The Colour of Death (33 page)

The longer they waited, the more he hoped Sorcha might still change her mind and return to civilization with him.  Whatever her doubts about herself, Fox was convinced Sorcha had had nothing to do with her father’s and half-brother’s crimes.  The fact that she had risked her life to enter the basement of the Russian Mafia’s house in Portland to break out the caged girls told him all he needed to know about her character and values.  He suspected, however, that nothing was going to convince her to come back with him now.  Especially when he watched the sodden, torch-bearing riders return to the settlement.  “Why’ve they given up so quickly?” he whispered in the dark.  “If you’re so damn important to your father, why aren’t they out searching all night?”

Sorcha shrugged.  “They cans see much in this rain and it’s dark and cold.  If they think I’m on foot with no food or proper clothing they probably assume I’ll have to stop and find shelter for the night.  They can track me better tomorrow.”

They waited another hour, until they were certain the riders had gone, then moved closer enough to look down on the settlement.  By midnight the last of the lights had dimmed from the windows, save a lone glow in the gatehouse by the bridge.  Fox glanced at Sorcha.  “Ready?”

She nodded, lips trembling with cold.  “Ready.”

In a dense part of the forest, sheltered and screened by massive ferns, they tethered the horse to a tree.  Near the bone pit, it was far enough from the settlement to avoid attracting attention but close enough for them to get back and ride away.  “Let’s keep this simple,” whispered Fox as they headed down the path to the settlement, shielding their rifles from the rain.  “We get inside the tower, find your locket, photograph any evidence of your father’s Great Work and then get out. 
Whatever
else we find, we don’t hang about.  We get out of here and let Jordache handle the rest.  OK?”

Sorcha nodded but didn’t look at him.  Just stared ahead into the dark.  As they carried on in silence, all he could hear was the falling rain and the squelch of their wet footsteps in the soft, waterlogged earth.  When they reached the settlement the rain suddenly stopped and the moon appeared through the storm clouds.  Although it wouldn’t be full until tomorrow, it looked plump and round and Fox felt more conscious of its unblinking scrutiny than that of the sinister eye on the tower.  When Sorcha made a move he held her back.  Only after the clouds again obscured the moon’s gaze did he release her arm and follow her across the dark settlement to the door of the tower.

“Put your ear against it and listen for any movement inside,” Fox said.

Sorcha shook her head.  “You do it,” she hissed.  “I’m not touching that door.”

“Why not?”

She pointed to the mosaic of embedded rubble fragments.  “Those stones are toxic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Each one must have come from a place of death.  When I touched them yesterday, I got a jumble of echoes.”  Fox remembered Connor telling him how his brother Regan used to collect random pieces of rubble to fashion into odd sculptures and mosaics.  Perhaps they weren’t so random.  He put his ear to the door and listened.  “It sounds quiet inside.”  Then he turned to her and asked the question she hadn’t answered till now.  “How are we going to get in?”

Sorcha didn’t answer because, despite all her bravado about returning to the tower, she wasn’t yet sure her plan was going to work.  The idea had come to her only a few hours earlier, when she had ‘seen’ the sound of the lunch bell as a cascade of colors.  She studied the keypad:  twelve keys configured in three columns and four rows.  Those on the top three rows were marked 1 to 9, those on the bottom ) * #.  Ignoring the markings, she closed her eyes and systematically pressed each individual key, listening to the unique sound it made — and the color it flashed up in her mind’s eye.  As each color appeared she compared it with those she had ‘seen’ when overhearing the code being entered yesterday.

“Good idea.  Visual memory is more precise than aural,” she heard Fox say when he realized what she was doing.  It took her less than twenty seconds to match the colors to the correct combination of keys and unlock the door.  ‘Impressive,” said Fox.

She shrugged.  “If I’ve got this goddamn
mothú
I may as well use it.”

Fox waited, allowing her to lead the way, but she hung back, suddenly nervous, so he stepped confidently into the dark interior.  It impressed her that, although he refused to enter the garage where his family had died, he had the courage to lead her, without any hesitation, into a place of genuine danger.

As she followed him inside, the door closed behind her, engulfing them in total darkness.  Immediately she sensed something in the building.  It was an indistinct murmuring but it filled her with dread and made the fine hairs on her forearm stand on end.  Thankfully, an automatic sensor turned on a series of concealed lamps, bathing the interior in a low atmospheric light.  They were in the base of the round tower.  The walls were rough stone and the floor tiled with slate.  A faint smell of pine disinfectant hung in the air.  A thick pillar stood in the center of the circular chamber with two partitions extending to the external wall, creating an internal pie slice of a room.  The door to this section was closed.  A second door in the outside wall evidently connected directly to Delaney’s quarters.  In the central pillar was another door, which presumably led to the stairs.  The door had been painted with the now-familiar Vitruvian man, complete with its shadow twin and chakras up the spine.

“Recognize any of this?” whispered Fox.

She pointed to the Vitruvian man.  “That’s on the doors of the Great Hall and on a tapestry in my father’s quarters.  But nothing else is familiar.”

Fox tried the door in the partition wall but it was locked.  Sorcha reached for a small keypad, tried the same code she had used earlier and the door opened.  Inside was an Aladdin’s cave of high-tech equipment and a large safe.  There was no sign of her locket.  One wall was covered with monitors displaying images from various closed-circuit television cameras around the settlement.  This was clearly where Delaney spied on his flock.  “When he told me he had eyes and ears everywhere he wasn’t lying,” she said.

“Perhaps this is why he calls his tower the Observatory,” Fox said, taking pictures with his BlackBerry.  “His cynical way of controlling his flock and convincing them of his spiritual gift — his third eye.”  Sorcha sensed relief in Fox’s voice.  “Perhaps this is all there is?”

