Nor was it long before Lucas could guess his destination. He was weaving his way through the dorms and classroom buildings, past the gardens of President Dodds’s house, and heading for the rear of the university art museum.
Where the conservation room was located.
The rucksack took on an ominous cast. But what was he planning to steal? The bones and artifacts had been removed to the labs, and he could hardly be planning to carry off the sarcophagus itself.
Lurking in a grove of trees, Lucas watched as Brandt, whose gait grew worse with every step, hobbled up to the ivy-covered wall of the museum. It was a sheer thirty or forty feet high, surmounted by the clerestory window. The glass had cracked on the night they had opened the ossuary, but as the pieces had held together, the grounds crew had not gotten around to fixing it yet. He saw Brandt tilt his head back, the rain running down his face, but there was something different about him. A firmer set to the jaw, a furrowed brow, an expression of what could only be called… fury. As if the brick wall had dared to thwart him, though not for long.
As Lucas wiped the rain from his eye, he saw Brandt loop the rope handle of the sack around his neck like a cape, then reach out to the ivy tendrils, and as gracefully as a chimpanzee, swing himself six feet up the wall. Clutching the vines, hand over hand, he scuttled up what had seemed only moments before to be an impregnable barrier, making his way, smoothly and swiftly, toward the window up top. Lucas watched in astonishment; it was a performance worthy of a circus acrobat, loose and easy and assured. Andy was swinging open the clerestory window when one of his galoshes came loose and tumbled to the ground. By then, Lucas knew that there was no time to lose. It would be impossible for him to match Andy’s feat, much less with his injured arm.
But he could still stop him, if he moved fast.
Barely catching his breath, he raced around to the front of the museum and, panting hard, unlocked the doors and quickly turned off the alarm panel, lest it provide Brandt with any warning. He wanted to catch him red-handed.
The galleries were only faintly illuminated by the night-lights along the baseboards, but it was enough to help him avoid the various statues and pedestals and display cases. The bigger problem was navigating with only one eye; he was constantly having to turn his head this way and that, in order to make sure he hadn’t missed something that was just out of his limited range of vision. The ancient Greek and Roman figures glowered down at him, as if he were disturbing their repose, and even the decorative vessels and vases reminded him now of the funeral urn for Dr. Rashid.
He had rounded the corner of the main gallery and was hurrying toward the conservation room when he heard the noise. A clunk, as if from a hammer or chisel, followed by a scraping. It wasn’t much, and he wondered if he’d actually heard it at all. Maybe it was just a noise in the pipes. It didn’t come again.
What did was a scuffling sound, accompanied by the rustle of something being dragged along the marble floor. He ducked behind the base of a massive kouros, three meters high and over two thousand years old, and waited. The limestone figure towered above him, like a guardian angel, but Lucas knew full well that he was on his own here. If he let Andy get away with whatever he was carrying, the fault would lie with him — and it was doubtful that Andy Brandt, or his purloined treasures, would ever be seen again.
The sound grew nearer, and now he could hear labored breathing. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have guessed it was an animal — a wild boar, or a lumbering bear — snuffling and snorting its way through the museum. A shadow passed in front of the kouros, but Lucas held still. He wanted to see exactly what he was up against — was Andy armed? And how was he toting the sack? A CRC man to his core, Lucas needed to ensure that, in any fracas that might ensue, he wouldn’t destroy some artifact that he had come there expressly to save.
Then the shadow had moved on, and Lucas still couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing. It was Andy all right, but he was almost doubled over, his head bent low beneath the hood of his black slicker, one arm dragging the filled rucksack behind him.
If Lucas had still harbored any doubts, they were resolved now. From the clattering alone, he knew that the sack was filled with the contents of the ossuary. But why would Andy have taken them from the lab and brought them back to the museum, before leaving with them again? He must have been up to something else. But what?
Like prey that had just caught the scent of a hunter, Andy suddenly stopped and lifted his nose in the air. He sniffed, turning his head to look all around. Lucas ducked back out of sight and held his breath. He was still trying to reconcile this strange creature in the corridor with Andy Brandt, the young anthropologist. After a few seconds, the sound of the rucksack being hauled along the floor resumed, and when Lucas dared to look again, he saw a wet trail and the second of the galoshes lying upside down.
Where, and when, Lucas wondered, should he confront him? Right here, there were several other display cases, containing extremely fragile terra-cotta amphorae. If a struggle ensued, this would not be a good place for it to occur.
Moving from the cover of one statue or display to another, Lucas kept pace, and in another minute or two, Andy had made his way out of the gallery and into the broad museum lobby. Once there, he stopped again, and as Lucas watched, he ripped off his shoes, too, and threw them to one side. His legs, like his arms for that matter, were cocked at an odd angle, and the hard breathing seemed now to be associated with some kind of pain, rather than exertion.
Whatever was going on, Lucas couldn’t wait any longer. As Andy looped the rope handle of the sack around his neck again, Lucas stepped out of the shadows and said, “Leave it there.”
Paying no attention at all, Andy straightened up and shifted the sack to fit neatly between his shoulder blades.
Had he heard him? “I said, leave it there.”
This time Andy glanced up from under the hood, but the look in his eyes was of utter incomprehension. For Lucas, it was like staring into the eyes of a beast, not a man.
Lucas repeated his order a third time, and Andy tilted his head to one side, as if out of curiosity. His eyes blinked furiously, uncontrollably, and then a light seemed to flicker on behind them. A yellow gleam, like a bolt of sunlight glancing off tarnished bronze. A gleam like the one Lucas had seen in the empty eye sockets of the skull.
As he watched in horror, a smile creased Andy’s lips, widening until it seemed almost to split his face, baring his teeth and projecting no mirth at all, only malice. Then he turned around and jumped with blinding speed directly at the doors to the museum, wrenching them entirely off their hinges and shattering the glass into a thousand pieces. As the shards, tinkling like tiny bells, rained down on the floor around him, Lucas saw Andy land on all fours on the walkway outside, shake the fragments of glass loose from the rain slicker, and then scramble with his rucksack into the night.
Lucas leaped through the jagged hole where the doors had been, and ran after him. In the dark and the rain, it was hard enough just to see him. To make matters worse, his quarry was loping along, close to the ground, like a wolf, dodging from one side to another, following no clear course, but gradually making his way up campus, and toward the lights of the town. There was a scream of terror as an unsuspecting student, heading home from the library, was bowled over. Lucas found him lying on his back in a puddle, his wire spectacles twisted on his face, mutely pointing in the direction that his attacker had fled. Lucas hurried on, gaining ground slowly but surely. In the distance, he could hear the commotion of traffic in town, and he could see that Andy was losing steam. Lucas picked up his own pace, and when he found himself within striking distance, lunged for the bottom of the rucksack. He tugged on it, hard, and Andy lost his footing on the damp grass, slipping onto his side. In the light of the lamppost, his face now was unrecognizable — it was a mask of pure depravity, frozen in the rictus of that agonizing smile.