Solomon's Jar

by Alex Archer

  “It’s a little hard to believe,” she said to him. “It’s just, on the whole, we could be on the outskirts of Phoenix right now, if it weren’t for the humidity. And come to think of it, Phoenix is pretty humid, thanks to irrigation and all those swimming pools.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He had a Borsalino hat or a good imitation on to protect against the weather, the brim low over his blue eyes—a pricey-looking hat, and if real, possibly one of the few affectations she’d been able to discern. His eyes lacked something of their customary glitter today, she’d noticed. He had been subdued since the campfire conference with Spyridon on Corfu.

  He stopped and nodded his head. “I think we’re here.”

  A discreet bronze plaque beside a door read Israel Antiquities Authority in English and Hebrew with a logo that looked like a stylized menorah. Annja looked over the building, which appeared no different from the others on the block, and frowned.

  “I thought with all their terrorism troubles, Israeli public buildings would be well fortified,” she said.

  “Undoubtedly the high muckety-mucks don’t think the place is worth defending,” Aidan said. “You know how governments feel—archaeologists are expendable.” He was making no effort to hide his bitterness.

  Annja laughed because she was pleased to see him get a bit of his sparkle back. Actually, if she understood correctly, Pascoe was wrong. Israel was obsessed with archaeology. From the earliest days of its existence as a modern state some of its most prominent political and even military figures had displayed fanatic interest in antiquity, at levels ranging from impassioned amateurs to world-renowned archaeologists.

  She knew Israel was also a heavily socialist country that loved its bureaucracy. And it had revered sites galore. You couldn’t sink a spade in the soil without disturbing ground walked on by some notable personage from the Mideast’s long and somewhat depressing history. As a consequence of all these things, a lot of Israel Antiquities Authority buildings dotted the landscape. But she supposed it may not have been especially useful or even affordable to defend them all like Cheyenne Mountain.

  “Shall we?” Aidan asked.

  They pushed in through the white-painted door. Inside it was cool and fluorescent bright. The dark-wood-and-metal desk in the reception area was unoccupied. It sported a computer, a phone and a half-full mug of coffee, showing a cartoon boy and girl leaning against each other with moonily romantic expressions. Hebrew characters were indecipherable above their heads. The air was tart with an astringent smell of dust and cleaning chemicals.

  “Ah,” said Aidan, sniffing. “Smells like they do archaeology here.”

  “Strange there’s nobody here,” Annja said. A door opened into a brightly lit hall behind the unoccupied desk.

  “But that means there’s no one to tell us not to go on back,” Aidan said with a twinkle. “Easier to get forgiveness than permission, as you Yanks say.”

  They took off their damp hats and placed them on the desk. She walked past him through the door. The hallway beyond consisted of half walls, with glass from waist height to ceiling on either side. To the right was an office with a bookcase on the far wall stocked with books with thick, age-cracked and darkened spines.

  In the larger room to the left a long table had a chunk of sandstone lying on it. An obviously ancient human rib cage and what appeared to be a curved reddish surface, apparently part of an earthenware pot or vase, had been painstaking half-liberated from a slab of sandstone. Tools—magnifying glass, steel pick like a dentist’s, a cordless Makita drill with a cotton disk buffer mounted in the chuck—lay next to the slab.

  Gradually Annja was becoming aware of a strange, cloying odor underlying the dust and disinfectant. At the same time she realized the tip of her left walking shoe seemed to be sticking to the floor. She looked down.

  A face looked up at her from a pool of blood spilling through the doorway.

  Aidan came into the anteroom door behind her and saw what she saw.

  It was a head of almost stupefying normality—if you left aside the expression. And the fact it was by itself—there was that, of course. It was the head of an elderly woman, with waved gray-white hair surrounding a plumpish face, the cheeks rouged, the lips painted.

  The eyes were wide in horror. The tongue, bluish, protruding from a lipstick-smeared hole of a mouth. The skin was sallow from the loss of the blood that had drained from the head to the vinyl floor.

