Deadline (12 page)

Colin looked at his watch. It was coming up on 5 p.m. The sky was already dark and getting darker by the minute. If they were going to try and get a good look at this place, they were going to have to do it soon. He didn’t want to be stuck in the basement in the dark if the battery on the flashlight suddenly decided to cut out.

He did a clockwise circuit of the building. All of the second floor appeared to be gone with the exception of a few old crossbeams that were lying at angles against the floor. The first floor was surprisingly intact, although it had been taken over by a wide variety of wildlife, plants and garbage over the years since the fire. At the back of the building was an old stone staircase that led down to a darkened entrance into the basement. Colin examined it carefully. A large number of loose stones and timbers had fallen over it, but it still looked more or less passable.

“You said they were in the basement?” he said.

Janice nodded. Just looking at the dark and forbidding staircase was enough to extinguish any desire she had to see what was down there. “Uh huh.”

Colin took a deep breath and then started making his way carefully down the stairs, stepping over the fallen beams as he went. The stones weren’t going anywhere, but the beams had been exposed to the elements for a long time and were probably as brittle as driftwood.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Janice said nervously as she followed him. She was careful to step exactly where he stepped, like a soldier following a trail of footprints through a minefield.

“Hey, this was your idea,” Colin said. “Anything happens to us, I’m blaming you.”

Colin swerved around the largest of the support beams and reached the door at the bottom. At one time, it had been closed off with a large sheet of plywood, but that had long since been pried away and was now lying mostly on the ground, covered in graffiti. He turned on the flashlight and stepped through the opening.

“This could all come down any time,” Janice whispered as she followed.

“It’s been standing like this for the last seven years,” Colin observed. “I think it’ll last another seven minutes.”

The inside was dark, chilly, and smelled strongly of stagnant water. Rain dripped down constantly between the cracks in the ceiling. The flashlight didn’t provide much in the way of illumination. As far as Colin could see, he might as well have walked in with a candle.

On his left were a couple of rows of wooden benches. One of the side panels had come loose on the first row and it had tumbled forward onto the stone floor. Colin stepped forward and examined them more closely. Janice followed close behind.

“Is it my imagination,” he said, “or do these look more like church pews than ordinary benches?”

“I think you’re right, Janice said, pointing to a slot built onto the back of the front bench. “Look at those. They look like they’re designed to hold hymnals or something like that.”

Colin turned towards the front of the room, where there was a raised wooden platform that looked vaguely like a stage.

Or an altar, he thought.

It was three steps, which made it about two feet high. He stepped carefully up. The wood groaned and sagged under his feet. He tried to only stand where he thought there might be a crossbeam. That might have a better chance of supporting his weight and keep him from dropping right through. Just looking at it was probably enough to require a tetanus shot.

One of the roof beams had fallen down over the centre. Colin shone the flashlight down on what looked like a circular metal grate that was built into the centre of the platform.

“What the hell is this?” he wondered out loud, kneeling down to examine it.

“I don’t know,” Janice whispered, circling around so that she was standing next to him. “Look, there’s some sort of cross.”

She was right. Colin realized that he had missed it because it blended in with all the other fallen pieces of wood. It was lying underneath the roof beam. He played the flashlight from one end to the other. It was tough to estimate, but he guessed it was probably seven or eight feet high and six feet wide. He could see the remains of some sort of metal framework that had held it in place.

“Looks too big to have mounted on the wall,” he said, looking at the wall behind the altar, which, because of the raised height of the platform, was only about six feet.

“I don’t think it was,” Janice said. “Look there.” She pointed at a spot where the metal frame appeared to have twisted and snapped loose from the platform. “I think it was mounted right here on the floor.”

“Why would you mount a cross on the floor where no one in the congregation can see it?” Colin asked.

Janice didn’t reply. She was circling around to the back of the platform. She motioned Colin to follow her with the flashlight. They found a pipe leading out the back of the platform and into a hole cut into the ground. To Colin, it looked to be about the same size as one that a builder would cut for a sump pump. The hole was full of debris and black, muddy water. It was impossible to tell how deep it was.

“What is this?” Colin asked, mystified.

Janice reached over and took the flashlight out of his hand, pointing it back up at the altar, panning slowly across each item as she spoke.

“Well, say something makes a mess up there…it falls down through the metal grate…goes along the pipe…and then empties into this.”

Colin took a moment to process this. “So we’re talking what?
Human sacrifices
?”

Janice nodded. “I’d call that a fair working hypothesis.”

Colin looked back at the altar and then up at the ceiling. “I don’t know about you, but if that were me up there, I’d make a hell of a lot of noise. What about the people on the main floor?”

“There may not have been anyone on the main floor,” Janice said. “Or they may have performed their rituals late at night when there was no one else around. We’re almost a mile from the town. They could do just about anything short of a rock concert down here and no one else would hear it.”

Colin looked back at the makeshift well, which suddenly appeared a lot more ominous than it had a moment before. The urge to leave was also getting stronger by the minute. A thousand-year-old murderous cult was one thing. But this was a murderous cult that had been in operation less than two hours from where he lived right now. And seven years didn’t relegate their activities to the foggy mists of ancient history, either.

Janice handed the flashlight back to Colin, then took her camera out of her backpack and started to take pictures. Colin caught a flicker of an image as the flash went off and went over to the wall to examine it more closely. It was hard to see at first because the wall was covered with so much dust, debris and mould, but it was there.

“Hey Janice,” he said. “Come check this out.”

Janice stopped taking pictures and walked over to where Colin was standing at the back of the platform. When she saw what he was looking at, her breath got stuck in her throat.

It was the symbol of the order: a Templar-style cross surrounded by two intertwining ropes of thorns. Somebody had carved it into the back wall of the basement. The outer ring was about the same circumference as a car tire.

