Cemetery Dance (43 page)

The protesters were still streaming in the shattered front doors of the church, filling up the space, while the last of the Ville residents disappeared. The only one remaining was the leader, Bossong, who stood like a statue, immovable, still bleeding from the forehead, watching the unfolding scene with baleful eyes.

As the last of the protesters packed into the church, Plock mounted the raised platform. "People!" he cried, raising his hands.

A hush fell on the multitude. He tried to ignore Bossong, standing in the corner, staring, projecting his malevolent presence throughout the room.

"We need to stay together!" Plock cried. "The torturers have gone to ground — we need to find them, flush them out! And above all, we must save the woman!"

Suddenly, from the corner, Bossong spoke. "This is our home."

Plock turned to him, his face contorting with fury. "Your home! This place of torture? You don't deserve a home!"

"This is our home," he repeated, his voice low. "And this is how we worship our gods."

Plock felt filled with rage. "How you worship your gods? By cutting the throats of helpless animals? By kidnapping and killing people?"

"Leave now. Leave while you can."

"Oooh, I'm scared now. So where's the woman? Where've you got her locked up?"

The crowd seethed with angry agreement.

"We honor the animals by sacrificing them for the nourishment of — our protector. With the blessings of our gods, we —"

"Spare us that crap!" Plock quivered with indignation as he shouted at the robed man. "You tell your people they're finished, that they'd better move on. Otherwise we're driving them out! You got that? Go somewhere else with your deviant religion!"

Bossong raised a finger and pointed it at Plock. "I fear it is already too late for you," he said quietly.

"I'm quaking in my boots!" Plock spread his arms in a welcoming gesture. "Strike me down, gods of the animal torturers! Go ahead!"

At that instant there was a sudden movement in one of the dark transepts of the church, a gasp from the protesters, a moment of hesitation. And then someone screamed and the crowd surged back like a rebounding wave, people pressing into the people behind them, shoving them into those farther behind — as a grotesque, misshapen figure lumbered into the wavering half–light. Plock gaped in horror and disbelief at the creature — but no, it was no creature. It was human. He stared at the scabby lips, rotten teeth, broad flat face; at the pale, slimy musculature draped in filthy rags. One hand held a bloody knife. Its stench filled the room, and it tilted its head back and bellowed like a wounded calf. A single, milky eye rolled in its head — then settled on Plock.

It took a step forward, then two, the thighs moving with a kind of slow, creeping deliberation. Plock was frozen, rooted, unable to move, to look away, even to speak.

In the sudden hush, there was a rustle of cloth and Bossong knelt, bowing his head and holding out his hands in supplication.

"Envoie," he said, quietly, almost sadly.

Instantly, the man–thing bounded straight at the platform with a crab–like shuffle, leapt onto it, opened his rotten mouth, and fell upon Plock.

Plock finally found his voice and tried to scream as the creature savaged him, but already it was too late for sound to emerge from his severed windpipe, and he expired in agonizing silence.

It was over very, very quickly.

Cemetery Dance

Chapter 76

Pendergast shined his penlight around the basement. The narrow beam revealed a chaos of bizarre objects, but he ignored them, focusing his attention on the basement wall — which consisted of flat, rough pieces of granite, stacked and carefully mortared.

His face tightened with recognition.

Now he turned his attention to the junk crowding the basement. Rising before him was an Egyptian obelisk of cracked plaster, weeping with damp and spiderwebbed with mildew. Beside it stood the truncated turret of a medieval castle, slapped together out of rotting plywood, complete with crenellations and machicolations, perhaps one–tenth actual size; next to that was a heap of broken plaster statues, stacked like cordwood, in which Pendergast could make out smaller–scale copies of the David, the Winged Victory, and the Laocoön, arms and legs and heads all tangled up, broken fingers lying about the cement floor beneath. The light revealed, in turn, a fiber–glass shark, several plastic skeletons, a primitive tribal relic carved from Styrofoam, and a rubber human brain with a bite taken out of it.

