The Soul Collectors (41 page)

She smelled the salt in the air before she heard the ocean.

The road wound its way around a cliff. Looking over the edge, she saw water lit up by the moonlight, the spent waves creaming against the rocks, and then they disappeared, lost in a blizzard.

She jerked backwards, blinking. No snow. She could see perfectly well. A hallucination. What had caused that? She hadn’t drunk their water. What? Her heart was thumping erratically and when she touched her face it felt as dry as her tongue. Dehydration? Or had that bucket of water she used been laced with something?

Looking off to her left, she could see endless water. To her far right, more water lapping against cliffs and a half-standing lighthouse sitting on a small island.

The area directly above the lighthouse was a field of broken boulders. No choice but to go down.

She had made it halfway when she saw some stairs cut into the rock. She took them down, relieved to see she didn’t have to swim to reach the lighthouse. But she had to wade through water cold enough to turn bone to ice, and it rose all the way up her legs before she reached the next set of stairs. She stumbled up them drunkenly, her head pounding by the time she reached the top.

The door was locked. She went to try a key and found she was no longer carrying the key ring. She had no memory of having dropped or lost it.

It took four blows of her shoulder to knock it open.

A winding metal staircase, the wind howling above her. She found a storage room in the back, the wooden shelves stripped bare.

Shivering, she took the stairs, her breath pluming and then disappearing in the cold air.

Halfway up she found another room with an upended cot and an old AM radio covered in rust. Warmer in here than outside. She shut the door, heard the wind whistle through the gaps and cracks, and turned over the cot. She lay down on her back and stared up at the black ceiling, thinking.

Where was she? Had to be somewhere on the East Coast, okay, but where? Some sort of island? She hadn’t seen any homes or cars. Nothing but woods and the ocean and this lighthouse.

Despair pressed against the walls of her heart and she closed her eyes and ignored it. Think of a plan. Wait for sunlight. Pray for a bright day and then head out of here. There has to be something here. Those people had brought her water, and Sarah Casey had brought her food. There had to be a grocery store somewhere near by. Darby switched back to Sarah Casey and wondered about the girl and her father, praying that they were still alive – still had the will to live. Jack Casey had had it crushed out of him, but his daughter – would she still cling to it if something happened to her father? What would she do if her father died? The question hung in Darby’s mind as she drifted off to sleep.

She dreamed that Coop had rescued her. He came with an army of helicopters that soared above the lighthouse, men rappelling down ropes and carrying guns.

Coop sat on the edge of her cot and nudged her awake.

‘I came back for you,’ he said. ‘I found you.’

He took her in his arms and kissed her cheek and hair and held her as she let it all out, dry sobs at first, then the rest of it, the worst part, and she wailed into his neck and screamed into his chest, wanting to purge it from her heart.

When she pulled herself away, she saw Jack Casey’s face pulverized and blood running from his nose and ears. His eyes.

‘Luck always runs out,’ he said. ‘You have to come back home now.’

*

Darby sat up in the dark and saw light creeping underneath the door. Heard footsteps.

‘Miss McCormick? Miss McCormick, you in here?’

She crept to the edge of the door and opened it slightly, looking down the winding staircase. In the bright sunlight saw a man dressed head to toe in black peering through the target site of an HK sub-machine gun. His partner was standing right behind him,
SWAT
in bright white letters on his back.

How had they found – the GPS transmitter in her arm. Sergey or the feds monitoring the signal had found it and sent people here.

She had to scrape the words from her dry throat.

‘Don’t shoot,’ she said, her voice a whispery rasp. She came out of the doorway with her hands raised. ‘Don’t shoot.’

The one in the back turned to her, then dropped his gun and said, ‘Jesus.’

84

The SWAT officers draped her arms across their shoulders and carried her out of the lighthouse. The wind slapped her face and blew her hair, and the bright sun pierced her eyes as she looked up the weathered cliff and caught sight of a Coast Guard helicopter.

‘It’s hidden in the woods,’ Darby croaked. ‘A hatch. Jack Casey and his daughter. Underground. Need to help them.’

They didn’t answer and she realized they couldn’t hear her.

She tried again when they brought her inside the helicopter.

