Infernal - Страница 45

As the house hove into view he slammed on the brakes. The tires skidded on the gravel.

"Oh, shit."

"Wow," Tom said, craning his neck for a better look through the windshield. "Somebody sure had their fun with this place."

Not exactly the traditional idea of fun: The front door stood open, its off-kilter storm door swayed back and forth, and someone had smashed every window in sight.

Tom snorted. "Vandals. The jerk who built the place probably thought he'd leave their kind behind when he came up here. But they're everywhere."

Jack hoped the destruction was due to garden-variety vandalism. Not a hell of a lot to do in these parts: Add drugs or booze to boredom and just about anything could happen. If that had been the case, fine. But he feared the destruction might have been motivated by something else.

Seized with a sudden urgency to find Brady's cabin, Jack put the Vic in reverse and started turning it around. Took him four moves before he could nose back into the driveway again.

"Jesus, what are you doing driving a tank like this? It's a cop car. Or a retirement-village car. And you're neither."

Jack could have told the shmegege that this black Crown Victoria was the exact match—right down to the license plates—of a car belonging to a big shot in the outfit's Brooklyn wing. But then he'd have to go into a long explanation of why he'd want something like this.

He turned back onto the blacktop and continued west. Now he had an idea of where he was going. He just hoped that Brady's cabin hadn't suffered the same fate.

A few miles farther on he found a similar driveway and turned into it. The rear wheels kicked up gravel as he spurred the car uphill. Hurrying wouldn't change things—if damage had been done, it was done.

When he saw the place he slowed to a stop.

"Shit!" He pounded on the steering wheel. "Shit! Shit! Shit!"

Only charred timbers remained of the north wall of Brady's woodsy A-frame. The rest of the house looked almost as bad—not an intact pane in sight.

Jack jumped out and hurried across the dead grass to the smashed front door. Tom tailed him.

The inside was consistent with the outside, maybe worse. Looked like someone had taken an ax to everything before starting the fire. Splintered furniture—some of it used as kindling, maybe—smashed framed photos, slashed paintings, books reduced to confetti. Rain washing in through the ruined roof had added to the damage.

But Jack didn't care about this—his interest lay below. He knew a trapdoor lay somewhere near the center of the main room, but he couldn't see where.

He dropped to his hands and knees and began searching the knotty pine planks.

He heard Tom say, "What are you doing?"

"Looking for the edge of a trapdoor."

"What makes you think there's a trapdoor?"

"I just do. Help me look."

He couldn't tell Tom that he'd been peeking through one of these windows when Luther Brady had swung up a section of the floor and disappeared below… carrying a book… a large, old-looking book.

Jack was counting on that being the Compendium. Herta had told him Brady had it. And Charlie had said Jack had seen it. If they were right, this had to be the place.

Tom walked around in a wavering circle.

"I don't see anything."

Neither did Jack. But he knew it was here. He tried to remember if the trapdoor's opening edge had been irregular. If so, he wouldn't find an obvious seam cutting across the boards. He stretched himself flat for an ant's-eye view.

There—a tiny depression running along one of the planks. He rose to his knees and ran his finger along the edge. Yeah, definitely a space here.

Jack pictured Brady lifting the door. It had opened toward the rear of the house. He searched for a ring embedded in a plank. Had to be one. Brady couldn't have lifted it without—

One of the knots two planks away looked different. He touched it and noticed it didn't feel like wood. He worked his thumbnail along its edge and up popped a metal ring, painted to look like wood. Jack hauled back on it and a section of the floor angled upward.

"Jesus!" he heard Tom say. "How did you know?"

He ignored the question as he threw the trapdoor back. A wooden stairway led below.

Jack started down. "Wait here."

"No problem."

-65:26

At the bottom Jack found himself in a dark, tiny cube of a room, maybe eight by eight. Daylight through the door above provided faint illumination. Probably should have gone back to the car for the flashlight, but hadn't wanted to waste the time. The enlarging of Vicky's mark had filled him with a desperate urgency.

