Cemetery Dance

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 manner of odd and unusual nooks and crannies, each stuffed with old props in various stages of decrepitude and decay, most from the grand historical epics for which Esteban was known. The basement was beginning to feel endless; it must have belonged to an earlier, even larger building occupying the site of Esteban's mansion.

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 tunnel stretched ahead into darkness — a tunnel that at first glance appeared to have been dug out of the raw earth. Pendergast moved closer and touched a wall — and discovered it wasn't earth at all, but plaster painted to look like dirt. Another movie set, this one retrofitted into what had evidently been an older tunnel. From the direction, Pendergast guessed it led to the barn; such tunnels connecting house and barn were a common feature of nineteenth — century farms.

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 tunnel, shading the pen — light with his hand. If Nora was imprisoned on the grounds — and he was sure she was — she would have to be in the barn basement.

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 tunnel that led from the barn to the house. Now he snapped on a small pocket LED; in the bluish glow he could make out the fake plaster walls and cribbing left over from shootingBreakout Sing Sing, in which he had used this very tunnel as a set — and saved a tidy sum. About twenty feet past the tunnel mouth, a plywood panel had been set into the wall, a small angle — iron lever protruding from it. Esteban gave it a quick inspection and found it to be in good condition. It had been a simple mechanism to begin with, requiring no electricity, only the force of gravity to operate — in the movie business, contraptions had to be reliable and easy to work, because it was well known that whatcould break,would break, inevitably when the cameras were rolling and the star was, finally, sober. Out of curiosity he had tested the device just the year before — a device he had designed himself — and found that it still functioned just as well as on the day he shot the immortal escape scene of the movie that had almost won him an Academy Award.Almost.

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.