“Bro,” I whispered.
He licked my hand.
“Gotta go,” I whispered, and I didn’t need to say that where I had to go was down.
Neither did I have to note that Orson’s myriad abilities didn’t include the extraordinary balance required to descend a perfectly vertical ladder, paw over paw. He has a talent for tracking, a great good heart, unlimited courage, loyalty as reliable as the departure of the sun at dusk, a bottomless capacity for love, a cold nose, a tail that can wag energetically enough to produce more electricity than a small nuclear reactor — but like every one of us, he has his limitations.
In the blackness, I moved to the hole in the wall. Blindly gripping one of the steel fittings that had secured the missing bookcase to a wall-mounted track, I pulled myself up until I was crouching with both feet on the sturdy two-by-six bolted across the opening. I reached into the shaft, fumbled for a steel rung, snared one, and swung off the two-by-six onto the service ladder.
Admittedly, I am less quiet than a cat, but by a degree that only a mouse would appreciate. I don’t mean to imply that I have a paranormal ability to race across a carpet of crisp autumn leaves without raising a crackle. My stealth is largely a consequence of three things: first, the profound patience that XP has taught me; second, the confidence with which I have learned to move through the bleakest night; third, and not least important, decades spent observing the nocturnal animals and birds and other creatures with whom I share my world. Every one of them is a master of silence when it needs to be, and more often than not it desperately needs to be, because the night is a kingdom of predators, in which every hunter is also the hunted.
I descended from darkness into darkness distilled, wishing that I didn’t need both hands for the ladder and could, instead, swing downward like an ape, swift and nimble, gripping with my left hand and both feet, holding the pistol ready. But then if I were an ape, I would have been too wise to put myself in this precarious position.
Before I reached the first basement, I began to wonder how my quarry had gone down the ladder while encumbered with the boy. Across his shoulder in a fireman’s carry? Jimmy would have to have been bound at ankles and wrists to prevent him from making a movement, either intentionally or out of panic, that might dislodge his abductor. Even then, although the boy was small, he’d have been a considerable burden and a relentless backward drag that had to be diligently resisted every time the kidnapper moved a hand from one rung to the next.
I decided that the man I was pursuing must be as strong, agile, and confident as he was psychotic. So much for my fond hope that I was chasing a soft-bellied librarian who, dazed and confused, had been driven to this insane act by the stress of converting from the Dewey decimal system to a new computerized inventory.
Even in the lightless murk, I knew when I had reached the gap in the shaft where the basement elevator doors had once been, one floor below the warehouse office. I can’t explain how I could know, any more than I can explain the plotline of the average Jackie Chan movie, though I love Jackie Chan movies. Perhaps there was a draft or a scent or a resonance so subtle that I was only subconsciously aware of it.
I couldn’t be sure this was the level to which the kidnapper had taken the boy. He might have gone farther down.
Listening intently, hoping to hear again the troll-deep voice or another sound that would guide me, I hung like a spider on an obsessively well-organized web. I had no intention of gobbling up unwary flies and moths, but the longer I remained suspended in the gloom, the more I felt that I was not the spider, after all, not the diner but the dinner, and that a mutant tarantula as big as an elevator cab was ascending from the pit below, its sharp mandibles silently scissoring.
My dad was a professor of poetry, and throughout my childhood, he read to me from the entire history of verse, Homer to Dr. Seuss, Donald Justice to Ogden Nash, which makes him partly responsible for my baroque imagination. Blame the rest of it on that aforementioned snack of cheese, onion bread, and jalapeños.
Or blame it on the eerie atmosphere and the realities of Fort Wyvern, for here even a rational man might have legitimate reasons to entertain thoughts of giant ravenous spiders. The impossible was once made possible in this place. If the hideous arachnid in my mind’s eye was the fault of just my dad and my diet, then my imagination would have conjured not a simple spider but an image of the grinning Grinch climbing toward me.
