Ghostwalkers Page 22

  Even though this was the house of a probable enemy, Grey felt a small stab of grief and another deeper one of anger.

  “It’s not her,” said Looks Away, and the sound of his voice almost made Grey jump.

  “What?”

  “That body—I think it was a woman named Anna Maria. See the right foot? It’s clubbed. Anna Maria Ramirez had a club foot.”

  “Was she another friend of yours?”

  “Anna Maria was a shit,” said Looks Away. “Nolan hired her as a maid, but she was really there to spy on his wife. Veronica was a virtual prisoner in this place.”

  “Are there places Veronica could have hidden during all of this?”

  “God, I hope so. But, Grey, there’s something else. Anna Maria is the first body we’ve seen. Don’t you find that strange? I mean, there are forty people working for Chesterfield. House staff and hired guns. More if you count the wranglers and yard servants. But, there’s clearly been a war here, and except for livestock this is the first body we’ve found. Human body, I mean. I dare say that Chesterfield lost this particular engagement. Do you agree?”

  “It’s a goddamn slaughter. But … you’re right, where are the other bodies?”

  Looks Away crossed to the doorway to the connecting room. “No one here, either. Should we search the whole place?”

  “I think we have to at this point.”

  They were talking in hushed voices, and in the same hushed tone he added, “Shall we do this stealthily or like bravados?” His smile was small and wicked.

  “Much as I’d love to kick doors and take names, friend, until we know who—or what—did all this, I think we should creep around like mice. Then we find Veronica and get the hell out of here. How’s that for a plan?”

  “Jolly good, actually.”

  So, they went with only as much speed as caution would allow.

  They took turns entering rooms with one or the other providing cover. They found more devastation. The place was decorated in the very height of style, with imported French furniture, paintings from Italy, a library with every English classic ever written and thousands of volumes of poetry and history, Turkish rugs, and curios from China and Japan. All of this magnificence was ruined, though; stained with soot, splashed with blood, torn by some savage claw, or holed by ordinary lead bullets. In the upstairs master bedroom, Looks Away knelt at the edge of a Persian rug that Grey was sure cost more than the entire value of the town of Paradise Falls. The embroidery within the rug showed a series of episodes from the life of Sinbad.

  Grey began to leave the bedroom but stopped when he realized that Looks Away wasn’t following.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  The Sioux nodded. “Come over here for a minute. Tell me what you see.”

  He came and stood next to him and studied the carpet. It took him only a moment to catch what Looks Away had already seen.

  There was considerable debris strewn across the floor as well as some ash residue that covered everything. However in the center of the carpet was an outline. It was large and probably male. But there was no body.

  “They took the body?” Grey wondered. “Why would they do that?”

  However Looks Away shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what happened. See…? There’s the outline of where a man fell. But what I don’t quite get is that it looks like he stood up again and walked off. See there? That’s a handprint like a man might make if he was leaning on the floor to push himself up to his feet. And there, those are his footprints.”

  “So he fell down and then got up again. I’m not sure why this is so fascinating.”

  “You’re not reading it the right way,” said Looks Away. “I may not have spent much of my adult life among my people, but from the time I could walk I was taught how to track, to read sign.”

  Grey nodded. It had been clear from their trip from Nevada that the Sioux was far more skilled than he was at tracking. Grey could follow a horse through a forest, but Looks Away seemed able to follow a rabbit over hard rock. It was an enviable talent, and in the presence of that level of ability it wasn’t worth arguing.

  “Tell me what you see,” he suggested.

  “I think the man was shot over there, by the dresser. There’s some blood drops on the top and down the side of the drawers. Not much on the carpet, though, which is why I believe the shot was a fatal one.”

  “A dead heart stops pumping blood. Dead men don’t bleed unless the wound is pointed toward the floor, and then it merely leaks out. It won’t pump out of a dead man.”

  Grey nodded, unnerved but impressed.

  “There are no marks to indicate that anyone came to help him up,” continued Looks Away. “Which begs the question of how a man with a fatal gunshot wound gets up and walks away.”

  He straightened and they stood there, looking at the outline of ash and debris.

  “Pretty sure we’re both thinking the same word,” said Grey.

  “Does it start with a u by any chance? As in ‘undead’?”

  “It does.”

  “Then bloody hell.”

  “Yup,” agreed Grey. He considered. “Not sure how much else you can read into this, but do you think this dead man was Nolan Chesterfield?”

  Looks Away shook his head. “It’s his room, but that body shape is from someone tall and thin. Chesterfield was heavyset.”

  They searched the rest of the upstairs but found no bodies. However, they looked for and found several places where bodies had fallen, and some of these were clearly not easy deaths. In one room there was a massive pool of blood, suggesting someone bled out there. In another they found long streaks of arterial droplets running up the wall to the ceiling.

  No bodies, though.

  They found bloody footprints, but that was all.

