by David Wood
“And the vault uncovered in Washington Square Park was one of his hiding places,” Crowley said.
Rose nodded, chewing one side of her lower lip. “I think Jazz died because she was looking into it and looking into Price himself. We have to be very careful. Especially as it looks like he’s on the verge of becoming truly immortal.”
“I wonder what his secret is,” Crowley said. “What his formula involves, why he has to kill people to get it.”
“Whatever it is, its effectiveness must be limited, thus the regular killings. The frequency of them. Look at all the bodies in that crypt under Washington Square Park. The two on top were fresh, but the stack of them went back several years. How many, do you think? Two killings a year? More? And what about elsewhere, outside New York?”
“The cost is high, obviously,” Crowley agreed.
“He said he just moved back to New York,” Rose said. “I’ll bet he has to move around a lot if he’s regularly killing people.”
“And traveling for his business is a good excuse.” Crowley paused, then admitted the thing that had been on his mind for some time. “I think Poe’s Masque Journal must be the thing Price is looking for. The second half of the immortality formula must be in that book. I don’t know why, but why else would it be the one thing he wants more than anything else? And I told him all about it. He might have gone on searching for weeks or months otherwise, but I think I’ve accelerated everything quite considerably.”
“That’s not really your fault,” Rose said, putting a hand on his knee. “Then again, if you’d trusted me when I said we shouldn’t trust Price, you wouldn’t have been cozying up to him so much and you wouldn’t have had the chance to spill the beans.”
Crowley glanced up sharply, cut a little by the accusation. Probably because it was accurate. But Rose was smiling softly. He smiled too. “You’re right.”
“But I meant it when I said it’s not really your fault,” Rose said, and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek.
“But I do need to fix it,” Crowley said. “He’ll know it’s at the Grolier Club now. Of course, security is tight there, as you found out.”
“Price might be tempted to wait until it’s returned to the ghost house,” Rose said. “After all, he’s waited this long. It would be much easier to lift from there.”
Crowley shook his head. “I doubt it. I can’t see Price being that patient, can you? Not when he’s is so close. And not if he’s onto the fact that we’re onto him.”
“So what do we do?”
Crowley grinned. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to steal it first.”
Chapter 30
Crowley felt bad for once again refusing Rose’s offer of help, but knew this mission was best tackled alone. He had spent the rest of the day researching and planning, then he and Rose left the hotel for dinner with Aunt Gertie a little after 4.30pm. They’d enjoyed a pleasant evening, taking the opportunity to talk about mundane things and pretend they weren’t deep into investigating a potentially immortal witch. Some things, Crowley thought to himself, were best put on the back burner now and then so a soul could enjoy a good meal and a fine wine. But he had restricted himself to only a couple of glasses of wine, given his later plans. It was slightly awkward every time Gertie mentioned her boyfriend, but he and Rose had both done a good job of quickly diverting the conversation each time. He was comfortable his aunt hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
Once dinner was finished, they had chatted until around ten and then excused themselves. Rose had been upset Crowley wouldn’t take her along and tried again to convince him to let her join him on the mission, but he insisted he go alone. It would be hard enough for one person, he said. Sometimes more hands didn’t make for lighter work. Besides, she needed the rest, he firmly believed that. So did he, for that matter, but the opportunity wasn’t there for him. So reluctantly Rose had returned to the hotel while Crowley shouldered his small backpack and headed over to Park Avenue and East 60th Street, and the large stone Christ Church on the corner there.
His research had led him down a maze of city planning and blueprints. It was remarkable the kind of information a determined person could unearth, and he had discovered one fatal flaw in the Grolier Club’s defenses. At least, he hoped it was a flaw. And just why the Grolier Club was so tightly secured was a mystery he chose not to dwell on too deeply. Maybe it was merely the value of its collections. There was a wealth of books in there, after all.