As I hung motionless on the ladder, the grinning Grinch rapidly became an inexpressibly more terrifying image than any spider could have been, until another hard crash boomed through the building, shaking me back to reality. It was identical to the first crash, which had drawn me this far: a steel door slamming in a steel frame.
The sound had come from one of the two levels below me.
Daring the maw of spider or Grinch, I went down one more story, to the next opening in the shaft.
Even as I arrived at this second subterranean floor, I heard the grumbling voice, less distinct and even less comprehensible than it had been before. Unquestionably, however, it issued from this level rather than from the final floor, at the base of the pit.
I peered toward the top of the ladder. Orson must be gazing down, as blinded to the sight of me as I was to the sight of him, sniffing my reassuring scent. Reassuring and soon ripe: I was sweating, partly from exertion and partly from anticipation of the pending confrontation.
Clinging to the ladder with one hand, I felt for the shaft opening, found it, reached around the corner, and discovered a metal handgrip on the face of the jamb, which facilitated the transition from the ladder to the threshold. No two-by-six safety barricade had been bolted across the gap at this level, and I passed easily out of the elevator shaft into the subbasement.
Out of a distillate of darkness into a reduction of darkness.
Drawing the Glock, I sidled away from the open shaft, keeping my back against the wall. The concrete felt cold even through the insulating layers of my coat and cotton pullover.
I was overcome by a prideful little flush of accomplishment, a curious if short-lived pleasure to have made it this far without detection. The flush almost at once gave way to a chill as a more rational part of me demanded to know what the hell I was doing here.
I seemed insanely compelled, driven, to travel into ever darker — impossibly bleak — conditions, to the heart of all blackness, where the darkness was as condensed as matter had been the instant before the Big Bang spewed forth the universe, and once there, beyond all hope of light, to be crushed until my shrieking spirit was pressed from my mind and from my mortal flesh like juice from a grape.
Man, I needed a beer.
Hadn’t brought one. Couldn’t get one.
I tried taking slow deep breaths instead. Through my mouth, to minimize the noise. Just in case the hateful troll, armed with a chain saw, was creeping closer, one gnarled finger poised over the starter button.
I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my fundamental humanity.
The air didn’t taste remotely as good as a cool Corona or a Heineken. It had a faintly bitter tang.
Next time I went chasing after bad guys, I’d have to bring a cooler full of ice and a six-pack.
For a while I conned myself with thoughts of all the eight-foot glassy waves waiting to be surfed, all the icy beers and the tacos and the lovemaking with Sasha that lay ahead of me, until the feeling of oppression and the claustrophobic panic gradually lifted.
I didn’t fully calm down until I was able to summon a mental picture of Sasha’s face. Her gray eyes as clear as rainwater. Her lush mahogany hair. The shape of her mouth curved by laughter. Her radiance.
Because I’d been cautious, the kidnapper was surely unaware that I was present, which meant he would have no reason to conduct his business without benefit of a lamp. Being unable to see his victim’s terror would diminish his twisted pleasure. The absolute darkness seemed proof to me that he was not dangerously close but
in another room, shut off from here but nearby.
The absence of screams must mean that the child had not yet been touched. To this predator, the pleasure of hearing would be equal to the pleasure of seeing; in the cries of his victims, he would perceive music.
If I couldn’t detect the dimmest trace of the lamp by which he worked, he wouldn’t be able to see mine. I fished the flashlight from under my belt and switched it on.
I was in an ordinary elevator alcove. To the right and around a corner, I found a corridor that was quite long and perhaps eight feet wide, with an ash-gray ceramic-tile floor and poured-in-place concrete walls painted pale, glossy blue. It led in one direction: under the length of the warehouse that I had recently traversed at ground level.
Not much dust had filtered down to this depth, where the air was as still and as cool as that in a morgue. The floor was too clean to reveal footprints.
The fluorescent bulbs and diffusion panels hadn’t been pulled out of the ceiling. They didn’t pose any danger to me, because power was no longer supplied to any of these buildings.
