They carry the shrouded body to the basement, and then through the hidden doorway and down the winding stairs—to the room. The room with the hinged chair with adjustable straps on it. With the cabinets and the tool bench and the floor dotted with dead flies.
Beside the body, Lela kneels. She doesn’t know how to pray, but she does her best to pantomime it, for her sister’s sake, braiding together her fingers and scrunching her eyes so tightly a few tears roll out of them. That is all the emotion she allows. She is obviously hard-shelled. She feels but she keeps it deep inside.
“What am I supposed to tell people?” she says, and Sarin says, “You tell them the truth. That she’s gone missing.”
There is an incinerator here, and they feed the body into it. After Sarin clamps the door in place and cranks the dial and the flames whoosh and a crackling sounds, she puts a hand on Lela’s shoulder and says, “You understand why we have to do it this way, don’t you?”
Lela says, “No one would understand.”
“I’m afraid most people live in a different reality.”
Lela listens to the ashes swirling and moaning through the vent pipes. Waves of heat pour off the incinerator. “That’s where I was living until yesterday.” Her affect is flat, her eyes bruised with fatigue and sadness, and she keeps her hands balled into fists, as though trying to contain herself, keep anything else from slipping away.
Sarin shrugs off her leather jacket. She looks unarmored without it. Bony, a bit hunched. Old. She walks to a line of cabinets and opens one up and pulls from it a Kevlar vest that she slips into with some difficulty. Then she digs out two pancake holsters that she fits around her shoulders and a third to tighten around her waist. Into each of these she tucks a 9mm. The jacket bulges over the top. She flips her hair out of the collar. The ammunition—all silver-topped cartridges with crosses cut into them to do more damage—she shoves into her pockets and into the duffel bag she pulls down and unzips. Then she turns to study Lela and asks the young woman to give her a sit rep.
Lela knuckles away a stray tear. “What?”
“Tell me what you know. I’ll tell you what I know.”
“I honestly don’t know what I know. Except that I’m really fucking scared.”
“Do your best.”
They talked about some of this last night—when hovering over Hannah—but Lela gives her the whole story now. About Undertown, about the Rue, about the skull and the small man, about the murder and the red right hand, about the hounds, about Hannah and the woods and the wolf mask and the bite marks and the man who crumbled to ash. About the book, Lock and Key, and what she learned from it.
While listening to all of this, Sarin finishes a cigarette and starts on a second. “So where’s the relic? Where’s the skull?”
Lela glances at her canvas purse. She set it in the corner, and there it bulges like some sated belly.
“Bring it here.”
Lela takes her time. Walking to the purse and kneeling beside it. Tucking her hair behind her ears. Clearing her throat. Pulling the skull out and holding it away from her body. Even when she carries it to Sarin, she doesn’t hand it over. “You can’t just give it to them.”
“Who said that was my plan?”
“You can’t break it either,” Lela says. “I tried.”
Lela tells her about what happened last night at Powell’s. Daniel yelled at her—told her to stop, wait—when she snatched the skull off the desk and headed for the staircase. The railing bit her belly when she leaned over it and hurled the skull down. She expected a satisfying shatter, like a dropped plate, but instead the skull merely tocked the concrete landing and thunked down the stairs and rolled to a stop. She chased after it, chucked it against a wall, slammed a door on it, no luck. She pulled down a fire extinguisher and hammered at the skull until the metal dented and cracked and spewed white foam. There was no use. The bones were somehow shielded, more than petrified.
Sarin reaches for the skull, and for a moment both their hands are on it. She tugs and Lela holds fast. It’s only when Sarin says, “Enough force, you can break anything,” that Lela lets go.
“I don’t see how there’s any way out of this,” Lela says.
“I hear you.” Sarin sets the skull on the duffel bag. “Lose-lose situation, right? They want the skull, but we can’t give them the skull, no matter if they’re holding the girl hostage.” On a whetstone she sharpens the blade of a knife with a snick-snick-snick. “But don’t worry. There’s always a way out. And it helps that they’re out of time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tonight’s Halloween. Fall climax. Rituals are essential to these people. No question in my mind, that’s when they’re going to do what they’re going to do.”
“Shit,” Lela says. “When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out.”
“Zero Day.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. It was something we heard before. About Zero Day. That Zero Day was coming. I think it’s come. I think it’s now.”
Lela says, “What’s our next move?”
“They’ve been chasing us. Now it’s time to chase them.” She tucks the knife into an ankle scabbard and tells Lela she’s headed to the Rue. “Below. That’s where we’ll find your niece.”
“What are they going to do to her?”
“They’re going to kill her of course.” Sarin expands upon what Lela already knows, telling her the Rue is a black site, a night chapel, spoiled land, a kind of charging station for evil. “They’re all over the place. The Paris catacombs, Guantánamo Bay, Lake Powell, the Bellagio, the House on the Rock, the Golden Gate Bridge.” There are at least two others in Oregon alone. The Rajneesh compound and the Lava River Cave. “Years ago, Tusk was trying to open the gates to the Rue.” She tucks a grenade into the pocket of her leather jacket and pats it. “If he had gotten away with killing me, it might have worked.”
“Because you’re special?”
“I kind of prefer the word spectrum, to be honest. Sounds more like the weird affliction it is. Anyway, Tusk doesn’t have me, but he’s got the next best thing: your niece. He’s going to try again. And this time, he’s got help. Some sort of organized campaign I don’t fully understand. A legion of shadows.”
“Tusk is dead,” Lela says, not in denial, trying to understand. “I saw the autopsy photos.”
“Who do you think put that knife in him?” She thumps her chest. “I’m talking about Tusk. But not Tusk. He was just the puppet. A conduit.” She points at the chair in the center of the room. The one with the hinges and the belts, the one with a dried slick of blood around it. “We had him here. We had him and we lost him, and now people are dead and dying. We fucked up and now I’ve got to make reparations.”
“What was his name?”
“Cheston.”
“But not Cheston.”
“Exactly. Just another puppet like Tusk.”