Once away, he dropped the center board, unfurled the yellow sail and, while raising it, noticed that another canvas sheet had been sloppily stowed in the bow. Had he left it that way himself? He certainly didn’t remember doing so, and it seemed unlikely that his mysterious benefactor, the one who might have fixed his knots, would have left such a rumpled heap there. It didn’t even seem that it belonged to this boat at all; it looked more like one of the canvas covers used to protect the rowers’ boats.
Who could have put it there, of all places?
A cool breeze filled the sail and carried him out onto the deep blue-gray waters of the lake. Einstein zipped his leather jacket up to the top of his throat — perhaps Kurt had dressed more sensibly for the coming weather than he had, after all — and took the tiller in one hand and the rope in the other. As always, he felt that he was leaving all the mundane and often vexing concerns of daily life behind, and passing into a world where no telephones could ring, no doors could be knocked on, no breathless couriers could arrive with outstretched hands for his latest packet of diagrams and calculations.
His eye wandered to the eastern sky, where the towering white clouds looked like a lopsided wedding cake, and then to the thickly wooded shores. While some of the trees had entirely shed their leaves already, others were still bedecked in red and yellow leaves that gleamed in the light of the afternoon sun. A couple of boys on the bank, holding pails and fishing poles, waved to him, and, securing the tiller in place, he waved back. His little blue boat with its distinctive yellow sail was well-known on the lake.
The wind picked up, and rustled the crumpled canvas in the bow. He should have stowed it away under the seat where the life preserver was kept, but it was too late for that now. Despite all the sailing he had done in his life, he knew that he remained a wretched sailor — once he had absentmindedly run his craft onto the shoals, another time into a buoy — and to make matters worse, he could hardly swim a stroke. It was a skill that he had always meant to acquire, but never managed to find time for.
To his surprise, the canvas pile rustled again. Glancing down, he could swear that the fabric bulged, as if something lying beneath it had moved. Could it be wharf rats? The fabric shifted again, and now he was quite certain that something was hiding underneath the cloth. For a second, he considered turning around and heading back to the pier, but even a rat, he knew, would do its best to keep clear of him. Maybe it was some more benign creature, a chipmunk perhaps, that would simply hide out until it could scamper back onto the pier.
The boat heeled, and he had to pull in on the sail. Water splashed over the side, sloshing under the floorboards and soaking the bottom of the canvas heap. Whatever was lurking under it reacted to the intrusion, jerking the canvas out of its way, then tenting it — higher than any rat or chipmunk could have done — and causing Einstein to rear back in alarm on his seat.
Was there a bear in the boat, for God’s sake?
His first clue came when it sat up entirely — and then, to his shock, stretched out one meaty hand, scabbed with blood, from under the wet canvas.
A moment later, it yanked off the cover entirely, shook its head and squared its shoulders, and looked him straight in the eye, like a stoat eyeing a cornered rabbit.
CHAPTER FORTY
“Come on!” Lucas called to Simone as he turned away from the empty display case and charged toward the stairs. Bolting up the steps three at a time and rounding the landing like a thoroughbred at the last turn, he made it to the top in a matter of seconds. Down the hall he could see the door to Delaney’s lab standing open, fluorescent light spilling onto the linoleum floor.
He had a bad feeling, made even worse when he got closer and smelled the clammy aroma of a peat bog.
“Are you in here?” he shouted. The lab looked like a cyclone had hit it — microscopes and other equipment smashed on the floor, papers strewn everywhere and blowing about in the wind from the open window.
“Oh my God,” Simone said, coming up behind him.
The big green steel locker — the one that had held the artifacts from the ossuary — had been ripped from its bolts in the wall, and knocked over. It was covered with dents and twisted out of shape, its door wrenched completely loose — but underneath it, Lucas thought he could detect a body, the empurpled fingers of one hand barely escaping from the crushing weight above it.
“Delaney?” he said, crouching down to peer under the wreckage.
But he couldn’t see anything more, and if he simply shoved the locker aside with his shoulder, he was afraid of hurting him even more.
“We need a lever,” he said, and Simone, looking around, grabbed the steel panel that had been the door, wedged it under the edge of the locker, and leaned against it. The cabinet lifted slightly, and Lucas said, “Yes — keep going!” as he reached under to grab Delaney by the arm. The locker came up another few inches, and Lucas pulled harder, drawing the body, headfirst, out from under its cover.
It was almost completely free before he realized his mistake, and jerked his hand away as if his fingers had been singed on a hot stove.
Simone, too, saw what it was and let the locker drop back into place with a heavy thud, crushing again the calves and feet of the creature she had been trying so hard to release.
The Caithness Man lay there, still as a mummy, its dark brown limbs twisted like tree branches, its body contorted. The head was turned sideways, revealing its beak-like nose, hollow cheeks, and the bloodless slash that was its mouth.
And of course the slit where its throat had been cut for good measure.
Lucas sat back on his haunches, studying the specimen for any sign of life, before thinking how profoundly absurd that was. It hadn’t gotten up here on its own; it was just a museum exhibit, a petrified man who had been tied to a stake and slaughtered, centuries ago, then buried in a bog. Why would anyone have broken into the display case and dragged it up here?
And how had it wound up under the battered, and no doubt burgled, locker?
“Where’s Patrick?” Simone said, asking the question that was just then coming to the fore in Lucas’s mind, too.
One thing was sure — he wasn’t in this lab. But there was every sign of his having put up an enormous fight. Lucas’s eye went to the open window. Had Delaney escaped that way? He went to the windowsill and leaned out — there was no fire escape here, just ivy vines clinging to the walls. A few of them, though, were hanging loose, dangling in the breeze, as if they had just been torn loose. Delaney was a big guy — could they have possibly supported him? The bushes below were dense, and unless he was mistaken, Lucas thought he detected a depression in them, where something heavy might have recently fallen into the thicket.
Had Delaney climbed out the window, even as Lucas and Simone had been coming up the stairs?
Why would he do that? It made no sense.
When he turned back to Simone, however, she had a look of grim certainty in her eye, and said, “It’s inside him now.”
“What is?”
“It needed a body — it always does — and so it borrowed the Caithness Man. But now it’s using Delaney instead.”
“To go where?” he asked. “To do what?”
Simone surveyed the ruins of the empty locker. “It’s already stolen the last physical evidence of its own existence. We’ll never see those things again. So now I guess it’s just rounding up and getting rid of the remaining witnesses.”
Andy Brandt was already gone. So was Agent Taylor. So was the janitor, Wally Gregg. And Dr. Rashid. That left him. And Simone.