Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(129)
Her body ached from the beating she had taken at the hands of the man she had killed, and her ear felt as if it were afire. She had left the Tylenol in the car. Didn’t matter. The pain would not incapacitate her. It focused her instead, sharpened her senses.
The thick fog resisted the power of light, and the flashlight beam proved a feeble tool. The fog did not only pool and eddy and creep, but also clung to surfaces in a way not foglike. Within the general murk, thicker shrouds grew like moss on tool-storage sheds, on pallets of concrete blocks and stacked crates of cobblestones. It draped backhoes and forklifts and other equipment like sheets thrown over furniture in a house closed for the season.
She became aware of—or imagined—low swift shapes paralleling her in the cloaking mist. They were pale-gray and featureless, as low as dogs or bobcats, but they were neither of those animals, slinkier than dogs and larger than bobcats, larger also than coyotes, wolfish and elusive. She saw no eye shine, and if they were more than shadows of a threat conjured by her mind, they were as silent as spirits.
The property would feel huge in broad daylight; but at night and in this murk, it seemed to be even more immense, a county unto itself. Bibi more sensed than saw the swooping forms of completed and half-finished buildings akin to those in the scale model in the construction trailer. Twice she came upon enormous cranes balanced by massive counterweights, their girdered booms vanishing high into the mist, like fossilized upright carcasses from the Jurassic period.
She moved at a turtle’s pace, and the farther east she went toward the back of the property, the more finished the project seemed to be, as if they had begun construction there and worked westward. At times the compacted earth gave way to cobblestone paths, to plazas paved with limestone inlaid with patterns in quartzite and granite, glimpsed through the turbid shifting mist. She circled the raised base of a fountain with a currently dry pool that must have been fifty feet in diameter, from the center of which rose what might have been, had the fog relented, a school of bronze dolphins leaping together, perhaps to spout water when the pool was filled and the pumps were started.
Bibi began to feel as if she had lost her way in an amorphous maze that foiled her by continually altering the route that would allow it to be successfully navigated, but then she saw lights ahead. They were faint at first, and curious, two measured series of large spheres, the first row perhaps fifteen feet above the ground, the second row about fifteen feet above the first. As they grew slowly brighter, she suspected that they weren’t floating spheres, but were instead windows formed like portholes, each six or seven feet in diameter. Her suspicion was confirmed when she drew close enough to make out the muntins that radiated from the center of each window and held the pie-shaped panes in place.
Although she could at first perceive the structure’s shape only by inference from the size and placement of the portholes, it had the feeling of a gargantuan vessel. She approached it with a shiver of wonder, as perhaps anyone in 1912 would have, from dockside, looked up with awe at the towering Titanic. Even within a few yards of the place, when she determined that it was not a vessel but a building, she could not discern more than a fraction of its details, though she sensed that it was longer than a football field, domed like an airplane hangar, and without windows on the ground floor. Walking alongside the structure, sliding a hand over the curved wall, she decided that it was skinned in metal, and she felt large, regularly placed exterior ribs forged of steel.
By the time she reached one end of the building and found a flat wall, the wolfish stalkers, real or imagined, attended her in greater numbers, as though they had been trained especially to protect this special edifice to which Bibi now sought an entrance. They were shadows of shadows. Surely immaterial. Except, now she heard subtle panting and the tick-click of claws on paving stones. She had the pistol in hand, wet with condensed fog and perhaps with Hoffline-Vorshack’s blood, but she had little faith that it would prove effective against the shadow horde—or even against one of them.
A fuzzy reflection of the flashlight flared in a matte-finished steel door, about five feet wide and eight tall, rounded at the top and protected by an overhanging cowl, medieval in spite of the material from which it had been crafted. There was no door handle or anything like a conventional keyhole, nor a slot into which she might insert a key card. The only possible lock release was a large oval hole in the wide steel frame encircling the door.
Bibi stood defeated for a moment but then remembered. From a pocket of her blazer, she withdrew the electronic key attached by a chain to the Lucite fob in which a dead wasp took wing forever.
The house in Cameo Highlands was to music what Toba Ringelbaum’s house was to books. Ganesh Patel, surf legend and audio-video god, had designed, manufactured, and sold a lot of through-house music systems; but in his own home, he had a standalone system in every room. The issues were volume, clarity, and ideal reverberation, and he was always making improvements to his equipment setups.
When Pax and Pogo stopped by to get the repaired tape recorder, the living room boomed with music Pax had never heard before. It was Hawaiian sway and steel guitar, it was rockin’ piano, it was tied together by backup harmony worthy of Motown, and the lead singer sounded like Elton John if Elton had been born in Nashville and grown up listening to Johnny Cash. But it was good. Their host turned the music down just far enough that they didn’t have to shout to hear one another.