The flaw he’d discovered had to do with the Club’s adjacency to the Christ Church. At nearly midnight, the street outside wasn’t completely deserted, he assumed nowhere in New York ever was, but the sidewalk was mostly empty, and the shadows of the arched doorway afforded Crowley the concealment he needed for a few moments with his lock picks. He slipped inside the church and closed the door behind him. He paused for a moment, and there were no shouts from outside, no alarms flashing inside. Good. Stage one was a success. But it was also the easiest part.
The interior was ostentatious, even by church standards. A black and white checkerboard floor stretched away from him between wooden pews. The walls were mostly gold, the ceiling black tiled with gold grouting. Two large white-veined, black marble columns stood sentinel to either side. At the far end, a great domed arch stood tall, filled with murals. Crowley only paused a moment to take it all in, then moved quickly through the church and down the right-hand side. On the other side of the black marble column, he headed for a door. It was open, and he slipped through, a penlight flashlight piercing the darkness beyond.
The corridor ahead was narrow, and Crowley followed it, then slipped through a side door and up two narrow flights of stairs. “Come on, come on,” he whispered to himself, gritting his teeth against a possible end to his mission right here. Then he saw a small wooden door in the side wall, about three feet square, and let out a suppressed, “Yes!” of triumph. The maintenance hatch hasn’t been marked on any of the plans he’d studied, but he had bet it would be there, as there was no other access to the ducting otherwise.
He crouched at the door and set to work on the small padlock pinning the hasp closed. It only took a moment to pick that lock, and he was in, crawling through a service space behind the large, arched end of the church, and, if the blueprints he’d found were to be believed, above the Grolier Club itself.
As he moved further through the crawl space, a dim light began to illuminate the area ahead of him. He got closer and saw it was leaking up through the edges of ceiling tiles off to his left. This was it. Crowley carefully shifted himself into position and gently pried up the nearest tile. It was about two feet by three feet, old-fashioned pressed metal instead of the more modern particle board new buildings might have had. It was heavy and scraped across its mountings, the sound harshly loud in the silence. With it halfway off, Crowley paused, teeth gritted. There were no other sounds. He slid it the rest of the way, then leaned forward over the gantry he sat on to see. The light came from soft, concealed nightlights around the edges of the ceiling, a couple of feet below where he squatted as if suspended above the large room below. The wooden floor seemed an awfully long way away, and Crowley swallowed down a moment of vertigo. It would be an ignominious end to fall through a suspended ceiling and die on the floor of an exclusive book club.
There was a camera mounted in the corner, only a few feet from where he sat, that seemed to take in the whole room. Its fish-eye glass stared forward and down. He checked, and saw no other cameras in the large room and thanked his luck that his first attempt had put so near to it. He replaced the tile, shifted carefully back, and levered up the tile he estimated to be right above the camera. Dust drifted down in a soft rain, vanishing from sight as it fell. He paused a moment, but nothing more happened, no alarms triggered. Holding his breath, he lay on his stomach and leaned down to reach the camera.
Two wires went into the back of it, and Crowley reached forward, balanced precariously, and tugged at the nearest. It popped free of its socke
t, and Crowley let it lay almost but not quite connected. It was ample to ensure the signal was interrupted. With any luck, someone would put it down to a wandering rodent or something similar rather than deliberate sabotage. He only hoped no one was looking at a security screen at that moment, who may then come and investigate. Regardless, he needed to move fast, just in case.
From his backpack, Crowley pulled out a coiled length of knotted rope. It was thin, but incredibly tough nylon, designed for climbers. Lightweight but able to support a considerable load. He looped and fixed one end securely to a metal stanchion set into the stonework behind him and was about to drop the rest down when something caught his eye.
Set evenly around the walls, maybe ten feet apart, were small black boxes, each with a dark lens in the center. Frowning, Crowley dug in his backpack and found nothing to help. Cursing, he looked around. Then he smiled, remembering the soft rain when he had moved the tile. The rarely used maintenance space was very dusty. Gathering a small handful of fine dust, he sprinkled it through the hole in the ceiling and watched it tumble through the air, enough this time that he didn’t lose sight of it. As it passed in line with the small black boxes, it sparkled red briefly. Lasers. This place was serious about security.
