As soon as everything was finished, he boarded up the mansion and moved Umbrella's headquarters to Europe."
"What happened to George Trevor?" Carlos asked. They stopped outside yet another door, what had to be one of the last rooms.
"Oh, that's the best part," Jill said. "He disappeared just before Spencer skipped town. No one ever saw him again."
Carlos shook his head slowly. "This is one nut job of a place to live, you know that?"
Jill nodded, pushing open the door and stepping back, revolver up. "Yeah, I've been thinking that myself."
Nothing was moving. Stacks of chairs to the right.
Three statues, busts of women, straight in front of them. There were two corpses huddled together to the left of the door, a couple, holding each other, making
Jill wince and look away—and there, hanging on the southern wall in heavy gold frames, were the three clock paintings.
They walked into the room, Jill nervously studying their surroundings. Itseemed normal...
...but so did that room in the mansion that turned out to be a giant trash compactor. On impulse, Jill stepped back and used one of the chairs to prop the door open before going to take a closer look at the paintings.
Well, kind of paintings. She supposed technically they'd be called mixed media. The three pieces were of women, one on each canvas, but each also contained an octagonal clock—the first and last set at midnight, the one in the middle at five o'clock. A small, bowl-like tray protruded from the bottom of each frame. They were labeled as the goddesses of the past, present, and future, from left to right.
"On the postcard, it said something about putting your hands together," Carlos said. "That's like the clock hands, right?"
Jill nodded. "Yeah, makes sense. It's just obscure enough to be annoying."
She reached forward and lightly touched the tray on the middle frame, a dancing woman. There was a tiny click and the tray dipped like a scale, the weight of her hand pushing it down. At the same time, the hands of the clock started to spin.
Jill jerked her hand back, afraid that she'd set something off, and the clock hands quickly spun back to their previous settings. Nothing else happened.
"Hands together...," she murmured. "Do you think
they mean that all of the clocks have to be set for the same time? Or do they mean literally, the hands aligned?"
Carlos shrugged and reached out to touch the tray of the future goddess, definitely the creepiest of the paintings. The past was a young girl sitting on a hill, the present a dancing woman ... and the goddess of the future was the figure of a woman in a slinky cocktail dress, her body enticingly posed—but with the bald,
grinning face of a skeleton.
Jill suppressed a shudder and didn't let any thoughts get started on the theme of imminent death,like I don't have enough of that already.
The tray Carlos touched dipped down, but again, it was the hands on the clock of the present goddess that moved. Apparently, the other two were fixed at midnight.
Jill stepped back from the wall, arms folded, think-ing—and suddenly she had it, she knew how the puzzle t worked, if not the exact solution. She turned around, hoping that the missing pieces were nearby, and she smiled when she saw the three statues—ah, the symme-try—and the shining objects they held in their slender stone fingers.
"It's a balancing puzzle," Jill said, walking to the statues. At closer inspection, she saw that each held a tray with a single, fist-sized stone. She picked them up, hefting each orb, noting the different weights.
"Three balls, three trays," she continued, walking back to the pictures, handing the black stone—made from obsidian or onyx, she wasn't sure—to Carlos. Another was clear crystal, the third a glowing amber.
"And the goal is to make the middle clock hit midnight," Carlos said, catching on.
Jill nodded. "I'm sure there's a motif to the solution, a color match, like black for death, maybe... or maybe it's mathematical. It doesn't matter, it won't take that long to try all of the combinations."
They set to work, trying each ball on one painting at a time, then using them all, Jill carefully studying the present clock's hand movements with each placement.
It appeared that the different balls held different values, depending on which tray they were in. Jill was just starting to feel like she could figure it out—it was definitely mathematical—when they lucked across the solution.
With crystal in the past, obsidian in the present, and amber in the future, the clock in the middle struck midnight, chiming softly. The minute hand started to move backwards with a clattering sound—and then the face of the clock itself fell from the picture, pushed out by
some machinery that Jill couldn't see. In the revealed hollow was the glittering gold cog that had been missing from the tower's bell mechanism.
Sneaky, you pricks, but not sneaky enough.
Carlos was frowning, his expression openly confused. "What the hell is all this, anyway? Who would hide the gear at all, and why in such a complicated way?"
Jill plucked the shining gear from its hiding place, remembering her own thoughts on that exact subject only six weeks before, standing in the dark halls of Spencer's mansion. Why, why such elaborate secrecy? The files Trent had given her just before the estate mission had been full of clues to the mansion's puzzles, lucky for her; without those, she might never have gotten out. Most of the bizarre little mechanisms had been much too intricate to be practical, time-wise or functionally. What was the point?
After giving it a lot of thought, Jill had finally concluded that Umbrella'sreal board of directors, the ones no one knew about, were paranoid fanatics. They were self-involved children, playing secret agent games and betting with other people's lives, because they could. Because no one had ever explained to them that hiding toys and making treasure maps was something people outgrew.
Because no one has stopped them. Yet.
Suddenly eager to wrap it all up, to place the gear and ring the bell and justleave, Jill phrased it much more simply to Carlos. "They're wacko, that's why. One-hundred-percent grade-A jacked-upbatshit. You ready to get out of here, or what?"
Carlos nodded somberly, and after a final look around the room, they headed back out the way they'd come.
EIGHTEEN
CARLOS WATCHED JELL CLIMB THE LADDER once more, trying not to get his hopes up again. If this didn't work, he was going to be deeply—no,majesti-cally pissed.
Hell with it. If this doesn't work, we should just walk out, or see if we can get to that factory and steal ourselves a ride. She's right, these people areandar lurias, lost in space; the sooner we get out of their territory, the better.
He stared blankly out at the dark yard for a few moments, so bone-weary that he wondered how he would do one more thing, take one more step; it seemed impossible. All that kept him going was his desire to leave, to get away from this holocaust and try to recover.
When the first massive peal of sound rang out, its
deep and hollow tone rolling out from the top of the tower, Carlos realized he couldn't keep a lid on his hope. He tried, telling himself that there was going to be a glitch in the program, telling himself that Umbrella would send assassins, that the pilot would be a zombie; nothing worked. A helicopter was coming for them, he knew it, hebelieved it; he just hoped the rescue team wouldn't have any trouble finding a place to land—
—spotlights!There were four of them on the ledge and a crusty-looking control box near the door that led back inside; the light would guide the transport in faster. Carlos hurried toward it, glancing up to see if Jill had started down yet. She hadn't—
—and when he looked ahead again, he saw that he wasn't alone. As if by magic, the giant, mutilated freak that had been chasing Jill was simplythere, close enough for Carlos to smell a burnt meat smell, snarling, its piggy, distorted gaze turned to the top of the ladder.