Cemetery Dance (40 page)

But as he turned away, preparing to renew his search for Nora, he caught a glimpse of something at the very head of the room — an unusual tomb. Something about it arrested his attention. He approached to examine it more closely, and then, making a decision, laid a hand on it.

It was a coffin, made of thick lead. Instead of being set on a bier like the others, it had been sunken into the stonework of the floor, only its top projecting above the ground. What caught his eye was that the lid was ajar and the vault within had clearly been looted — very recently looted.

He examined it more intently. In past centuries, lead had often been the material of choice for interring an important person because of its preservative qualities. Playing the light over it, he noted just how carefully the coffin had been sealed, the lead lid soldered firmly to the top. But someone had hacked open the lead cover with an ax, chopping violently through the seal and prying the lid off, leaving a ragged, gaping hole. This had been done not only recently, but in great haste. The marks in the soft metal were bright and shiny, showing no signs of dulling or oxidation.

Pendergast looked inside. The body — which had mummified in the sealed environment — had been roughly disturbed, something wrenched out of its crooked hands, the ossified fingers broken and scattered, one arm torn from its dusty socket.

He reached inside and felt the corpse dust, gauging its dryness. This had happened so recently that not even the damp air of the room had had time to settle inside the coffin. The looting must have occurred less than thirty minutes ago.

Coincidence? Certainly not.

Pendergast turned his attention to the dead body itself. It was a remarkably well–preserved corpse of an old man with a full white beard and long white hair. Two golden guineas were pressed on its eyes. The face was shriveled like an old apple, the lips drawn back from the teeth by desiccation, the skin darkened to the color of fine old ivory. The body was dressed in simple, Quaker–like clothes — a sober frock coat, shirt, brown waistcoat, and pale breeches — but the clothes around the chest had been ripped open and disarranged by the looting, buttons and bits scattered about in what appeared to have been a frenzied search of the corpse. On the man's disarranged chest, Pendergast could see pressure marks on the clothing of what had evidently been a small, square container — a box.

That, along with the broken fingers, told a story. The looter had wrenched a box from the corpse's dusty grasp.

On the floor behind the coffin, Pendergast spied the broken remains of what could only be the very box, the dry–rotted top wrenched off. He leaned over and examined it more closely, sniffing it, noting its dimensions. The faint smell of vellum confirmed his initial impression that the box had held a quarto–size document.

Slowly, deliberately, Pendergast walked around the coffin lid. At the top end, stamped into the lead, he could see an inscription, obscured by whitish blooms of oxide. He wiped the oxide away with his sleeve and read the inscription.

Elijah Esteban

Who Departed this Life Novbr 22d 1745

In his 55th Year

How doleful is the Sound,

How vaft the Stroke

Which maketh the Mortall Wounde.

Ye living,

Come View the Ground

Where ye muft shortly lie.

Pendergast stared at the name on the tomb for a long time. And then, quite suddenly, everything fell into place and he understood. His face darkened as he thought of the catastrophic mistake he had made.

This looted coffin wasn't a coincidence, an irrelevant sideshow — it was the main event.

Cemetery Dance

Chapter 68

The creature was gone — somehow, D'Agosta had outrun it or it had given up the pursuit. Although the latter didn't seem likely: the thing might be a shambling zombii, but it had the tenacity of a pit bull. Maybe, he thought, its absence had something to do with a faint commotion he had heard from above, like a stampede. He sagged against the damp stone, half stunned, gasping for breath, the roar in his head gradually subsiding. He could still hear the faint hubbub coming from the church above.

He sat up. As he did, pain shot through his right forearm. He probed gingerly with his left hand, felt the bone grinding on bone. It was obviously fractured.

"Pendergast?" he spoke into the dark.

No sound.

He tried to orient himself, to place himself in the welter of tunnels, but it was pitch–dark and the flight had disoriented him. It was impossible to know how far he'd run, or where he'd gone. Wincing with pain, he tucked his broken arm into his shirt, buttoned it snug, and then crawled over the ground until the hand of his good arm found a brick wall. He pulled himself to his feet, feeling nausea wash over him. The voices continued above, overlaid now with another, much closer noise: cries and yells that echoed toward him from somewhere else in the basement, approaching rapidly.