Sorcha knew differently and felt herself drawn to the door in the central pillar.  Close up, the painting of the Vitruvian twins was subtly different to the similar images she had seen earlier.  The colored chakras running up the spine, which had been depicted as spiral vortices, were stylized lotus flowers here.  The biggest difference, though, was how the physical body and its spiritual twin had been inverted.  In the other images the physical body had been painted in bold color, with the astral spirit body a ghosted shadow in the background.  In this image, the spirit body had become the vibrant, dominating entity and the physical body the pale shadow.

Leaving Fox alone, she opened the door and stepped onto the stone steps of a spiral staircase which led up into the dark.  The sense of muted whispers was stronger here — louder.  She swallowed hard and vaguely heard Fox calling after her, telling her to wait, but the tower’s siren call was too strong.  Ignoring Fox, she climbed the dark stairs, triggering sensors that turned on soft lights as she ascended.

Arriving at the first landing she didn’t register the details of her physical surroundings.  She was almost swamped by the echoes now bombarding her senses.  What was this place?  What had happened here?  She tried to remember what Fox had taught her and let the various visions, smells and sounds flow past her.  But this was much more intense than anything she had experienced at Tranquil Waters, or at the crime scenes.

She entered a room on her right and then immediately stepped out again, careful to stay away from the walls, fearful that if she touched anything she would be overwhelmed.  As she hurried back to the stairs, every room she glanced in was physically empty — and yet brimming with menace.  On the stairs, every step that took her higher ratcheted up her dread, but she couldn’t stop.  Like a shark, she had to keep moving or die.  Breathing hard, she climbed to the next level, then the next.  As if she were running an invisible gauntlet, the sensory onslaught intensified the higher she rose, forcing her to move still faster.

Regardless of the level, every empty room she glanced in looked the same but felt totally distinct.  As she hurried up the tower she realized she was in one of her recurring nightmares:  running through a deserted hotel filled with vacant rooms, occupied only by the ghosts of the dead.  She tried to reach back to other memories, from before her amnesia, to the day she had fled this place.  She sensed them hiding in the recesses of her mind, still too frightened to break cover and make themselves known to her.

Running past a room on the sixth level she suddenly stopped dead.  For a second she didn’t know why.  Then she saw the locket hanging casually on the door handle like a
Do Not Disturb
sign.  She replaced it around her neck and held it tightly, as if to ward off the ghosts swirling around her.  Taking a deep breath, she entered the empty room and pressed her hand hard against the wall.  As soon as her flesh touched the stone she cried out like an animal in pain.  The experience was so intense and visceral that any attempts to distance herself from the images, sounds and smells were futile.  Holding her hand against the stone made her doubt all that Fox and his aunt had told her.  This was no neutral echo or residual imprint but a soul in torment — a soul she knew.  As if in a trance she reached into her pocket and found the photo Eve had given her of her mother.  She didn’t need it to match her mother to the death echo, though, because Aurora’s face looked just like her own.  Even more shocking, Sorcha didn’t see only her mother in the death echo.  She also saw her father.  How could Delaney have done this to a woman he professed to love?  Then she remembered what he had done to Eve and knew the answer.

As well as the death echo other fragments of memory surfaced, broken and disjointed like the shards of a shattered mirror.  She sensed that something else had happened in this  death chamber, something as disturbing as the murder of her mother.  She pulled her hand from the wall, ran back to the stairs and climbed higher.

Chapter 50

Moments earlier

Where the hell was she?  Why hadn’t Sorcha waited for him?  As Fox stepped into the central stairwell, flickering lights revealed a spiral staircase that snaked its way up into the tower.  This was the only way up or down.  If Delaney came in while they were up in the tower they would be trapped like rats.  “Sorcha,” he hissed.  “Where are you?”

When she didn’t reply he cursed under his breath, checked the safety catch on the rifle and followed her up the stone steps.  Reaching the first level, he stepped into a circular landing surrounded by bright red doors.  All were open and as he glanced into the rooms radiating out from the center he noticed they were totally empty — devoid of any furnishings or décor.  Except one:  a wetroom complete with shower, basin and toilet.  In an alcove by the bathroom was a pile of mattresses, cushions and pillows covered in immaculate white linen.  On the top pillow lay a small noose and a cord with a knot in its middle, both of braided silver silk.

“Sorcha?  Sorcha, where are you?”  Still no reply.  As he moved back to the stairwell he noticed on the pale stone floor an image of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man inlaid with amethyst.  At the base of the man’s spine, the site of the first chakra, a lotus symbol had been set with a red gemstone — a triangle within a square within a circle surrounded by four lotus petals:

Pausing to review the claustrophobic rooms, Fox registered the pattern on the walls.  In the low light, it resembled natural marbling but when he looked closer he noticed plaques of polished amethyst embedded in the pale stone.  Veins of the same amethyst ran like violet blood vessels through the walls, connecting the plaques.  The positioning of concealed lamps gave each room the semblance of a small private gallery with each plaque a work of art.  He noticed that some of the plaques were blank, but most featured four lines of chiseled text.  The top line was a series of numbers in the form of a date; the second a word — Neonate, Child or Adult; the third a single letter — M or F.  The last line featured the same symbol as that on the Vitruvian man.  Although they contained no names, the plaques were evidently memorials of some kind.

The next level had an identical layout:  rooms radiating from a central circular landing, an amethyst Vitruvian man inlaid in the floor, a single bathroom, a pile of immaculate white mattresses and cushions with a silver cord and noose on the top pillow.  The doors on this floor, however, were orange.  As was the gemstone symbol on the site of the second chakra on the Vitruvian man’s lower spine — a spiral circle surrounded by six lotus petals: