Crimson Shore Page 22

  “Get that out of my eyes.”

  “I’m just making a point. This is like the fifth blackout this year. You’d think that you—of all people—would have a good supply of candles.”

  “No one’s stopping you from buying candles when you’re in town—which you are every day.”

  “I assumed you’d taken care of it. There’s this thing called a division of labor.”

  “You never mentioned we were out of candles.”

  “I did. You just forgot.” He threw himself down on the sofa in disgust. This was what their life was like, fighting every damn day over the stupidest of things. He wondered what he’d ever seen in this woman. They didn’t have kids. No reason they couldn’t end it now. But there were complications, financial entanglements…

  The shutter slammed into the side of the house again, and a strong gust rattled the windows in their frames. The shutter slammed yet again, harder, and this time a windowpane broke with a tinkling of glass. A howl of wind came in, accompanied by a gust of rain, knocking over a photo frame standing on the sill.

  “There!” Sarah cried triumphantly. “Now look at what’s happened!”

  The wind gusted again, a splatter of raindrops spotting the table—and carried along with it the howl of an animal outside.

  “What was that?” Mark asked.

  Sarah stood where she was, not saying anything, straining to look into the darkness. “That was really close to the house.”

  “Somebody’s stupid dog, left out in the rain.”

  “It didn’t sound like a dog.”

  “Of course it’s a dog. What else could it be?”

  Another howl, this time from the darkness right before the window.

  “Go take a look,” said Sarah.

  He took the flashlight and went into the front hall, shining the light out through the door window.

  “Ahh!” he screamed, falling back just as the door burst open with a crash. A dark shape out of a nightmare bounded in, cloaked in nothing but a vile stench. Lillie wildly flailed his arms in disbelief and terror, trying to fend the beast off, but with a terrible inchoate roar it swung two stringy arms around him, grasping his midriff with its clawed hands.

  “No, no!” he screamed, trying to twist away as he felt the long, sharp nails digging into his gut.

  “Stop it! No!” He could vaguely hear his wife in the background, screaming.

  A sudden popping sound, like fat being pulled off of meat, and the hands opened him up like drawing back a pair of curtains. All was dark, the flashlight was gone, and he was only able to feel—and what he felt was a blast of cold air inside his very body cavity that, for just a moment, overwhelmed even the sudden agony. He fell back with a scream of horror and pain beyond description, and even as he did he could feel something reaming him out from the inside, accompanied by the loud, wet, busy sound of chewing.

  44

  Constance Greene was soaked to the bone, her sodden dress clinging heavily to her body, the hem bedraggled with sand and mud. But she did not feel the cold: her homeless childhood on the docks of New York City seemed to have made her permanently immune to chill. The wind thrashed the salt grass and cattails, which swayed crazily as she pushed her way through, her low boots squishing along the marshy ground, the flashlight beam playing into the murk, illuminating the slashing drops of rain. She moved swiftly, her mind an angry, embarrassed, humiliated blank.

  At first, her instinct had been simply to get away—get away before she did something so violent and permanent she would regret it forever. But as she ran from the Inn, south toward the dunes and the salt grass, the faintest of plans began to form.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that what she was doing wasn’t simply defying Pendergast, but was also irrational and perhaps dangerous. She didn’t care. She also knew that her guardian, for once, was wrong: there was something else going on in the town of Exmouth, something dark, strange, beyond ratiocination—and still unsolved. She knew more than he did about such documents as the Sutter manuscript; she knew there was often more to them than was commonly believed. Obscura Peregrinatione ad Littus (A Dark Pilgrimage to the Southern Shore): there was a mystery here still to be uncovered, and the answer to that mystery lay to the south, in the ruins of Oldham—she was sure of it. What that answer was she could not begin to guess. But she would prove to Pendergast that she was right. She would prove it—and then she would shut herself away in certain sub-basement chambers of the Riverside Drive mansion known only to her until she felt in the mood to see the sun again.