Crowley gathered more dust, blew it gently forward, and watched it fall. It took about ten minutes, which felt like ten hours as he expected a security guard to appear and look right up at him every moment, but he eventually had the crisscross pattern of security lasers figured out. He’d been forced to remove two more ceiling tiles in the process. Now he’d found a spot he could use to drop into a laser-free diamond area, then he could crawl below the lasers to get to where he needed to be. He replaced the other two tiles and re-tied his rope at his new chosen point of entry. He lowered the line with excruciating slowness, desperate that it did not swing and interrupt any beam of light. Once it was down, he lowered himself through the hole in the ceiling and painstakingly went hand under hand down to the floor. His arms were trembling with the effort by halfway down, going so slowly, but his strength would hold out. He knew his limits. Once his feet hit the wooden floor, he immediately dropped to his belly and crawled forward. From his vantage point high in the ceiling, he’d seen the cabinet he needed. At least, he hoped he had.
On the floor by the correct cabinet, he turned onto his back and mentally tracked all the small black eyes around the room and their invisible beams of light. Nodding once he’d chosen the space to stand up in, he slowly rose to his feet. No alarms. At least, none he could hear. Silent alarm systems were common, but he had to hope against that.
With his surgical gloves in place, and his face covered with a bandana in case he’d missed any cameras, he quickly went to work on the lock at the side of the glass display case. Now he was close enough to read the small cards placed next to the exhibits, he confirmed the small, black journal he’d seen from above was indeed the Poe journal on loan. His heart raced with excitement and nerves, but he forced himself to work slowly and calmly.
The small sliding lock took no real effort to open, and Crowley slid the glass front carefully aside. He reached in and took the journal, his hands trembling with tension. If he and Rose were right, he was holding all he needed to pin Matthew Price to the wall.
He slipped the book into his pocket and removed a small black book of similar design. It wasn’t entirely a lookalike, but it wasn’t bad. He’d found it in a book store not far from their hotel, roughed it up to make it appear aged, and smeared it with road gravel. Once he’d brushed that off again, he had been quite pleased with his handiwork. It looked interesting enough to put off the casual eye. Placing it on the small glass display stand now, it didn’t look out of place at all. With a soft smile, he slid the glass door closed again and re-locked it.
Making sure he’d left nothing behind, he commando-crawled back to his hanging rope and climbed slowly hand over hand back up again. It was slow going, ensuring the end of the rope didn’t swing back and forth with his motion, and his biceps were burning as he neared the top.
He crawled in through the gap where the ceiling tile had been removed and began to carefully bring the rope up, coiling it slowly over his arm. He was awash with relief when the end of it lifted above the level of the crossed lasers. Then a sharp beep made his heart stutter. He froze.
Nothing discernible had changed. What had beeped? Then the door at the end of the large room rattled. Crowley held his breath as the door opened slowly. A large man, his dark skin reflecting the nightlights softly, entered the room and looked around. He wore a navy blue security guard’s uniform, with a black peaked cap bearing a logo Crowley couldn’t quite make out. Tufts of gray hair curled out from the edges of it. The guard shone a flashlight left and right, lips pursed.
Crowley’s rope hung in the air maybe ten feet off the ground. If the man’s gaze rose even a little bit, he was sure to spot it. Then that gaze would rise up the rope to the hole in the ceiling and Crowley framed by it, wide-eyed and breath held. He was tempted to haul the rope quickly up, but surely the guard would see the movement. Or perhaps he could drop it and run, but then the guard would definitely see him, and they’d know there had been a break-in.
Like a rabbit in headlights, Crowley squatted, his legs cramping from the precarious position he held, his arms trembling from the climb and then being held so still, holding the rope out in front of him like he was fishing for something in the room below.
The guard swept his flashlight around the room once more. Then once more.
Crowley gritted his teeth. Don’t look up! Don’t look up!
