Crimson Shore (Agent Pendergast, #15)(14)
He walked along the trail, checking the rude map. The nineteenth-century working waterfront, long abandoned, was around the next bend of the estuary. As he turned the corner, it came into view: a series of old wooden pilings extending in parallel rows of stubs into the bay, the decking long gone. Massive granite pilings, formed of rough-cut blocks, still stood along the shore—and would stand to the end of time—the granite foundations of loading docks and wharves, along with a ruined fish-processing plant. McCool had carefully mapped this area, using historical documents and photographs to re-create the waterfront of the 1880s. This was where the draggers and seiners and coasters had plied their trade, having endured a long economic decline from the whaling heyday of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The moribund waterfront had finally succumbed to the infamous “Yankee Clipper” hurricane of 1938. The modern waterfront had been rebuilt farther up the estuary, in a more protected location. But the town had never really recovered.
As the rotting piers came into view, McCool heard a sound behind him and turned to find the man approaching him at a determined rate. And now he noticed what a peculiar and frightening figure this was: with a strangely warped face, a Brillo-brush of wiry red hair, disturbing wet lips thicker on one side than the other, a splotch of diseased-like freckles, a three-pointed beard, and a projecting brow with a single bushy eyebrow straight across. McCool thought he knew everyone in town, but he had never seen this fellow before. He was the stuff of nightmares.
He carried a bayonet in one hand, which—as he approached with fast stride and gleaming eyes—he unsheathed with a zing of steel.
With an involuntary cry of confusion and fear, McCool turned and ran toward the old piers. His pursuer also broke into a run, keeping pace, not closing in or dropping behind, almost as if driving him forward.
McCool cried out for help once, then again, but he was far from the town and his voice was swallowed by the vast marshlands beyond the rotting piers.
In an effort to escape his pursuer, he plunged off the trail, scrambled up an embankment above the first pier, vaulted over a stone foundation, and clawed his way through a thicket of raspberry bushes. He could hear his pursuer crashing along behind.
“What do you want?” McCool cried, but received no answer.
The brambles tore at his pants and shirt, scratching his face and hands. He burst out the other side of the thicket and continued along the contours of the embankment, stumbling past a rotting, caved-in fish house and a tangle of rusted cables and chains.
This was insane. He was being pursued by a lunatic.
He sobbed in panic, gasping, sucking in air. In his terror he tripped over another broken foundation and rolled partway down the embankment, regained his feet, then sprinted into a broad area of marsh grass. Maybe he could lose the man in the grass. He pushed forward, pinwheeling his arms, pressing through the thick grasses. He glanced back; the red-haired lunatic was still following, eyes like coals, sweeping effortlessly along, bayonet in hand.
“Help!” he screamed. “Someone help me!”
A flock of blackbirds burst upward from a swath of cattails in a mass of beating wings. There was no way to outrun this dogged pursuer. He was just being pushed deeper and deeper into the marsh.
The water. If he could just reach the water. He was a strong swimmer. The lunatic might not swim as well.
He veered left, toward the heart of the marsh. Now the grass was so high he couldn’t see ahead, and he stumbled forward, bashing aside the sharp grass with his arms, barely noticing the cuts and slashes it inflicted. On and on he plunged, hearing the crash and swish of his pursuer, now only a dozen feet behind. The bay or a marsh channel would be ahead somewhere. Something, for God’s sake, something…
And suddenly the grasses ended and he burst onto a mudflat, stretching ahead fifty yards to a swift-flowing channel of water.
No help for it; he leapt into the mud, sinking to his knees. With a cry of fear, he struggled, flopping and sucking and flailing through the muck. He turned and saw the red-haired freak standing at the edge of the grass, bayonet in hand, his entire face distorted into a grotesque grinning visage.
“Who are you?!” he screamed.
The man melted back into the grass and disappeared.
For a moment McCool stood in the muck, gasping for breath, coughing, his hands on his knees, feeling as if his lungs might fall out. What to do now? He looked around. The channel lay fifty feet farther on, a muddy stream going out with the tide. On the far side was more endless marsh.
Never would he go back into that nightmare of grass: not with that maniac lurking in there. Never. And yet the only way out of this hell was back through the grass, or else to take to the water and drift out with the tide.
He stood there, heart pounding. The light was fading; the water ran on and the blackbirds wheeled about, crying.
He slopped his way toward the water channel. The mud grew firmer as he approached the edge, where he paused. The mud was cold—and the water, he knew, would be colder still. But he had no choice.
He waded in. It was very cold. He pushed off, letting the current take him, and he began to swim downstream, burdened by the tweed jacket and mud-soaked trousers and heavy leather shoes. But he was an experienced swimmer and kept himself above water, taking long strokes, making fast time, the marsh grass slipping by. The channel narrowed, the current growing swifter, the grass closing in on both sides. He was heading toward the sea. That was all he could focus on. Thank God, he would soon see the beach, where he could climb out and get back to the safety of the Inn.