At 3:09 I sailed into the slough and found the back of the Quonset hut.
The land fell off to the water, ending in a small sandy beach strewn with maple leaves which had once wafted down on the wind. The hut itself sat like a hat on top of a concrete bunker. The bunker was only visible when you came in from the rear. A rickety wooden staircase descended down the backside of the concrete until it ended at a plank and piling pier that jutted out over the slough. That bunker looked as though it could withstand full-scale nuclear attack.
Now it is entirely possible that there was another Sycamore Maple tree within the Lower Mainland.
It is also possible that even if the sand in the bucket was from here it was carted to some other place.
But when you've been a cop as long as I have, you learn to trust your instinct. And my gut told me the Headhunter had been inside this structure. I broke out in a sweat.
For, you see, I had spent my whole life living in fear of this moment. Sure I had become a cop to confront my psychological dread of blood. But the night we caught the squeal on the John The Baptist killing, where an old man in a derelict rooming house had murdered his best friend, cut off his head, put it on a plate and knocked on his landlady's door, I stayed in the squad room and let Leggatt take to the wheels. Sure, I may have confronted those pictures, blowing them up in size. But a photograph is one thing. Butchered human flesh another.
I wanted to cut and run. Instead my right eye started twitching.
"Don't be afraid of fear, son. We all have to conquer it someday — one way or another."
And I knew my day had come.
I moored the boat to the bunker pier and climbed the rickety stairs. Halfway up I removed my.38 from the holster clipped to my belt.
From the rear the Quonset hut didn't look much different than it did from the front. Same streaked metal. No windows. Only a single door secured with a new combination lock. I knocked on the door and stood off to one side just in case some shots came through. When nothing happened, I waited. Then I knocked again. Once more. Once again. And decided no one was home.
That was when I noticed the smell that was coming from inside the hut. It was like the stench of rotting meat combined with the stench of rotting fish. I knew for certain then that I did not want to enter this place, just as I knew for certain that I would. I'd have to go back to that hardware store to obtain the necessary tools. So I climbed back down the rickety stairs and cast off in the boat.
It was as I inched off to the left of the pier to make for the open slough that I saw the gap between the back of the dock and the concrete wall of the bunker. The wall was shadowed by the ladder down to the pier but in the murk I could still discern some sort of opening. I secured the boat again to a piling and stepped into the water. Knee-deep in sludge I waded up onto the sandy, leaf-strewn shore.
The space behind the dock was no more than three feet wide. It was a day of cold clear weather and sunlight stabbed deep into the shadows through cracks in the plank-joins above. Where there was protection from the rain I saw a mass of tangled spiders' webs and the oozy trails of summer slugs.
The opening was a square wooden door, more a hatch, set into the concrete wall just over five feet up from the ground. The high tide mark was a foot below it. This door was secured with a padlock that it took me ten minutes to pick. In my job the tools for this sort of work are constantly on your person.
The hinges squealed as I eased open the hatch.
I removed the police flashlight from my back left pocket and shone the torch inside. The beam illuminated a concrete passage about three feet square. The tunnel sloped down at an angle, then straightened out again so I couldn't see its end. Taking a deep breath, I used the pier supports to hoist myself up so that I could wriggle in through the opening. Working my feet and using my hands I inched my way down the narrow passage — until I got stuck.
Have you ever had claustrophobic fear slip inside your skull and begin eating small chunks of your brain? Well there I was, halfway down this incline, the slope of it making blood rush to my head, my body stuck, my arms confined. I thought my mind would snap if I couldn't move my arms. I'd be stuck like this until what? I starved to death?
Details began to flood into my senses. A smell within this tunnel, the smell of burnt human flesh. Two red eyes of a water rat just up ahead and sniffing at my fingers. Green slime on the roof, shaded a glistening black where the torchlight died away. The squish of rat shit in small lumps on the floor beneath my face. And then into the realm of my misery intruded this germ of an idea.
Pulling with my fingers, pushing with my toes, then reversing direction I began twisting and turning my body, trying desperately to coat both my skin and clothes with the foul-smelling ooze. Rat shit and slime: that might just get me moving.
And it worked.
Soon I was once more advancing, centimeter by centimeter down this mushy incline. I reached the bend in the tunnel where the passage opened wider only to find myself confronting yet another barrier — this one a crosshatch of iron bars with a padlock on the other side.
Twenty-five minutes it took me to do a job on this one. I had to work my fingers with the pick through a couple of the crosshatch holes, moving the flashlight with my chin to get the right illumination. If the pick dropped from my sweaty fingers there would go the ball game. But I finally did it and pushed the bar-door open. Wiggling through I dropped head first six feet down to the floor.
Thank God the flashlight survived the tumble. I picked it up and shone it around.
Mr. Albert Stone's fallout shelter was something to behold. The walls were of concrete, no doubt many feet thick, surrounding a room ten feet by twelve. The floor was of concrete. The roof was of concrete. And there was a concrete slab off to one side of the tunnel I had just come through, positioned so that it could be slid across as a radiation barricade. A second slab of concrete stood to the right of some stairs, and these I immediately climbed.
The stairs ended abruptly at yet another doorblocking my progress. This door was of steel sealed by a combination lockset right into the metal. So much for that. I had no doubt that this threshold led to the Quonset hut.
As I began to descend the stairs I heard twigs crunching underfoot. When I shone the light down I saw that I was treading on hundreds of little rat bones. Then as I reentered the fallout shelter I was met by another uneasing thought. With the door at the top of the stairs locked, the only way out of here was back the way that I had come. And I was not yet ready for that.
Stalling, I began to examine the details of the room. Before long I had reached the conclusion that I would rather fry in a nuclear war than spend a couple of years in here.
There were stacks of canned goods and rows of glass bottles scattered around the floor, one wall nothing but shelves of tins, their labels long since disintegrated, piled up to the ceiling. Here was a rusted first-aid medical kit; there a coal-oil hurricane lamp. There were several boxes of 350 paperbacks, all of them science fiction. There was a…
There was a water rat with beady eyes watching me intently from a breach in one of the walls. I hadn't noticed the opening before.
I crossed over to this alcove door and shone my torch inside. Instantly I was horrified, shocked almost numb by what met my eyes.
The chamber was approximately ten feet by ten. Once again it was constructed entirely of concrete. Against the wall to my left there was an old-fashioned full-length mirror. In front of me, raised up from the floor, was this square slab of cement that looked much like an altar. On top of it were two candlesticks and a very large silver box. The surface of the slab was stained and streaked by puddles and rivulets of dried and clotted blood. Fingers of blood ran down its sides and across the floor. In a semicircle behind this altar were seven sharpened poles. And rammed down on each pole, the sticks bursting through the bone at the top of the cranium, were seven grinning skulls.