He had only thirteen minutes to be back at the sub-basement door. Having decided to keep the lantern turned off, he now held it in his cane hand, thus freeing up his gun hand, should he need it.
His eyes had grown more accustomed to the dark, and he could make out the shape of the walls as he moved through the passageway, going toward the next vent, where a smidge more light filtered into this dungeon.
The downward slope on the floor had steadily increased, and now he stood in water up to his ankles.
“What the hell else?” he asked of the problems he faced here. “Pour on the misery.”
Ahead of him, he saw a slick shiny surface of what looked to be black ice. Not so, more water…deeper. Deep enough to have a current.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Time to turn around. Nothing here to see.”
Alastair was in midturn, prepared to go back the way he’d come, when something floating in the water caught his peripheral vision. At first he thought it trash, perhaps washed in from the drains, perhaps Thom Carmichael’s Herald-and a fitting place for it too, he inwardly laughed.
He took a step toward leaving when something in his brain said, No, that’s not a newspaper floating there but clothing, a coat, perhaps. He moved in for a closer look, and he relit the lantern, opening it full. The light created huge black swaths of darkness and shadow, the biggest being his own. It also illuminated the bloody clothing floating by from a secondary passageway.
Alastair waded into the water here, up to his thigh, and using his cane, he pulled in the clothing. It did not look like something long in the water, and in fact, it appeared a somewhat expensive tweed coat and there were snatches of linen from a shirt. As he examined the ripped coat, he smelled the blood even as his hands became painted with it. His reflex was to drop it but one hand had hit a hard metal object that pricked his finger-a badge.
Under the grim light, Alastair studied the badge number: CPD-1438. Jedidiah’s badge, his coat, his bloodied shirt.
He immediately doused the light, and he carefully waded his way toward the direction from which the bloody clothes had drifted. The blood had been fresh, coming off in his hands. Whoever had killed Logan could not be far away.
Ransom knew he must proceed with great caution and haste at once.
Even the noise of wading through the water was too great, as it could alert someone waiting in the shadows ahead.
He recalled telling the guard to send for help after twenty minutes if he should not return by then. Time had already run beyond that, so someone would be alerted. He prayed backup was on the way.
More rats went past, swimming this time.
As Alastair continued on, the incline here was going uphill, the water subsiding behind him as a result. Overhead, out in the larger world, he could hear claps of thunder that the humorist Mark Twain would call a real sock-dollopper! Nature’s riotous calamity. Most certainly the clouds had burst.
Whoever was in the passageway ahead of him, they-for there was whispering now-must be aware of the storm overhead as well, and that the passages here could become a deathtrap if Lake Michigan swelled beyond her breakers. The resounding splash of waves slapping into the bowl-vents clearly announced this danger as a growing threat.
Ransom could not let whoever had killed Logan find their way to the nearest vent or to an open entryway into the museum exhibits. He must act quickly.
Another sound came to his ears as he inched closer to the whispering voices. It was the sound of feeding as of rabid animals devouring a carcass. Ransom feared the worst. The family he had been tracking all this time were here en masse, and they had descended on Logan, killed him many times over, and were now feeding on his remains like a pack of hyenas.
The thought infuriated Ransom almost as much as it terrified him.
He had come out of the water and feared that he could be seen by these rabid animals whose eyes surely, even supernaturally, worked more efficiently in pitch than in light, like the eyes of a pack of unholy dogs. He rested his cane against the wall, careful not to allow it to fall or clatter. He then took out his flint box lighter, and opening the lantern, he lit it.
Five pairs of eyes met his at once. They were some twenty yards off, the entire coven, all situated over Logan’s nude, mutilated corpse, some off to the side, nursing hunks of flesh cut from Jedidiah’s flanks and backside.
Ransom felt as if he’d gotten a glimpse into the last rung of Dante’s Inferno, but there was not a moment to think. He hurled the lantern at the enemy, and it hit the woman hunched over Logan’s flanks, its contents spilling over her and setting her aflame. Two of the children leapt back into shadow, while the oldest struggled to save its mother only to catch its own clothes afire.
The father hurled himself at Ransom, his huge knife extended like a lance, his mouth bloody with feeding on raw flesh. Ransom raised his blue gun and fired at the same instant the inhuman creature fell atop him, sending him into the water. Ransom went under with the dead weight of the man he’d shot threatening to drown him even in death, but in fact, the monster was yet alive, stabbing at him with the knife to the end. Just as the hyena-man had held on to the knife, Ransom had held firm to his weapon. The knife came down, tearing into Alastair’s left shoulder, as the fiend was going for his heart. At the same time, Ransom fired twice more, and the second and third shot ended any movement in the madman. Only three bullets remained in his weapon.
Ransom clambered to his knees in the blackness, and he remained in the water when the woman and eldest child, sharing flames, leapt into the muddy sewage together to save themselves. Ransom aimed and fired, putting a bullet through the woman’s brain when suddenly he was hit with a powerful blow to one leg where another child had stabbed him. The final child leapt on his chest and tore at his face with its knife, slashing wildly even as Ransom pounded the little hyena in the face with his gun.
Ransom sustained cuts to his cheek, forehead, leg, and the wound to his left shoulder. The three remaining fiends had regrouped somewhere in the black tunnel beyond the water’s edge. It seemed, for the moment, that he owned the water and they owned dry ground. Where the infant might be, dead or alive, was anyone’s guess. It flashed through Alastair’s brain that one or more of the other may’ve succumbed to a liking for young human flesh just a little too much.
As the water began to rise, a chilling cold came over Ransom. He’d bled out badly at several of the wounds, particularly the one dealt him by the alpha wolf-the father. It flit through his mind that the cold in his bones could be the onset of trauma, that he could pass out at any moment, and this would leave him victim to the deadly children, and not one of them would show him any mercy whatsoever; in fact, if he passed out, they’d be feeding on his body for a long time. He was as good as dead, as good as Logan.
He gave a momentary thought to Behan. Where in hell’s Behan? Can I count on Ken? Or is he dead as well down here in this hellhole?
He imagined Thom Carmichael’s headline in the papers: three of cpd’s finest found dead below the fair. How fitting…
How will Philo Keane get through life without me, he wondered. Then he thought of the future he will have lost with Jane, of watching Gabby mature, marry and have a child of her own some day. But all such thoughts were dispelled when his instincts took hold on hearing the animals in the dark begin a slow-building keening, a kind of animal mantra, preparing to strike again.
The cane, he thought. Need to get to my cane.