Another fifteen minutes passed in silence as the cameras rolled. Gannon was eating up a hell of a lot of gigabytes, and it would be a pain to edit, but she couldn’t risk missing anything.
Finally, Moller stopped. With a long sigh, he turned toward the group.
Betts moved in. “Dr. Moller, we’re fascinated to hear what you found. Can you share it with us?”
Moller looked up. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?”
“This house is not haunted,” said Moller. “I detected absolutely no spiritual turbulence. There is nothing here.”
“How can that be?” cried the proprietor, his voice rising. “We have witnesses, scores of witnesses over the years, who have experienced the haunting!”
“Perhaps it’s the wrong evening?” Betts asked. “The spirits are, um, quiescent?”
“It doesn’t matter the evening,” said Moller gravely. “There’s nothing here. Even if the spirits don’t manifest themselves, the disturbance can be measured. My instruments measured no disturbance whatsoever. The spirits — if there ever were any — are long gone. This is merely an empty house — a tourist trap, perhaps, but nothing more.”
“Cut, cut!” Betts cried, turning on Moller furiously. “What the hell do you mean, Gerhard? This is the most haunted house in the whole damn town! What am I going to do with all this useless footage?”
Grooms, red-faced, nodded his agreement. “Maybe the problem isn’t with the house, but with all this hocus-pocus!” He gestured disdainfully at Moller’s equipment. “The ghosts are here—you just didn’t find them!”
At this, Moller threw him a withering look but said nothing. He moved back into the hallway and began to pack up his case. The now-superfluous historian, Daisy Fayette, tried to say something, but Betts waved her away as he would a housefly. “Get her out of here,” he said to one of the assistants.
“Now look here, Gerhard,” he said, turning back toward his ghost hunter and trying to modulate his voice. “We’ve gone to a lot of trouble and expense to set this up. This is the perfect haunted house. Couldn’t you, ah, be persuaded to try it again, and make the equipment work?”
Moller drew himself up and said, in an ice-cold voice, “The equipment did work.”
“For Chrissakes, Moller, you can make it work better!”
Moller stared at Betts. “What I do isn’t some circus sideshow. This is real. This is science.” He paused. “You will be glad to have that footage you just shot, Mr. Betts. Because if we do discover something elsewhere — and I expect we will — having found nothing here will make those discoveries all the more credible.”
At this, Betts fell abruptly silent. Gannon noted that, after a moment, a small smile began to creep around the edges of his lips. “I see your point, Gerhard. My apologies.”
Moller nodded curtly.
Betts turned to Gannon. “Action.”
As Gannon began filming again, Betts turned to the camera, a serious expression on his face. “As you can see, detecting a supernatural presence is a delicate, scientific process. Ghosts can’t be conjured up at will. Dr. Moller found nothing — and, given his reputation, that means nothing is here.”
At this, the proprietor objected. “Nothing here?” he cried. It’s a well-known fact that this is the most haunted house in Savannah!”
Betts turned coolly to him. “What will soon be a well-known fact, Mr. Grooms, is that this place is a tourist trap and nothing more — a fake, exposed by Dr. Moller.”
“How dare you!” Grooms said. “Turn off those cameras!” He gestured furiously at the cameras, which of course kept rolling, zooming in on his face. “This is defamation! I’ll sue!”
But Gannon kept shooting. God, it was priceless. She was amazed at how Betts had turned this whole fiasco around. And she wondered, not for the first time, if there wasn’t something to Moller’s tricks after all.
18
The church was a twenty-minute walk across town. Even though it was late, the streets were packed with tourists and drunk college students, bars overflowing, restaurants lit up, squares teeming with people. The church lay just outside the old pre — Civil War city limits, edging into an impoverished neighborhood of far less cheer. It was a nondescript brown brick building streaked with damp, missing some of its slate shingles. The small parking lot was full, and Coldmoon noticed the cars in it were expensive — Maseratis, BMWs, Audis. The first-floor windows had all been boarded up. Pendergast had a no-knock warrant, but Coldmoon suspected he was not going to employ the usual direct method of just busting down the front door.
They went around the corner from Bee Street — busy even at midnight — and examined the building from the rear. There was a small sacristy in the back, along with a modest rectory, its windows boarded up as well. Hopping a low iron railing, Pendergast darted up to the rectory’s back door. Coldmoon followed. It was fitted with a gleaming new lock that looked out of place against the weathered oak. Pendergast reached into his suit and pulled out a set of lock picks nestled within a pouch of folded leather. A moment’s fiddling released the lock.
Pendergast pressed his ear to the door for a long time and then slowly eased it open. The hinges, Coldmoon noted, were well oiled.
They slipped into a dark entryway. When Pendergast shut the door, the darkness turned to pitch black. Pendergast snapped on a small penlight and shined it around. The entryway gave onto a small, shabby parlor to the left and a dining room to the right. Straight ahead was a door leading in the direction of the church. Pendergast stepped up, placed his ear to that door as well, then gestured for Coldmoon to do the same.
When Coldmoon did, he could hear, through the door, the throbbing of voices — a monophonic, ritualistic chanting, slowly rising and falling.
They retreated from the door. “A cappella,” Coldmoon murmured. “Nice.”
“There are usually two doors from a rectory to a church,” Pendergast whispered in return. “One for the public entrance of the minister, and one for the private entrance. Let us seek the private one.”
They went into the dining room, then through it to a small kitchen. The flashlight’s pencil beam illuminated a plastic jeroboam sitting on a counter, full of some unknown liquid. Pendergast swiped a glass from a shelf, held it under the container’s spigot, and turned it.
A thick red stream came out.
“Holy shit,” said Coldmoon, taking an involuntary step backward.
Pendergast slipped out a test tube, swabbed blood out of the glass, placed the swab in the tube, then stoppered it and returned it to his suit coat. He moved to a door at the far end of the room. Coldmoon watched as he tested the handle: unlocked.
He cracked it open ever so slightly, and the sound of chanting grew louder. A reddish light filtered through the crack. Pendergast stood there for a moment, then motioned for Coldmoon to take a look.
Beyond lay the sacristy, and beyond that the apse of the church. Where the altar would normally have been there was now a stage, and on the stage was a group of about half a dozen naked people moving in a slow circle, hands above their heads, chanting — and drenched in blood. Most were old and overweight, the men bald, the women with peroxided hair — on their heads, at least. In the middle of the circle was a pentagram with bizarre symbols chalked on its arms. Roaming about the stage was a woman, also naked and covered in blood. A macabre-looking necklace, from which dangled demonic-looking faces stamped in gold, hung from her neck. She held a brush and a copper pot, and periodically she dipped the brush into the pot, then splattered it over the dancers like a basting mop. It appeared to Coldmoon that the pot was full of blood.