Redheads (44 page)

“No,” she said. She was almost whispering.

“What happened?”

“They gave me the normal dose and prepped me for it, and when they started cutting through my gums with the scalpel it was like they hadn’t given me anything at all. It hurt so much, even after they tripled the dose and I was completely out, I could still feel them cutting in. For a long time afterwards, a year maybe, I’d dream about it.”

Westfield nodded.

“Tara was that way.”

“You’re saying redheads don’t react to anesthetic like other people?” Chris asked.

“Not quite,” Julissa said. She was looking at her fingernails. “Redheads, a lot of us anyway, are hypersensitive to pain. It’s something to do with pigmentation hormones, I think.”

“That’s what it needs,” Westfield said. “I think it doesn’t just want to kill them and eat them—it wants to get inside their heads while it’s doing it and feel what they’re feeling. It’s not satisfied unless the girl’s suffering enough—enough for it to hit a certain point.”

“Like an orgasm,” Julissa said, quietly.

They sat in silence after that, looking at the cold, soot-blackened fireplace.

After a while, Westfield went to his own room and got into the bed. In spite of all their gains they might never know the final answers. If they were lucky, they would find the thing and kill it, but they wouldn’t learn everything they had to ask. If they were only searching for a man, they would probably be satisfied with that. They could kill a man and wipe their hands, and never wonder much what happened in his childhood, or what part of the country he’d grown up in. Those things wouldn’t matter: he would be just a man who killed women for sport, and men like that weren’t anything special.

Maybe he would be satisfied if he killed this thing but never answered any of the questions. It was still just a thing that killed women for sport; maybe it didn’t matter where it came from. The only thing that really mattered was to kill it.

Westfield went out alone the next morning and walked through the shops of New Town until he found a hardware store that sold brass stock. At a different store nearby he bought a small vise, a set of files, and an electric engraving tool that came with a dozen different bits for carving and grinding. He was back in Chris’s suite by nine in the morning. They pulled a wooden shelf from the closet and used it to mount the vise over the claw-footed bathtub in Julissa’s suite. Julissa had printed the pictures of the key, then used a ruler and a set of precision calipers to create a full-scale line drawing. The three of them worked through the morning, taking directions at times from Chris, who understood locks, but mostly working in concentrated silence. By two o’clock in the afternoon they had a rough cut of the key. Chris and Westfield took turns with an emery cloth, buffing the key to a fine finish, and then they oiled it with mineral oil. When they were done, Westfield held the key and compared it to the pictures.

“You think it’ll work?” he asked.

Chris shrugged.

“It’ll open the door. It’s what happens next that worries me.”

They would leave the hotel after three in the morning, when the last of the pubs had closed and the drunken crowds had finished stumbling home. It would be empty in the Old Town. Westfield watched as Julissa used black electrical tape to fasten an LED flashlight to the barrel of the sub-machinegun. She looked up at him, but there was nothing to say.

They watched the sun trace its long arc across the northern sky, and they waited.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Somewhere in the city a church bell was ringing the hour.

Julissa sat in the chair by the fire and counted to midnight. When the bell tolled the last hour, she rose and stood a moment next to Chris, who was asleep in the other chair, and then she quietly let herself out of his room.

The hallway was empty.

Earlier, she’d seen a janitor’s supply closet at the end of the hall, near the stairwell. It was locked, but poorly. She took her Visa card from the pocket of her jeans and slid it into the doorjamb, twisting the knob to the left while she pressed the card down. The door popped open and she stepped into the closet and turned on the light. After their visit with Stark, Aaron had left the empty Russian syringe in her backpack. She took it out of her pocket now and looked at the jury-rig she’d fashioned from a nylon shoelace and a Velcro strap from her camera bag. It wasn’t much to look at, but it worked, with the shoelace fastened to the thumb-button of the plunger with a couple wraps of duct tape.

She’d practiced with it in the bathroom when Chris and Aaron were finishing the key, and it had worked fine. Now she scanned the shelves in the janitor’s closet, looking for something more potent than the tap water she’d used for practice.

There was a gallon-sized, grimy bottle of industrial drain cleaner on the top shelf. She climbed a stepping stool and took it down, turning it in her hands to read the label on the back. But the label had been dissolved by the contents of the bottle.

That’s gotta be a good sign.

She knelt on the floor and poured a tablespoon of drain cleaner into the bottle’s cap. Wisps of smoke rose from droplets that spilled on the concrete floor. She dipped the needle into the cap and drew the fluid into the syringe by pulling back the plunger. She strapped the syringe to her wrist, pulled the sleeve of her sweatshirt over it, and wrapped the shoelace around her finger. Then she put the drain cleaner back on the shelf, switched off the light, and went back down the hall to Chris’s room.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chris woke at fifteen minutes to three, when Julissa put her hand on his cheek. He stood from the armchair and stretched.

“Westfield?” he said.

“Just called him. He’s changing his bandages one more time.”

Chris took Julissa’s shoulders and pulled her to his chest so that he was holding her against him, the soft curve of her breasts against his ribs. He kissed the top of her head, letting his face rest there for a moment in the warmth of her hair. Then he put on his jacket, tucking his pistol into the waistband of his pants.

Westfield was waiting for them by the elevator, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

They walked across the empty lobby and out onto Princes Street. Crossing Waverly Bridge above the train station, they could hear a crew of workmen talking as they coupled train cars on the tracks down below. Then they crossed the cobblestone traffic circle at Market and Cockburn Streets, stepped under the scaffolding of a construction site, and entered the tight confines of Advocate’s Close. They climbed the stone staircase and stopped at the door. Dewdrops in the lichen covering the carved ship glowed in distant light from the street lamps on High Street. Chris took out the key and held it in his left hand, then drew his pistol and held it in his right hand. Julissa turned on a small flashlight and aimed it at the door. He turned and saw it was the flashlight taped to the barrel of the sub-machinegun. Westfield was just behind her and to her right, his pistol drawn but pointed at the base of the door.

