their way. The brutish figure was intent on moving toward the grille, and the entrance to the subterranean warren beneath the castle. The shape ran unevenly, dragging one leg with a strange limp, but whatever wound it carried didn’t slow it at all. Despite favoring the leg, it didn’t appear to be in pain.
“The golem doesn’t feel pain,” Roux said, as though privy to her thoughts. “Believe me. I caught it with more than one good blow with my sword, but it didn’t cry out once.”
“Nor when I shot it, or when its coat caught fire,” Garin added.
“Maybe it’s the voice that’s lacking, not the pain receptors,” Annja said. “Because there’s something wrong with one of its legs.”
“Just because something is damaged doesn’t mean that it causes pain,” Roux said. “Pain is a uniquely living quality. Something has to be alive to feel pain.”
“That looks pretty alive to me.”
“And again, just because something is mobile doesn’t mean it is alive, or sentient, or any such notion. Mechanisms wear out.”
“Speaking from experience there, old man?” Garin chuckled from the backseat.
Annja tried not to let the smile spread across her lips, but it wasn’t easy.
The figure disappeared out of sight.
She felt her heart start to beat a little faster.
She wanted to get this over with, but the two men had a better idea of what was down there than she did.
“We should go straight in after it,” Garin said. “Get this over with. I can’t pretend I’m looking forward to it.”
“We wait until Lars gets here,” Annja insisted. “You both owe me that much.”
Roux raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware that either of us owed you anything. This life isn’t all quid pro quo.”
She stared at him through the mirror. Did he really mean that or was he trying to rile her, push her away?
They were a team, weren’t they?
She might be the junior partner, but she brought unique strengths to the table. They needed her. She’d always given as good as she’d got. Certainly she’d come a long way since she’d needed rescuing by the old man on that hillside in France or by Garin in the village below. No, that wasn’t fair. They did owe her. They owed her plenty.
“Call him,” Garin said. “Find out how far away he is. Ten minutes here or there won’t make much difference. Maybe he got lucky with the roads.”
She knew it was a long shot. The worst case was confirmed when he picked up.
“Where are you?”
“Stuck. There’s some kind of holdup.”
“Holdup?” Annja felt two pairs of eyes burning into her.
“The traffic’s at a standstill. Nothing is moving. The lineup is half a mile long. All I can see in the road up ahead are blue flashing lights. I’m not going anywhere fast. Sorry, boss.”
“Okay, there’s nothing you can do about it,” Annja said. She could only stall Roux and Garin for so long, and that wasn’t going to be long enough. “Call me and let me know when you’re moving again.”
She forced a smile and shrugged as she slipped the phone back into her pocket. “Give him ten minutes,” she said eventually.
“He won’t be here in ten minutes,” Roux said, as if that ended the debate.
Annja had no choice but to admit defeat. Roux opened his door without waiting for a response from the others. Garin was out of the car a second behind him, keen to get on with things. All hope of giving the network what they wanted to save the show went out of the door with them.
Without Lars there’d be no footage, and no footage meant no salvation.
It was over. All that was left was facing up to that fact.
Annja was the last out of the car.
She didn’t lock it. She followed them up the hill to the grille at the castle wall. Garin pulled a handgun from his waistband, checked the mechanism, then replaced it. Roux appeared to be unarmed save for the flashlight they had used to peer into the darkness before. In the distance the sky was beginning to glow, a stark reminder that dawn was not far away.
“You got a weapon, Roux?” Garin asked as he lowered himself onto the first rung.
Roux tapped his jacket, his free hand resting lightly on a bulge that Annja hadn’t noticed before.
“No need to ask you, madam,” he said to Annja. “Here goes nothing,” Garin announced as he started to make his way into the darkness.
“You next,” Roux said, playing the light over the iron rungs. “Don’t do anything heroic down there. In and out, let’s just get this over with.”
“I’m not big on stupid,” Annja told him.
“Then maybe it will all end here,” Roux said. There was something fatalistic about the words that Annja didn’t like.
29
Annja stumbled back into Garin’s arms when she reached the bottom of the shaft.
“Thanks,” she said, the sound of her voice echoing down the tunnel. Garin winced as the darkness multiplied the word a hundredfold. Annja glanced back up the deep shaft to see the dull light disappear as Roux made his way down.
Garin had his gun out, the muzzle pointing the way ahead into the darkness. The last time he’d been down there he had had a single shot from his flintlock. Now he could just about cut the brute in two with bullets before it could charge them. Times changed, and with them man’s ability to kill.
Despite everything that the two men had told her, Annja realized that she had begun to think of the killer as human. Strange and deformed, yes, but still human. How else could it be alive? Even her memories of that childish sketch of a face couldn’t change that. The rest, living for two hundred years or more? Well, her companions were proof that there were more things in heaven and earth than the mundane philosophies she’d believed for so long before she met them.
