Cemetery Dance

It took a step forward, then two, the thighs moving with a kind of slow, creeping deliberation. Plock was frozen, rooted, unable to move, to look away, even to speak.

In the sudden hush, there was a rustle of cloth and Bossong knelt, bowing his head and holding out his hands in supplication.

"Envoie," he said, quietly, almost sadly.

Instantly, the man — thing bounded straight at the platform with a crab — like shuffle, leapt onto it, opened his rotten mouth, and fell upon Plock.

Plock finally found his voice and tried to scream as the creature savaged him, but already it was too late for sound to emerge from his severed windpipe, and he expired in agonizing silence. It was over very, very quickly.

Chapter 76

Pendergast shined his penlight around the basement. The narrow beam revealed a chaos of bizarre objects, but he ignored them, focusing his attention on the basement wall — which consisted of flat, rough pieces of granite, stacked and carefully mortared.

His face tightened with recognition.

Now he turned his attention to the junk crowding the basement. Rising before him was an Egyptian obelisk of cracked plaster, weeping with damp and spiderwebbed with mildew. Beside it stood the truncated turret of a medieval castle, slapped together out of rotting plywood, complete with crenellations and machicolations, perhaps one — tenth actual size; next to that was a heap of broken plaster statues, stacked like cordwood, in which Pendergast could make out smaller — scale copies of theDavid, the Winged Victory, and theLaocoön, arms and legs and heads all tangled up, broken fingers lying about the cement floor beneath. The light revealed, in turn, a fiber — glass shark, several plastic skeletons, a primitive tribal relic carved from Styrofoam, and a rubber human brain with a bite taken out of it.

The extensive clutter made for slow going, and it prevented him from grasping the full dimensions of the belowground areas. As he moved through the eerie piles of cast — off movie sets — for that was clearly what they were — he kept the penlight low, moving as swiftly and silently as he could manage. Though scattered and jumbled without hint of organization, the props and the concrete floor they lay on were unusually clean and dust free, attesting to an excessive interest on the part of Esteban.

The light flashed this way and that as Pendergast moved deeper into the clutter of Hollywoodiana. The claustrophobic spaces continued to branch out underground, room after room, stretching beyond the current footprint of the house, all ma

Esteban. He would return home shortly, if he hadn't already. Time was passing — precious time that Pendergast could not afford to waste.

He moved to the next cellar — once apparently a smokehouse, now stacked with a witch — dunking chair, a gibbet, a set of stocks — and a spectacularly realistic guillotine from the French Revolution, blade poised to drop, the tumbrel below filled with severed wax heads, eyes open, mouths frozen in screams.

He moved on.

Reaching the end of the final cellar, he approached a rusty iron door, unlocked and standing ajar. He eased it open, surprised to find that the heavy door moved silently on oiled hinges. A long, narrow tu

He shined the light down the murky passage. In places the fake plaster walls had peeled off, revealing the same stacked granite stones that had been used to build the house basement — and that were evident in the video of Nora.

He began moving cautiously down the tu

Esteban entered the barn through the side door and treaded softly in the vast space, fragrant with the smell of hay and old plaster. All around him loomed the props he had so assiduously collected and stored, at great expense, from his many films. He kept them for sentimental reasons he had never been able to explain. Like all movie props they had been built in haste, slapped together with spit and glue, designed to last only as long as the shooting. Now they were rapidly decaying. And yet he was deeply fond of them, could not in fact bear to part with them, see them broken up and hauled off. He had passed many a delicious evening strolling among them, brandy in hand, touching them, admiring them, fondly recalling the glory days of his career.

Now they were serving an unexpected purpose: slowing down that FBI agent, keeping him occupied and distracted, while at the same time helping to conceal Esteban and his movements.

Esteban threaded through the props to the back of the barn, where he unlocked and unbolted an iron door. A set of stairs descended into cool darkness, down into the barn's capacious underground rooms — once upon a time the fruit cellars, cheese aging rooms, root cellars, meat — curing vaults, and wine cellars of the grand hotel that had occupied the site. Even these spaces, the deepest on the estate, were chock — full of old props. Except for the old meat locker he had cleared out to imprison the girl.

Like a blind man in his own house, Esteban made his way through the mass of old props, not even bothering with a flashlight, moving surely and confidently in the dark. Soon he had reached the mouth of the tu

Flushing at the thought of the lost Oscar, he switched off his light and listened. Yes: he could hear the faint footsteps of the approaching agent. The man was about to make a gruesome discovery. And then, of course, there was no way the poor FBI agent — no matter how transcendentally clever — could possibly anticipate what would happen to him next.

Chapter 77

Harry R. Chislett, deputy chief of the Washington Heights North district, stood at the central control point on Indian Road, a radio in each hand. Faced with an unprecedented and utterly unexpected development, he had nevertheless — so he considered — adapted with remarkable speed and economy. Who could have foreseen so many protesters, so quickly, all moving with the ruthless precision and purpose of a single mind? Yet Chislett had risen to the occasion. What a tragedy, then, that — for all his probity — he was surrounded by incompetence and ineptitude. His orders had been misinterpreted, improperly carried out, even ignored. Yes: there was no other word for it than tragedy.