Crimson Shore

by Douglas Preston

  Constance walked calmly and slowly along the rear wall of the room. The two were so fixated on their struggle that they had forgotten about her completely. Whatever was going to happen to Gavin, it wasn’t good, and she did not particularly wish to see it. The creature was as swollen as a toad with incandescent hatred.

  “Please,” Gavin said, his voice breaking. “We respect you, you’re very important to us… I’m so, so sorry about what happened. It’ll all be different now, with me in control.” He held out his good hand in a gesture of supplication.

  Morax, enraged by this speech, roared incoherently and seized the other wrist, twisting it hard; this time Gavin broke down, issuing a shrill scream and sinking to his knees; and that was the last Constance saw of him as she slipped around the corner into the darkness of the central corridor and the deeper tunnels beyond.

  53

  Pendergast paused at the lip of a low sand dune and gazed down into the ruins of Oldham, which lay in a scrubby hollow scattered with deformed pine trees. The storm was abating, with the rain having temporarily ceased and the wind dying. But the sea continued to pound the shingle beach with ferocity. A full moon appeared fitfully, casting a feeble gloom through the ruins, the walls half buried, the scattered cellar holes, the bits of crockery and sea glass gleaming dully in the wet sand.

  The creature’s tracks had been almost obliterated, but there were still indentations in the sand and shingle that Pendergast was able to follow—some of which were the creature’s, along with smaller ones that he felt certain belonged to Constance.

  From the position of the cellar holes, Pendergast was able to determine where the main street had once passed through town. At the far end he saw a broken brick wall on a larger foundation of granite blocks: undoubtedly the ruins of Oldham’s church. He walked to the edge of the church’s cellar hole, a deep basement area faced with cleaved blocks, scattered with loose bricks, wood planks, trash, and—at the rear—a rotten canvas sailcloth.

  He climbed down into the ruined cellar and shone his light around, quickly focusing his attention on an uncovered iron plate at one end, near the sailcloth. Going over to it, he knelt and examined the hinges. A close examination revealed it had been used—and often. He lifted it carefully, making no noise, and shone his penlight in. A narrow stone staircase led down to a damp tunnel, which in turn snaked off into darkness.

  Hooding his light, he slipped inside, easing the plate shut behind him. Switching off the light, he crouched on the stairs, listening intently; the sounds of the surf were now muffled, but no noise appeared to issue from underground: only the rising stench of death and decay, overlaid with a faint scent of burning wax.

  He drew his Les Baer and listened once again. Still nothing.

  Switching the penlight back on, he examined the stairs and saw clear signs of recent passage, including sand, moisture from the storm, and a partial—but clear—bare print. Once again, he felt a deep disturbance at this; it was an incontrovertible sign of how he had overlooked crucial evidence. But even as he sorted through that evidence in his mind, he could not arrive at an explanation for the sudden appearance of a monstrous, barefoot mass murderer in Exmouth, or why it had chosen this moment to unleash its ferocity on the town.

  Deep anxiety for Constance’s safety warred with caution inside him as he descended the stairs and crept forward, moving cat-like along the tunnel. Scratchings, both ancient and fresh—pictographs, demonic figures, symbols, odd Latin phrases—all mingled together on the walls.

  And then he heard it: an animalistic murmur, a sibilant, quasi-human utterance. He froze, listening. The sound was distorted by the web of tunnels. Now came a voice, pleading and indistinct, again too unclear to make out the words or even the sex of the speaker.

  A beast-like roar echoed through the tunnels. Another roar came rolling down, and then in response, a reasonable-sounding voice, pleading, first quietly and then louder and louder, ending at last in a high-pitched, horribly distorted scream.

  Pendergast broke into a run; the tunnel divided and he took the right fork, heading in the direction the sound seemed to have issued from. But there was another fork in the tunnel, which he again took, only to be halted by a cul-de-sac. He turned and retraced his steps even as a second hideous scream reverberated; it was a male voice, he could tell that now, but its terror was so profound that its owner could never have been recognized.