“Okay,” Chris whispered.

He fit the key into the lock, slowly, feeling the faint taps as the pin tumblers lifted and settled over the newly filed ridges of the key. Then he turned the key clockwise and felt the lock’s internal plug rotate with it. There was a click, and the door opened inwards an eighth of an inch. Chris put his hand where the creature had put its claws, and he pushed. The door swung on oiled hinges. He felt the rush of cold air coming around his feet and understood immediately, even before Julissa stepped forward and shone her light onto the stairs, that they were standing at the mouth of a cave.

Nothing rushed up to meet them except the dank smell of cold air. There was a smell like roots and earthworms. The stairs went down at a forty-five degree angle inside of a vaulted passageway that was only wide enough to allow them to walk single file. The stones overhead were carved into arches. They were standing in Advocate’s Close with Julissa’s light pointing down the passage. The light was only good for a hundred feet and then it was useless.

Chris pocketed the key and turned on his flashlight. He held it in his left hand with the pistol braced above it in his right hand. He walked down the first three steps and paused when he felt Julissa’s hand on his shoulder.

“I think Aaron should close the door when we’re all inside,” she whispered. “So no one wanders in.”

Chris nodded and walked down another two steps, then heard the quiet
click
when Westfield closed the door. With three lights shining down the tunnel he could see farther, but the shadow of the dropping tunnel stretched long past the reach of their light. The beam of his flashlight settled on a black box bolted to the solid rock wall up ahead. As they approached it, all three of the beams focused on the little box.

“Wireless internet repeater antenna,” Julissa whispered. “Probably to bounce the signal around the corner and up to another antenna at street level.”

“Wireless,” Westfield said. “Jesus.”

“All the modern conveniences,” Chris said. He let his light follow the black electrical cable that came out of the box and followed the stairway downwards, secured to the wall at intervals by U-bolts.

Chris knew it wasn’t just an animal they were stalking. It sent emails. It took digital photographs and flew around in helicopters. It had a lawyer in its pocket and a fleet of ships that spanned the globe. But the smell in this cave didn’t tell him they were walking into the penthouse of an international shipping magnate. The stench of rot and mud and old death told him they were walking into something else. This creature could live in their world, but its hand hadn’t shaped it. When they got to the bottom of these stairs, they would see how it lived when it was alone.
We’re going into its nest
, Chris thought.

Its lair.

He walked downwards. The stairs were slick with damp and mold, but as they went deeper the air became drier. After six hundred and twenty steps the passageway leveled, curving to the right. There was another wireless antenna. The passage was barely two feet wide and wasn’t high enough to stand up straight. He knew he was so amped up he would probably fire his entire clip if he saw a rat. He paused to steady himself and again felt Julissa’s hand on his shoulder. She didn’t say anything and he didn’t look back. When he started to move again she kept her hand at the small of his back, a light press of her fingers to let him know she was there. When he made it around the curve, the floor dropped away again into another set of stairs. This passage was no wider, but the ceiling here was shorter, made of flat slabs of stone instead of arches. The small pools of light from the three flashlights wavered unsteadily on the ceiling and the steps as they went down.

Chapter Fifty-Six

For Julissa, the strangeness began the moment she stepped off the well-traveled steps of Advocate’s Close and into the tunnel beneath the city. First there was the push of cold air and that smell, like a handful of wet earth taken from the place where a dead thing had been buried long ago. It was a dead smell, but it was more than that. It was sickeningly fecund; something was growing very well down there in the dark. After Aaron closed the door behind them, and the darkness was complete except for the dim circles of their flashlights along the dripping ceiling and mossy steps, something started to grow in her thoughts.

At first it was just a whisper.

Like hearing snatches of a conversation while walking on the streets of a foreign city, the language so different from her own she couldn’t tell where one word left off and the next began. And then it was gone.

She held the sub-machinegun’s pistol grip tightly, but kept her finger away from the trigger. They walked down the steps in silence and when they were deeper under the city, images began to take shape in her mind. She saw a young redheaded woman walking out of the water and onto the wet sand a few moments before sunset. She saw this from inches above the water, charging in towards the shore as if riding a powerful current. The girl turned to look at the waves, one hand behind her neck to feel the knotted strap holding up her bikini. Julissa’s vision liquefied as she went beneath the surface. She saw taloned white hands gripping into the wave-rippled sandy bottom, clumps of Sargasso weed rolling in the current, a sand dollar. She watched the hands claw along the bottom, dragging her towards the shore; she could feel the small humps of sand sliding beneath her belly, the scratch of seaweed rolling down her bare leg.

Ahead of her, Chris stopped and she nearly bumped into him.

The vision in her mind disappeared.

Then, for a second, she saw the inside of Allison’s condominium in Galveston. She saw it from the outside looking in through the third-floor window. She saw her sister pass through the kitchen with a glass of wine, walking towards her bedroom wearing a pair of panties and a tank top. Superimposed over this image of Allison was a pair of glowing yellow eyes, a transparent reflection on the glass of her dead sister’s window.

That image faded too.

They reached the bottom of the staircase and began to walk through a narrow, curving passage. Chris stopped and she put her hand on his shoulder, needing him. He paused and leaned back into her touch to acknowledge it.

She was seeing the creature’s dreams. It must have been asleep or falling back to sleep, its mind wheeling through images and broken thoughts, waiting to settle on something.