Dance Of Death

She hastened on into a completely different space that depicted the Japanese tea ceremony. There was an orderly garden, the plantings and pebbled walkway in meticulous order. Beyond lay the sukiya, the tea room itself. It was a relief to enter this open, orderly space after the claustrophobia of the catacombs. The tea room was the living embodiment of purity and tranquillity, with its polished wood, paper screens, mother-of-pearl inlays, and tatamis, along with the simple accouterments of the ceremony: the iron kettle, the bamboo dipper, the linen napkin. Even so, the emptiness of it, the deep shadows and dark spaces, started to u

Time to wrap up this errand and get out.

She walked briskly through the tea room and wound her way deeper into the exhibition, passing an eclectic parade of exhibits including a dark Indian funerary lodge, a hogan filled with Navajo sand paintings, and a violent Chukchi shamanistic rite in which the shaman had to be physically chained to the ground to keep his soul from being stolen by demons.

She finally arrived at the four Kiva Society masks. They stood in a glass case in the center of the room, mounted on slender rods, each facing in a different direction. Around the circular walls had been painted a magnificent depiction of the New Mexico landscape, and each mask faced one of the four sacred mountains that surrounded Tanoland.

Margo gazed at them, awestruck anew by their power. They were amazingly evocative masks, severe, fierce, and yet at the same time overflowing with human expression. Although they were close to eight hundred years old, they looked modern in their formal abstraction. They were true masterpieces.

She glanced at her notes, then walked to the nearest wall map to orient herself. Then she moved around the central display, checking each mask-and was surprised to find that they were, in fact, facing the correct directions. Ashton, for all his bluster, had gotten it right. In fact, she grudgingly had to admit he'd put together an outstanding exhibition.

She stuffed the notes back in her purse. The silence, the dimness, was starting to get to her. She'd take in the rest of the show some other time, in broad daylight, when the halls were bustling with people.

She had just turned to retrace her steps when she heard a loud clatter, like a board falling, in the next room.

She jumped, heart suddenly pounding in her ears. A minute passed with no further sound.

Her heart slowing again, Margo advanced to the archway and peered into the dimness of the exhibit beyond. It was a depiction of the interior of Arizona's haunting House of Hands Cave, painted by the Anasazi a thousand years ago. But the room was empty, and the quantity of cut lumber still lying around indicated that what she'd heard was just a propped-up board which had finally gotten around to falling.

She took a deep breath. The watchful stillness, the spookiness of the exhibition, had finally gotten to her. That was all. Don't think about what happened before. The museum's changed since then, changed utterly She was probably in the safest place in New York City. The security had been upgraded half a dozen times since the debacle seven years ago. This latest system-still being finalized-was the best money could buy. Nobody could get into this hall without a magnetic key card, and the card reader recorded the identity of each person who passed through, as well as the time.

She turned again, preparing to walk back out of the exhibition, humming to herself as a defense against the silence. But before she had even crossed the exhibit, she was stopped again by the clatter of lumber-this time from the room ahead of her.

"Hello?" she called out, her voice u

There was no answer.

She decided it must be the guard making his rounds, tripping over loose boards. In the old days, the guards, having discovered the tanks of grain alcohol preservative stored in the Entomology Department, were sometimes found drunk at night. I guess some things never change.

Once again, she headed back in the direction of the entrance, wending her way through the dark exhibits, walking briskly, her heels making a reassuring click-click on the tiled floor.

With a sudden snap!, the exhibition was plunged into blackness.

An instant later, the emergency lights came to life, rows of fluorescent tubes set in the ceiling, popping and humming as they winked on, one by one.

Once again, she tried to calm her wildly beating heart. This was silly. It wasn't the first time she'd been in the museum during a power failure; they happened all the time in the old building. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to worry about.

She had barely taken another step when she heard yet another clatter of lumber, this time from the room she had just passed through. It sounded almost deliberate-as if someone were deliberately trying to spook her.

"Who's there?" she asked, whirling around, suddenly angry.

But the hall behind her-a crimson-painted crypt arrayed with the cruel trappings of a black mass-was empty.

"If this is some kind of joke, I don't appreciate it."

She waited, tense as a spring, but there was no sound.

She wondered if it was just a coincidence: another board falling on its own, the exhibition settling down after a hectic day. She reached into her handbag, feeling around for something she might use as a weapon. There was nothing. In years past, following the trauma of the museum killings and their aftermath, she had taken to keeping a pistol in her bag. But this was a habit she'd dropped when she left the museum and went to work for GeneDyne. Now she cursed herself for letting down her guard.

Then she spied a box cutter, sitting on a worktable on the far side of the exhibit. She ran to it, snatched it up, and-holding it out aggressively before her-resumed her walk toward the entrance.

Another clatter, this one louder than the others, as if someone had tossed something.

Now Margo was sure there was someone else with her in the exhibition: someone deliberately trying to scare her. Was it possible it was somebody who objected to her editorial and was now trying to intimidate her? She'd find out from security who else had been in the hall and report them immediately.

She broke into a trot. She passed through the Japanese tea room and had just entered the looted Egyptian tomb when there was another sharp snap! This time the emergency lights went out and the windowless hall was plunged into total blackness.

She halted, almost paralyzed by sudden fear and a chilling sense of déjà vu as she recalled a similar moment in another exhibition, years earlier, in this same museum.

"Who is it?" she cried.

"It's just me," a voice said.

THIRTY-TWO

Smithback froze, all senses on high alert. He looked left and right, eyes straining in the greenish dark. But there was no sound; no figure rushing toward him, black upon black.

Must be my imagination, he thought. The creepy place was enough to give anybody the heebie-jeebies.

Much as he hated to leave the faint light of the boiler room, he knew he had to move on. He needed to find the loading dock and- just as important-a good hiding place nearby. If the last ten minutes were any indication, it might take him a while.

He waited a good five minutes, listening, making sure the coast was clear. Then he crept back out of the vast room and, turning, began making his way toward what he thought must be the back of the mansion. The pale light faded away and he once again slowed his pace, putting his arms out in front of him, shuffling his feet gingerly so as not to bark his shins a second time.