  But where was Constance?

  Turning down yet another passageway, his flashlight beam reflected off what appeared to be a pool of blood; he raised the light to reveal two corpses, lying on their backs, limbs splayed, eyes wide open. He recognized them both as inhabitants of Exmouth: one was the fisherman who had given Constance a ride to the police station, the other he had seen one evening at the bar at the Inn. Both had been torn apart in the most horrifying and brutal way imaginable. Bloody bare footprints led away from the mess. Pendergast examined the scene with his flashlight. It told a horrifying story indeed.

  And then, as if to underscore the horror, the fresh sounds of torture and pain came rolling down the tunnels.

  Constance Greene felt her way along the slick walls of the tunnel with both hands. She had left behind what dim light there was, and she was now cloaked in a profound darkness. Her hands were still cuffed, and her stiletto was tucked once again into a pocket of her dress. The sounds of extreme agony and torture continued to echo through the tunnels. Constance had seen and heard many unpleasant things in her lifetime, but few if any were as sickening as what was clearly transpiring behind her.

  The sounds were now dying out, as Gavin evidently sank into death. She turned her attention back to the problem at hand—escaping from this hellhole and the insane creature that tenanted it. She hoped—although common sense told her it was unlikely—there might be a second exit at the far end of the tunnels. If not, then perhaps there might be a place in which she could hide and wait for an opportunity to slip out.

  As she moved deeper into the underground complex, the stench lessened somewhat, replaced with earthy smells of fungus, mold, and damp. The problem was that she had become disoriented in the darkness of this new set of tunnels, and was unsure how to return the way she had come. But the darkness did not frighten her—she was used to it and, in some ways, even found it a comfort—and she felt confident in her ability to merge with the dark, become one with the walls. In time, the disorientation would also turn to familiarity…if she were allowed that time.

  And now, with one final chuckle of anguish from behind her, silence descended. The demon was finished with Gavin, and he was gone.

  54

  He held up his hands. They were red and wet. He licked them. They tasted like the bars of his cage. He looked down. The head of the Bad One lay upside down, tongue dangling, eyes open.

  He smelled the air, and there were strange smells. The girl had run away.

  He took his big toe and poked the head in the eye. He was looking at something far away. Very far away.

  Where was the girl?

  He sniffed the air. He wanted her out. This was his home. This was his territory. Not hers. He had gotten rid of the hated faces. They would come no more. This place was his now.

  He walked past the altar and pinched out the light. Now it was dark. Darkness was his friend. It made others stupid and afraid.

  The girl was going into the Dead Ends.

  His chains were gone. The strange one had suddenly appeared, warning him of the Killing Men who were coming for him, and then broken his lock. He was free now. He could go anywhere—even to the Above Place. But he had been to the Above Place…and it was not as they had promised. They had lied. What he had dreamed about all his life was a lie. Like everything else they said. The sun, they had called it. All the pain they caused him, the Blooding Knife and the rest, they said would be made up for when, one day, they would take him to the Sun, the warm fire in the sky. Darkness gone, light everywhere.

  Thinking of this, thinking of the pain
, thinking of the lies, thinking of the cold blackness he had found in the Above Place, just like here, the rage came back. Stronger than ever.

  He went toward the Dead Ends. After the woman.

  55

  From the time of her childhood, Constance had been no stranger to the dark. Despite the disorientation, she moved with a sense of purpose.

  The walls were damp and dripping. Sometimes her fingers encountered spiders or millipedes that scrambled off in a panic when she brushed past them. She could hear rats, too, rustling softly, squeaking and skittering out of her way. The air smelled increasingly of fungus, slime, and rot. There was no movement of air, less and less oxygen. Clearly, there was no outlet in this direction.

  Feeling along the wall, she came to a corner. She paused, listening. The only sound she could hear was the low rumble of surf, the vibration moving through the ground itself, and the faint drip-drip of water. All was quiet.

