The doctor started to argue, but Kim hissed for him to be silent, holding up a hand. She stood in the doorway, listening to the sounds of the cave.
“Someone’s shouting.”
An awful melancholy fell over Walker, and he saw in her eyes that Kim shared it, as if a moment before they had been attempting to stoke an ember of hope, and now it had been extinguished.
“Father, you and the professor get to work,” he said, moving toward Kim. “Let’s go.”
They followed the shouting. With the stalls and passages and openings between levels, the ark could play tricks with sound, throwing whispers into dark corners. But as they reached the back wall, the shouts grew louder and more numerous. Walker hit the ladder first, his thoughts toward what it would take for his team to get down the mountain on their own. How long before they could be ready? Could Father Cornelius make the climb in the storm? Would one of the Kurds guide them? Maybe Hakan himself, who seemed so determined to halt the project.
He dropped to the floor, turned, and raced to the ladder that led down to level one. Through the opening, he saw the glow of flames. Meryam stood there, pools of orange light flickering on her face, shadows moving like some undersea hell.
“Kim,” he said. “Fire.”
She responded with a string of colorful English profanity. By the time she finished he was already rushing down that ladder, Kim following.
“Get back!” Meryam snapped.
Walker leaped the last three rungs and spun to face her, but Meryam hadn’t been talking to him. Polly had arrived from one of the passageways, a fire extinguisher in her hands, and Meryam had rushed to block her way.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Polly screamed. “There’s nothing but dry wood in here and you started a goddamn fire!”
Meryam jabbed a finger in the air, as if that alone would keep Polly from moving. “Then your job is to keep it from spreading, but you let it burn! You hear me? You let the fucking thing burn!”
Kim came up beside Walker. There were a handful of others there—Feyiz, Mr. Avci, and a grad student named Chloe—and Calliope stood in the corner, getting it all on film. Walker could see the reflection of the flames off the lens of her camera.
“Meryam,” Feyiz said, starting toward her, his hands out in supplication.
“No,” Meryam said, swallowing hard as she fought back tears. “Not you. You’re the last person who should be talking to me right now.”
So nobody did.
She had unwrapped the corpse of the demon, maybe doused it with some kind of accelerant, and set it on fire. The dry bones popped and the wisps of ancient papyrus-like skin crisped and curled, and ashes floated up into the rising smoke. Flames danced inside the skull, making a hideous jack-o’-lantern out of the wicked curve of the open jaws. The horns blackened further, somehow untouched by light or flame, as if determined to declare themselves infernal.
Walker saw the fire beginning to eat through the timbers under the cadaver, spreading to the wall. Polly and Chloe and Feyiz all shuffled forward, as if they might all rush in at once.
“Wait,” Walker said, sliding past Meryam.
She started to protest as he reached for the fire extinguisher in Polly’s hands. Polly resisted, confused, but then relinquished the metal canister. Walker took it, and turned to face the popping, crackling, blackening bones of the demon.
“Meryam’s right,” he said. “We’re gonna let it burn.”
FIFTEEN
Meryam’s skin prickled with the memory of heat. The cadaver lay on the canted floor at the rear of the ark’s lowest level, nothing but charred bones, ashes, and glowing embers. They flared orange, popped and hissed, and then went dark one by one. The demon’s horns still jutted from its skull, but most of its skeleton had been burned down to withered framework, and some of the bones had crumbled.
Half an hour, maybe less, and the demon’s remains were reduced to this.
The demon, she thought, staring at those glowing embers. In some strange way, she felt she ought to be celebrating. She believed in this thing, in its evil, and if evil truly existed, that opened up so many other questions she had thought she had answered for herself years before. Adam had lived with terror as a boy, real fear inspired by his grandmother’s belief in an evil spirit hiding inside her clock. He’d always lied to himself and to her about how much of that he’d believed. He had fought against believing because of what it would mean about those days, those long nights.
Now the evil had slipped inside of him, almost as if the dybbuk had cracked open the door into his soul all those years ago, and this thing, Shamdon, had found its way in.
When she reached her soot-blackened hand to wipe at her tears, her whole body began to shake.
One of the dark figures at the back of the ark moved toward the crumbling, smoking remains of the demon. Walker, she saw. He wore a grim expression as he approached the thing, raised a heavy boot, and smashed his heel into the face of the demon. The skull gave way, crushed to black powder. A puff of sparks rose.
A line of fire had spread to the wall behind the remains, but Walker lifted the extinguisher and blasted it. He had kept the blaze under control the whole time. The cadaver had burned remarkably fast, nothing but dry skin and bones, but there had been a great deal of smoke. Meryam felt it in her hair and clothing and at the back of her throat. The stink would remain with her for days. Perhaps forever.
She winced and glanced around at the shadowed figures. For the first time, it occurred to her that forever might end for her right here in the ark. Meryam wasn’t going to let that happen.
“How much of it do you think we can lay off on the demon?” she asked, scanning the faces of those around her. Wyn Douglas and Polly Bennett. Kim and Walker. Mr. Avci and Father Cornelius. Calliope, with her fucking camera.
No, don’t hate her for that. Hate her if you want, but not for that. Adam would want this all on film.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said the old priest.
“Yes you do. Our behavior, mine included. I’ve got some ugly shit happening in my life even outside of this nightmare, but still I wonder if it’s been influencing me. Influencing all of us.”
Walker wiped his boot heel on the timber floor. “It has or it hasn’t. Doesn’t matter. From this point forward, we watch each other and we look inside ourselves. What’s happened to Adam isn’t just influence, it’s full on…”
She could see he didn’t want to say the word, so she said it for him. “Possession.”
“Father,” Kim said, “was it moving it from the box that did it? Allowed it to… move more freely?”
“That may be,” Father Cornelius replied. “It does seem bolder now. But we have to assume those who’ve vanished have been killed, and that it used one of the people inside the ark to kill them, which suggests that either Adam or someone else had been possessed before we moved the cadaver.”
“We can’t trust anyone,” Walker said. “I could be looking at you, talking to you, and you might be the demon. No way to know.”
Meryam inhaled the smoky air. A cold wind slithered down the passage. For a moment they all stared at one another, wondering.
“No,” Wyn Douglas said. “Right now, we do know. It’s taken control of Adam. So whatever we’re going to do, whatever decisions we’re going to make, let’s make them.”
Mr. Avci agreed. Polly and Kim both nodded.
Father Cornelius coughed. Smoke inhalation had gotten to them all. “I disagree. The demon is going to continue to plague us. And we have no way of knowing what more it might be capable of.”