The Night Is Alive koh-10

by Heather Graham

  “Come this way,” Roger said. “There’s a hall that leads to the main church.”

  Malachi set a hand on the small of Abby’s back as they started through the shadows to a door. There were drapes on the few windows down the hallway, shredded and torn in places. Daylight glinted through the rips and tears.

  They came to a door that opened into the side of the main church. There were no longer pews that faced the altar, but the steps to the altar and the altar on its dais still stood. Here, there was light that seemed to spew into the interior in a number of colors. Stained-glass windows remained, none had been damaged or altered. Biblical scenes were represented in the glass, beautifully executed. Above the altar, Christ looked down at Mary Magdalene and his mother, Mary, surrounded by lambs. To one side was John the Baptist, to another, the archangel Gabriel.

  The glass windows marched down both sides of the church. The blues in the glass were rich and deep, as were the crimsons. The light they admitted was eerie.

  Tables had replaced the pews. When it was a nightclub, the owners had played on the religious symbols and added to them with an ironic and diabolical twist—bats dangled from the ceiling.

  “The tunnel entrance is up on the dais and behind the altar,” Roger said.

  They trailed after him.

  It wasn’t quite as odd an entry as the one by which they’d entered. A little wooden fence surrounded a grate; they opened the entrance and then Roger bent down to lift a hatch. A steep narrow stairway led to the darkness below.

  “Father Liam O’Leary is in the coffin directly beneath the altar,” Roger said. “The Irish Catholics liked to take their cues from Rome, I guess, and the Vatican. There are a number of coffins on biers just below here—glass encased. Sort of creepy. I’ve got a little penlight. Anyone else have anything?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Abby said, producing her key chain and a small flashlight. Malachi drew the light he’d used that first night out of his pocket.

  “Prepared, huh?” Roger joked.

  “Me and the Boy Scouts,” Malachi said. He shined his light over the circular room, directly beneath the altar where they were standing. Not surprising, it was dank and musty, and there seemed to be a verdant smell of the earth around them. He walked over to one of the coffins. The lid was glass; beneath it lay the decaying body of a priest in his vestments. His skin was growing brown as it stretched over the bone. Malachi dusted the grit and grime off the bronze plaque before him. His name had, indeed, been Liam O’Leary and he’d been born in County Cork in 1744 and died in Savannah, Georgia, in March of 1793, beloved of his “lambs.”

  “First priest here,” Roger told him. “And around the room you have several more of the especially beloved fellows who served the faithful. I’m surprised they weren’t dug up—or carted out—when the church sold the property in the late 1890s and the building was deconsecrated. Could’ve been bureaucratic error, red tape, whatever. Seems strange and sad that these guys were down here while people were up above them drinking ‘Exceptionally Bloody Marys’ and watching vampire bats dance over their heads.”

  Malachi and Abby both nodded.

  “When I first started exploring down here, I was shocked,” Roger said. “And I didn’t even know there were catacombs or tunnels—until I leaned against the wall and it turned out someone had just boarded up the entry. I practically went through. But there are five tunnels leading out from here, with lots of corpses lining them. Again, kind of like the Christian catacombs in Ancient Rome. Savannah started off English, of course, but had a large Irish population from the beginning. Man, you should come for Saint Patrick’s Day! But that’s beside the point. These people were very Catholic. And when the church was established here, they emulated Rome.”

  “Five entries—by each of the five dead priests?” Malachi guessed.

  Roger nodded. “After I found the first, I tapped around the room and found the rest of them. Those three—” he pointed across from Father O’Leary “—must’ve caved in decades ago. The other trunks go on and on. It gets damper and damper as they head under the streets to the river. So...” He let the word hang as he lifted his flashlight to look at Malachi’s face. “You can pick door number one or door number two.”

  “I think we should head out from behind our good Father O’Leary—what say you, Ms. Anderson?”

  “I’m sure the good father would not lead us astray,” she said.