  She slipped around the corner, her feet finding purchase on the damp floor, her hands tracing the wall. She brushed past an insect—a centipede—and it fell down her sleeve, wriggling frantically against her skin, and she paused to gently shake it out. She once again considered trying to find a place to hide, but rejected that as a strategy of last resort; the demon Morax certainly knew these tunnels better than she. With only a stiletto, and her hands shackled, she had no hope of killing him. After what he’d done to Gavin—what she had seen, and what she had heard—she knew she could expect the same from the creature.

  There was no escape in this direction. She would have to get past Morax and get out the way she had come in.

  A. X. L. Pendergast turned away from the two eviscerated bodies. He backtracked and ran down a side tunnel in the direction the screams had come from, even as they now died away with an ominous rapidity. But almost immediately he came to another division in the tunnel; he paused to listen intently, but in the fresh silence was no longer able to determine from which direction the screams had come.

  The extent of the tunnels surprised him. They appeared to have been constructed over a long period of time, perhaps even centuries—clearly, the style of their building changed from one section to another, indicating the work of many years. They had a similar feeling to the catacombs that he had once explored in Rome: a secret place of worship. But there was more to these tunnels, as the bizarre symbols on the walls, the smell of occupation, and other stenches far worse, would attest.

  Examining the ground, he took the left-hand branch, as that seemed to his eye the more traveled. It, too, branched several times, but he continued to stay on the more beaten path. After a few minutes, the tunnel turned a corner and he found himself staring at prison bars blocking the way ahead. Set into the bars was a metal door that yawned open. The smell emanating from the cul-de-sac beyond was so foul that it suggested long occupation with an utter lack of either hygiene or toilet facilities.

  He flashed his light into the rude cell and saw it ran about a hundred feet back, ending in a wall, with a sleeping area of filthy straw, an overflowing hole for necessities, and a broken table. A steel collar, studded with sharp points, was fastened to a leash of metal links. It was hanging on one of the bare stone walls. Kneeling, he observed the traces of the occupant in the damp, sandy floor—a welter of human bare feet, matching the prints he had been tracking from Exmouth. This was where the killer had been locked up—for a very long time.

  He straightened and, shining his penlight, glanced at the padlock that once held the door, now lying open on the ground. What had initially been a cursory inspection suddenly became riveted attention. He picked up the lock and gave it a minute inspection, at one point removing his portable loupe and examining the mechanism. It was an almost new Abloy shrouded steel padlock with a top-loading cylinder, invulnerable to bumping. A most serious lock indeed, and one that would have challenged even Pendergast himself. Yet he could see that it had been interfered with in a subtle, clever, and devious way, so as to make it appear locked when it wasn’t.

  Something about the particular method of interference seemed chillingly familiar.

  After completing his inspection, he stepped inside the prison and walked to the far end of the cul-de-sac, stepping over filth, old chicken carcasses, pieces of rotting hide, and broken marrow bones. Greasy cockroaches scurried away from the beam of his light. Against the far wall, manacles, cuffs, and chains lay sprawled on the ground, open. These also were advanced, high-tech devices, of recent manufacture. Each manacle and cuff had its own small lock; Pendergast once again examined each lock in turn, his pale features becoming like marble.

  The jailers had gone to great care and expense to keep the prisoner absolutely secure. But on their last approach to this jail, they would not have known the locks on the cuffs and manacles had been tampered with—that the creature would be able to free itself and attack them.

  No doubt those jailers were the two bodies he had come across in an earlier passage.

  As he examined the final lock, his normally steady hand began to tremble, and he dropped the chain. His knees gave way and he sank to the ground in disbelief.

  A sound reached his ears. After a long moment, he shook off his paralysis and rose to his feet. Constance was still somewhere in this complex of tunnels—and now, it seemed she was in far greater danger than he had realized.

