He found the intersection with 3A, passed the turnoffs for Pike Hollow and the Blakeney compound, and then—slowing to a crawl—navigated the forks in the narrow dirt track beyond that left the highway and led still deeper into the woods. This time, to his great relief, he managed to avoid getting lost—the route was still fresh in his memory—and in short order he could make out faint lights through the fretted trunkwork of forest. Immediately, he killed his own headlights, stopped the Jeep, and turned off the engine. He sat for a minute, listening to the ticking of the engine as it cooled. Then he picked up a handheld GPS navigator and lithium-powered flashlight from the passenger’s seat, opened the door, slipped out, and shut the door as quietly as he could behind him.
He stood in the darkness a minute, breathing in the night air. Through the network of branches overhead, a pale moon was just visible behind dark, swollen clouds. There was a rumble of thunder. He was vaguely aware of a sense that something was wrong somehow; of a kind of violation of the natural order of things. But this was something he always sensed out here, beyond Pike Hollow, close to the Five Ponds Wilderness—and the Blakeney residence.
His eight-thousand-candlepower flashlight was exceptionally bright, and he dialed it back to its lowest setting. He aimed it at the ground, switched it on just long enough to establish his bearings and get a sense of the dirt lane ahead of him. He glanced at his watch: ten thirty. And then, with a deep breath, he set forward. In the distance ahead, he could hear the barking and whining of dogs. The night breeze was blowing into his face; it couldn’t be his presence that had disturbed them. He hoped they were not roaming free; if they were, his little nocturnal escapade might end prematurely.
Slowly, as he walked on—using the flashlight now and then to orient himself—the faint lights of the lab became sharper. And then he stepped into the clearing. The collapsed fire tower itself was like a severed black finger stabbing skyward. The main laboratory building was dark, the generator rumbling quietly beyond it. The lights he had been following came, he now saw, from a building on the far side of the parking area; evidently, this was the living quarters. As he watched, a figure moved behind a curtained window.
He hesitated a second, considering how best to proceed. Then he began walking in a semicircle along the edge of the clearing, sticking close to the wall of trees, staying far from the living quarters. He passed the fire tower and the lab, passed a few small outbuildings—dark and, for the most part, shuttered and in disrepair. The moon, fully obscured now by clouds, shed only the faintest of light, and he was forced to use the torch more frequently as he made his way through grass and knee-high saplings.
Five minutes brought him to the far side of the clearing. From here, he could see what looked like a naturalist’s blind—a structure he assumed to be Pace’s “A Pen”; a storage depot; and across the clearing, a large run of chain link that, to his great relief, housed the two dogs. He could just make out their dark figures, running back and forth and whimpering. They were ignoring him entirely, facing away, evidently distracted in the opposite direction.
He paused once again to reconnoiter. Pace had said the lights and noises had come from an old outbuilding deep in the woods, south of the lab. He moved carefully along the southern fringe of trees, then stopped when the moon came out briefly from behind the clouds. The faintest of tracks could be seen here, heading south from the clearing into the forest. The living quarters were now obscured by outbuildings, and he ventured to use the flashlight again, tracing the path as it meandered between the trees. There was no sound save for the whisper of wind in the branches, the distant generator, and the worrying noises of the dogs.
…But wait: was that a faint flickering of light ahead, far into the trees? Wasn’t that a low susurrus of voices: first one speaking, then another?
He began making his way along the narrow path, using the flashlight still more frequently now that he was out of the clearing and in amid the dense woods. There it was again: a low voice, followed by another.
Abruptly, the wind shifted and the whining of the dogs became a sudden, frantic racket: they had caught his scent. Damn. He moved more quickly along the path, hoping to get out of range, but the chorus of loud barking continued for several minutes before eventually dying away. When it did, he paused to listen. Nothing now: no voices, just the faint night sounds of the woods. Had he heard them at all, or was it his—and Pace’s—imagination?
It was utterly dark ahead, no lights whatsoever, and now Logan used his flashlight continuously to guide him along the narrow, twisting trail. Another minute, and a building loomed out of the woods ahead: a long, low, dilapidated structure with a metal roof and perhaps half a dozen windows, all covered by what looked like heavy, rotting burlap. It sat in the middle of a tiny clearing. What the structure’s original purpose might have been—dormitory, mess—or why it was situated out here in the middle of the forest, he couldn’t imagine. What was clear was that it looked dark and untenanted.
He played his light slowly over the structure, from one end to the other. Was this the source of the lights and noises Pace claimed to have heard? It seemed likely: the narrow trail ended here, at the building’s sole door.
Logan hesitated a moment, but there was nothing save the distant whining of the dogs. He approached the door, grasped the old-fashioned handle.
It was unlocked. He depressed the plunger with his thumb, eased the door open, and stepped inside. Then, closing the door behind him, he began a circuit of the interior with his flashlight.
What he saw was a revelation. Instead of the clutter and debris he was expecting—old tables and benches, covered with cobwebs and mice droppings—the ramshackle building contained a small laboratory. It appeared to have been rather hastily assembled but was nevertheless, if anything, even more modern than the one in which Laura Feverbridge and Pace worked. The beam of his torch licked over an autoclave; a centrifuge; two types of compound microscopes; a mass spectrometer; a UV transilluminator; what looked like a capillary gel DNA sequencer; and a host of other instruments Logan did not recognize. A door in the far wall led to another room, within which he could make out a narrow cot. As in the main lab, there were several cages for small animals—mice, moths, caterpillars, salamanders—set on wooden shelving. A very large, drum-shaped lamp with a grilled front lens, of the kind used in photography and film studios, hung from a wheeled stand, and there was other optical equipment scattered about as well. Nevertheless, on the whole the research equipment here seemed more medical in nature than that in the primary lab.
Suddenly, Logan froze. The beam of his flashlight stopped, in its transit of the room, on two figures, standing silent and motionless in a corner. One of them was Laura Feverbridge. She was holding a shotgun, and it was pointed at Logan. The other was an elderly man, very tall and gaunt, with a heavy salt-and-pepper beard and a shock of white hair—the man Logan had seen in the photo on the lab table.
Chase Feverbridge. Laura’s father—who had fallen to his death while hiking six months before.
19
For a moment, all three of them stood as if frozen. Then, slowly, Laura Feverbridge lowered the shotgun.
“Would you mind taking that light out of our eyes, Dr. Logan?” she asked.