  He smiled and raised his own flashlight. The beam played over Roger, standing between two of the glass-domed coffins and their decaying priests, and then over Abby. She appeared to be pale, almost ethereal with her jet-black hair and deep eyes. She would’ve been a perfect image, he thought wryly, when the place was a vampire-themed nightclub.

  “Just push that piece of plasterboard aside. That’s the entrance,” Roger told them.

  Malachi lifted the loose piece of wood—plastered over and painted white to blend with the wall—and moved it to one side. The first tunnel yawned directly before them.

  “You can see why they don’t want the average tourist family with their four-year-old running around down here,” Roger said.

  “Yeah.” Abby glanced at Malachi and then trained her light down the tunnel, which seemed to stretch ahead endlessly. She stepped forward and he followed. Roger quickly came up behind him.

  Each side of the wall had shelving dug into it, and each shelf had been the burial point for one Christian soul. The shrouds on the bodies had long ago turned as dark and murky as the earth on which they rested; they seemed to have gone back into it, giving true meaning to the Biblical term dust to dust.

  It was eerie and sad. Here and there, tree and brush roots were crawling through as if they reached down to embrace the last mortal remains of those who lay here, forgotten by time.

  “We’re going toward the river,” Abby commented, walking ahead of him.

  “Yes, you can feel that it’s growing damper.”

  “Some experts believe there are even more tunnels underneath the ground than those we know about,” Roger said. “They know of some that were part of a real ‘underground’ railroad during the Civil War—but in those days, they would’ve used anything. I’m thinking those hidden doors, like the one we came through, were put up during the Civil War.”

  “It’s certainly a valid theory,” Malachi said.

  They moved slowly. The dark was so complete that their lights made the surrounding blackness seem even deeper.

  Suddenly, while walking ahead of him, Abby let out a startled shriek, threw up her hands and dropped her flashlight.

  “What is it?” Malachi demanded, rushing up behind her. Her arms flapped in the darkness.

  “Hey,” he said quietly, holding her. He felt the beat of her heart, felt her frantic breathing.

  And her warmth, the way she started and then eased as he held her.

  “They were all over me!” she said. “Sorry—ugh. I’ve got to get it off.”

  He smoothed her face, removing strands of web. Raising his light, he saw the web in her hair and smoothed it away, too.

  “Spiderwebs!” Roger said, and laughed. “Nothing but spiderwebs. I told you, Abby screams like a girl when it comes to spiders and snakes!”

  “I’m sorry,” Abby murmured. “I did scream because I walked right into a big web. It was all over my face—my eyes and mouth.”

  “It’s a creepy feeling,” Malachi said. “Whether you’re a girl or not,” he teased.

  She grinned. “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Don’t—I might have screamed like a girl, too.” Malachi spoke reassuringly. “Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “Seriously?” Roger asked. “Corpses melting into the earth don’t bother you, but a little old spider can drive you nuts?”

  “Ah, but spiders are alive and bite. Corpses lay where they’re left,” Malachi said.

  “Until the zombie apocalypse.” Abby laughed nervously. “But since I’m not a big believer in zombies, yea
h, spiders are scarier. You can get a nasty bite from a brown recluse, you know.”

  “Yeah, okay, whatever you say, Abs.” Roger retrieved her fallen flashlight and handed it to her. Abby turned—and crashed into a wall of earth.

  “Watch it,” Roger said. “There’s a funny curve here. I think this is where the Saint Sebastian’s catacombs ended. We make a little twist to the right—and I’m pretty sure it’s where, long ago, another church stood. I checked the old records. There was a Lutheran church here from about 1790 to 1830. It burned to the ground and there’s just parkland on top of us now.”

  They made the turn. The earth was dug out a little differently—three shelves to a wall instead of four and there were no corpses in them.

  Casting the beam of his flashlight around, Malachi said, “These shelves seem to be empty.”

  “They were probably dug out, and the dead reinterred, after the church burned down. They might’ve been brought to Bonaventure Cemetery. I do know that the dead from some churches were reinterred, or whatever one calls it.”

  “That makes sense,” Malachi agreed.

