A Fatal Frame of Mind

Chapter Thirty-one

The tunnel was barely five feet high. Shawn and Gus had to keep their knees bent with every step to keep from hitting their heads on the ceiling. And for Kitteredge it was even worse. He’d be better off crawling, Gus thought as the professor slammed his forehead into another light fixture. If the bare bulbs hadn’t been caged in wire he would have smashed half of them and his scalp would have been shredded by glass.

Only Malko didn’t have any trouble maneuvering his way through the narrow tunnel, and he led them at a pace that suggested it had never occurred to him that anyone else would.

“What is this tunnel?” Gus whispered to Shawn.

“Apparently one of the benefits of having a bootlegger for a father,” Shawn said.

“Smugglers have long used tunnels for storing and transporting their goods,” Kitteredge said. “For example, in the small hamlet of Hayle in Cornwall, there is a seventeenth-century smugglers’ tunnel that runs for hundreds of yards. Of course, the seventeenth century was when smuggling really took off across Europe, thanks to huge taxes imposed by governments to pay for a series of financially crippling wars and-”

There was a dull thud as Kitteredge smacked his head into another light.

Gus wanted to turn back to see if Kitteredge was all right, but the tunnel was too narrow. “Professor?” Gus asked.

“I’m fine,” Kitteredge said. “Although perhaps I should focus on the present moment for a while.”

“There’s a plan,” Shawn said.

Gus had to agree. The present was the time to focus on. Partly because the past was becoming a blur in his sleep-addled and stress-befuddled brain, but mostly because the future was increasingly obvious. It involved arrest, incarceration, and, after some number of decades, an unmarked grave in a prison cemetery.

That had become evident once everyone realized that the blue and red lights on the dining room ceiling were the flashers from a squad of police cars. Almost immediately after the amplified voice had boomed through the house, there was a pounding on the front door. It was only fists, but Gus knew that was just an opening gambit. If Low didn’t open it fast, they’d be using a battering ram.

Low knew it, too. Grabbing Kitteredge by the arm, he led them quickly out of the dining room through a long, high-ceilinged hall, and then left into a smaller corridor. Behind them, Malko scurried to keep up. Halfway down the hallway, Low stopped and threw open a door.

“Get in,” Low said.

Gus and Shawn peered into the room. It was four feet wide and four feet deep. Mops and brooms hung on one wall, and the shelves on the other side were stocked with cleaning supplies.

“It’s a broom closet,” Shawn said. “Don’t get me wrong-it’s a perfectly nice broom closet, and if we had a couple extra hours to clean this place up, we’d be really happy to see it. But if you’re thinking this would be a good place to hide from the police, I’ve got to tell you I’ve been at lots of crime scenes, and they almost never forget to check in the closets.”

“Get in, fool,” Malko growled. He shoved Shawn and Gus through the door. Then he gave Kitteredge a respectful bow. “Please, Professor.”

Kitteredge looked dubious, but he stepped into the small space, taking up nearly every available square inch that didn’t already contain Shawn or Gus, and more than a couple that did.

“I’ll hold the police off as long as I can,” Low said apologetically. “You just run. Follow Malko. He knows the way.”

“Run?” Shawn said. “I can’t even lift my big toe.”

Malko growled dismissively and then forced his way into the closet. Before Gus or Shawn could shove him out again, Low slammed the door. After a second there was a dreadful, final click. That could mean only one thing: Low had locked the door. There was no way out.

Claustrophobia had never been one of Gus’ primary fears. Not that he wasn’t uncomfortable in tight spaces; it was just that there always seemed to be something better to be frightened of.

But now, in this tiny coffin, gasping for a breath that hadn’t already been exhaled by one of the others, Gus suddenly realized that there was nothing more terrifying than the prospect of being buried alive. And if the burial happened not to be under six feet of dirt but pressed up against six feet plus of art history professor’s tweed, it was still the most horrible fate imaginable.

At least it was until he felt something squirming against his legs. What kind of disgusting creatures had been breeding here in the eternal blackness? Gus had a vision of hairless creatures, half rat and half slug, with white blanks where eyes should be, reaching out with their scaly talons to feel their way through the world-and through Gus’ flesh, if it got in their way.

Until he heard Malko’s angry whisper. “Get out of the way, you idiot. I’ve got to get past you.”

Gus would have breathed a sigh of relief, but all the air had been pressed out of his lungs by Kitteredge’s bulk. He squeezed closer to the professor. Or thought he was squeezing closer; it was hard to tell. But he felt the scrabbling move across his legs, and Malko didn’t curse him out again, so he assumed he had done the right thing.

“Anyone got ideas on what we should do to pass the time?” Shawn said. “I was thinking about a game of tennis.”

Gus heard Malko mutter a curse under his breath. At least, he hoped that’s what he’d heard. If it wasn’t the hunchback, that meant there really was someone or something locked in the closet with them. And while Gus liked to think he was generally a level-headed person immune from irrational panic attacks, he couldn’t help recalling the scene from C.H. U.D. in which one of the cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers reached up through a manhole and dragged an innocent passerby and her little dog to their unspeakable fate.