  As the land rose, the salt grass gave way to scrub oaks and twisted Scotch pines. She had passed Skullcrusher Rocks and the hook of land beyond, crossed a mudflat and channel—it was low tide—and reached Crow Island, at the far edge of the wildlife refuge. The ocean lay eastward, to her left, beyond the long, narrow barrier island. She paused to listen, but the wind was so loud that she could not hear the surf. The only thing visible in the swirling blackness was the faint blinking of the Exmouth lighthouse behind her, the beam sweeping by every nine seconds. It was this light that she navigated by, the beacon showing her the way to Oldham.

  The scrubby trees began to thin, and dunes anchored by dune grass made their appearance. Now she could finally hear the thundering of the unseen ocean—or rather feel it beneath her feet, the shaking of the ground caused by the huge Atlantic rollers pounding the beach. She angled across the island, once again checking her position with the lighthouse. The deserted town could be no more than another mile or two. She would be there very soon.

  A good nor’easter didn’t frighten Bud Olsen. On the contrary, he liked it. It filled him with vigor. And it didn’t bother Aubrey, his golden retriever. After retiring from fishing ten years before, Olsen had moved into town and now lived in a small house at the end of Main Street, where he could walk everywhere—especially to his Tuesday lunch club and to the library, where he was a vigorous borrower of books, preferring the maritime adventure stories of Patrick O’Brian, John Masefield, and C. S. Forester.

  At nine o’clock, with the wind rattling the casements, Aubrey began whining at the door and wagging his tail. Olsen laid aside his book and rose from the chair with a grunt. He turned off the kerosene lantern and walked to the door.

  “You want to go out, boy?”

  Aubrey wagged his tail more vigorously.

  “Well then, let’s have ourselves a little walk.” More by feel than by sight, he donned his oilskin and sou’wester, pulled on a pair of boots, fished the flashlight out of the hall drawer, and snapped the leash on Aubrey. He pushed the door open against the wind, then walked down the porch stairs and out into the street. The town was mostly dark because of the blackout, but the police station at the far end of town was lit up by an emergency generator. The wind whipped across the water of the bay, the rain lashing almost horizontally. Bud lowered his head, the wind tugging at the sou’wester, which was securely tied around his chin.

  They turned left and headed down Main Street toward the center of town. As they passed the various houses he could see the soft shadows, backlit in orange, of people moving about with candles or lanterns in hand, giving the town a cozy, old-fashioned, Currier and Ives sort of feeling. This was how it had been in Exmouth a hundred years ago, Bud thought, before electricity. It wasn’t so bad. Electricity had brought nothing but trouble, when you thought about it—glaring light, pollution, computers and iPads and all that nonsense that he saw every day, as everyone—and not just kids—walked around town staring like zombies into little bright rectangles instead of greeting one another, instead of smelling the salt air and observing the scarlet maples in their autumnal glory…

  His reverie was interrupted by a growl. Aubrey had stopped, staring ahead into the darkness, his hair bristling.

  “What is it, boy?”

  Another low growl.

  This was unusual. Aubrey was probably the friendliest dog in town, who posed a danger to burglars only by virtue of tri
pping them in the dark. He would greet the grim reaper himself with a wagging tail.

  Aubrey took a step back, stiff with fear, the growl turning into a whine.

  “Easy now, there’s nothing there.” Bud shone the light around, but it didn’t penetrate far into the swirling murk.

  Now the dog was shaking and cringing, the whine increasing in intensity. Suddenly Bud smelled a dreadful odor—the stench of shit and blood—and with a yelp the dog pulled back abruptly, a puddle of urine appearing on the ground beneath it.

  “What the hell?” Bud backed up as well. “What’s that?” he called into the darkness.

  With a screech of terror Aubrey jerked back on the leash, pulling it out of his hands and hightailing it down the street, leash dragging behind him.

  “Hey, boy!” Bud watched the dog tear off into the darkness. This was the craziest thing. He heard a noise behind him and turned back to see something that at first he could barely comprehend: a stringy, naked, oddly elongated figure emerging from the darkness.

