Still Life With Crows (46 page)

All right,
she said to the darkness.
I won’t give up.

By inches, she began shifting her body around, searching for the sharp outcropping of rock, careful to keep her hands behind her back. Locating it, she raised her tied ankles and began rubbing them slowly back and forth across the edge, trying to be as quiet and inconspicuous as possible. But he was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t seem to notice what she was doing. She watched his back through slitted eyes while she chafed the fraying rope against the sharp edge of calcite. He had temporarily left Tad’s corpse and was now hunched over what appeared to be three small burlap bags, stuffing them full with . . . She turned away, deciding she’d rather not know any more.

She scraped and scraped, and at last felt the rope give. She twisted her feet back and forth, loosening it further. One foot slipped free, then the other.

She lay back again, thinking. She was free. What now?

Grab the lantern and make a run for it. She’d follow the trail. It had to go somewhere.

Yes: she’d grab the lantern and run like hell. He’d pursue her, of course, but she was fast, the second fastest girl in her class. Maybe she could outrun him.

She lay there, breathing deeply, her heart pounding with fear at what she was about to do. Now that she was about to take action, she began to think of a dozen reasons why it would be so much easier just to lie there quietly. He had something else to keep him busy. Maybe he’d just forget about her, and . . .

No.
One way or another, she had to get out.

She glanced around once more, orienting herself. She took a deep breath, let it out, took another, held it.

And then she counted to three, leapt up, grabbed the lantern, and ran. A loud, inarticulate bellow sounded behind her.

She skidded on the wet stone; almost fell; found her feet again; and ran headlong into the dark vertical maw at the far end of the cavern. The slot led to a long crack that opened into a strange gallery of thin, dripping cave straws and evil-looking ribbons of hanging limestone. Beyond was a shallow pool where the ceiling dropped precipitously; she splashed across the water and scrambled through the low place, holding the lantern high. Then she emerged into a larger cavern, filled from floor to ceiling with thickly-tiered stalagmites, many joined with the stalactites overhead to form strange yellow and white pillars.

Was
he
following? Was he right behind, about to clutch at her again . . . ?

She caromed between the pale, glistening pillars, gasping with terror and exertion, light flashing off the great trunks of stone. The lantern banged and the candle flickered, and Corrie was seized with a new fear: if the candle went out, it would all be over.

Slow down. Slow down.

She scrambled around another pillar and collided with a crumpled block of calcite that had fallen from the ceiling, badly scraping one knee. She paused a minute and looked around, fighting for breath. She had reached the far end of the cavern. Here, a rubble-strewn trail led upward. As she glanced back and forth, she became aware that there were crude marks etched into the walls, as if with a stone: weird concentric ribbons, sticklike figures, great clouds of frantic scribbles. But this was no time for sightseeing, and she scrambled up the slope, slipping and falling as the loose rocks gave way. Her raw wrists were bleeding afresh. The trail grew steeper, and as she again lifted the lantern over her head she could make out a sill of rock at what appeared to be its upper edge. She grabbed it with her free hand, hoisted herself up.

Ahead ran a long glossy tunnel of limestone as blue as ice, feathery crystals sprouting from the ceiling. She ran on.

The tunnel was completely flat, and it snaked gently back and forth. A thin flow of water ran along a rill at its center. Once again, the blue walls were incised with strange, crude, disturbing images. Corrie dashed forward, her feet splashing through the water, her footfalls echoing strangely in the long tunnel. But there were no corresponding sounds of following footsteps.

She could hardly believe it, but she’d escaped.
She’d outrun him!

She kept going, pushing herself as hard as she dared. Now she entered a large cavern, its floor covered in a blizzard of shattered and broken stalactites. She scrambled over and under this cyclopean masonry, following whenever possible the wear marks indicating a trail. And there it continued, almost vertically, at the far end of the cavern.