  Forcing his mind back to the issue at hand, he leapt up and raced through the dank corridors, again following the main path, heedless now of the noise that he made. After several twists and turns he arrived at a wide passage leading to a large, ponderously decorated, pentagonal room, lit by candles and dominated by an altar. He stopped, peering around with his silvery eyes. A ropy tangle of flesh and bone lay on the altar. It was so distorted it took Pendergast a moment to realize the tangle had once been human. A muscle was still twitching: a neurological artifact. The man was very recently dead. But where was the killer who had just completed this work of death and dismemberment?

  He spun around, Les Baer in hand, flicking his light into the darker alcoves as he moved across the altar room; but even before his light had reached the final alcove, the figure he had earlier seen assault Mourdock—naked, bestial, yellow—exploded out of a dark corner. Pendergast swung the handgun around and squeezed off a round, but the figure did a curious, cringing flip that avoided the shot while at the same time striking a blow at Pendergast with one foot, smashing the weapon out of his hand. Pendergast half turned to absorb the blow and dealt the man-creature a sharp punch to the midriff as he rotated past, tail lashing him across the face. Pendergast rolled, braced, then crouched, pulling a modified Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife with a short fixed blade from its strap on one calf, but the creature took advantage of the movement to come back at him low, then leap at him with a growl. They fell to the ground, the creature on top of him; Pendergast tried to stick him with the knife but the brute seized the blade in a massive hand and tried to wrest it from his hand, gripping the steel, blood running freely. Forced to drop the flashlight, struggling to keep his attention on the fight at hand while holding his new, fresh concern at bay, Pendergast tried to work the blade through the clutching fingers. The flashlight rolled against the wall, still casting a feeble light. As they struggled over the knife, the stinking demon opened his muzzle and, with broken black teeth, seized the corner of Pendergast’s ear and bit through it with a crunch of cartilage. The action momentarily relieved Pendergast of the pinning weight of the beast, and he kneed him in the chest with a sound of cracking ribs; with a roar the demon tore the knife out of Pendergast’s hands, severing several of his own fingers in doing so, then lowered his head and attempted to ram Pendergast up against the wall. But Pendergast slipped sideways, more nimble than any bullfighter, and the demon rammed himself against the stone even as Pendergast rotated behind him and leapt back.

  He swiftly cast about for the gun; it lay on the far side of the demon, but the knife was closer, just to his right. He darted for it and the demon, instead
of trying to block him as he’d anticipated, brought his massive foot down on the flashlight with a crunch. Blackness descended.

  Knife now once again in hand, Pendergast rolled twice over the floor and rose up, but the attacker had anticipated the move and came crashing into his side. Twisting hard, Pendergast slashed at him with the knife, its blade sinking deep into flesh. The demon howled in pain and smacked the knife out of Pendergast’s hand while temporarily backing off. Pendergast used the respite to make a fast retreat back down the approach corridor and into the maze of still-darker tunnels beyond. Groping madly ahead, his hand made contact with stone and he moved at a run, far faster than was safe, feeling ahead along the damp wall, having no idea where he was going.

  All he knew for certain was that he had been overmastered, and that—if his fears were correct—the creature was now the least of his worries.

  56

  It was textbook. As Rivera gazed out on the scene, it appeared just as in all the disaster and terrorist drills they had done dozens of times back in Lawrence and Boston. The entire town was essentially being treated as a crime scene, with MRAPs securing all points of ingress and egress, the medics clustered around the motionless bodies, the ambulances quietly coming and going, the SWAT team members engaged in patrol, questioning the unhurt victims, and surveillance in place on the chance the killer returned. It was the very picture of purposeful activity. An increasingly restive crowd of reporters and vans were being held back at the Metacomet Bridge, and they would have to be appeased soon or they would really go nuts. The airspace had been temporarily restricted over the town, but television choppers hovered over the marshes and circled about just outside the restricted zone, ready to rush in as soon as they were cleared.