  “They’re...not all empty,” Abby said. She was across from Malachi, inspecting the middle shelf. She brought her light up, illuminating the space, and gasped.

  “Abby!” Roger shook his head, laughing. “There are going to be spiders down here!”

  She turned. Her eyes, bluer than the sky, were caught in the glow of the light.

  “It’s not a spider,” she said. “It’s a corpse.”

  “There are corpses all over!” Roger protested.

  “Not like this,” Abby said, and her tone was weak.

  Malachi moved past her, hunkering down to get a good look at the body on the middle shelf that had been dug into the earth by hands that had lived in a far past day.

  There was, indeed, a “fresh” corpse on the shelf.

  It was that of a young woman. He had little medical training, but he’d seen his share of corpses.

  He estimated that this one had been there about a month. She had bloated and browned, her skin tightening over her frame. She’d worn a baby-doll dress and still had one shoe; the other was missing.

  The third finger on her left hand was missing, too.

  * * *

  “Well, that’s not going to be much of a secret tunnel anymore,” Roger said, leaning against the trunk of Jackson Crow’s car.

  They’d been down there for a long time after discovering the corpse. Malachi had called it in to Jackson Crow, and Jackson had arrived with David Caswell and Kat Sokolov. They’d all been down in the tunnels waiting for Kat. She’d brought a medical bag and had gloved her hands and made a cursory inspection of the corpse where she lay.

  Two crime scene techs had come behind them, bearing a litter. Scoops of earth were taken, bright lights beamed within the tunnel and the corpse was photographed from every conceivable angle. They’d been asked if they’d moved anything at all and, of course, they hadn’t. With David, Jackson, Malachi, Kat and two crime scene techs down in the tunnel, it had grown crowded. Roger and Abby had moved back through the tunnels to the priestly vault beneath the altar, and then up to the main church and out into the sunlight.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Malachi had said to Roger. “The paperwork awaits.”

  “Roger, the tunnel couldn’t have been your secret. Someone else has definitely been down there,” Abby said.

  He smiled at her. “Thank God you said that! I was hoping you didn’t think I managed to get that corpse down there. Oh, well, if I had put the corpse there, I wouldn’t have taken you down to find it. Unless, of course, I was trying to throw you off by bringing you down there to discover the corpse. Oh! Hey, don’t get any ideas! I obviously watch too many police shows on TV. I swear—I haven’t been down that far in ages. I’ve known about the tunnels under the church. A lot of the other guides in town know about them, too, but...mostly, we honor the city’s rulings on what we can and can’t show people. Like I said, it’s private property, so trespassing is against the law. I wouldn’t bring the average tourist down there. You know that, right? You believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you, Roger,” Abby said.

  “Oh, Lord! Are the police going to believe me?”

  “I can’t tell you what other people will believe, but as far as I know, there isn’t anyone out there who thinks you’ve been running around murdering tourists.”

  “No. I wouldn’t murder tourists. I make my living off tourists.” Roger shook his head. “I’m not the type to murder tourists because they gave a lousy tip or didn’t tip at all. I mean, there’ve been a few I wanted to slap, but even then...survival wins out!”

  “Roger, I’ve wanted to slap a few tourists over the years, too,” Abby said, obviously trying to lighten the tone. As she spoke, the main doors to the church opened and the two crime scene techs appeared, bearing the litter holding the corpse—now covered with a clean white sheet—out to the ambulance. The others emerged into the sunlight behind them. Kat Sokolov waved and headed for the ambulance; she wasn’t letting this corpse out of her sight. Jackson Crow, Malachi and David Caswell strode toward them.

  “Can you come down to the station and sign statements?” David asked Roger and Abby. “No way out of record keeping.”

  “Of course,” Abby said.

  “Uh, yeah, sure.” Roger looked at Malachi and winced. “I did tell you that these tunnels aren’t on the beaten tourist path.”

  Malachi patted his shoulder. “Not to worry. I told David that I insisted on going down there and that we were on federal law enforcement business. Your reputation as a tour guide will remain absolutely spotless.”