The extensive clutter made for slow going, and it prevented him from grasping the full dimensions of the belowground areas. As he moved through the eerie piles of cast–off movie sets — for that was clearly what they were — he kept the penlight low, moving as swiftly and silently as he could manage. Though scattered and jumbled without hint of organization, the props and the concrete floor they lay on were unusually clean and dust free, attesting to an excessive interest on the part of Esteban.

The light flashed this way and that as Pendergast moved deeper into the clutter of Hollywoodiana. The claustrophobic spaces continued to branch out underground, room after room, stretching beyond the current footprint of the house, all manner of odd and unusual nooks and crannies, each stuffed with old props in various stages of decrepitude and decay, most from the grand historical epics for which Esteban was known. The basement was beginning to feel endless; it must have belonged to an earlier, even larger building occupying the site of Esteban's mansion.

Esteban. He would return home shortly, if he hadn't already. Time was passing — precious time that Pendergast could not afford to waste.

He moved to the next cellar — once apparently a smokehouse, now stacked with a witch–dunking chair, a gibbet, a set of stocks — and a spectacularly realistic guillotine from the French Revolution, blade poised to drop, the tumbrel below filled with severed wax heads, eyes open, mouths frozen in screams.

He moved on.

Reaching the end of the final cellar, he approached a rusty iron door, unlocked and standing ajar. He eased it open, surprised to find that the heavy door moved silently on oiled hinges. A long, narrow tunnel stretched ahead into darkness — a tunnel that at first glance appeared to have been dug out of the raw earth. Pendergast moved closer and touched a wall — and discovered it wasn't earth at all, but plaster painted to look like dirt. Another movie set, this one retrofitted into what had evidently been an older tunnel. From the direction, Pendergast guessed it led to the barn; such tunnels connecting house and barn were a common feature of nineteenth–century farms.

He shined the light down the murky passage. In places the fake plaster walls had peeled off, revealing the same stacked granite stones that had been used to build the house basement — and that were evident in the video of Nora.

He began moving cautiously down the tunnel, shading the pen–light with his hand. If Nora was imprisoned on the grounds — and he was sure she was — she would have to be in the barn basement.

*        *        *

Esteban entered the barn through the side door and treaded softly in the vast space, fragrant with the smell of hay and old plaster. All around him loomed the props he had so assiduously collected and stored, at great expense, from his many films. He kept them for sentimental reasons he had never been able to explain. Like all movie props they had been built in haste, slapped together with spit and glue, designed to last only as long as the shooting. Now they were rapidly decaying. And yet he was deeply fond of them, could not in fact bear to part with them, see them broken up and hauled off. He had passed many a delicious evening strolling among them, brandy in hand, touching them, admiring them, fondly recalling the glory days of his career.

Now they were serving an unexpected purpose: slowing down that FBI agent, keeping him occupied and distracted, while at the same time helping to conceal Esteban and his movements.

Esteban threaded through the props to the back of the barn, where he unlocked and unbolted an iron door. A set of stairs descended into cool darkness, down into the barn's capacious underground rooms — once upon a time the fruit cellars, cheese aging rooms, root cellars, meat–curing vaults, and wine cellars of the grand hotel that had occupied the site. Even these spaces, the deepest on the estate, were chock–full of old props. Except for the old meat locker he had cleared out to imprison the girl.

Like a blind man in his own house, Esteban made his way through the mass of old props, not even bothering with a flashlight, moving surely and confidently in the dark. Soon he had reached the mouth of the tunnel that led from the barn to the house. Now he snapped on a small pocket LED; in the bluish glow he could make out the fake plaster walls and cribbing left over from shooting Breakout Sing Sing, in which he had used this very tunnel as a set — and saved a tidy sum. About twenty feet past the tunnel mouth, a plywood panel had been set into the wall, a small angle–iron lever protruding from it. Esteban gave it a quick inspection and found it to be in good condition. It had been a simple mechanism to begin with, requiring no electricity, only the force of gravity to operate — in the movie business, contraptions had to be reliable and easy to work, because it was well known that what could break, would break, inevitably when the cameras were rolling and the star was, finally, sober. Out of curiosity he had tested the device just the year before — a device he had designed himself — and found that it still functioned just as well as on the day he shot the immortal escape scene of the movie that had almost won him an Academy Award. Almost.

