Blood Of Angels (16 page)

The man from the street was standing on the other side.

There were beads of moisture on his long coat. He stood with his feet a little apart; solidly planted, very still, yet giving the impression of someone ready to move quickly in any direction he chose. He looked at Oz. His eyes were green and sharp.

'Are you Oswald K. Turner?'

'How did you get up here?'

'Came in the door, walked up the stairs.'

'Just opened the street door, right?'

'That's correct.'

'No. It was locked, dude.'

'I didn't notice.'

'Didn't… right. Whatever you say.' This wasn't something Oz was prepared to make an issue of. The longer he stood with this guy, the more he wondered if he was a cop. Or a soldier. Or a full-on Man in Black. Something heavy, that's for damned sure.

'Can I come in?'

Oz thought that was curiously polite of him, given he looked like a guy who was used to going pretty much where he wanted.

'Depends,' he said, warily. 'What do you actually want?'

The man reached into his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. Held it up so Oz could see. It was an interior page from the
Ledger,
printed three weeks before. The article carried the Oswald K. Turner byline and was entitled 'WHEN WILL THEY TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY?'

'I want to talk about this,' the man said. 'I want you to show it to me.'

'Go
out
there? It's raining.'

'I'm aware of that.'

'My car's in the shop,' Oz said.

'Mine isn't.'

'There's a serious walk even when you get there. Uphill. And it's on private land. And the owner doesn't like me much.'

The man didn't say anything, merely inclined his head about five degrees and kept looking at him. Oz got the picture. They were going to go see this thing, they were going now, and they were going if it started hailing, or snowing, or raining cows.

'Are you with… somebody, or what?'

'Me?' the man smiled, kind of. He looked out of practice. 'No. I'm just an avid reader.'

'And do you have a name?'

The man looked at him coolly for a moment, as if making a judgement.

'My name is John Zandt.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The man drove in silence, speaking only to get directions. Oz kept quiet too, exercising his observation skills. Maps and books were spread across the back seat. The car had six and a half thousand miles on the clock, the journey indicator said six thousand two hundred. It was possible the hire place hadn't remembered to reset it before giving the car to this guy or some previous fellow, but Oz didn't think so. The car smelt a little of cigarette smoke, but otherwise was factory fresh. Oz thought Mr Zandt had been on the road for a while, or drove fast, and possibly both.

Oz took him up 112 and then a right onto 51C — or Old Pond Lane, as it was called. It wasn't obvious why: the road did pass a pond on the left side, but the area was full of water features and there was nothing to suggest why this one was considered worth mentioning. Oz saw the guy glance at it as they passed, and guessed he was wondering the same thing. He had no way of knowing that the man was observing a resemblance between the small lake and one in Vermont he had stood by, a little over a year before; that he was trying to remember what his life had been like then, and could not recall.

Fifteen miles up the way Oz pointed to the right again, and they started up the rough one-lane road that skirted the edge of the Robertson state forest, a near-thousand acres of trees and foothills that people went hiking in once in a while.

At the end of it was a gate. 'Going to have to park here,' Oz said. 'Do the rest on foot, like I said. It's a couple miles.'

The man nodded, killed the engine. Got out. Waited for Oz to do the same. Then locked up. Waited for Oz to lead the way.

The first few hundred yards made Oz nervous, because it involved going up what was effectively Frank Pritchard's driveway. The Pritchard farm backed into the park and was surrounded by it on three sides. Getting where they were going was a lot easier if you took this short-cut through Frank's property, ducked back onto national land, and then came back onto private property at the end. Problem was Frank, who was not big on local heritage. Last time he'd seen Oz slinking around he had threatened to destroy the damned thing, with conviction, and while waving a shotgun.

They left the road without incident and dipped into the forest, where Oz soon stopped feeling he was leading the way. He had to point out the direction every now and then, but the other guy walked fifty per cent faster than Oz's usual pace, taking rises and stream beds as if it was all level ground, and before long Oz was red-faced and hot.

