Grey nodded. It had been clear from their trip from Nevada that the Sioux was far more skilled than he was at tracking. Grey could follow a horse through a forest, but Looks Away seemed able to follow a rabbit over hard rock. It was an enviable talent, and in the presence of that level of ability it wasn’t worth arguing.
“Tell me what you see,” he suggested.
“I think the man was shot over there, by the dresser. There’s some blood drops on the top and down the side of the drawers. Not much on the carpet, though, which is why I believe the shot was a fatal one.”
“A dead heart stops pumping blood. Dead men don’t bleed unless the wound is pointed toward the floor, and then it merely leaks out. It won’t pump out of a dead man.”
Grey nodded, unnerved but impressed.
“There are no marks to indicate that anyone came to help him up,” continued Looks Away. “Which begs the question of how a man with a fatal gunshot wound gets up and walks away.”
He straightened and they stood there, looking at the outline of ash and debris.
“Pretty sure we’re both thinking the same word,” said Grey.
“Does it start with a u by any chance? As in ‘undead’?”
“It does.”
“Then bloody hell.”
“Yup,” agreed Grey. He considered. “Not sure how much else you can read into this, but do you think this dead man was Nolan Chesterfield?”
Looks Away shook his head. “It’s his room, but that body shape is from someone tall and thin. Chesterfield was heavyset.”
They searched the rest of the upstairs but found no bodies. However, they looked for and found several places where bodies had fallen, and some of these were clearly not easy deaths. In one room there was a massive pool of blood, suggesting someone bled out there. In another they found long streaks of arterial droplets running up the wall to the ceiling.
No bodies, though.
They found bloody footprints, but that was all.
Even though Grey understood that this was now part of the world, that through some process the dead were able to rise again, it was still deeply unnerving. Knowing something isn’t always a pathway to accepting it. Each time they found fresh evidence of the returning dead Grey felt more frightened and less certain that they were going to figure a way out of this.
They reached the far end of the top floor and found a set of stairs that led from the servants’ quarters down to the kitchen and pantry. And it was there that they found something that changed the whole complexion and direction of their day.
It changed everything.
In the pantry there were a row of cupboards. Most of them had been shattered and they sagged from the walls, their contents spilled out onto the floor in a profusion of powders, grain, rice, beans, bottles, and cans. The air was rich with the scent of a hundred exotic spices. But stronger than the crushed herbs and seasonings was a foul and fetid stench that swirled out of the shadows between a wooden frame and a hidden door.
The door now stood ajar. The concealed handle and the jamb were smeared with bright red blood. Beyond them, revealed in the gap, was a set of stone stairs cut into the living bedrock. They circled around and vanished into shadows that were as black as the pit.
The aroma that rose from below carried with it the fresh-sheared copper smell of blood and the rotting fish stink of something alien and grotesque.
All of the footprints the two men had found led them to this pantry, this doorway, and those steps.
Thomas Looks Away pulled the door open and stared down into the darkness.
Beside him, Grey Torrance stood with his gun in a tight fist and cold sweat running in lines down his face. He cleared his throat and spoke in a hushed whisper.
“We have to go down there.”
“God help us.”
Grey shook his head. “I don’t think God lives down there.”
Chapter Forty-Six
They were both brave men, tough men, experienced men who had seen violence more times than most. However, going down those stairs took more courage than either of them believed they possessed. Going into battle was always terrifying, and Grey knew for sure that any man who said otherwise was a damn liar. He’d done it time and again since his teenage years, but in each of those cases he knew essentially what he was facing. Men with guns and knives.
Not monsters.
Not the walking dead.
Not the unknown.
Not something that might do worse than kill him. Something that could steal his flesh and wear it like a suit of clothes. Something that could possibly rend his soul. Something that could turn him into a monster.
The gun in his hand felt small and inadequate. He did not want to go down there. It was foolish and mad and probably suicidal.
He went down anyway.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Looks Away found an oil lantern in a closet by the front door and lit it. He held it out before him with one hand and clutched his shotgun with the other.
The stairs wound around and around, and as they descended, the light pushed back the shadows.
No, that was not right. That wasn’t how it looked or felt to Grey. It seemed as if the shadows crept backward from the light, always retreating to just around the turn in the spiral staircase. Not gone, not banished. Waiting. Drawing the two of them down, down, down.
They came to the bottom and stood in a wide circular stone chamber. There was another expensive rug on the floor and the walls were hung with heavy tapestries. The images on these tapestries were strange, though, and completely at odds with the ones upstairs. There, Chesterfield had tended toward scenes from myth and magic. Not only Sinbad, but King Arthur and Tam Lin and Hercules.
Down here the subjects took a darker turn.
At first glance the nearest tapestry seemed to show naked nymphs in a grove standing around a fire. But as Grey bent to study it, he saw that they weren’t nymphs at all. They were naked women bound to stakes about to be burned.
He said, “Shit…”
“Look at this one,” said Looks Away.
The second one had a scene of a woman — also naked — strapped to a chair that was being lowered backward into a stream of running water. The delicate embroidery caught every line of tension in her screaming mouth. Beside the stream a group of men in Puritan clothes stood by. Most were scowling, but the man controlling the pulley was laughing.
“Jesus,” muttered Grey.
They went from one tapestry to the next. In each a naked woman or women was being tortured, beheaded, enclosed in a spiked box, impaled, or otherwise abused. In each of the images the woman was still alive and whoever had made these tapestries seemed to want to capture that exact moment between the terror of anticipation and the moment of destruction.
“I sense a certain misogynistic theme here,” said Looks Away dryly.
“A what?”
“The man hates women.”
“Chesterfield? He’s married, isn’t he?”
“And how does that change things? Haven’t you ever met a married man who despises women?”
“Yeah, damn it.”
They looked around the chamber but there seemed to be no exit.
“Strange,” remarked Looks Away.
“Lower the light for a minute,” said Grey as he knelt. “Down here.”
The Sioux set the lantern on the floor and from that angle the shadows changed. Small lines appeared on the cold stone. Looks Away bent and studied them, then turned and slowly extended a finger to a tapestry across the chamber.
“The footprints are nearly gone, but it looks like they went that way.”