  With the pallid jowls sagging into the wide pool of blood—shockingly red with bluish undertints in the uneasy light of the overheads—it was impossible to tell how the head had been removed from the body. Violently seemed a good guess.

  For a moment Annja’s vision—her whole existence, really—was tightly focused onto the severed head of what she presumed had been a receptionist or secretary. Drawing in a deep breath through her mouth, to avoid smelling more than necessary, she widened her vision field enough to take in the fact that visible not far beyond the head, a pair of thick, dough-pale legs protruded into view on the floor between worktable and half-window front wall. They ended in sagging wool socks and stodgy black shoes. Toes down. Annja swallowed hard at the realization that the body, presuming it belonged to the head, was pointing away from the door. Whatever had removed the head had carried it a short distance before depositing it near the door.

  She felt a chill.

  Suddenly, from the corridor’s far end came a wild cry of panic. Annja focused her will. The sword came into her hand as a man burst through the door at the end of the hall, emerging from a darkness that suggested a poorly illuminated stairway. The man was tall and gaunt, with gray hair streaming in a wild nimbus to either side of a dome of olive skull. He wore a lab coat over a shirt and tie. The tie was askew. The lab coat was spattered in red.

  He skidded as he broke from the doorway. He saw Annja and Aidan and called out to them in Hebrew, half-slumped against the wall as if trying to catch his breath. His eyes, already standing out of his head in terror, seemed to focus. For a moment Annja saw an expression of something like hope flicker across his face.

  A growl from the stairway washed it away. He bolted toward them, arms and legs flying in a transport of panic.

  A black shape shot from the doorway behind him, already waist high when it came into view, and rising. Light seemed to be sucked into it. It struck him on the left shoulder and slammed him back into the wall, pressing the side of his face into the glass. He screamed shrilly as he was dragged down to the floor.

  It was a dog, huge, 120 pounds at least. Against its matte-black hide its eyes were visibly outlined in red, rolling in its big broad head. Its teeth were brilliant white.

  Blood fountained around its muzzle, driven under high pressure from a severed carotid artery. The man’s outcries abruptly ceased.

  The dog let its prey fall to lie twitching on the speckled gray-white tiles. It raised its burning eyes to Annja. They almost seemed to widen when they saw the sword. Then they narrowed with a hatred so intelligent, so human seeming, that it struck Annja like a blow. The dog growled again.

  To the depths of her being she was stricken with the most total horror she had ever known. Fear clamped like asthma on her windpipe and threatened to let go the set screws of her knees, drop her choking and weeping and crippled to the floor. She had never imagined such fear.

  “Annja,” Aidan said from behind her.

  She made herself step forward and to her right to put herself in the middle of the corridor, squarely between the hellish creature with the gore-dripping muzzle and Aidan. “Stay back,” she said without turning her head.

  It seemed for a moment that she saw ghost shapes, shimmers in air above the dog’s shoulders. Like a pair of shadowy wings. She did not dare even blink, but shook her head violently. The shadows vanished.

  The dog darted forward. Its claws clacked on the vinyl flooring. Its snarling rose in a crescendo as it galloped toward Annja with tremendous speed, looking huge. Its upp
er lip was pulled back from its teeth, white swimming in red.

  It was as terrifying a sight as anything Annja had seen in her life. Yet the blinding-fast attack released her from the fear that threatened to disable her. She steeled herself to face it. I’ve got to trust the sword, she thought. And myself, she thought.

  Halfway down the hall and still a dozen feet away, the beast sprang for her. She met it with a diagonal step forward to her right and a two-handed cut that began behind her right shoulder.

  She feared to strike the thing head-on. That huge sloped skull would shed a blow that didn’t hit squarely, even from a preternaturally sharp blade.

  Fanged jaws flew at her face, spread wide. Her stroke took the creature at the juncture of left shoulder and trunk-thick neck, angling inward toward the center of its chest.

