The ponderous lid scraped along the rim of the sarcophagus until enough of it protruded over the top end that Lucas had to change positions. With Delaney pushing from the bottom, while he kept the slab balanced, they were finally able to tilt it on end, and from there lower it flat, with a resounding thump, against the mattress. A cloud of dust rose from the old mattress, and the ossuary itself, as if exhaling, released a gust of acrid air, a smell like burnt matches and desert sand. Lucas barely had time to turn his head away and catch a breath of less tainted air when he heard Simone murmur, from behind the camera, “Oh my God.”
Straightening, he turned to the open box. Delaney was standing mute, staring into it. Lucas’s eye jumped from the jumble of bones to the crooked staff, and from that to the ancient iron crucifix — or was it silver, dulled by the centuries? — all lying helter-skelter inside. He had certainly expected to find skeletal human remains, but he had not expected — nor, apparently, had Simone — to find so many bones, including two separate skulls, only one of which was plainly human. The other one was more perplexing. Smaller, and with a sloping brow and unusually close eye sockets, it might have been the skull of an ape, or even a hideously deformed child.
“Are you getting this?” Lucas asked, and Simone, still manning the camera, said, “Yes,” in a hushed tone.
Lucas leaned forward, and as if under some strange compulsion, lifted the odd skull from the heap of other bones and artifacts. Like Hamlet staring into the empty orbs of poor Yorick, he held it up for closer scrutiny.
“Something’s going wrong with the camera,” Simone said. “Everything’s getting blurry.”
Before Lucas could even think to come to her aid, he felt an even stranger sensation — a feeling that the yellowed skull was somehow looking back at him. A shiver descended his spine, and a breeze stirred the hair on his head. He looked at Delaney — his hair was blowing, too, and Simone, he saw, was struggling to keep her balance on the cinder block. A wind had sprung up in the room, out of nowhere, and was rustling the tarps around the base of the pedestal, making the paintings quiver on the creaking easels.
Delaney said, “Put it back,” and Simone, nearly falling, left the camera running, its lens pivoting on the tripod as she stepped down to the floor, hugging herself as though she were freezing.
Lucas dropped the skull back among the other bones, but the turbulence only grew stronger, as if something unseen was gathering speed and racing around the room in search of escape. The new window groaned in its frame, the glass splintered but held, and though it might only have been the wind, Lucas thought he heard a low moan from behind the crates piled around the door.
The spotlights flickered and dimmed, and before they came back on again, there was a banging sound as the door was flung open so violently that the hinges squeaked and the wood cracked.
The wind followed, sucked out into the dark galleries, leaving an eerie emptiness in the room. The camera had swiveled toward the door, and it clicked and whirred as the last of the film was depleted. Simone’s teeth were chattering, and Lucas instinctively went to her and wrapped her in a bear hug — a hug she did not resist.
“Did that just happen?” Delaney said, slumping against a worktable and passing his hand across his eyes in disbelief.
“Yes,” Simone whispered, so low it was as if she were speaking only to herself.
Lucas said nothing, though he, too, had been gravely affected. Inside him now, there was a melancholy ache, a sorrow more profound than any he had ever known. He sensed that he had served as a conduit, however fleetingly, for something suddenly free and wild, something as old as time, and unutterably bad.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Get out of here!” Andy Brandt shouted at the kids gathered around the Caithness Man’s display case. “Go to school!”
“Make us!” one of them retorted.
“It’s a Saturday!” another one said.
But they did disperse, scooting around him and out the door of Guyot Hall, hooting and hollering as they skipped down the front steps. Those damn kids treated the collection of artifacts as if they were a freak show, and Andy longed for the chance to give a couple of them a good swat.
He couldn’t risk getting into any trouble with the university, however. It had taken a lot of cunning and a lot of time, to get securely situated there, and anything that called undue attention to him, or his work, would be dangerous to everyone involved. Most of all, to Andy.
Besides, he thought, as he unlocked the door to his cluttered first-floor lab, he had other, more immediate problems.
For one, he had felt like crap since sneaking into the conservation room with the key he’d secretly copied off of Delaney’s ring. From his perch behind the crates and easels stacked by the door, he’d only been able to see bits and pieces of what was going on. But he’d seen enough to know that it was an undertaking of great significance.
A movie camera had been set up, with that Egyptian woman running it, and although what Lucas and Delaney said to each other had been largely inaudible to him, he could hear their grunts and groans as they had sawed through the chains and removed the lid from a white stone chest. An ossuary, to be precise — the one his superiors back in Berlin had been tracking.
It was pure luck that Brandt had already been safely ensconced at Princeton when the thing arrived on campus. For purposes the Reich chose to keep secret, his original mission had been to keep a close eye on the radio isotope experiments being conducted in Delaney’s lab; no fool, Andy had surmised the reason had something to do with the invention of new weaponry. Then, out of the blue, this ossuary had shown up, and virtually overnight, all of the priorities had changed. It was enough to make Andy’s head spin.
“The artifact was stolen from the Führer’s own collection,” the encoded telegraph message had said. “It is critical to the war effort.”
A box of old bones?
“Alert us to any developments. Procure and immediately transmit any information relating to its study, disposition, or relocation.”
Okay, he’d thought. He would do as he was told.
Only, something very odd had happened the moment the box was opened. A chill wind had inexplicably sprung up out of nowhere, as if there were air filters or fans hidden around the room. He’d hunkered down, afraid that the easels might topple over and blow his cover, but something even more troubling had occurred instead. He’d felt certain that there was something in that wind, something sentient, though invisible — how crazy was that? — and that it was careening around the room, like a wild beast desperately searching for a way out of a trap. He’d been knocked flat, shivering, and when he could get back on all fours, he’d made a mad scramble for the door. Running through the dark gallery, he’d been sure something was following close on his heels, but he’d been too afraid to stop, or even look back.
All the way to his apartment, one dingy room on Harrison Street, where the grad students and preceptors lived, he’d had that same sense of something nipping at his heels. Once or twice, he had even imagined he heard a weird gibbering at his ear. Home, he’d slammed the door shut, thrown the bolt lock, and then slumped, utterly out of breath, against the edge of the bed, where his transmitter was cleverly concealed inside a compartment cut into the box spring.