Devil Bones (3 page)

“You’ve given a statement?” Gently. The man’s body language suggested genuine distress.

Arlo nodded, head moving crosswise to a torso canted at the same slope as the swing.

“Can you summarize what you saw?”

Now the head wagged from side to side. “The devil’s work.”

OK.

“You are Arlo…?”

“Welton.”

“The plumber.”

Arlo gave another bobble-head nod. “Been banging pipes for thirty years. Never come across nothing like this.”

“Tel me what happened.”

Arlo swalowed. Swalowed again.

“I’m changing out fittings. The new owner’s missus is planning to put in some newfangled washer setup, some kinda green thing saves the environment. It’l need different pipe fittings. Lord knows why she wants to start with that, place needing al it does. But that’s not my business. Anyways, I start in on the wal and drop a piece of brick that takes a bite outa the flooring. I think to myself, Arlo, you cut that flooring, they’re gonna take the cost of repairs outa your wages. So I rol back the flooring, and what do I find but a big ole wood plank.”

Arlo stopped.

I waited.

“Don’t know why, but I give the thing a nudge with my toe, and the end raised up in the air.”

Again Arlo paused, recaling, I suspected, a bit more than a nudge.

“This plank was part of a hatch that opened?”

“Thing was covering some kinda hidey-hole. I’l admit, curiosity got the better of me. I took my flashlight and shined it on down.”

“Into a subcelar.”

Arlo shrugged. I alowed him time to continue. He didn’t.

“And?” I prompted again.

“I’m a churchgoing man. Every Sunday and Wednesday. Never seen the devil, but I believe in him. Believe he’s in the world, working his evil amongst us.”

Arlo ran the back of a hand across his mouth.

“What I seen was Satan himself.”

Though the day was stil warm, I felt a chil ripple through me.

“You reported that you saw a human skul.” Al business.

“Yes’m.”

“What else?”

“Don’t want to put words to wickedness. It’s best you see with your own eyes.”

“Did you go down into the subcelar?”

“No way.”

“What did you do?”

“I hauled my butt upstairs fast as I could. Caled the police.” Arlo emphasized the first sylable and gave it a very long
o.
“Can I go now?”

“The officer is downstairs?”

“Yes’m. Folow the hal, then through the kitchen.”

Arlo was right. It was best I saw with my own eyes.

“Thank you, Mr. Welton. It shouldn’t be long.”

I crossed the porch and entered the house. Behind me, the swing rattled as Arlo’s face dropped back to his hands.

The front door opened directly onto a narrow corridor. To the right was a bile green living room. A broken window had been sealed with cardboard duct-taped into place. The furnishings were sparse. A moth-eaten armchair. A sofa badly clawed by a cat.

To the left was a dining room, bare except for a knotty-pine sideboard, a mattress, and a stack of tires.

Continuing down the central hal, I turned left into a kitchen that would already have been retro in ’56. Round-top Philco fridge. Kelvinator stove. Red Formica and chrome dinette set. Speckled gray Formica countertops.

A door stood open to the left of the Kelvinator. Through it I could see wooden stairs and hear radio static drifting up from below.

Shifting my kit to my right hand, I gripped the banister and started to descend. Two treads down, smal hairs began rising on the back of my neck.

Unconsciously, I switched to breathing through my mouth.

3

THOUGH FAINT, THE ODOR WAS UNMISTAKABLE. SWEET AND FETID, it heralded the presence of rotting flesh.

But this wasn’t the cloying, gut-churning smel with which I am so familiar. The reek of active putrefaction. Of innards ravaged by maggots and scavengers. Of flesh greened and bloated by water. No other stench can compete with that. It seeps into your pores, your nostrils, your lungs, your clothing, rides you home like smoke from a bar. Long after showering, it lingers in your hair, your mouth, your mind.

This was gentler. But stil undeniable.

I hoped for a squirrel. Or a raccoon that had gnawed through a wal and become trapped in the basement. Recaling Larabee’s words, and Arlo’s agitation, I doubted either scenario was likely.

The temperature dropped with each downward tread. The dampness increased. By the time I reached bottom, the banister felt cool and slick to my palm.