Then the man turned and left, closing the door silently behind him. Crowley’s relief was so complete that for a moment his vision crossed and he thought he might pass out and fall through the hole back to the hard wooden floor below. He sat back, legs muscles screaming, and quickly coiled up the rest of the rope. That was way too close for comfort. Heart racing faster than if he’d run a mile at a dead sprint, he replaced the ceiling tile and quickly retreated the way he’d come.
Chapter 31
Rose tried not to be too angry with Jake for not letting her come along to the Grolier Club. On the one hand, she understood how breaking and entering a place like that wasn’t something you did with tourists tagging along. But she was capable and had got Crowley out of trouble on several occasions. She didn’t like being sidelined. “It’s just that it’s really a one-person operation,” Crowley had said.
Well, Rose thought that was bulldust, but she’d given in. Mainly because she knew there was something else she could be doing while Crowley was crawling around the Grolier Club like a ninja. The last number in Jazz’s message pad had given her a lead. When she’d rung it, and on a whim had simply said, “Revenant,” the concise reply she’d received was mysterious.
Tonight. Midnight. The park. Behind Jacob’s Witch.
She’d had no idea what any of that meant. But while Crowley had been studying city plans for his great heist, Rose had been doing research of her own. She thought she had discovered what it meant when she came across the story of George Jacobs Sr, who had been hanged in Salem Village, Massachusetts, on August 19th, 1692, a victim of the infamous Salem Witch Trials. Among his accusers were his granddaughter, Margaret, who implicated him through an attempt he had made to save her life. His daughter-in-law also accused him, though she was thought to be mentally ill and suffering from a brain tumor. Others were said to have fits at his trial, caused by his witchcraft. Rose reflected on the collective madness that had infected that terrible time and thought the stain of it might never be washed away. But George Jacobs story was a dead end with regards to “the park.”
So Rose searched using the only park she thought the message could mean, Central Park, and she discovered a stone carving of a witch that had been made in the 1800s by an architect called Jacob Wrey Mould. It was a strong possibility this was what the cryptic message had been referencing, though she had no idea how it might be of any use.
Regardless, as Crowley had gone off adventuring without her, she intended to check it out all the same.
New York never slept, so the story went, and the streets were indeed far from deserted, but there was a weight of nighttime over Rose as she walked from the hotel to Central Park. Once she left the streets behind and moved into the much quieter green space, her senses were on alert. She watched everywhere, checked the shadows. It would be foolish to stumble into an assault or mugging while wandering around at nearly midnight as she was. Then again, let them try, She was a fighter, had beaten men bigger than her before and would again if necessary. But it was always better not to fight, so caution was the preferred course of action.
The Bethesda Terrace, leading to the Bethesda Fountain overlooking The Lake, was about dead center of the park between 5th Avenue and Central Park West, only a quarter of the way north from the park’s southern boundary. The start of the terrace was on the road above, sandstone pillars and balustrades intricately carved in a variety of designs. A person could walk either side for a higher view, or take stone steps down through a gallery, with arches at either end, that passed under the wide roadway and led to the fountain at the lake’s edge.
Rose searched and found that several of the square pillars had a bas relief design carved deep into them, each within a clover-shaped indentation. An owl on a branch with a bat flying behind, an open book lying atop a lectern, a sun rising over rocks and flowers, and then she found Jacob’s witch. The design had the classic fairy tale witch astride a flying broomstick, a jack-o-lantern below her and a house, or maybe a stone church, in the background. It was an artistically rendered carving, somehow both cartoonish but also imbued with a weight of meaning. Or perhaps that was simply because it was late at night and Rose had been reading about witch trials.
Looking around to ensure no one was watching, Rose reached out and ran her fingers over the carving. She pushed and pulled, wondering if there was something beyond the mere sandstone that she might discover, but nothing happened. Frowning, she stepped back. Was she being foolish, wasting her time? Or maybe she just needed to wait here, and someone would come to her, but that option seemed fraught with danger. And the message had said Behind Jacob’s Witch. But there was no behind really, it was a square pillar in the open.