  The jaws clashed futilely beside her left ear.

  Blood spurted over Annja’s face. It seemed unnaturally hot. Her gut revolted. She had bared her teeth as she cut. Blood had sprayed into her mouth.

  But she followed through, turning her hips, driving from her powerful legs.

  She felt the sword spring free. She saw the beast strike the floor with a sodden thump.

  Annja kept herself from going over backward but had to drop to a knee to do so. She held the sword raised before her.

  The animal lay thrashing on the floor, one lung a deflated ruin, the other pumping its final breaths. Its other organs spilled out on the floor. Impossibly it lifted its head from the floor to stare at her. Its teeth chattered horribly in its blood-slavering jaws.

  For an instant Annja had the horrific sense it was trying to speak to her. Then the light went out from its eyes and the head fell to the floor with a thump, the tongue lolling motionless over the teeth of the lower jaw.

  She felt as if a hideous presence had vanished—and an enormous weight had lifted from her soul.

  “My God,” Aidan said quietly.

  Slowly Annja rose. She felt the blood drying on her face, getting tacky, starting to itch. The front of her blouse and pants were sodden; she could feel the dampness against her breasts and belly and the fronts of her thighs. She became aware of a salty taste in her mouth and spit violently. It took an effort of will not to vomit.

  “You killed a dog,” Aidan said accusingly.

  “Yes,” she said. She felt a stab of remorse for the animal. “It killed that man,” she said, sounding more defensive than she intended.

  He shook his head. “Isn’t that a bit thick?” he asked. “It was just a dog.”

  She drew a deep breath. He’s shaken, she realized. And no surprise. It’s made him irrational.

  Sword in hand, she moved cautiously into the lab to the left. It was a bloody shambles. She avoided looking at the dead woman. There wasn’t anything to do for her. And whatever had killed her had made a ragged job of decapitating her.

  The lab was splashed liberally with blood. More surprising, notebooks had been torn and a stool and a chrome-and-leather chair had been slashed open so that stuffing swelled from them like puffy white excrescences. This scene is starting to look familiar, she thought.

  Aidan stood in the hall staring in through the window at her. She backed out, moved quickly to the door across the way. “Keep an eye on that door,” she suggested, nodding as she passed to the end of the hallway. “We don’t know what else might come through it.”

  Aidan’s normally pink complexion had gone ashen and green around the edges. He was breathing rapidly through his mouth. “And take deep breaths,” she added. “Into the abdomen.”

  The office on the far side looked curiously untouched. She backed out of there and went to kneel gingerly by the side of the man who lay slumped against the corridor wall. Still keeping the sword in her right hand, she went quickly through his pockets, feeling more than a bit like a ghoul.

  “It’s Dror,” she said, holding up a wallet unfolded to show a credit card in a plastic carrier with the archaeologist’s name embossed on it.

  “Hmm,” Aidan grunted. His eyes weren’t quite tracking. Even after all he’d been through in the past week, what he had witnessed since entering the corridor had shaken him like a fist wrapped around his spine.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, stepping around the body of the huge black dog. “I’m having trouble with the dog. I can’t help it; it just seems harsh to treat an animal so, no matter what it’s done. It’s just a poor animal. It has no moral judgment. It can’t be blamed, after all.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she told him, rubbing the wallet clean of fingerprints with her shirttail, or so she hoped, and slipping it back into the dead man’s pocket. She straightened. “Doesn’t this strike you as somehow familiar?”

  He gaped at her.

  “The scene on the bridge of that fishing boat in Corfu,” she said. “The blood splashes. The ripping up of the furniture and the logbooks, apparently out of sheer fury.” She nodded her head at the window opening onto the long lab chamber. “Same thing happened here. Not to mention two brutal murders. At least.”

  “You think that dog killed the crew of the Athanasia?” Pascoe’s voice curled and cut like a whip of sarcasm. “And then what? It swam across the Mediterranean to assassinate Dror?”