  Even though Grey understood that this was now part of the world, that through some process the dead were able to rise again, it was still deeply unnerving. Knowing something isn’t always a pathway to accepting it. Each time they found fresh evidence of the returning dead Grey felt more frightened and less certain that they were going to figure a way out of this.

  They reached the far end of the top floor and found a set of stairs that led from the servants’ quarters down to the kitchen and pantry. And it was there that they found something that changed the whole complexion and direction of their day.

  It changed everything.

  In the pantry there were a row of cupboards. Most of them had been shattered and they sagged from the walls, their contents spilled out onto the floor in a profusion of powders, grain, rice, beans, bottles, and cans. The air was rich with the scent of a hundred exotic spices. But stronger than the crushed herbs and seasonings was a foul and fetid stench that swirled out of the shadows between a wooden frame and a hidden door.

  The door now stood ajar. The concealed handle and the jamb were smeared with bright red blood. Beyond them, revealed in the gap, was a set of stone stairs cut into the living bedrock. They circled around and vanished into shadows that were as black as the pit.

  The aroma that rose from below carried with it the fresh-sheared copper smell of blood and the rotting fish stink of something alien and grotesque.

  All of the footprints the two men had found led them to this pantry, this doorway, and those steps.

  Thomas Looks Away pulled the door open and stared down into the darkness.

  Beside him, Grey Torrance stood with his gun in a tight fist and cold sweat running in lines down his face. He cleared his throat and spoke in a hushed whisper.

  “We have to go down there.”

  “God help us.”

  Grey shook his head. “I don’t think God lives down there.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  They were both brave men, tough men, experienced men who had seen violence more times than most. However, going down those stairs took more courage than either of them believed they possessed. Going into battle was always terrifying, and Grey knew for sure that any
man who said otherwise was a damn liar. He’d done it time and again since his teenage years, but in each of those cases he knew essentially what he was facing. Men with guns and knives.

  Not monsters.

  Not the walking dead.

  Not the unknown.

  Not something that might do worse than kill him. Something that could steal his flesh and wear it like a suit of clothes. Something that could possibly rend his soul. Something that could turn him into a monster.

  The gun in his hand felt small and inadequate. He did not want to go down there. It was foolish and mad and probably suicidal.

  He went down anyway.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Looks Away found an oil lantern in a closet by the front door and lit it. He held it out before him with one hand and clutched his shotgun with the other.

  The stairs wound around and around, and as they descended, the light pushed back the shadows.

  No, that was not right. That wasn’t how it looked or felt to Grey. It seemed as if the shadows crept backward from the light, always retreating to just around the turn in the spiral staircase. Not gone, not banished. Waiting. Drawing the two of them down, down, down.

  They came to the bottom and stood in a wide circular stone chamber. There was another expensive rug on the floor and the walls were hung with heavy tapestries. The images on these tapestries were strange, though, and completely at odds with the ones upstairs. There, Chesterfield had tended toward scenes from myth and magic. Not only Sinbad, but King Arthur and Tam Lin and Hercules.

  Down here the subjects took a darker turn.

  At first glance the nearest tapestry seemed to show naked nymphs in a grove standing around a fire. But as Grey bent to study it, he saw that they weren’t nymphs at all. They were naked women bound to stakes about to be burned.

  He said, “Shit…”

  “Look at this one,” said Looks Away.

  The second one had a scene of a woman—also naked—strapped to a chair that was being lowered backward into a stream of running water. The delicate embroidery caught every line of tension in her screaming mouth. Beside the stream a group of men in Puritan clothes stood by. Most were scowling, but the man controlling the pulley was laughing.

  “Jesus,” muttered Grey.

  They went from one tapestry to the next. In each a naked woman or women was being tortured, beheaded, enclosed in a spiked box, impaled, or otherwise abused. In each of the images the woman was still alive and whoever had made these tapestries seemed to want to capture that exact moment between the terror of anticipation and the moment of destruction.

  “I sense a certain misogynistic theme here,” said Looks Away dryly.

  “A what?”

  “The man hates women.”

  “Chesterfield? He’s married, isn’t he?”

  “And how does that change things? Haven’t you ever met a married man who despises women?”

  “Yeah, damn it.”

  They looked around the chamber but there seemed to be no exit.

  “Strange,” remarked Looks Away.

  “Lower the light for a minute,” said Grey as he knelt. “Down here.”

  The Sioux set the lantern on the floor and from that angle the shadows changed. Small lines appeared on the cold stone. Looks Away bent and studied them, then turned and slowly extended a finger to a tapestry across the chamber.

  “The footprints are nearly gone, but it looks like they went that way.”

  The tapestry over there was of a young and very buxom blond woman screeching as she was about to be torn apart by four horses. It sickened Grey to look at it, and for a bent copper penny he’d have torn them all down and tossed a match onto the pile.

  Now wasn’t the time.

