They winged the glasses into space, leaning over the parapet to watch as they flashed in a downward arc, landing in the pond with a splash. As he watched, Nick noticed that the sun-bathers, roller skaters, and various Park loungers were now gone, and the base of the castle was deserted. He’d better get the show on the road. Plunging his hand into his jacket pocket, he removed the box and handed it to her. He stepped backward, watching proudly as she opened it.
“Nick, my God!” she cried. “It must have cost a fortune!”
“You’re worth a fortune,” Nick smiled as she placed it on her finger, then pulled her to him and gave her a quick, hard kiss. “You know what it means?” he asked.
She turned to him, eyes shining. Over her shoulders, the gloom was starting to gather in the trees.
“Well?” he urged.
She kissed him back and whispered in his ear.
“Until death do us part, baby,” he replied, and kissed her again, longer this time, cupping one of her breasts in his hand.
“Nick!” she said, laughing and pulling away.
“There’s nobody here,” he said, placing his other hand on her rear and pulling her hips hard against his.
“Just the whole city watching,” she said.
“Let them. They might learn something.” His hand slipped inside her shirt and teased her hard little nipple as he glanced around at the encroaching darkness. “We’d better move this to my apartment,” he whispered into her ear.
She smiled, then moved away from him toward the stone stairs. Watching her, admiring the natural grace in her walk, Nick felt the expensive champagne running through his veins. Nothing like a champagne buzz, he thought. Goes straight to the head.
Straight to the bladder, too. “Hold on,” he said aloud. “I’ve got to drain the main vein.”
She turned to wait as he walked to the tower. There were rest rooms hidden on its back side, he remembered, beside the metal maintenance staircase that led up to the weather equipment and down to the pond. Under the shadow of the tower it was still; the sounds of the traffic on the East Drive seemed muffled and distant. He located the men’s room door and pushed through, unzipping his fly as he crossed the scuffed tile, past the row of dark stalls toward the bank of urinals. The room was deserted, as he knew it would be. He leaned against the cool porcelain and closed his eyes.
He opened them again quickly as a slight sound broke his champagne reverie. No, he realized; it was nothing. He laughed, shaking his head at the paranoia that was always bubbling just under the skin of even the most jaded New Yorker.
The sound came again, much louder, and he turned in surprise and fear, his dick still in his hand as he saw that someone was in one of the stalls, after all, and was coming out, fast.
Tanya waited, standing at the parapet, the night breeze quickening on her face. She felt the engagement ring, heavy and foreign on her finger. Nick was taking his sweet time. The Park was dark now, the Great Lawn deserted, the bright lights of Fifth Avenue winking off the surface of the pond.
Impatient, she walked toward the tower, then skirted around its dark bulk. The men’s room door was shut. She knocked, timidly at first, then louder.
“Nick? Hey, Nick! You in there?”
There was no sound, only the wind sighing through the trees. The wind carried a strange smelclass="underline" a pungent odor that reminded her, unpleasantly, of feta cheese.
“Nick? Stop playing games.”
She pushed open the door and stepped inside.
For a moment, silence settled again over Belvedere Castle. And then the screams began: ululating, rising louder and louder as they rent the soft summer night.
= 17 =
SMITHBACK TOOK A seat at the counter of his favorite Greek coffeeshop, nodding at the griddleman for his usual breakfast order: two poached eggs on a double portion of red flannel hash. He sipped the cup of coffee that was placed in front of him, sighed contentedly, and slipped the newspapers out from under his arm. He turned first to the Post, frowning slightly as he scanned Hank McCloskey’s front-page article on the Belvedere Castle murder. His own piece on the rally at Grand Army Plaza had been demoted to page four. By rights, he should have owned the front page that day, with his story on the Museum’s involvement and the teethmark angle. But he’d promised Margo. Tomorrow would be different. Besides, maybe his forbearance would land him more scoops down the road.
The breakfast arrived and he dug into the hash with relish, putting aside the Post and cracking open the New York Times as he did so. He scanned the top headlines—tastefully understated and tidy—with derision. Then his eye, traveling below the fold, stopped at a one-column headline that read merely “Museum Beast Returns?” It was bylined Bryce Harriman, Special to the Times.
Smithback read on, the hash turning to wallpaper paste in his mouth.
August 8—Scientists at the New York Museum of Natural History are continuing their analysis of the headless corpses of Pamela Wisher and an unknown person, trying to determine if teeth marks found on the bones are the postmortem work of feral animals or possibly the cause of death itself.
The brutal murder and decapitation of Nicholas Bitterman at Belvedere Castle in Central Park yesterday evening has increased the pressure on the forensic team to find answers. Several deaths among homeless persons over the past months also may fit the pattern. It is not known if these corpses will also be brought to the Museum for analysis. Pamela Wisher’s remains have been returned to her family, and will be interred in a 3:00 P.M. service this afternoon at Holy Cross Cemetery, Bronxville.
The autopsies have been proceeding under a cloak of secrecy at the Museum. “They don’t want to have a panic on their hands,” said a source. “But the unspoken word on everyone’s lips is Mbwun.”
Mbwun, as the Museum Beast is known to scientists, was an unusual creature that was inadvertently brought back to the Museum by a failed Amazonian expedition. In April of last year, the creature’s presence in the Museum’s subbasement became known when several museum-goers and some guards were killed. The creature also attacked a large crowd during a Museum opening, causing panic and a mistriggering of the Museum’s alarm system. This resulted in 46 deaths and nearly three hundred injuries, one of the worst disasters in New York in recent years.
The name Mbwun was given to the creature-by the now-extinct Kothoga tribe, who lived in the animal’s original habitat along the upper Xingu River in the Amazon Basin. For decades, anthropologists and rubber tappers had heard rumors of a large, apparently reptilian animal in the upper Xingu. Then, in 1987, a Museum anthropologist, Julian Whittlesey, organized an expedition to the Upper Xingu to seek clues about the tribe and the creature. Whittlesey disappeared in the rain forest, and the other members of the ill-fated expedition were tragically killed in a plane crash as they were returning to the United States.
Several crates containing relics from the expedition made their way back to New York. The artifacts were packed in plant fibers which contained a substance that the Mbwun animal craved. Although the manner in which the creature reached the Museum is not known, curators theorize that it was inadvertently locked into a freight container along with the expedition’s collections. The creature lived in the Museum’s vast subbasement until it ran out of its natural food and began attacking visitors and guards.
The animal was killed during the resulting melee, and its carcass was removed by authorities and destroyed before detailed taxonomic research could be performed. Although there are still many mysteries about the creature, it was determined that it lived on an isolated plateau in the Amazon called a tepui. Recent hydraulic gold mining in the Upper Xingu has severely impacted the area and probably caused the extinction of the species. Professor Whitney Cadwalader Frock of the Museum’s anthropology department, author of Fractal Evolution, believed the creature to be an evolutionary aberration produced by its isolated rain forest habitat.