At this the crowd hesitated. The church was forbidding; it stood like a medieval structure of Boschean strangeness, crooked, half timbered with rude — looking buttresses projecting out into the air before stabbing into the ground, bristling and massive. The portal to the church stood in front — a second set of timbered doors, banded and riveted with iron.
The hesitation lasted only a moment. Then the roar went up again, stronger than ever, and the men with battering rams advanced again and stood on either side of the banded doors, swinging the rams in an alternating, asynchronous rhythm: boom — boom! boom — boom! boom — boom!A massive cracking sound announced the yielding of the ancient oak as the relentless pounding continued. These doors were much tougher than the last set, but in the end they gave way with a splintering crash, to the ring of popping iron rivets and bars. They sagged inward, then collapsed under their own weight with a thunderous shudder…
And there in the dimness, blocking the way, stood two men. One was tall and striking, dressed in a long brown cloak, hood drawn back, heavy brows and massive cheekbones almost hiding a pair of black eyes, pale skin glowing in the light of a freshly rising moon, his nose like the blade of a knife, curved and honed. The other man, shorter and coarser looking, was gowned in a fantastically decorated ceremonial gown. He was clearly a holy man of some sort. He stared out at the invaders, his eyes glittering with malice.
The innate force of the taller man instantly subdued the crowd. He held out one hand and said: " Do not proceed." The voice was quiet, funereal, with a faint accent Plock didn't recognize — yet it conveyed great power.
Plock shoved forward and faced him. "Who are you?"
"My name is Bossong. And it is my community you are desecrating with your presence."
Plock drew himself up. He was fully aware that he was half his opponent's size and twice his width. Nevertheless, when he replied, his voice crackled with conviction: " Wewill proceed and youwill step aside. You have no right to be here, vivisector."
The men stood stock — still, and to his surprise Plock could see, standing in the red dimness behind him, at least a hundred people.
"We do no harm to anyone," Bossong went on. "We only want to be left alone."
"No harm? What do you call slitting innocent animals' throats?"
"Those are honored sacrifices, a central tenet of our religion—"
"Bull! And what about the woman you kidnapped? Where is she? And where are the animals? Where do you keep them? Tell me!"
"I know nothing of any woman."
" Liar!"
Now the priest abruptly held up a rattle in one hand and a strange — looking bundle of feathers in the other, and broke into a loud, quavering chant in some foreign language, as if casting a curse on the invading force.
Plock reached up and slapped the bundle out of his hand. "Get that mumbo — jumbo out of my face! Step aside, or we'll run you down!"
The man stared, saying nothing. Plock stepped forward as if to walk through him, and the crowd behind him responded with a roar and surged forward, propelling Plock against his will into the priest and driving him back, and in a moment the man was down, the crowd pouring around him into the dark church, Bossong pushed rudely to one side, the congregants inside grown hesitant at the sight of their fallen priest, crying out in fear and anger and outrage at the violation of their sanctuary.
"To the animals!" Plock cried. "Find the animals! Free the animals!"
Chapter 67
Pendergast's clotheswere torn and bloody and his ears still rang from the attack. He propped himself up and rose unsteadily to his feet. His encounter with the man — beast had knocked him senseless for a few minutes, and he'd come to in the dark. He reached into his suit coat, removed a tiny LED light he carried for emergencies such as this, and shined it around. Slowly, methodically, he searched the damp floor for his gun, but it was nowhere to be seen. He could make out faint signs of struggle, with what were evidently D'Agosta's fleeing footprints, the barefooted painted man in pursuit.
He flicked it off and remained in the dark, thinking. He made a quick calculation, a swift decision. This creature, this zombii, had been possessed by his minders of a terrible and murderous purpose. On the loose, he presented a grave threat to them both. And yet Pendergast had confidence in D'Agosta — a confidence almost amounting to faith. The lieutenant could take care of himself if anyone could.
But Nora — Nora still awaited rescue.
Pendergast flicked the light back on and examined the next room. It was a veritable necropolis of wooden coffins laid out on rows of elevated stone pedestals, some stacked two and three high, many collapsing and spilling their contents to the ground. It appeared as if many of the basement spaces of the Ville, originally built for other purposes, had been converted to storing the dead.
But as he turned away, preparing to renew his search for Nora, he caught a glimpse of something at the very head of the room — an unusual tomb. Something about it arrested his attention. He approached to examine it more closely, and then, making a decision, laid a hand on it.
It was a coffin, made of thick lead. Instead of being set on a bier like the others, it had been sunken into the stonework of the floor, only its top projecting above the ground. What caught his eye was that the lid was ajar and the vault within had clearly been looted — very recently looted.
He examined it more intently. In past centuries, lead had often been the material of choice for interring an important person because of its preservative qualities. Playing the light over it, he noted just how carefully the coffin had been sealed, the lead lid soldered firmly to the top. But someone had hacked open the lead cover with an ax, chopping violently through the seal and prying the lid off, leaving a ragged, gaping hole. This had been done not only recently, but in great haste. The marks in the soft metal were bright and shiny, showing no signs of dulling or oxidation.
Pendergast looked inside. The body — which had mummified in the sealed environment — had been roughly disturbed, something wrenched out of its crooked hands, the ossified fingers broken and scattered, one arm torn from its dusty socket.
He reached inside and felt the corpse dust, gauging its dryness. This had happened so recently that not even the damp air of the room had had time to settle inside the coffin. The looting must have occurred less than thirty minutes ago.
Coincidence? Certainly not.
Pendergast turned his attention to the dead body itself. It was a remarkably well — preserved corpse of an old man with a full white beard and long white hair. Two golden guineas were pressed on its eyes. The face was shriveled like an old apple, the lips drawn back from the teeth by desiccation, the skin darkened to the color of fine old ivory. The body was dressed in simple, Quaker — like clothes — a sober frock coat, shirt, brown waistcoat, and pale breeches — but the clothes around the chest had been ripped open and disarranged by the looting, buttons and bits scattered about in what appeared to have been a frenzied search of the corpse. On the man's disarranged chest, Pendergast could see pressure marks on the clothing of what had evidently been a small, square container — a box.
That, along with the broken fingers, told a story. The looter had wrenched a box from the corpse's dusty grasp.