'Been here a while,' he panted, at the other guy's back. 'Another twenty minutes aren't going to make much difference.'

The man stopped, turned to look at him. But he did seem to walk a little more slowly after that.

Oz kept them on a rough north-east bearing up into the hills. 'Aw, crap,' he said, a little later. He stopped walking, and pointed. 'Bastard's repaired the fence.'

He rested a moment, hands on his knees. Part of him felt relieved. Where they were headed was now the other side of a new eight-foot wire fence. This meant they couldn't go on. Game over, weird guy. Been nice not knowing you.

The man walked up to the barrier, looked at it. Reached into his coat, and pulled out a small tool. In about forty-five seconds he had clipped a five-foot vertical slash in the wire.

'Oh, great,' Oz said, but the man was already climbing through.

Oz followed. What else was he going to do?

Once they were back on Pritchard's land, it wasn't far. About three hundred yards in the lee of a ridge, then a sharp left and over a small hill. The other side was a little steep, and they came down carefully. When they reached flat ground again they were faced with another very similar hillock, about six yards in front. Trees grew all around, and the undergrowth was tangled. Oz led the guy around to the right, then stopped.

'So there you are,' he said, with a touch of pride. 'There's your root cellar.'

He was about to say more, go into his spiel, but the guy held up his hand and so Oz shut up instead. The man walked closer to what they'd come to see. It wasn't anything outstanding to the naked eye, and in fact would have been easy to walk past without noticing, as people had for many, many years.

Hidden amongst tree roots and random bits of rock, there was a small rectangular recess in the side of the hill. The bottom of the recess was the ground; the sides were slightly bowed and consisted of stones, not unlike those which lay around, but set together in a dry wall construction to create supports about a foot wide and three feet high, a little over two feet apart. Across these lay a flat lintel stone. On top of that, earth.

The man squatted a moment and looked at the opening, tracing a finger over the joints between some of the stones. Then he stood and looked over it, sweeping his gaze across the hill behind. Pulled a camera out of his pocket and took a couple of pictures. Walked around the base of the hillock a little way, observing the relationship between the door and the hill.

Then, his eyes still on the feature, he came back to where Oz was waiting.

'Okay,' he said. 'Now you can talk.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

In 1869 a resident of a homestead near Lincoln — then a hamlet of little size or repute — was foraging for firewood in the forest when he came across something odd. A stone construction, something that looked like a very small doorway. The next day he and his son cleared the undergrowth, and moved a collection of large stones which appeared to have been inserted into the mouth of a tunnel beyond: it was hard to see how they could have got there otherwise, and what function they could have had except to impede access. The son was sent inside, with a candle. He discovered the tunnel continued into the hillside for approximately eight feet, before broadening into a round, arched chamber with a diameter and height of around three metres. That night the son, who was talented with a pencil, drew what he had seen. The next day his father went in himself, navigating the narrow tunnel with some difficulty. He was inside for forty minutes, and when he emerged he instructed the son that they were going to block up the entrance again. To prevent children or livestock becoming trapped inside, he said, though neither were common to the area. He was also firm that they speak of this to no one outside the family. The son recorded the events in a private diary, which was discovered in an archive in Lincoln's small museum — along with the drawing — over a hundred years later.

A local curiosity, nothing more. An abandoned root cellar, very likely, built to preserve vegetables in the lean early years, its stone construction enabling it to outlast any sign of the cabin it once served.

Except that on February 1, 1876, the
Boston Journal
had reported the discovery of another underground chamber near Dedham, south of that city. Over the course of the next five decades hundreds of similar chambers were discovered across New England — in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. Usually, but not always, associated with hillsides, they were of two types: simple covered passageways, often formed by taking advantage of natural crevices in rock; or more complicated beehive structures, like the Lincoln chamber, dry-walled and corbelled to arching ceilings. Both forms were usually covered and in-filled with earth, moulding them into the hillside or ridge where they were found.