“Panicking isn’t going to help,” Shawn said. “At least not panicking about C.H.U.D. s. Because you’re not going to find any here. We’re not underground. And I’ve never heard of a cannibalistic humanoid closet dweller. If you want to panic about something useful, panic about the fact that the police are going to open this door at any minute.”

“I wasn’t panicking about C.H.U.D. s,” Gus said. “I wasn’t even thinking about them.”

“Then you’d better get your facial muscles under control, because they’re sending out some seriously bad messages,” Shawn said.

“Both of you, be silent,” Malko snapped from a corner of the closet.

“I’ve got to tell you: the police are going to think to look in here even if we don’t say anything,” Shawn said. “If your boss lets them down this hallway, it’s all over.”

Gus heard a noise from far above him, and he realized it was Kitteredge clearing his throat. “I’m sorry I got you two into this,” the professor said. “My own research has made me a target of the Cabal, and I’ve long accepted that prospect. But to drag in the two of you, when all you wanted to do was help-all I can say is I will do everything I can to take all the blame if we are captured.”

“We won’t be, if you’ll all be silent,” Malko said.

Gus heard a thunking noise from the back of the closet and suddenly felt the most wonderful sensation he’d ever experienced-a fresh breeze blowing in his face. The fact that it was only as fresh as the air from an unplugged refrigerator opened for the first time in a year didn’t concern him. It had oxygen in it, which put it far ahead of anything he’d been breathing since Low locked the closet door.

“This way,” Malko said.

Gus couldn’t imagine which way Malko was talking about, but since two of the four possible choices entailed passing through the solid flesh of either Shawn or Kitteredge and the third would mean unlocking the closet door just in time to meet the local constabulary, he chose to step toward the back wall.

Toward, but not to, as it turned out. The back wall had disappeared, and now the closet seemed to go on forever. Before he could figure out exactly what was going on, he was shoved forward by Shawn and Kitteredge.

Gus took a step, then two, keeping his arms outstretched in case the back wall had merely moved ahead a couple of feet.

“Everybody out?” Malko said, and received grunts of assent in return. “Good.”

Gus heard a door closing behind him, and then a string of lights glowed into existence overhead. Gus couldn’t believe what he was seeing in the faint illumination-a low, rounded tunnel carved through the bedrock of the hills. He couldn’t tell where it went or how long it would take to get there. It seemed to stretch on forever.

“Now get moving,” Malko commanded, and set off down the tunnel.

It wasn’t like there were many other options at this point. But if the rest of them had any doubts about the course of action, they were quickly convinced by the muffled sound of Low’s voice behind the door, apparently explaining to a policeman that the room they had just entered was indeed nothing more than a broom closet.

So they set off. How long they’d been walking and how far they’d gone Gus couldn’t say. At one point he contemplated counting the light fixtures they had passed under, figuring out how many feet there were between them and using that to calculate distance. But he kept losing count every time Kitteredge banged his head on a bulb, there didn’t seem to be any consistency in their spacing, and he realized he had no idea how many feet there were in a mile, so he gave that up and just kept moving.

Finally the tunnel walls fell away and disappeared into the darkness outside the radius of light pumped out by the bulbs.

“I think I understand now,” Kitteredge said. “This is a natural cave in the hills. Whoever built the tunnel started here and worked back toward the house. I’d guess this is an artifact of the Prohibition days.”

“Mr. Low’s father had it made,” Malko said.

Kitteredge peered back down the way they’d come. “Truly astonishing,” he said. “Even if it had been dug after 1956, when the first successful tunnel-boring machine was deployed in digging the Humber River Sewer Tunnel, a passage this long would have been an astonishing feat. But to think of the work that must have gone into construction without such a machine-it must have taken years.”

“Wasn’t around then to know,” Malko said.

“Do you know how long it is?” Kitteredge said.

“Unless it’s long enough to reach across the Mexican border, we’re still in trouble,” Shawn said.

“It’s not,” Malko said.

“So we are,” Gus said.

“But it’s got something just as good,” Malko said.

The hunchback took two steps forward and disappeared into the darkness. Before anyone could move, another set of lights switched on, and they could see where they’d arrived.

The cave was the kind of place Gus had dreamed of as a kid. It was so vast that even with the illumination of a hundred ceiling lights, its corners faded away into darkness. Stalagmites jutted up out of the ground around the walls-unless they were stalactites; Gus could never remember which was which-but the center of the cave had been cleared and the floor had been blasted and sanded until it was a solid slab of rock hundreds of feet across. It was, Gus thought, big enough to house a 747.

Which meant it was several times larger than it needed to be, since the only plane it housed was a Learjet.

Malko walked quickly to the plane. He turned a handle on the door, yanked it open, and pulled down a flight of steps. “Get in,” he growled.

Kitteredge wasted no time in racing up the stairs and into the plane. Shawn and Gus held back.

“Do you know how to fly one of these things?” Shawn said. “Because I’m pretty sure Gus doesn’t.”

“I don’t,” Gus said.

“Then you’d better hope I don’t have a heart attack when we’re at ten thousand feet,” Malko said. “Now get in.”