She gripped the lantern handle in her teeth and began to climb. The foot- and handholds were slippery and worn. But fear spurred her on, helped her forget the pain in her wrists and ankles. The farther she went, the farther she would get from him. And the trail had to lead somewhere, she was bound to find a way out sooner or later. At last, with a gasp of relief, she reached the top, hoisted herself up—

And there he was. Waiting for her. His monstrous body covered with flecks of blood and flesh, the nightmarish impossible face fixed in a broken smile.

She screamed and the pallid features broke out into a high-pitched, squeal-like laugh. A laugh of childlike delight.

Corrie tried to wriggle past, but a great hand swept down and clubbed her to the ground. She fell on her back, stunned. His laughter echoed hysterically. The dark-lantern went rolling across the floor, candle guttering. He stood above her, clapping his hands and laughing, face distorted with merriment.

“Get away from me!” she screamed, pedaling herself backwards.

He reached down, grabbed her shoulders, jerked her to her feet. The breath steamed from his rotten mouth like an abattoir. Corrie screamed and he squealed again. She twisted, trying to break out of his grip, but he held her with steel arms, laughing, squeezing.

“Don’t hurt me!” she cried. “You’re hurting me!”

“Hooo!” he said, his strange high voice sending out a spray of fetid-smelling spittle. He suddenly dropped her, scurried away, disappeared.

She tried to get up, picked up the lantern, looking around wildly. She was surrounded by a forest of stalactites. Where was he? Why had he run away? She started down the trail—and suddenly with a huge bellow he leapt from behind a stalagmite and swung at her, knocking her down, his laughter filling the cave. And then he was gone again.

She rose to her knees, panting hard, feeling stupid with terror and incomprehension, waiting for the pain to clear from her head. All was quiet and dark. The light had gone out.

“Heee!” came the voice from the darkness, and the sound of clapping.

She crouched in the black, cringing, desperate, afraid to move. A scratching sound, the flare of a match, and the lantern was relit. And there the monster was, standing over her, leering, drooling, exposing the stumps of his rotten teeth, the lantern casting a dull glow. He cackled, ducked behind a pillar.

And that’s when Corrie finally understood.
He was playing hide-and-seek.

She swallowed, trembling, tried to find her voice. “You want to play with me?”

He paused, then squealed a laugh, his wispy beard waggling, his thick lips wet and red, the two-inch nails flashing as his hands alternately opened and clenched. “Pway!” he cried, advancing toward her.

“No!” she screamed. “Wait! Not that way—!”

“Pway!” he roared, spittle flying, as he drew back a massive hand.
“Pway!”
Corrie shrank back, waiting for the inevitable.

And then, suddenly, the thing turned his head. His grotesque eyes swiveled wetly in their orbits, long brown lashes blinking. His hand hovered in the air as he looked off into the darkness.

He seemed to be listening.

Then he picked her up, slung her over his shoulder, and once again began moving with fearsome speed. Corrie was only dimly aware of the confusing procession of galleries and chambers. She closed her eyes.

And then she felt him stop. She opened her eyes to a small hole, a mere black tube at the base of a limestone wall. She felt herself sliding off his shoulder, felt him pushing her feet into the hole.

“Please, don’t—” She tried to grab on to the sides, clutching and scratching, nails tearing against the stone. He placed his hands on her shoulders, gave a brutal thrust, and she slid downward, falling the last few feet and landing hard on the stone floor.

She sat up, dazed and bruised. He leaned in from above, holding the lantern, and for an instant she had a glimpse of the smooth glassy sides of the pit that surrounded her.

“Hooo!” he called down, and puckered his lips grotesquely at her.

Then his head vanished with the light, and Corrie was left at the bottom of the pit, in utter darkness, alone in the wet, cold silence of the cave.

Sixty

P
endergast slipped silently through the dark galleries of stone, moving as quickly as possible, following the faint worn marks of a trail.

The cave system was enormous and his map showed only a sketchy outline of its true complexity. The map was wrong in many particulars, and there were entire levels of the cave not shown on it at all. The cave system was folded in over itself in exceedingly complex ways, making it possible for someone familiar with its secrets—the killer—to move in mere minutes between locations that on the map appeared to be a thousand linear yards apart. Still, despite its drawbacks, the map was a remarkable piece of work, proving what even the U.S. Geological Survey maps didn’t show: that Kraus’s Kaverns was the mere tip of a subterranean iceberg, a vast cave system that honeycombed the depths beneath Medicine Creek and the surrounding countryside—of which one node connected with the Ghost Mounds.