  “What the hell—?”

  The figure lunged forward and Bud felt the hot, gurgling breath of it, the stench of the slaughterhouse, and with a muffled shriek of terror he turned to flee when a pain he could never have imagined suddenly tore through his vitals; he looked down with surprise and horror to see a glabrous pate buried in his gut, streaming red with blood, muscled jaws working, apparently eating him to death…

  Constance emerged from the last line of dunes, skirted a half-buried sand fence, and came out on the beach. The surf was tremendous, massive curlers collapsing far offshore, driving in as a line of boiling water and breaking a second time and thundering up the beach to the foot of the dunes. Until this trip to Exmouth, Constance had never seen such an angry ocean, and—with her inability to swim—she found the sight unsettling. It was easy to see how a ship would be pounded to flotsam in a sea like this in very little time. Her flashlight beam barely penetrated ten feet into the murk.

  She looked back. The Exmouth Light was just visible, blinking away steadily despite the blackout. She recalled the old maps she had looked at in the Historical Society. The ruins of Oldham couldn’t be much farther to the south. Sure enough, as she continued on, she at last made out the stubs of pilings poking out of the sand as the shore curved into the estuary that formed the end of Crow Island and the former Oldham Harbor. A few more minutes brought her to a granite seawall, built of huge blocks that had once protected the opening to the harbor.

  She skirted the seawall and walked inland. The dune area gave way to hard ground, scrubby pines, and stunted oaks. And there were house foundations here: cellar holes of stacked granite stone, full of oak leaves and drifted sand. It wasn’t hard to make out where the single street had passed through town, cellar holes on either side, along with the odd piling or rotten wooden beam.

  A map of Oldham she’d examined at the Historical Society had indicated the town’s only church stood at the far end, where the street divided, so to be visible the length of town in a traditional New England arrangement. And sure enough, as she moved along the long-abandoned road, she found a larger, deeper foundation at the far end, in somewhat better condition than the other ruins, consisting once again of hand-cut and stacked granite blocks. A stone staircase led down into the remains of a basement.

  Constance stood at the top of the stairs and looked down. There was nothing visible but sand and rubble. What was she expecting to find here? The futility of her plan struck her. Despite the remoteness and the desolation, these ruins had no doubt been picked over by beachcombers and other people in the many decades since Oldham was abandoned. What could she possibly find—especially when she didn’t know what, precisely, she was looking for?

  She felt another surge of humiliation, chagrin, and anger. Against her better judgment she walked down the granite steps and into the open cellar. Here, within the shelter of the hole, the wind subsided. She shone her light around. The cellar was about thirty feet by forty, with a central stone structure that supported the remains of two fireplaces on the first floor. Those fireplaces could still be seen, of mortared stone, falling apart, a partial chimney sticking up like a hollow stub. The wooden part of the church was mostly gone, with only a few heavy, worm-eaten beams lying here and there, as soft as punk. Oak leaves lay piled up in the corners and against the back part of the central chimney. Bayberry bushes grew thickly along the north-facing stone wall, and a large stained canvas—it looked like an old sailcloth—lay rotting against it.

  Constance finished a circuit of the cellar. If there was some dark secret hidden in this town, it would probably be here, in the church. But what? She brushed aside the leaves here and there, uncovering only broken glass, rusted nails, and bits of crockery. The wind picked up and she moved into the shelter of one of the walls. The sailcloth she had noticed was sprawled in the dead weeds. She grasped one end of it and pulled, dragging it back. A foul smell arose, like that of a dead animal, and instinctively she let the canvas fall back. She hesitated, grasped it again, and this time dragged it out of the way, back from the wall. The stench rose again. Shining her light, she saw that the sailcloth had been concealing a small, four-foot-square iron plate in the stone of the rear wall. The plate appeared to be covering a niche. The smell was awful, but no dead animal could be seen—in fact, the smell seemed to be coming from behind the plate.