‘Jack Casey and his daughter.’

They guided her on to a stretcher.

‘Below us,’ Darby croaked. Christ, how her throat ached. It felt raw and dry and nearly swollen shut. ‘Go to the woods and find the hatch, hurry, not much time.’

Darby felt a cool alcohol swab brush against the back of her hand. She turned and saw a Coast Guard officer, a woman, hovering by her side. Darby looked over the woman’s shoulder, at the two SWAT officers who had turned away. They had heard her, she was pretty sure. She could see them running towards the woods, the trees shaking in the breeze on a beautiful autumn day.

Darby moaned when the IV needle slipped into her hand.

‘Sorry,’ the woman said. ‘It’s your skin. You’re dehydrated. We need to get fluids into your system.’

Darby needed to be sure they had heard her. She beckoned the woman closer and told her about the hatch, Casey and his daughter, everything.

The woman straightened, looking confused and frightened. ‘I’ll tell them.’

‘Where am I?’

‘Black Rock Island. It’s off the coast of Maine.’

‘Stay.’

‘I will. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere –’

‘No. Stay here. On the island. I need to go back there. I need to see.’

‘There’s nothing out there, hon. Nobody comes out this way.’

‘Don’t take me away’ was the last thing Darby said before she drifted off.

Coop came as the sun started to set.

Darby saw him standing near the edge of the woods. She sat up on the stretcher, the IV line still in her arm, and lost sight of him for a moment. Her head was spinning but not as badly as before and she leaned back against the cabin wall.

The aft door slid open and Coop popped his head into the copter, his face washed in the sunset’s deep gold and purple hues.

Not Coop but a federal agent with a similar face and haircut.

‘Special Agent Martynovich wanted me to tell you he’s here.’

‘The hatch?’ Her throat was still raw but most of her voice had come back.

‘They found it. He’s about to go down, and he said he’ll talk to you once – What are you doing?’

‘Coming with you.’ Darby slid the IV needle out of her arm. She found a bandage and covered the wound.

‘Miss McCormick, you’re not exactly dressed for the weather,’ he said, looking at her hospital scrubs and bare feet stained with dirt. They had cleaned her up and dressed her while she had slept. ‘It’s getting pretty raw out.’

‘Grab that.’ She pointed to one of the bulky orange Coast Guard jackets hanging on the wall.

‘What about shoes?’

‘I’ll manage,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s get going before it gets dark.’

She found Sergey pacing in front of the hatch.

‘I don’t know anything yet,’ he said. ‘We discovered the hatches about an hour ago and –’

‘Hatches? There’re more than one?’

‘Two. One here, and one in the southern part of the woods. Before I sent anyone down, I wanted the air tested. I’m glad I did. It tested positive for sarin gas.’

Darby thought about Casey and his daughter, the people she’d seen chained to the walls, and felt a sick and hollow pit in her stomach.

‘I was told what’s down there is an ossuary created back in the early eighteen hundreds,’ he said. ‘When the cemeteries on the mainland flooded, they brought the bones here to this island and created this space to honour the dead. There’s some old church up there, what’s left of it. The locked cells and some of the other things we found, they’re probably new. The locals say nobody comes out to this rock.’

‘Jack and his daughter are down there. I saw them.’

Sergey nodded, kept nodding. ‘I couldn’t send anyone down until we had the proper masks and clothing. I’m waiting for mine to arrive, and then I’m going down.’

‘You didn’t have that stuff on your plane?’

Sergey kicked a tuft of grass with the tip of his shoe. ‘The plane’s been grounded. My boss and the pencil pushers he works for have decided to conduct an internal audit of this investigation. When we found your signal, I had to make other travel arrangements.’

‘Why did they shut down the investigation?’

‘Because I’ve lost too many people – Jack and his daughter, and now Keats. The Secret Service agent has vanished, along with his wife and son, Luke.’

‘Keats didn’t disappear.’ Darby told Sergey what had happened with Keats in the back of the ambulance.

Sergey looked at the hatch and said, ‘Did they bring Keats here with you and Jack?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him. Just Jack and his daughter. In the great hall.’

‘The what?’