“Oh my God,” she gasped. “I was right! They really were here!”

Colin moved closer to examine the detail of the carving job. Despite all the dirt and debris, he could see that it was a remarkably skilled job. Whoever had done it had known what they were doing and had taken their time. It hadn’t just been chipped out by somebody with a hammer and chisel and a few hours to spare.

“Based on the quality of the engraving, I’m guessing they were here for quite a while,” he said. “Or they were planning to be. We should probably try to find out more about that fire. Do you know how old this building is?”

Janice took a step back to try to get some pictures of the image. It was hard to do because so much of it was obscured. “No. But I plan to find out.”

T
hey combed through the wreckage for another half hour, but didn’t find anything else that might have been connected to the Knights. Colin found what appeared to be a closet in the back with some empty food containers and a torn overcoat, which led them to believe that the place had probably been used intermittently as a shelter for homeless people or hitchhikers. Janice took a couple of hundred photos of anything that looked interesting, transferring them instantly onto a memory stick.

“That way, even if I drop the camera in that well, the pictures are still safe,” she said.

“Good thing,” Colin agreed. “Because if you did drop it in that well, I don’t think either of us would be reaching in there to get it.”

They were both starving on the way home and stopped in to a pub for something to eat. It was just another chain faux-Irish place, but Colin didn’t care. He was just happy to be out of the dark basement. His mind kept flashing back to the grate over the floor and all of the horrible things that might have happened there. It took three large gulps of his first beer before the feeling started to go away.

“I still can’t believe we found it!” Janice said, paging through the photos as they waited for their food.

Colin wasn’t feeling quite the same vibrating sense of excitement. Having opened a locker door on Terrence Devane’s severed head and a shipping box on Shalene Nakogee’s hand, he had more personal experience of what the Knights were capable of than Janice did, and it filled him with a creeping sense of unease. These guys were out there somewhere. Not a thousand years ago and a million miles away, but right here and now.

Added to that was the fact that Janice was making real progress with her investigation and, so far, he had diddly squat.

“I wonder how many of them there are,” Colin mused. “It could just be one guy, but I get the feeling it’s bigger than that.”

Janice put the camera down. “Were you able to find out anything more from the cops?”

Colin shook his head. “I think they’ve seen enough for me for the moment. I did stop by security because I got a tip that Devane was involved in some sort of incident at the auto repair bay. Whatever it was, it was enough to get him kicked out of school. Security had the record of the file in the computer, but the file itself had vanished.”

Their food arrived. Janice had ordered a BBQ chicken wrap and Colin a club sandwich. Neither of those things were exactly a staple of Irish cuisine, but it was food, and they were both hungry.

“That’s weird,” Janice said after swallowing her first bite. “What do you think happened?”

“I think Ludnick pulled it,” Colin said, chewing. “But I don’t know why. Yet.”

“Are you gonna try again?”

Colin shook his head. “No. I’m sure that file is shredded or ashes by now. And Ludnick’s probably found someone on staff eager or easily intimidated enough to delete the computer file reference for him. Security’s a dead end at this stage.”

“So what’s next?”

Colin smiled. “Look at you, Miss Hot-On-The-Trail!”

Janice laughed. “Sorry. I’ve just never been right about something like this before! It’s like in university when you sit down to write a thesis paper, only about a thousand people have had the same idea before you or it’s a dead end because there’s nothing to back it up. This is actually happening!”

“Well, don’t worry. My investigation is not going to start and stop with the estimable—and when I say that I mean in girth only—Jerome Ludnick.”

“You really don’t like him,” Janice said. “Or Devries, either. You do an excellent job of being balanced in your stories, but I can tell.”

“I don’t like a lot of people,” Colin said. “It’s an occupational hazard. The more you find out about certain people, the less harmless they seem. Especially when you put them in positions of real responsibility.”

Janice stopped chewing for a moment. “Do you think we should tell the cops about that basement?”

Colin thought about it for a moment before shaking his head. “No. It’s been more or less open to the elements now for seven years at least. Any trace forensic evidence they might find in there will be gone or useless. It look like it’s been used by everyone from teen partiers to homeless people.”

Janice let out a sigh of relief. He could tell that was the answer she was hoping for, even if it was one he wasn’t 100 per cent sure about himself. What if the cops
could
find something useful in there that led them to a suspect?

“CJ told me that you tried to do a story on Devane, but Hal pulled it,” Janice said. “Something to do with it possibly interfering with a police investigation.”

“If there had actually been a police investigation, that might have been true,” Colin said, giving her a précis version of the events that had led to his opening the package and placing his call to Detective George Betts.

“Wow,” Janice said after he was finished. “So Devries told Hal to pull the story. Was that why you tried to get his Merc towed?“

“It was definitely a contributing factor,” Colin allowed.

“You don’t like Hal that much, either.”

“If I gave him any thought I probably wouldn’t.”

Janice laughed. “That’s
Casablanca
! You just lifted an unattributed quote from Rick Blaine.”

Colin smiled. “True. You just caught me in a breach of journalistic ethics.”

“Is there anyone you don’t dislike?”

“Well, so far Miss Yu, we seem to be getting along just fine.”

“But would you say it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship?”

Colin raised his glass and they clinked. “Here’s looking at you, Yu.”

The two of them took a swallow of beer. “Maybe you should just stick to quoting other sources,” Janice advised.

“Noted.”

C
olin arrived in the newsroom the next morning to find out if there had been any updates in the police investigation.

The internet access in his apartment was spotty at best and the public terminals in the college library were always crowded, particularly right before the start of classes.

“Hey, I remember you!” CJ said when Colin worked in. “Didn’t you used to work here?”