  Instead he and Looks Away approached the tapestry from either side. Grey touched the center of the big fabric and it yielded as if there was nothing behind it.

  With a nod to his companion, Grey took a fistful of the brocade edge of the tapestry and gave it a mighty downward jerk. The rings stretched and popped and the material fell heavily to the floor, revealing a short passage behind it. At the end of which was a door made from heavy oak timbers and banded with iron-riveted metal bands.

  The door stood slightly open and the light from a lantern glimmered within.

  Together, they crept down the hall and on a signal from Grey, Looks Away kicked open the door. They rushed in together, fanning right and left.

  There was no one to shoot.

  There was nothing alive in that room.

  But they both stopped and gaped at what was there.

  The room was much bigger than the chamber outside, with walls that stretched back farther than even the light of two lanterns could reach, and rows of stout pillars supporting the roof. Along all of the walls were sturdy pallets made from rough-cut oak, and on these were stacked pieces of metal. Each piece was about seven inches long, not quite four inches wide, and one-and-three-quarter inches thick. Each pallet was piled to shoulder height.

  The men stood stunned, utterly unable to speak.

  Looks Away finally managed to take a few steps forward, but his feet were clumsy and he staggered, falling against one stack. He set his shotgun down and picked up a single gleaming bar. It was the color of hot honey and it was improbably heavy.

  “By the Queen’s lacy garters,” he breathed as he hefted it in his hand. “This is … this is…”

  Words failed him and he was unable to finish the sentence.

  Grey staggered over to another pile and lifted a plate whose argent sheen was like metal moonlight. “Is this silver?”

  “No,” said Looks Away as he picked up a second gold bar, “that’s platinum. As are the next—what is it? Ten? A round dozen?—stacks. I believe the silver is over there.”

  “Looks like,” said Grey in a hollow voice, “there has to be a couple of tons of this stuff.”

  The Sioux set the heavy bars down with a dull clang and picked up the lantern. He and Grey walked along the rows. Looks Away stopped at a series of pallets of metals Grey did not recognize.

  “This is palladium or I’m a Chickasaw.” He moved to another. “And this is ruthenium. They only discovered this in ’44. I met the man who wrote a paper on it. A Baltic German—Karl Ernst Claus. Doctor Saint bought some because of its usefulness in electrical conductivity. And this … God, Grey, this is an entire mound of rhodium. It’s corrosion resistant, but I’ve only ever seen it in small quantities. And there, that bluish metal? That’s osmium. Heaviest damn stuff you’ll ever find, and God save me, but that is iridium over there. A ton of it at least.”

  He stepped away to the center of the room and turned in a wide circle.

  “By the Queen’s several birthmarks, Grey, this is not merely a fortune—this is perhaps the greatest single fortune I’ve ever even heard of. Millions of dollars. Maybe thousands of millions. Good lord, man, just one wagonload of these bars—any of these bars—and a man could buy himself his own country.”

  “So what the hell is it all doing down here?” asked Grey, astounded at what he was seeing and hearing. “I mean, first off, how the hell did Chesterfield acquire all this? What was he going to do with it? And…” He stopped and shook his head. “No, I got nothing. My brain is spinning.”

  “Mine, too.” Looks Away came over and touched Grey’s arm. “Listen to me. This isn’t what we came for, but let’s face it, old chap, this is better than anything we could have hoped for. Clearly Chesterfield and his family are dead. Everyone in this damned house is dead.”

  “So what?”

  “So what is that we have a much simpler solution to our fight with Aleksander Deray than we thought. Look around you. All we have to do is get some of this out of here. Not all. We don’t need to be greedy, but a wagonload or two.”

  “And what? I’m not interested in buying myself my own country.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. We can take this back to Paradise Falls and distribute it evenly betwe
en the remaining residents. Don’t you see, Grey? We can make them all rich. But we give it to them on the condition that they move the hell away from here. Let Deray have the damned land. It’s falling apart anyway and who wants to stay and fight someone who can raise the sodding dead? No, let’s make everyone rich on the condition that they bugger off out of here. Sound like a plan to you?”

  Grey holstered his gun and rubbed a hand over his jaw. The mountains of metal gleamed in the lantern light.

  “Or,” said Grey, “we could use this money to hire us a private army and go and reclaim this land from Deray. Walking dead or not, he can’t stop an entire army, and we can hire ten thousand men—and pay them well enough to guarantee their loyalty.”

  The Sioux smirked at him. “And that would allow Jenny Pearl to keep her farm and earn you her undying gratitude and affection.”

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

  They grinned at each other.

  “Either way,” began Looks Away, but his words were instantly cut short by a terrible high-pitched scream of unbearable horror.

  Not a child’s scream this time.

  The shriek that rang through the underground treasure chamber was torn from a woman’s throat.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “Veronica!” cried Looks Away.

  A second scream tore the air.