‘The great hall. That’s what Sarah Casey called it. I know where it is.’

‘There’s no need for you to go down there, I’m sure they’ll –’

‘The place is a maze of tunnels. I’m going down. Don’t argue.’

‘Then you’re going to need to be properly dressed,’ he said, and barked a request for another suit and gas mask into his radio.

85

Halfway through the tunnels, Darby got dizzy. Not from whatever was in the air; she wore a gas mask, as did everyone who was down here. The dizziness came from dehydration. Her body hadn’t bounced back yet and she had ignored it, pushing herself too fast; her body was now pushing back. Sergey had to hold her arm the rest of the way.

They walked into what Sarah Casey had called the great hall and found it packed with bodies. A hundred, maybe more, it was impossible to tell. Dead from sarin gas.

Casey was no longer tied to the wheel. The device that had held his daughter lay on the floor, spotted with blood.

Sergey glanced around the room packed with bodies. ‘I can’t … This is …’

Darby moved to her right and searched through the bodies for Jack and Sarah Casey.

She didn’t find them.

She was thinking of the smiling faces of those missing children in the photographs when she turned around and saw Sergey studying the metal device Sarah Casey had been forced to wear around her neck: the rusted O-ring with four metal rods leading to a horizontal one with two half-moon rings.

‘I didn’t find Jack or his daughter,’ she said. ‘You?’

‘No, nothing here.’ Sergey’s voice was muffled behind the gas mask. ‘This thing is called the Scavenger’s Daughter. I first saw it, along with some other torture devices, when I toured the Tower of London. Henry VIII used it: prisoners would be forced to kneel with their chins on their knees, and then they’d be locked into the device, which crushed them into a foetal position.’

Darby looked away, her eyes wet. They settled on the steps leading up to the throne where the masked Archon had sat, watching the spectacle.

‘Lot of pain,’ Sergey said. ‘Cracked ribs and collapsed lungs, and if enough time passed, the capillaries would burst and blood would start pouring from every orifice of the body. I pity the poor son of a bitch who had to endure this.’

She turned back to him as he leaned the device against the Catherine Wheel, its thick wooden spokes splattered with blood – Jack Casey’s blood.

‘Jack,’ she started to say, and her throat closed up.

Sergey gave her his full attention and she told him about what had happened in this room, everything she had heard and seen.

A tall man dressed in a biohazard suit stepped inside the room and waved to Sergey. She went with him, and they followed the man down through the dirt-floored tunnels lined with bones and skulls.

The man stopped halfway down one tunnel and then fell to his knees and faced a grille. No, not a grille – the iron bars of a cell. She saw an ancient padlock flecked with rust.

The man shone the beam of his flashlight on whatever was inside and she also fell to her knees and looked, saw the tiny cell holding a tangle of broken limbs and dirty skin covered with fresh abrasions and welts from whippings – Neal Keats, the Secret Service agent, curled into a foetal position and hugging his dead son fiercely against his chest.

Epilogue

86

Darby woke to sunlight and the squawk of seagulls.

She sat up in the bed and checked her watch. It was early, just past six. She pulled the covers off and padded across the room in her bare feet to the rear window overlooking the ocean. The binoculars sat on the bureau. She picked them up and examined the shore.

After her hospital stay, three short days that felt like a lifetime, she helped Sergey and a federal team consisting of fifty people, most of them forensics, search every corridor, tunnel and room. When Jack and Sarah Casey’s bodies didn’t turn up, she braced herself for the fact that they would bob to the surface of the ocean at some point. The currents from Black Rock Island hit the beach near her rental home in Ogunquit, so she checked the shoreline every morning, at noon and then in the early evening before it got dark and she had to lock herself inside the house.

No bodies this morning, but she could see only part of the beach from her house. She’d have to walk the rest of it to be sure. She put down the binoculars, went back to the bed, grabbed the Glock from underneath the pillow and took the nine with her to the shower. She had already put out the next day’s clothes, laying them on top of the toilet tank.

After she locked the door, she wedged the chair underneath the knob.

Dressed in heavy winter clothes, her hair blown dry and tucked underneath a Red Sox baseball cap, she checked the upstairs rooms first, Glock in hand.