Ahead, Pendergast could hear the sound of water. Another minute brought him to the spot. Here, a phreatic passage, formed ages before by water under great pressure, cut laterally through the limestone cavern he was following. Along its floor ran a swift-moving underground stream, the lone remaining vestige of the forces that had originally sculpted these strange, deep corridors.

Pendergast paused at the water, knelt, scooped up a handful, and tasted it.

It was the same water he’d drunk at the Kraus mansion—the water the town tapped into. He tasted again. It was, as he’d expected, the very water Lu Yu’s
Ch’a Ching,
the Book of Tea, considered perfect for brewing green tea: oxygenated, mineral-laden water from a free-flowing underground limestone stream. It was that tea, and the water, that had triggered the revelation that Kraus’s Kaverns must be more extensive than the small portion open to the public. The trip to Topeka had proven him right, had armed him with the map he now held. But the knowledge had come at a cost. He had not anticipated Corrie acting on her own, and coming so far in her own deductions—although, in hindsight, it was all too clear that he should have.

He rose from the stream, then paused again. Something lay on the far side at the faintest perimeter of his flashlight beam, a canvas knapsack, torn apart roughly at the seams. He crossed the stream and knelt, taking a gold pen from his pocket and using it to pull apart the edges of the cloth. Inside was a road map, a couple of trowels, and several spare D batteries, the kind used in heavy flashlights and metal detectors.

Pendergast let his light play around the bag. Arrowheads and potsherds were scattered on the ground beside it. An old parfleche was decorated in the same Southern Cheyenne style he’d seen in the burial chamber beneath the mound . . .

. . . And then, a few feet away, his light stopped at a ragged clump of hair, bleached-blonde with black roots.

Sheila Swegg. Digging in the Mounds, she had accidentally come across the rear entrance to the cave. It was well hidden, but easy enough to access if one knew which rocks to move. She must have been astounded at the burial chamber where the Ghost Warriors were entombed, and she’d then gone deeper into the cave, looking for even more treasures.

She found something else instead. She found
him
 . . .

There was no time for additional examination. Taking one final look at the pathetic remnants, Pendergast turned and followed the small river along the smooth curves of the phreatic passage.

Within a few hundred yards, the river dropped away into a deep hole, filling the cave with a wash of mist. Here, Pendergast went upward, through narrower tubes and pipes. Now the faint marks made by the long-term passage of feet were becoming stronger: he was approaching the inhabited region of the cave.

Pendergast had believed from the beginning that the killer was local. His mistake had been in assuming the killer was a
citizen.
But no, he was not somebody to be found on Margery Tealander’s tax rolls: he lived
with
them yet not
among
them.

From this realization, it was a relatively simple matter to determine the identity of the killer. But along with that determination came an understanding—or the beginnings of an understanding—of just how malformed and amoral a creature they were dealing with. He was a killer of extraordinary dangerousness, whose actions even Pendergast, with his long study of the criminal mind, could not predict.

He arrived at another narrow corridor. Along the floor, the calcite flow had recrystallized, forming a shimmering, glowing, frozen river. In the center, the soft flow had been worn down several inches by the passage of feet over a great many years.

At the end of the corridor the tunnel began to branch repeatedly, each branch showing signs of having been traversed many times. Narrow crawlspaces and vertical cracks also showed signs of passage: a delicate crystal crushed here, a smear on an otherwise snowy white dripstone there—the variety of ways a human could betray his movements through a cave were almost infinite. In the labyrinth of passages Pendergast lost his way—once, twice—each time managing to guide himself back with the aid of the map. As he rejoined the central trail the second time, his flashlight caught a glimpse of color: there, on a high shelf of dripstone, was a collection of Indian fetishes, left hundreds of years before.