Amber light seeped from a bulb dangling from a fuzzy overhead cord. Stepping onto hard-packed earth, I looked around.

Barely six feet high, the celar had been divided into a number of smal rooms arranged around a central open space. Plywood wals and prefab doors suggested partitioning had taken place long after the home’s construction.

Every door in my sight line was open. Through one I could see shalow shelving, the kind used to store home-canned jam and tomatoes. Washtubs were visible through another. Stacked boxes through another.

A Charlotte-Mecklenburg uniform waited at the far end of the celar, past a furnace that looked like a Jules Verne contraption. Unlike the other three, the door at his back looked old. The oak was solid, the varnish thick and yelowed with age.

The cop stood with feet spread, thumbs hooking his belt. He was a compact man with Beau Bridges brows and Sean Penn features, not a good combination. Drawing close, I could read the plaque on his shirt.
D. Gleason.

“What have we got?” I asked, after introducing myself.

“You met the plumber?” Gleason lowered the volume on a speaker mike clipped to his left shoulder.

I nodded.

“Around sixteen hundred hours, Welton phoned in a nine-one-one. Said he’d found dead people in a crawl space. I caught the cal, spotted remains which I believed to be human. Reported in. Desk told me to stay put. I told Welton to do the same.”

I liked Gleason. He was concise.

“You go belowdecks?”

“No, ma’am.” A second bulb hung in the room at Gleason’s back. The angled light faling through the door threw shadows from his brows and carved his already too chiseled features deep into his flesh.

“The ME said you suspected more than one body.”

Gleason waggled a hand. Maybe yes, maybe no.

“Anything down here I should know about?”

I was remembering a pizza parlor basement in Montreal. Detective Luc Claudel had pegged rats while I’d dug bones. I pictured him underground in his cashmere coat and Gucci gloves, almost smiled. Almost. The bones had turned out to be those of adolescent girls.

Gleason misinterpreted my question. “Appears to be some sort of voodoo thing. But that’s your cal, doc.”

Right answer. Skeletons often appear sinister to the uninitiated. Even gleaming white anatomical specimens. The thought lifted my spirits. Maybe that’s what this would turn out to be. A fake skul long forgotten in a celar.

I flashed again on the pizza parlor case. The initial concern there had been PMI. Postmortem interval. How long since death? Ten years? Fifty? A hundred and fifty?

Another hopeful scenario. Perhaps the skul would turn out to be an ancient head pilfered from an archaeological site.

Lab models and relics don’t smell of rot.

“Fair enough,” I said to Gleason. “But I was wondering about rats, snakes?”

“So far, no company. I’l watch for party crashers.”

“Much appreciated.”

I folowed Gleason through the doorway into a windowless room measuring about ten by twelve. Two brick wals appeared to be exterior, part of the original foundation. Two were interior. Workbenches pressed against those wals.

I did a quick scan of the jumbled contents atop the tables. Rusty tools. Boxes of nails, screws, washers. Coiled wire. Chain linking. A vise.

Large rols of textured gray plastic lay below the workbenches. Dirt coated the underside of each.

“What’s with the plastic?”

“G-floor.”

I cocked a questioning brow.

“Rolout vinyl floor covering. I instaled it in my garage last year. Normaly, the stuff’s secured with adhesive and seaming strips. Here it was just spread over the dirt and a hatchway.”

“Welton roled it and set it aside.”

“That’s his story.”

Save for the workbenches and the vinyl flooring, the room was empty.

“Opening is over here.” Gleason led me to the corner at which the exterior wals met.

A one-by-two-foot breach was evident at roughly shoulder level in the easternmost wal. Jagged edges and a marked color difference attested to the brevity of the opening’s existence. Shattered brick and plaster littered the floor below. Welton had broken through to the plumbing at that location.

Through the gap I could see labyrinthine piping. On the ground, just out from the rubble, gaped a black rectangle, partialy covered by a battered hatch of wood planks.

Setting my kit to one side, I peered down into the blackness. It yielded no clue of what lay below.

“How far to the bottom?”

“Twelve, fifteen feet. Probably an old root celar. Some of these houses stil have them.”

I felt the familiar crawly sensation. The tightness in my chest.

Easy, Brennan.

“Why so deep?” I asked, forcing my voice calm.