He looked around. Shelves lined the space, stacked with envelopes and magazines and books of all sizes. The one he'd seen had been large, somewhere between sixteen and twenty inches on a side.

He stepped to the nearest shelf and began pulling things off it. They felt soggy—water must have seeped through and worked its way down here. He caught sight of photos in the magazines as he tossed them on the floor—naked boys. No surprise there.

He worked his way along the shelves until he came to a steel cabinet, like a fuse box. He tugged on the handle. Locked.

Well, he'd fix that.

Jack pulled his Spyderco folder from his back pocket and snapped out the blade. He worked it along the edge, wiggling and pushing until he had a third of the blade inside, just above the lock. Then he leaned against the knife, prying… prying…

The door popped open.

Blessed be the man who invented tempered steel.

Jack pulled open the door and squinted into its dim interior. Only one thing inside: a book—big like the one he'd seen Brady bring down here. Had to be the same.

But was it the book?

Jack pulled it out and hefted it. Heavy. The covers and spine seemed to be made of stamped metal. He stepped to the center of the space and held it in the shaft of light under the trapdoor.

Markings embossed on the cover… he squinted at them… looked like random squiggles at first, then they swam into focus… words… in English…

Was this what the prof had talked about… the text changing to the reader's native language?

Compendium ran across the upper half in large serif letters; and below it, half size: Srem.

Jack felt his throat constrict. He'd found it. Goddamn it, he'd found it. But was it what he needed?

He pounded up the steps to the main floor where he'd found Tom standing by the rear wall with a shocked look on his face.

"Got it!"

Tom didn't seem to hear. He clutched a couple of torn, water-stained eight-by-ten photos. He held one up and looked at Jack.

"Here's a picture of some guy with Oprah." He held up the other. "And here's the same guy with President Clinton. I know I've seen him before but I just can't place him."

Might as well tell him, Jack thought. Sooner or later it'll come to him.

"That's Luther Brady."

Tom's eyes widened. "The Luther Brady? The Dormentalist? The pedophile?"

"The same. Look—"

"The indicted-for-murder Luther Brady?"

"Yes."

And you're talking to the guy who put him there.

"This must be his place!" Tom pointed to the open trapdoor. "How did you know about that?"

"I know about a lot of things." Jack jerked his thumb toward the front door. "We're getting out of here. And you're driving."

-65:14

With Tom ensconced behind the wheel and winding the car back toward Route 84, Jack hunched forward in the passenger seat with The Compendium of Srem balanced on his knees. This being the shortest day of the year, the sun had already set, so he switched on the courtesy light.

Took him only a few pages to realize this was the oddest book he'd ever seen. Not simply the metal covers with their unusual hinges, and not the curlicue handwriting, but the pages themselves. The page paper—if it was paper at all—felt thinner than onionskin, but was completely opaque. He'd figured that if the book was half as old as it was supposed to be he'd find some damage. But no. Not a tear, not a wrinkle, not a single dog ear.

And who or what was Srem? If he was the guy who'd put this thing together, he at least could have had the decency to include an index or table of contents.

Jack flipped through the unnumbered, single-ply-tissue pages—lots of illustrations, many in color—hoping to catch a glimpse of the Lilitongue. He went through twice, stopping on the second run and backtracking toward the rear when he thought he saw movement in one of the illustrations.

Couldn't be. Just a trompe l'oeil of the flipping pages, like the little animations he'd drawn in the corners of his loose-leaf sheets back in grammar school when he was bored and—

Christ!

He froze and gaped at a page with an illustration that moved.

More than simply moving: an animated globe spinning in a void. He recognized it as Earth by the layout of the continents. He also recognized the crisscrossing lines connecting the dots on its surface.

He'd seen that pattern on an oversized globe hidden away in Luther Brady's office.

And he'd seen the same pattern cut into the back flesh of two of the women with dogs.

He ran his fingers over the animation. It felt no different from the rest of the page—not a ripple, not the slightest vibration, not even a tingle.