Flushing at the thought of the lost Oscar, he switched off his light and listened. Yes: he could hear the faint footsteps of the approaching agent. The man was about to make a gruesome discovery. And then, of course, there was no way the poor FBI agent — no matter how transcendentally clever — could possibly anticipate what would happen to him next.

Cemetery Dance

Chapter 77

Harry R. Chislett, deputy chief of the Washington Heights North district, stood at the central control point on Indian Road, a radio in each hand. Faced with an unprecedented and utterly unexpected development, he had nevertheless — so he considered — adapted with remarkable speed and economy. Who could have foreseen so many protesters, so quickly, all moving with the ruthless precision and purpose of a single mind? Yet Chislett had risen to the occasion. What a tragedy, then, that — for all his probity — he was surrounded by incompetence and ineptitude. His orders had been misinterpreted, improperly carried out, even ignored. Yes: there was no other word for it than tragedy.

Picking up his field glasses, he trained them on the entrance to the Ville. The protesters had managed to get inside, and his men had gone after them. The reports were chaotic and contradictory; God only knew what was really going on. He would go in himself except that a commander must not place his own person in danger. There might be violence; perhaps even murder. It was the fault of his men in the field, and that was how his report would most emphatically read.

He raised the radio in his right hand. "Forward position alpha," he rapped out. "Forward position alpha. Move up to defense position."

The radio cracked and sparked.

"Forward position alpha, do you read?"

"Position alpha, roger," came the voice. "Please verify that last order."

"I said, move up to defense position." It was outrageous. "In the future, I'll thank you to please obey my orders without asking me to repeat them."

"I just wanted to make sure, sir," came the voice again, "because two minutes ago you told us to fall back and —"

"Just do as you're told!"

From the gaggle of officers milling around confusedly on the baseball diamond, one figure in a dark suit separated itself and came trotting over. Inspector Minerva.

"Yes, Inspector," said Chislett, careful to let his voice radiate a dignified, McClellan–like tone of command.

"Reports are coming back, sir, from inside the Ville."

"You may proceed."

"There is significant conflict between the inhabitants and the protesters. There are reports of injuries, some serious. The interior of the church is being torn up. The streets of the Ville are filling with displaced residents."

"I'm not surprised."

Minerva hesitated.

"Yes, Inspector?"

"Sir, once again I'd recommend you take … well, firmer action."

Chislett looked at him. "Firmer action? What the devil are you talking about?"

"With all due respect, sir, when the protesters began their march on the Ville I recommended you immediately call for backup units. We've got to have more people."

"We have sufficient manpower," he said fussily.

"I also recommended that our officers move quickly to take up positions across the road to the Ville, to block the march."

"That is precisely what I ordered."

Minerva cleared his throat. "Sir … you ordered all units to maintain their positions."

"I gave no such command!"

"It's not too late for us to —"

"You have your orders," Chislett said. "Please carry them out." He glared at the man as he dropped his eyes and mumbled a "Yes sir," while walking slowly back to the gaggle of officers. Honestly, it was nothing but incompetence, incompetence, even from those he had hoped to rely on the most.

He raised his binoculars again. Now, this was interesting. He could see protesters — first just a few, but as he watched, more and more — running out of the Ville and back down the drive, faces contorted with fear. His officers were finally flushing them out. Sprinkled among them were robed and cowled figures, residents of the Ville itself. All were streaming out of the Ville, sprinting away from the ancient wooden structures, falling over one another in a panicked effort to get as far away as possible.

Excellent, excellent.

Lowering the binoculars, he raised his radio. "Forward position delta, come in."

After a moment, the radio squawked. "Forward position delta, Wegman speaking."