It didn't take long for some people to notice the similarity of these structures to stone chambers built in Europe a long, long time before America was supposed to have been discovered. Mainstream archaeology was firm on the subject, however; these were root cellars, built by early colonial settlers — since moved on or died — and forgotten until rediscovery. Some of them (like the Dedham chamber itself) seemed to become mislaid again, and the phenomenon faded into obscurity.

There the matter rested until the 1960s, by which time enthusiastic amateurs had grown so clamorous in their desire to read something else into the chambers that the archaeologists had to take charge of the subject once again. The pros weighed in with a wealth of tedious data concerning the lack of pre-Columbian artefacts in the area, the fact that the distribution of the discovered structures largely mirrored known colonial settlement patterns in New England, and that oral and historical traditions confirmed the existence of stone root cellars. QED, in effect — now go away and leave this to the professionals. But the amateurs pointed out that some chambers seemed to have an astronomical orientation: one at the Gungywamp site in Connecticut, for example, which featured a channel markedly similar to one in the prehistoric New Grange monument in Ireland. An accident, said the archaeologists. But a sample of charcoal taken from a chamber in Windham County, Vermont, was radiocarbon dated to around 1405, said the amateurs. Carbon dating is notoriously tricky, the archaeologists scoffed (except when it backs up what
you
say, countered the amateurs). And even if most of them
are
root cellars, others are ludicrously large for that purpose, the amateurs further insisted, by now quite bad-temperedly.

'Whatever,' said the archaeologists, sticking their fingers in their ears. 'Go away.'

'But something tells me you know all this,' Oz muttered, tailing off. 'Half of it is in that piece in the
Ledger,
for a start.'

He had grown uncomfortable under the man's steady gaze, and for once in his life wanted to stop talking. Everybody's heard of the thousand-yard stare of the Vietnam vet. This guy's seemed to reach for maybe ten times that distance — which was unsettling, especially if it was boring straight through your head.

'What's inside?'

Oz laughed. 'Yeah, right. You think I've been
in
there?'

'You've written about this place three times that I know about, and you've never gone inside?'

'Look at the entrance,' Oz said. 'One of the questions over these things is why the openings are usually too small for easy access. Now look at me, dude. How's your spatial awareness? You see me fitting up there? Even if there weren't a shitload of rocks in the way?'

There was silence for a few moments, and then Oz glumly watched the man taking off his coat.

===OO=OOO=OO===

It took over a half-hour. The rain had thinned to little more than mist by the time the guy was having to stick his torso into the hole to reach far enough to pull out more rocks. Oz did what he'd been told, which was to take the ones he was passed and put them in a neat pile to the side. Then there was a slight but distinct change in the echoed sound of the man's breath, and he emerged slowly, pulling with him a rock far larger — and flatter — than any of the others.

'It's open,' he said. He looked at Oz.

'Not that I don't want to, man,' Oz said, and now that the way was clear, he really sort of did. 'But I'm a little too old, too chunky, and
way
too claustrophobic. Went in one of these up in Vermont eighteen months ago, had a much bigger entrance, and I still felt like I was being buried alive.'

The guy smiled very slightly at this, but Oz didn't think it was anything to do with mockery. More as if Oz had said something unexpectedly close to the mark.

Then he was down there, only his feet still visible in the mouth of the entrance, and soon nothing left at all.

Oz sat down on the pile of rocks and waited.

After ten minutes he leaned over and peered up the tunnel. A couple of yards away he could see a brief sweep of a powerful flashlight. The guy came prepared, that was for sure.

Oz sat back on the rocks. It was raining again and he wished he had a coffee, but otherwise he was feeling kind of psyched. Only a few hours before he'd been rueing a very average Monday morning, wishing something would happen. Well, it had. This, without question, was something happening. He had been to this place maybe fifteen, twenty times over the years. Sat close to where he was now, wondering what the purpose of the structure was. And now someone was inside, maybe finding out.