So he was still being hunted, after all.

He called out as loudly as he dared. "Pendergast!"

No reply.

His flashlight was gone, but he remembered the old Zippo lighter he carried in his pocket, a habit from his cigar–smoking days. He took it out and flicked it on. He was in a small room, with an arched doorway opening into a brick tunnel. Moving slowly so as not to aggravate his pain and nausea, he staggered to the archway and looked around. More brick tunnels.

The heat from the lighter began to burn his finger and he let it go out. He had to make his way back, locate his gun and flashlight, find Pendergast. And, above all, they had to locate Nora.

He cursed out loud and flicked the lighter back on. Trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his arm, using the brick wall for support, he moved into the main tunnel. He didn't recognize it — it looked like all the others.

He staggered along slowly. Had they traveled down this tunnel? In the wavering glow of the lighter, he could see fresh marks on the wet, muddy floor, but were they his? Then he spied a large, splayed print of a bare foot. He shuddered.

The sounds from above were louder: yells, the squawk of a bull–horn, a crash. It didn't sound like a ceremony anymore. It sounded like the protesters had arrived.

Was that why the thing had vanished? Nothing else made sense.

"Pendergast!"

Suddenly, he saw lights in the darkness and a group of congregants appeared at a bend in the tunnel ahead of him. They were cowled and robed. Some held flashlights and torches in their hands, others an assortment of weapons, shovels, pitchforks. They numbered twenty, perhaps twenty–five.

D'Agosta swallowed, took a step back, wondering if they had spotted him in the dark.

Crying out with what seemed a single voice, the group charged toward him.

D'Agosta turned and ran, tucking his broken forearm against his chest, fleeing as best he could down the darkened tunnels, the lighter flickering and bluing in the draft. It went out and he paused to flick it on, took his bearings, began running again. He turned a corner and found himself in a dismal basement crowded with rotting stacks of lumber. At the far end was a door. He ran through the doorway and slammed the door behind him, then leaned against it, gasping. The pain in his forearm made him feel light–headed. The Zippo had guttered in his headlong run, and when he flicked it back on he found himself in what appeared to be another large storage room. He looked down at his feet — and his heart froze in his chest.

Not five feet before him was a pit, faced in stone. It was clearly an old well, with slick, rock–mortared walls. He approached it gingerly, held his lighter over its dark maw. It appeared bottomless. All around were stacked heaps of ancient furniture, broken ceramic tiles, moldy books, and other junk.

He cast about desperately for a hiding place. There were plenty, but none would last long if these freaks on his tail were to search every nook and cranny. He circled the ancient well, then ran on, knocking over an old cane chair in his flight, which broke and tangled around his foot. He shook it off violently, then ducked beneath an archway at the far end of the storage area. He now found himself in a vast, crypt–like space, with ancient stone columns and groined ceilings. He flashed the lighter around: it was another crypt, different from the first, its walls and floors laid with marble slabs carved with crosses, weeping willows, and skulls, birth and death dates crudely carved into them. There were also rows of crude wooden sarcophagi. It was a mess, everything covered in dust, the stone walls bulging and collapsing. This was beyond ancient: it had to predate the Ville's occupation by decades, maybe centuries. Overhead, the voices had swelled: it sounded like the beginnings of a confrontation, if not a riot.

He heard the door of the well–room roughly opened behind him, heard the running of many feet.

Spying an arched passageway at the far end of the crypt, he ran for it, dashed along its length, turned at an intersection, chose another tunnel at random, then another. This one was cruder but seemed to date to a later time, more like a catacomb dug out of the ground, with niches carved into the hard clay walls, the tunnel cribbed with old timbers. Here, voodoo imagery reigned, with moth–eaten bags, bundles of decaying feathers, strange constructions and graffiti, and the occasional oddly shaped shrines.

