Cemetery Dance

Chapter 67

Pendergast's clotheswere torn and bloody and his ears still rang from the attack. He propped himself up and rose unsteadily to his feet. His encounter with the man — beast had knocked him senseless for a few minutes, and he'd come to in the dark. He reached into his suit coat, removed a tiny LED light he carried for emergencies such as this, and shined it around. Slowly, methodically, he searched the damp floor for his gun, but it was nowhere to be seen. He could make out faint signs of struggle, with what were evidently D'Agosta's fleeing footprints, the barefooted painted man in pursuit.

He flicked it off and remained in the dark, thinking. He made a quick calculation, a swift decision. This creature, this zombii, had been possessed by his minders of a terrible and murderous purpose. On the loose, he presented a grave threat to them both. And yet Pendergast had confidence in D'Agosta — a confidence almost amounting to faith. The lieutenant could take care of himself if anyone could.

But Nora — Nora still awaited rescue.

Pendergast flicked the light back on and examined the next room. It was a veritable necropolis of wooden coffins laid out on rows of elevated stone pedestals, some stacked two and three high, many collapsing and spilling their contents to the ground. It appeared as if many of the basement spaces of the Ville, originally built for other purposes, had been converted to storing the dead.

But as he turned away, preparing to renew his search for Nora, he caught a glimpse of something at the very head of the room — an unusual tomb. Something about it arrested his attention. He approached to examine it more closely, and then, making a decision, laid a hand on it.

It was a coffin, made of thick lead. Instead of being set on a bier like the others, it had been sunken into the stonework of the floor, only its top projecting above the ground. What caught his eye was that the lid was ajar and the vault within had clearly been looted — very recently looted.

He examined it more intently. In past centuries, lead had often been the material of choice for interring an important person because of its preservative qualities. Playing the light over it, he noted just how carefully the coffin had been sealed, the lead lid soldered firmly to the top. But someone had hacked open the lead cover with an ax, chopping violently through the seal and prying the lid off, leaving a ragged, gaping hole. This had been done not only recently, but in great haste. The marks in the soft metal were bright and shiny, showing no signs of dulling or oxidation.

Pendergast looked inside. The body — which had mummified in the sealed environment — had been roughly disturbed, something wrenched out of its crooked hands, the ossified fingers broken and scattered, one arm torn from its dusty socket.

He reached inside and felt the corpse dust, gauging its dryness. This had happened so recently that not even the damp air of the room had had time to settle inside the coffin. The looting must have occurred less than thirty minutes ago.

Coincidence? Certainly not.

Pendergast turned his attention to the dead body itself. It was a remarkably well — preserved corpse of an old man with a full white beard and long white hair. Two golden guineas were pressed on its eyes. The face was shriveled like an old apple, the lips drawn back from the teeth by desiccation, the skin darkened to the color of fine old ivory. The body was dressed in simple, Quaker — like clothes — a sober frock coat, shirt, brown waistcoat, and pale breeches — but the clothes around the chest had been ripped open and disarranged by the looting, buttons and bits scattered about in what appeared to have been a frenzied search of the corpse. On the man's disarranged chest, Pendergast could see pressure marks on the clothing of what had evidently been a small, square container — a box.

That, along with the broken fingers, told a story. The looter had wrenched a box from the corpse's dusty grasp.

On the floor behind the coffin, Pendergast spied the broken remains of what could only be the very box, the dry — rotted top wrenched off. He leaned over and examined it more closely, sniffing it, noting its dimensions. The faint smell of vellum confirmed his initial impression that the box had held a quarto — size document.

Slowly, deliberately, Pendergast walked around the coffin lid. At the top end, stamped into the lead, he could see an inscription, obscured by whitish blooms of oxide. He wiped the oxide away with his sleeve and read the inscription.

Pendergast stared at the name on the tomb for a long time. And then, quite suddenly, everything fell into place and he understood. His face darkened as he thought of the catastrophic mistake he had made. This looted coffin wasn't a coincidence, an irrelevant sideshow — it was the main event.