  She knelt and, breathing through her mouth, looked closely at the plate. It was rusted but not, it seemed, as rusted as it should have been. It looked like the entrance to a root cellar. The plate was hinged, the hinges oiled and suspiciously operable.

  Her heart beat faster. There was something behind here; she was sure of it.

  She shone the flashlight around the space, checked to make sure her stiletto was still tucked into the folds of her dress. Then, quietly and carefully, she lifted the iron plate—which moved easily on its hinges—revealing not a root cellar but a low tunnel, a descending stone staircase. A horrible smell came drifting up: a mingling of feces, urine, and rotting meat. She ducked through the opening and began descending the stairs into darkness.

  At the bottom she paused, listening. The storm above was now greatly muffled, and she could hear a faint, intermittent sound ahead: the sound of childlike weeping.

  45

  Gavin sat in the back room of the station house, staring glumly at the checkerboard. Once again the chief was winning, and it galled him no end to be beaten in checkers by a person who was in every way his intellectual inferior. How did Mourdock do it? He’d probably read a book and learned some cheap tricks, like those guys who played ten-second chess for money in Boston Common.

  He finally made his move.

  “King me,” the chief said, his plump fingers moving a piece into the back row.

  With ill-disguised annoyance Gavin stacked on a second chip. He was going to lose this one, too.

  What made it worse was that the chief, insufferable at the best of times, had become puffed up like a toad since his triumph that afternoon, where he’d basically hogged all the credit for solving the case, when it was Pendergast and Constance Greene who had done all the work. Gavin couldn’t understand why Pendergast had just stood at a distance during the press conference while the chief monopolized the limelight. At least, he thought, the case was over. He couldn’t get out of his memory those two corpses, obscenely carved up with the Tybane Inscriptions, and it had been a tremendous relief to learn it was just those dumbass Dunwoody brothers trying to divert suspicion from their own criminal bullshit. It was like he’d been telling everyone from the very beginning: The carvings were only a red herring. No witches or witchcraft was involved at all—a ridiculous false alarm.

  “Your move,” Mourdock said, intruding on his thoughts.

  The chief had moved his king into a clever position in which Gavin saw he was inevitably going to lose two pieces and, with them, the game. There was nothing he could do. He moved a piece, and the chief quickly double-jumped his men,
smacking the pieces down with excessive force as he did so. Fucking jackass.

  “I resign,” Gavin said immediately.

  “Come on, don’t give in so early,” said the chief, almost at a whine. “You might still win.”

  As Gavin was shaking his head he heard a sudden crash in the outer office—the front doors had been flung open. This was followed by a half-bellowed scream for help.

  Gavin and the chief leapt up, the board and its pieces scattering. A woman—Rose Buffum, Gavin instantly recognized—stood in the doorway, streaming wet, her sodden clothes clinging to her heavy body, her long gray hair plastered against her head, her eyes wide in terror.

  “God help me!” she screeched, choking. “Help me!” She staggered toward Gavin.

  “What is it?” Gavin grabbed one arm and the chief took the other. She was shaking violently. “Are you hurt?”

  “My God, my God!” she wailed.

  They eased her down in a chair. Gavin rushed to get her a cup of coffee.

  “Call nine-one-one, get an ambulance,” said the chief. “There’s blood here.”

  Buffum lay back in the chair, half swooning, eyes rolling in her head. Gavin put down the coffee and grabbed his radio. He quickly got the dispatcher in Newburyport and called in the 911. Meanwhile, the chief was wiping down Buffum’s face with a paper towel, dabbing here and there.

  “Where are you hurt?” he asked.

  The woman gasped. “It isn’t my blood!”

  “Okay,” said the chief. “Have a sip of coffee and tell us what’s going on.”

  Buffum ignored the coffee, let out another gasped wail. “The monster!”

  “Monster?” Mourdock repeated in a skeptical tone.

  “It won’t stop killing.” And then, as if seized with a sudden thought: “Oh, dear God, lock the doors!”

  “We don’t lock the station doors,” said the chief.