On other nights, I had found that the government’s salvage operation had stripped away items of value from only limited areas of the base. Perhaps, in the middle of the process, the Department of Defense accountants had decided that the effort was more expensive than the liquidation value of the salvaged goods.
To my left, the corridor wall was unbroken. Along the right side lay rooms waiting behind a series of unpainted, stainless-steel doors without markings of any kind.
Even though I was currently unable to consult with my clever canine brother, I was capable of deducing on my own that the slamming of two of these doors must have produced the crashes that had drawn me down here. The corridor was so long that my flashlight couldn’t reveal the end of it. I wasn’t able to see how many rooms it served, whether fewer than six or more than sixty, but I suspected that the boy and his abductor were in one of them.
The flashlight was beginning to feel hot in my hand, but I knew the heat wasn’t real. The beam was not intense, and it was directed away from me; I was keeping my fingers well back from the bright lens. Nevertheless, I was so accustomed to avoiding light that, by holding this source of it too long, I began to feel something of what hapless Icarus must have felt when, flying too near the sun, he’d detected the stink of burning feathers.
Instead of a knob, the first door featured a lever, and instead of a keyhole, there was a slot for the insertion of a magnetic card. Either the electronic locks would have been disabled when the base was abandoned or they would have disengaged automatically when the power was shut off.
I put one ear to the door. There was no sound whatsoever from within.
Gingerly, I pressed down on the lever. At best I expected a thin, betraying skreek and at worst the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. Instead, the lever worked as noiselessly as if it had been installed and oiled only yesterday.
With my body, I pushed open the door, holding the Glock in one hand and the flashlight in the other.
The room was large, about forty feet wide by eighty feet long. I could only guess at the precise dimensions, because my small flashlight barely reached the width of the space and could not penetrate the entire depth.
As far as I could see, no machinery or furniture or supplies had been left behind. Most likely, everything had been hauled off to the fog-wreathed mountains of Transylvania to re-equip Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Strewn across the vast gray tile floor were hundreds of small skeletons.
For an instant, perhaps because of the frail-looking rib cages, I thought these were the remains of birds — which made no sense, as there is no feathered species with a preference for subterranean flight. As I played the flashlight over a few calcimine skulls and as I registered both the size of them and then the lack of wing structures, I realized that these must be the skeletons of rats. Hundreds of rats.
The majority of the skeletons lay alone, each separate from all the others, but in places there were also piles of bones, as though a score of hallucinating rodents had suffocated one another while competing for the same imaginary hunk of cheese.
Strangest of all were the patterns of skulls and bones that I noted here and there. These remains appeared to be curiously arranged — not as though the rats had perished at random dropping points, but as though they had painstakingly positioned themselves with an intricacy similar to the elaborate lines in a Haitian priest’s voodoo veves.
I know all about veves because my friend Bobby Halloway once dated an awesomely beautiful surfer, Holly Keene, who was into voodoo. The relationship didn’t last.
A veve is a design that represents the figure and power of an astral force. The voodoo priest prepares five large copper bowls, each containing a different substance: white flour, cornmeal, red brick powder, powdered charcoal, and powdered tannis root. He makes the sacred designs on the floor with these substances, allowing each to dribble in a measured flow from his cupped hand. He must be able to draw hundreds of complex veves freehand, from memory. For even the least ambitious ritual, several veves are needed to force the attention of the gods to the Oumphor, the temple, where the rites are conducted.
Holly Keene was a practitioner of good magic, a self-proclaimed Hougnon, rather than a black-magic Bocor. She said it was maximum uncool to create zombies by reanimating the dead, cast curses that transformed her enemies’ beating hearts into rotting chicken heads, and stuff like that — even though, as she made clear, she could do those things by renouncing her Hougnon oath and getting a Bocor union card. She was basically a sweet person, if a little odd, and the only time she made me uneasy was when, with passionate advocacy, she declared that the greatest rock-’n’-roll band of all time was the Partridge Family.