  “Thanks,” Roger said a little huskily.

  “Pile in,” Jackson told them. “I’ve got my old federal-issue SUV. We’ll all fit.”

  They did pile in; David Caswell and Jackson Crow were in front.

  Abby was in the back between Malachi and Roger. Despite Malachi’s words, Roger was still agitated. He seemed nervous the entire time they were at the station, although Malachi did most of the talking and they were both merely asked if they had anything to add. When Malachi was asked why he’d felt it was important to get down into the tunnels, he said flatly, “I believe that the person or persons killing young women in Savannah now thinks of himself as some kind of pirate. I believe that he—or he and his accomplice—kidnaps these young women and brings them through to the river via the various tunnels.”

  Eventually, the statements were signed and they were free to go. Jackson drove back to the Dragonslayer.

  “Wow. Lord. Oh, God,” Roger moaned when they pulled into the parking lot at the tavern. He looked at Abby as if everything that had happened today was finally hitting him. “There was a dead girl in the tunnel. Not long dead. Newly dead.”

  She laid a hand on his arm. “You brought us there and we found her. That’s a good thing, Roger.”

  “She’s dead. How can that be good?”

  “Finding her could help us catch the killer,” Abby replied.

  “She’ll still be dead,” Roger said dully.

  “But,” Malachi added, “the fact that her body’s been found could bring some solace to her family. For those left behind, there’s comfort in knowing that a killer is brought to justice.”

  Roger got out of the car. “Uh, did you want more of a tour?” he asked.

  “Not today,” Malachi said. “But if I have any questions about the city, I’ll call you.”

  “Yeah, all right. I’ll probably be in the Dragonslayer later,” Roger muttered. “Might see you then.”

  They watched him walk to his car. “That was good of you,” Abby told Malachi. “It was really kind of you to speak to him the way you did. I know he was afraid he was a suspect.”

  Malachi looked at her. “He is a suspect,” he said.

  Abby frowned.

  “Everyone’s a suspect right now,” Jackson explained. “Let’s go into the Dragonslayer. We’ll se
e what Will’s managed with the cameras so far.”

  Abby walked slowly toward the restaurant. She had a sick feeling inside. She believed in Roger; they’d gone to high school together!

  But she believed in Dirk as well, and their other customers and Macy and...

  It didn’t have to be anyone close to her. Maybe the Dragonslayer had been used, just as, perhaps, the Black Swan had been used.

  She took a deep breath and entered the restaurant.

  It was after lunch but before dinner. Will Chan was at the bar talking to Dirk, Aldous and Bootsie.

  Malachi walked over as if he’d known the four of them all his life. “Hey, Dirk. How are you? Have you heard that our Mr. Chan’s a fine actor and magician?”

  Dirk nodded absently. “I’m all right,” he said. He didn’t look all right. He was parchment-white. He turned to Malachi anxiously. “According to the TV news, another body was just found in a tunnel. A woman.”

  “It wasn’t Helen,” Malachi assured him.

  “But how do you know?” Dirk asked.

  “Poor girl was dead long before Helen disappeared,” Malachi told him. He rested a hand on Dirk’s shoulder. “The bad news is that a number of young women have lost their lives. The good news is that the local police and the feds are working hard on the case. The streets will be full of police and agents who know what they’re looking for and I’d bet money that, with these combined efforts, the truth will come out and the killer will be caught.”

  Dirk nodded. “Did you work today?” Malachi asked him.

  “I took the first tour group out. I let the guys handle the second. My other actress was back so...I’m okay.”

  “Yeah, he’s doing fine,” Bootsie said.

  “I was telling him that if he wanted, I’d head out with him tomorrow,” Will put in. “I’d love to play pirate.”

  “The tours are fun,” Abby said. She felt as though she was playing a part at that moment. Pretending everything was normal. Pretending that the Dragonslayer would go on as it always had, and that Gus would be there in spirit. Women were not dead and missing—and Gus had not been suspicious of anything before he died.