When the three of them stood together, Roux turned on the flashlight again.
He played the beam into the tunnel. The damage to the walls from the explosions and fire was still readily apparent, though it looked less like a raw wound now and more like ancient scar tissue.
“Left or right?” Annja asked.
“Right,” Garin said. “Some things you remember like it was only yesterday when they happened.”
“And sometimes it was yesterday when they happened,” Roux said, still not prepared to believe Garin had nothing to do with the brute’s resurrection.
“Draw your sword,” Roux told her. It wasn’t going to be comfortable to wield it in the confines of the tunnels. “And be alert. There are many twists and turns down here. It was a labyrinth then. There’s no telling what it is like now, after the explosions. It was a warren with plenty of dark places to hide.”
“And there’s no guarantee the creature will have taken refuge in the same cellar,” Garin said. “So, eyes and ears open. If we’re lucky, we’ll hear it coming.”
That didn’t sound very lucky to Annja, but she didn’t need to be told twice.
She closed her eyes, summoning the familiar image of Joan’s mystical blade to mind, and reached out for it as the two men moved ahead of her. As ever, she sensed the sword’s presence in the mists of the otherwhere before she felt its familiar grip in her hand. Its weight there was reassuring, the thrill of elemental magic as she felt its pull, drawing it from the otherwhere in a smooth slow action. The move was part of a dance long since preordained.
As she had feared, there was precious little room to swing the sword and to test her muscles after the fall, but simply holding the weapon was enough to make her feel whole again. It was as if she had found part of herself that she had almost forgotten had existed.
It didn’t matter what lay ahead of them in the darkness, human or something else; she was ready for it.
The flashlight cast weird shadows as they walked through the tunnel in single file.
Garin led the way unerringly, not faltering even once as he kept them off the wrong track, which he promised dead-ended, through to where the tunnel had collapsed. The ground was still littered with rubble from the cave-in. The walls were charred black.
Annja stumbled more than once as she picked her way through, reaching out with her free hand to the wall to stay on her feet.
The air was foul.
As they made their way farther along the tunnel, Annja couldn’t see any evidence that the killer had come this way. The rubble was undisturbed. She listened hard in the darkness, but heard nothing beyond the echo of their footsteps and the sliding stones as they dislodged them.
Before they reached the cellar where Roux and Garin had fought and thought they’d killed the brute all those years ago, their path was blocked.
There was no way through the cave-in.
Roux climbed on the debris, clawing at it in search of a gap to try to shine his light through. There was no point. Nothing had come that way. Either now or then.
“Anything?” Garin asked from the rear, but Roux just shook his head.
Annja said, “No,” knowing that there was no way Garin could have seen the gesture.
“You could be right about a second killer,” Roux admitted, staring at the stones.
“I’m not that worried about being right or wrong,” Annja said bluntly. “I just want this to be over.”
“We all do,” Roux promised her.
Garin started to retrace his steps back along the passage to the last branch in the tunnel. Annja followed him a couple of paces behind.
“Did you feel that?” she asked as a chill breeze brushed against her cheek.
“Feel what?”
“Air, like there’s another way out.”
Garin shook his head. “This place is a maze. It wouldn’t surprise me if we’d missed a secret entrance years ago. There are a million places to hide, why not a million and one?”
“I felt it back then, too,” Roux said.
Annja held up a hand. Both men stopped, silent. She listened for any sounds in
the dark, knowing that there was every chance the killer could move around behind them and escape while they were still down in the tunnels chasing it fruitlessly.
Roux pushed his way to the front with his flashlight, playing it over the ground as they picked their way back through the rubble. Garin, reluctantly, stepped aside to let him through.
The flashlight’s beam picked over the rock dust and rubble, but the only signs of disturbance were their own.
As they walked she heard movement.
At first Annja thought that it was a groan from the ceiling, their presence somehow disturbing the delicate balance that held what remained in place.
But it wasn’t that.
Garin reacted first, moving like lightning between her and Roux.
She hadn’t even realized there was a fork in the tunnel. By the time she did, he was gone.
“Garin,” Roux whispered uselessly after his back.
Garin was already stumbling through the darkness, making far more noise than they had done since they’d descended into the network of tunnels. If the killer hadn’t already known they were down there, it had to now.
Annja hurried after him, stumbling more than once before she was clear of the last of the rubble. She couldn’t see Garin anywhere, but she equally couldn’t see where he could have gone. She hurried on into the darkness, reaching a point where the tunnel branched into three separate passages.
“Garin!” she called out, giving up all pretense of stealth.
There was no reply.
“This way,” Roux said, starting off down the right-hand tunnel.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“No,” he said, without turning. “But any decision is better than standing here doing nothing.”
Annja resisted the urge to snap back at him that she wasn’t doing nothing, and instead followed the old man into the tunnel. Roux played his flashlight in front of them, picking out a path.