Crawling through a low archway, he found himself in a chamber whose walls sported floor–to–ceiling niches, each one of which held one or more skeletons. Without thinking, he forced his way into the biggest niche, favoring his broken arm, pushing the bones aside, wriggling as far to the back as he could, and then awkwardly scraping the bones back around with his feet to form an obscuring wall.

Then he waited.

The searchers were closer now: he could hear their voices echoing strangely through the underground spaces. This was no good: they were going to find him eventually. He examined the niche with his lighter and discovered it retreated still deeper into the earth. By squirming he could wedge his way farther in, all the while sweeping back with his legs the bones he'd pushed aside. Fortunately, dampness kept any telltale dust from rising from his efforts, although an unpleasant moldy, decaying stench now enveloped him. Some of the corpses still sported shreds of clothing, hair, belt buckles, buttons, and shriveled–up shoes. It seemed that the occupants of the Ville placed the corpses of their dead in these deep niches — and just kept shoving the old corpses back as new ones were placed inside.

The slickness of the walls allowed him to move farther back along the slight downslope as he pushed as deeply as he could into the niche.

And then he waited, listening, as the voices of the searchers waxed and waned, gradually growing closer. And then they grew all too clear: his pursuers were now in the chamber.

He was far back in darkness, too far for a flashlight to penetrate. He heard rattling sounds: they were jabbing a pole into the burial niches, trying to root him out. In a moment the pole came sliding into his own crawl space, knocking the bones aside, but he was too deep and the pole fell short. It prodded this way and that before finally withdrawing. He heard them probing in successive niches. Then, suddenly, their voices rose in both pitch and excitement. He heard the sound of retreating footsteps and then, quite quickly, their voices died away.

Silence.

Had they been called back to defend the Ville? It was the only possible explanation.

He waited a minute, then another, just to be safe. Then he moved to extricate himself from the niche. It was useless: he discovered that, in his panic, he had wedged himself in very tightly. Too tightly. A horrible sense of claustrophobia washed over him; he struggled to master it, to regulate his breathing. He wriggled again but he was firmly stuck. The panic threatened to surge back, stronger.

It couldn't be. He'd gotten in; surely he could get out.

He bent his leg, wedged it between the ceiling and the floor, and tried to leverage himself out while pushing with his good hand. No luck. The walls were slippery with damp and slime and the pitch was slightly uphill. He struggled, grunting, his good hand scrabbling on the wetness. In a fresh wave of panic, he dug his nails into the moist earth and tried to push his way forward, breaking several of them in the process.

My God, he thought. I'm buried alive.

It was all he could do to keep from screaming.

Cemetery Dance

Chapter 69

It took Special Agent Pendergast ten minutes of wrong turns and doubling–back to reach the dumbwaiter leading up to the pantry. He pulled out the groaning, semi–conscious man, climbed in, and — by reaching through a panel in the top and grasping the cables — was able to haul himself up and out of the basement. When the dumbwaiter bumped to a stop against the shaft ceiling, Pendergast slid open the door and jumped out. From the church came the sounds of a loud disturbance, one that seemed to have drawn off all members of the Ville within earshot. That left him an escape route. He sprinted through the darkened rooms of the old rectory, out the side door, and down the crooked back alley. In less than five minutes he was once again in the woods of Inwood Hill Park. He shrugged out of the cloak and hood and dropped them on the leafy ground, pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

"Hayward," came the clipped answer.

"Pendergast here."

"Now why does hearing your voice fill me with dread?"

"Are you in the vicinity of Inwood Hill Park?"

"I'm with Chislett and his men."

"Ah, yes. Chislett. A testament to the ultimate futility of higher education. Now listen: D'Agosta is in the basements of the Ville. He might be in a difficult situation."

A brief silence. "Vinnie? Inside the Ville? What the hell for?"

"I think you can guess — he's looking for Nora Kelly. But I've just now realized Nora isn't there. There's a confrontation brewing —"

"It's not just brewing. It's fully brewed, and —"

Pendergast cut her off. "I think Vincent might need your help — and need it rather badly."

A silence. "And what, exactly, are you up to?"