  “No. Not this dog,” Annja said.

  “So you suspect an outbreak of some kind of madness—mutated avian flu perhaps—that’s making domestic animals run amok and rip up people and commit random acts of vandalism?”

  She took a deep breath. “I agreed with you that the dog wasn’t to blame,” she said. “That’s because the dog isn’t responsible.”

  “But you just said—”

  “But the same guiding agency did. The same entity. Do you get what I’m driving at, Aidan?”

  He glared at her for a moment as if suspecting she was making fun of him. His nostrils were flared.

  Then he shook himself, so violently she feared for a moment he was having a seizure. He sighed gustily. “You’re speaking of demonic possession.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  He shook his head. “It’s hard to assimilate something like that.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “it is. Let’s look around. We came here to learn some things. We need to get out of here before the authorities arrive, unless you feel like discussing demonic possession with the cops.”

  “Right,” he said. “And perhaps we’d best discover if there are any more demonic dogs about.”

  “Good point,” Annja said.

  The room next to the office was a little storeroom filled with boxes of specimens and overstuffed filing cabinets. A door stood ajar, letting in a slice of sunlight shining down through a break in the heavy overcast. A quick glance showed it opened onto a narrow alley.

  Annja caught Aidan’s eye with a meaningful look. It explained how the dog had gotten inside. Or at least, it offered one explanation.

  It took all her will and physical courage for Annja to grip the sword in both hands and go down the stairs through the door at hallway’s end. The mere physical danger scared her, certainly. But she had faced greater danger—although the horrible savagery of the dog’s attack had shaken her as few assaults from humans had. But she felt a creeping conviction that they faced a menace that was more than physical. The dread that had almost overwhelmed her when she faced the animal down clung to her like wisps of fog.

  Above all she feared what she might find at the bottom of the stairs.

  Her fears were realized.

  The stairs turned once. The walls were cool stone and smelled of it; a relief after the abattoir upstairs. “Obviously the modern building’s been built on a preexisting site,” she murmured. She wasn’t vastly concerned about making noise. If anything awaited them downstairs, it—or they—already knew they were coming.

  “Looks nineteenth century, to hazard a guess,” Pascoe said, reaching out to brush the stone with his fingertips. Though he spoke quietly, as she had, his voice was steadier, more co
ntrolled than before. In a small way she was tempted to smile. Thinking professionally was an excellent way to break the spasm of shock and horror.

  But the respite was brief. The stairs emptied into a small chamber with metal shelves to either side bowing beneath the weight of the customary dusty artifacts, some wrapped in plastic, some exposed. The floor was concrete, laid when the upper structure was built, Annja guessed.

  An arm lay in the middle of it. It looked male, to judge by the dark, hairy hand jutting from the blue sleeve. A heavy gold band, probably a wedding ring, encircled one finger. The other end of the sleeve was soaked in purplish blood. A raw bit of bone jutted out, yellow in the single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  A similar light illuminated a scene of fresh horror through the doorway. Beyond lay a storeroom with crates and boxes, many of which had been shattered or ripped open. Amid artifacts, many of shiny yellow metal, sundry body parts were strewed. By the usual mathematics—chiefly that she quickly saw two heads—she guessed at a pair of victims, including the original owner of the arm in the outer room.

  “Nothing down here,” Annja said. “Nothing alive.” She willed the sword away.

  “God,” Aidan said in a choked voice. He held a handkerchief to his mouth, either in an attempt to prevent himself from vomiting or to ward off the stench in the damp basement. “Such rage.”

  Annja was aware of conflicting sensations, again reminiscent of what she had felt on the Athanasia, both a sense of intense evil and of power.

  “The jar was here,” she said. “I can feel it. But it’s not here now. Perhaps the creature expected to find it, and was enraged by its disappointment.”

  “The jar itself may not be here,” Aidan said, voice muffled by the handkerchief, “but there are certainly jars here. In plenty.”