Crimson Shore (Agent Pendergast, #15)(85)

He went toward the Dead Ends. After the woman.





55



From the time of her childhood, Constance had been no stranger to the dark. Despite the disorientation, she moved with a sense of purpose.

The walls were damp and dripping. Sometimes her fingers encountered spiders or millipedes that scrambled off in a panic when she brushed past them. She could hear rats, too, rustling softly, squeaking and skittering out of her way. The air smelled increasingly of fungus, slime, and rot. There was no movement of air, less and less oxygen. Clearly, there was no outlet in this direction.

Feeling along the wall, she came to a corner. She paused, listening. The only sound she could hear was the low rumble of surf, the vibration moving through the ground itself, and the faint drip-drip of water. All was quiet.

She slipped around the corner, her feet finding purchase on the damp floor, her hands tracing the wall. She brushed past an insect—a centipede—and it fell down her sleeve, wriggling frantically against her skin, and she paused to gently shake it out. She once again considered trying to find a place to hide, but rejected that as a strategy of last resort; the demon Morax certainly knew these tunnels better than she. With only a stiletto, and her hands shackled, she had no hope of killing him. After what he’d done to Gavin—what she had seen, and what she had heard—she knew she could expect the same from the creature.

There was no escape in this direction. She would have to get past Morax and get out the way she had come in.





A. X. L. Pendergast turned away from the two eviscerated bodies. He backtracked and ran down a side tunnel in the direction the screams had come from, even as they now died away with an ominous rapidity. But almost immediately he came to another division in the tunnel; he paused to listen intently, but in the fresh silence was no longer able to determine from which direction the screams had come.

The extent of the tunnels surprised him. They appeared to have been constructed over a long period of time, perhaps even centuries—clearly, the style of their building changed from one section to another, indicating the work of many years. They had a similar feeling to the catacombs that he had once explored in Rome: a secret place of worship. But there was more to these tunnels, as the bizarre symbols on the walls, the smell of occupation, and other stenches far worse, would attest.

Examining the ground, he took the left-hand branch, as that seemed to his eye the more traveled. It, too, branched several times, but he continued to stay on the more beaten path. After a few minutes, the tunnel turned a corner and he found himself staring at prison bars blocking the way ahead. Set into the bars was a metal door that yawned open. The smell emanating from the cul-de-sac beyond was so foul that it suggested long occupation with an utter lack of either hygiene or toilet facilities.

He flashed his light into the rude cell and saw it ran about a hundred feet back, ending in a wall, with a sleeping area of filthy straw, an overflowing hole for necessities, and a broken table. A steel collar, studded with sharp points, was fastened to a leash of metal links. It was hanging on one of the bare stone walls. Kneeling, he observed the traces of the occupant in the damp, sandy floor—a welter of human bare feet, matching the prints he had been tracking from Exmouth. This was where the killer had been locked up—for a very long time.

He straightened and, shining his penlight, glanced at the padlock that once held the door, now lying open on the ground. What had initially been a cursory inspection suddenly became riveted attention. He picked up the lock and gave it a minute inspection, at one point removing his portable loupe and examining the mechanism. It was an almost new Abloy shrouded steel padlock with a top-loading cylinder, invulnerable to bumping. A most serious lock indeed, and one that would have challenged even Pendergast himself. Yet he could see that it had been interfered with in a subtle, clever, and devious way, so as to make it appear locked when it wasn’t.

Something about the particular method of interference seemed chillingly familiar.

After completing his inspection, he stepped inside the prison and walked to the far end of the cul-de-sac, stepping over filth, old chicken carcasses, pieces of rotting hide, and broken marrow bones. Greasy cockroaches scurried away from the beam of his light. Against the far wall, manacles, cuffs, and chains lay sprawled on the ground, open. These also were advanced, high-tech devices, of recent manufacture. Each manacle and cuff had its own small lock; Pendergast once again examined each lock in turn, his pale features becoming like marble.

The jailers had gone to great care and expense to keep the prisoner absolutely secure. But on their last approach to this jail, they would not have known the locks on the cuffs and manacles had been tampered with—that the creature would be able to free itself and attack them.

No doubt those jailers were the two bodies he had come across in an earlier passage.

As he examined the final lock, his normally steady hand began to tremble, and he dropped the chain. His knees gave way and he sank to the ground in disbelief.

A sound reached his ears. After a long moment, he shook off his paralysis and rose to his feet. Constance was still somewhere in this complex of tunnels—and now, it seemed she was in far greater danger than he had realized.

Forcing his mind back to the issue at hand, he leapt up and raced through the dank corridors, again following the main path, heedless now of the noise that he made. After several twists and turns he arrived at a wide passage leading to a large, ponderously decorated, pentagonal room, lit by candles and dominated by an altar. He stopped, peering around with his silvery eyes. A ropy tangle of flesh and bone lay on the altar. It was so distorted it took Pendergast a moment to realize the tangle had once been human. A muscle was still twitching: a neurological artifact. The man was very recently dead. But where was the killer who had just completed this work of death and dismemberment?