Anyway, the rat bones. They must have been here a long time, because no flesh adhered to them — as far as I could see or cared to look. Some were white; others were stained yellow or rust red, or even black.
Except for a few scattered gray puffballs of hair, the rats’ pelts surprisingly had not survived decomposition. This led me to wonder briefly if the creatures’ bodies had been rendered elsewhere, their boiled bones later arranged here by someone with more sinister motives than those of Holly Keene, bikinied Bocor.
Then, under many of the skeletons, I saw that the tile floor was stained. This vile-looking residue appeared to be gummy but must have been brittle with age, because otherwise it would have lent an appalling odor to the cool dry air.
In a deeply hidden facility on these grounds, experiments in genetic engineering had been conducted — perhaps were still being conducted — with catastrophic results. Rats are widely used in medical research. I had no proof but plenty of reason to suppose that these rodents had been the subjects of one of those experiments, though I couldn’t imagine how they had wound up here, like this.
The mystery of the veve rats was only one more of Fort Wyvern’s virtually infinite supply of enigmas, and it had nothing to do with the more urgent mystery of Jimmy Wing’s disappearance. At least I hoped it didn’t. God forbid that I should open another door, farther along the hall, and discover the ritualistically arranged skeletons of five-year-old boys.
I stepped backward, out of the rodents’ equivalent of the legendary elephants’ graveyard, easing the door shut with a click so preternaturally soft that it could have been heard only by a cat on methamphetamines.
A quick arc of the flashlight, hotter than ever in my hand, revealed that the corridor was still deserted.
I moved to the next door. Stainless steel. Unmarked. Lever handle. Identical to the previous one.
Beyond was a room the size of the first, sans rat skeletons. The tile floor and painted walls gleamed as if they had been spit-polished.
I was relieved by the sight of the bare floor.
As I backed out of the second room and silently eased the door shut, the troll voice rose once more, nearer than before but still too
muffled to be understood. The corridor remained deserted both ahead and behind me.
For a moment the voice grew louder and seemed to draw closer, as though the speaker was approaching a door, about to step into the hallway.
I thumbed off the flashlight.
The claustrophobic darkness closed around me again, as soft as Death’s hooded robe and with pockets almost as deep.
The voice continued grumbling for several seconds — but then abruptly broke off, seemingly in mid-sentence.
I didn’t hear a door open or any sound to indicate that the kidnapper had entered the hallway. Besides, light would betray him when at last he came. I was still the sole presence here — but instinct warned me that I would soon have company.
I was close to the wall, facing away from the direction I’d come, toward unexplored realms.
The extinguished flashlight was now cool in my hand, but the pistol felt hot.
The longer the quiet lasted, the more it seemed bottomless. Soon it was an abyss into which I imagined myself drifting down, down, like a deep-sea diver festooned with lead weights.
I listened so hard that I was half convinced I could feel the fine hairs vibrating in my ear canals. Yet I could hear only one sound, and it was strictly internal: the thick, liquid thud of my own heartbeat, faster than normal but not racing.
As time passed without a noise or a sudden wedge of light from an opening door farther along the corridor, the likelihood grew that in spite of what instinct told me, the troll voice had been receding rather than approaching. If the kidnapper and the boy were on the move and heading away from me, I might lose their trail if I didn’t stay close behind them.
I was about to switch on the flashlight again, when a shiver of superstitious dread passed through me. If I had been in a cemetery, I would have seen a ghost skating on the moon-iced grass between tombstones. If I had been in the Northwest woods, I would have seen Big Foot shagging among the trees. If I had been in front of any garage door, I would have seen the face of Jesus or the Holy Virgin in a weather stain, warning of the Apocalypse. I was in the bowels of Wyvern, however, and unable to see any damn thing at all, so I could only feel, and what I felt was a presence, an aura, like a pressure, hovering, looming, what a medium or a psychic would call an entity, a spiritual force that could not be denied, chilling my blood and marrow.
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