Gleason shrugged. “Warm climate, no refrigeration.”

Opening my kit, I unfolded and stepped into coverals. Then I settled on my stomach, face over the hole.

Gleason handed me his flash. The shaft danced down makeshift wooden steps whose angle of descent was precariously steep, more a ladder than a stairway.

“Stuff’s over by the east wal.”

I shot the beam in that direction. It picked out rusted metal, flecks of red, yelow. Something ghostly pale, like cadaver flesh. Then I saw it.

The skul rested on some sort of short, round pedestal, lower jaw missing, forehead strangely mottled in the smal oval of light. An object was centered on top of the cranial vault.

I stared. The empty orbits stared back. The teeth grinned, as though daring me to approach.

Pushing to al fours, I sat back and brushed dirt from my chest and arms. “I’l take a few shots, then we’l remove the plank and I’l go down.”

“Those treads appear to have some years on them. How about I test to see if they’re safe?”

“I’d prefer you stay topside, lower equipment as I need it.”

“You got it.”

The click of my shutter. The skitter of dirt cascading from the undersurface of the hatch cover. Each sound seemed magnified in the absolute stilness of the celar. Irrationaly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the hush was ominous.

After gloving, I shoved my Maglite into my waistband. Then I tested the first riser. Solid enough. Turning my face toward the steps, I gripped the banister with one hand and clutched the risers with the other as I descended.

The air grew dank. The odor of death strengthened. And my nose began picking up ribbons of other things, olfactory hints more than solid smels. Impressions of urine, sour milk, decaying fabric.

Six rungs down, almost no light penetrated from above. I paused, alowing my pupils to adjust. Alowing my nerves to come to grips with their environment. The tunnel I was descending through was two feet square, damp, and smely.

My heart was banging now. My throat felt constricted.

There you have it. Brennan, the legendary tunnel rat, was claustrophobic.

Breathe.

Death-gripping the side rails, I descended four more steps. My head cleared the tunnel into a larger space. As I moved to the fifth, a sliver pierced the latex sheathing my left palm. My hand jerked reflexively.

More self-coaching.

Calm.

Breathe.

Two more rungs.

Breathe.

My toe touched solid ground with an odd little click. Gingerly, I explored behind me with my foot. Found nothing.

I stepped from the stairs. Closed my eyes, a reflex to stem the pounding adrenaline. Pointless. It was pitch black.

Releasing the banister, I flicked on my flash, turned, and swept the beam above and around me.

I was standing in an eight-foot cube whose wals and ceiling were reinforced by rough wooden beams. The dirt floor was covered with the same rolout vinyl that had been used overhead.

The action was off to my right. Cautiously, I edged in that direction, beam probing the shadows.

Cauldrons, one large, one smal. Rusty saucepan. Plywood. Tools. Statues. Candles. Beads and antlers suspended overhead.

Gleason had caled it correctly. The chamber housed some sort of ritualistic display.

The large cauldron appeared to be the focal point, with the rest of the paraphernalia fanning out from it. Stepping over a semicircle of candles, I pointed my light toward center stage.

The cauldron was iron and filed with dirt. A macabre pyramid rose from its center.

An animal cranium formed the base. Judging by shape, and by what I could see of the teeth, I guessed it came from a smal ruminant, maybe a goat or sheep. Remnants of desiccated tissue lined the orbits and orifices.

Centered on the ruminant was the human skul that had so frightened the plumber. The bone was smooth and fleshless. The vault and forehead were oddly luminescent, and darkened by an irregular stain. A stain the exact red-brown of dried blood.

A smal avian skul topped the human
cabeza.
It, too, retained scraps of dried skin and muscle.

I angled my beam to the floor.

Positioned at the cauldron’s base was what looked like a section of railroad track. On the track lay a decapitated and partialy decomposed chicken.

The source of the odor.

I inched my light left to the saucepan. Three hemispheric objects took shape. I bent for a closer look.

One turtle carapace. Two halves of a coconut shel.

Straightening, I sidestepped right past the large cauldron to the smaler. It, too, was soil packed. On the soil surface lay three railroad spikes, an antler, and two strands of yelow beads. A knife had been thrust into the fil to the depth of its handle.