“You’re an idiot,” he told himself, but his words seemed unnaturally loud. Alarmingly so, and he hushed himself as if someone was listening. As if maybe the box itself was listening. That thought wormed its way through his brain and, try as he might, Harry could not mock it into silence.
He made himself focus on the task at hand. Heavy iron bands held the chest shut and these converged at the hasp, from which hung a remarkable, heavy, old-fashioned padlock. More of the strange symbols were carved onto every square inch of the lock. He bent to peer at the lock, and then nodded. This was better; this nudged him back into his comfort zone. He was mediocre with electronics but he loved to pick locks. His father had hired a locksmith — and former professional thief — to give him lessons. That was a birthday present when Harry was eleven. His dad was like that. His father was never off the clock. He was Bolton, Harcourt Bolton, all the damn time. Even at Thanksgiving. Even on Christmas morning when Harry was a kid. Giving a complete professional forensic evidence collection kit when he was ten. Wrapped by the maid, no doubt. Another year it was a professional disguise and makeup kit under the tree. Always stuff like that.
Most of the time Harry hated his father for trying to turn his son into a clone. But as he removed the leather toolkit from his pocket down there in the dark, he was cool with it. He stepped up to the chest, studied the lock for a moment, then selected a tension wrench from the kit. He inserted it into the bottom of the keyhole and applied slight pressure, then he slipped a pick into the top of the lock and gave very slight torque to the wrench as he scrubbed his pick back and forth. He felt one of the pins move. Nice. He repeated this until all of the pins had shifted, though he was surprised to find that there were double the normal number of them and each moved with rusty reluctance. But Harry had a deft hand and after six minutes of patient work the lock clicked open.
“Easy-peasy, Mrs. Wheezy.” It was a nonsense thing the locksmith had said every time he opened a lock, and Harry had picked it up.
Harry gingerly removed the lock from the hasp and set it aside, then very carefully lifted the lid. The lock and the lid were absurdly heavy, almost as if they were made of lead instead of steel, but when he raised the lid he saw that the underside gleamed with gold and green. Copper. Or an alloy of both. Harry fished in his mind for what he’d learned of metallurgy from the locksmith — who insisted that his pupil understand all of the materials he might encounter. The name came swimming up out of his memories. Molybdochalkos. He grinned at himself for remembering that.
Then, as he looked inside the chest, his grin faded. He expected to find a false top, maybe with some actual ancient relics on it, with the real booty below — IDs and debit cards and maybe some weapons.
Instead he saw a book. That’s it. Nothing else. A book. It was big, two feet long and eighteen inches wide. At least seven inches thick, and it, too, was sealed by metal bands. Six of them running laterally and two more going up and over. Each one was fastened with a smaller but no less sturdy padlock. The bands were covered by a different kind of engraving than had been used on the chest. Instead of the holy symbols of protection, the bands and the book they surrounded were covered by monsters. Prancing goats with too many heads, writhing squids, demon faces with hundreds of eyes, shapeless mounds with too many mouths and worms for hair.
Harry flinched away. It hurt his mind to look at those symbols, and in his creeped-out imagination, they seemed to move. Or to tremble in anticipation of moving. He licked his lips, which had gone totally dry. His tongue felt like old leather and his heart was punching the inside of his chest.
“This is bullshit,” he told himself.
The room threw echoes back at him that distorted his words into meaningless and sinister mutterings. He forced himself to focus on the rust-pitted locks on the metal bands. When he touched them they felt strangely warm. It was more like touching skin rather than metal. Harry recoiled. He did not like any of this. Not one bit. He closed his tool kit and put it into his pocket, closed the chest, reset the lock, and moved over to the small hatch through which he’d entered.
Except…
Except that he did not do any of that.
His eyes seemed to glaze and when he blinked them clear he was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, his legs stretched out before him, and the big book resting heavily on his thighs.
Harry said, “What—?”
He had no memory at all of how that happened.
His eyes watered and Harry blinked again.
And he was no longer in the chamber. Now he stood in the entrance foyer to the museum. Again there was no memory of having climbed out through the hatch or of making his way up here. It was as if he had stepped out of his own mind and left his body to run on autopilot.
Except that wasn’t it. And he knew it. He could feel something shift inside of him. In his mind. In a moment of absolute mind-numbing terror Harry Bolt realized that he was not alone inside his own head. There was someone else in there. He flung the book away and ran screaming from the building.
Only he didn’t.
He wanted to. He saw himself doing that.
But he did not.
Harry stared at the book. He no longer held it but he clearly had not thrown it away. It lay on the floor at his feet.
It lay in a wide, dark lake of blood. A puddle of it that seemed to cover the whole floor. There were islands in that lake. Lumps. Red and torn. Covered with the last shreds of clothing. The gray and black of the library’s security patrol.
The all-black of the same kinds of clothes that Harry wore. Soft, nonreflective, nonbinding black.
Roy Olvera.
Jim Florida.
Their eyes stared at him with sightless astonishment; their mouths hung open as if frozen that way as they screamed their last screams. The bodies were…
Gone. No. Not gone. The islands in that lake of blood wore the same kinds of equipment. Parts of it. What was left of it. All of it crisscrossed with knife wounds and punctured with the red dots of bullet wounds.
Harry stared for three full seconds.
Then he screamed.
INTERLUDE TEN
Oscar Bell watched the major as she walked out to her car. Bell leaned against the doorframe and watched her drive off. He was four scotches in and felt more of it than he showed.
Songbirds sang in the trees and overhead a gull whose breast was flawlessly white sailed on the breeze, heading out to sea. Bell stepped down into the yard and strolled across the grass toward the backyard. The expensive play set that had been erected when Prospero was four was still there, cleaned by the yardman but as pristine as the day it was assembled. Prospero had never used it. Not once. Bell took his cell phone out of his pocket and sat down on the saddle of the center of three swings.
His first call was to Dr. Greene. After a quick exchange of meaningless pleasantries, Bell asked, “You mentioned something to me last year and I wanted to clarify it. You said that Prospero had atypical creative drives. Do you remember? You said that there was a definite correlation between his mood and the quality of his creative output. What did you call it? The tortured artist syndrome?”