Damon shined the light around the rest of the room. The only objects were a heavy-duty flashlight, lying against the opposite wall, and a pickax, a few feet away from the feet of the corpse. The room was otherwise empty.
Damon next turned his light on the statue. A good seven feet in height, it was carved entirely from some kind of shining black stone that gleamed like ebony oil in the beam of his light. It appeared to represent a demon, or maybe a gargoyle. Two long, curling horns jutted from its forehead. Its strikingly reptilian mouth was open wide, revealing a double row of razor-sharp teeth. The creature’s torso was humanoid in form, but covered with thousands of tiny scales like the flesh of a miniature dragon. Wicked-looking talons jutted from its four-fingered hands and feet. Batlike wings swept outward from the center of its back. The craftsmanship was superb, giving the creature a sense of life. To Damon it seemed as if at any moment it might leap off the small pedestal on which it stood.
“It’s certainly ugly,” Damon said. Jake didn’t answer. The statue might have been easy enough to handle if that was all it was, ugly. But there was something more, something near indefinable about it that instantly put Damon on guard. It was more a gut feeling than anything else, a sense of wrongness about the thing that disturbed him on some deep, primitive level.
Damon felt the short hairs on the back of his neck start to rise and quickly turned his attention to the body on the floor. It took him a moment, but he finally recognized it as that of Kyle Halloran. Kyle had been one of the bad ones, constantly getting into fights at the bars down in Glendale. More than once Damon had had to toss him in a cell for the night on charges of drunk and disorderly. Kyle had been the type to stay out of trouble for a month, maybe two, then end up back in a cell on similar charges.
Aside from the expression on his face, there were no obvious signs of violence. Damon could not detect any evidence of a disturbance in the dirt around him, either. Drugs were the first thing that came to mind. That would explain the lack of injury. The theory might also explain the man’s expression.Who knew what one might encounter in their own drug-induced hallucinations?
“Recognize him?” the sheriff asked.
Jake nodded. “Kyle Halloran. Hired him last week as a temp. Bit of a loudmouth. My foreman said he was slacking on the job, so I let him go yesterday.”
“Any idea what he might have been doing down here?”
“I couldn’t even tell you how he found out about it. He wasn’t on the detail that was working down here.”
The sheriff nodded. It seemed pretty obvious to him. Halloran had heard about it from another worker, figured there might be something valuable hidden in the tunnel, and decided to check it out for himself. He’d probably been pumped to the gills with whatever he’d been on that week and taken on more than he could handle.
Damon took out his notebook and jotted down his impressions and general facts about the scene. He’d learned long ago to make a record of everything at a crime scene; you never knew what was going to be important later. When he was finished, he stepped inside the room for the first time.
Jake watched the sheriff make a careful inspection of the body. Damon squatted next to the corpse and felt for a pulse on the man’s neck. He sat back on his haunches and visually inspected the corpse, taking care not to touch anything else. After a few moments he jotted down some notes and even sketched a quick diagram of the situation. Jake recognized the hallmarks of a methodical and patient man. Once the sheriff had finished with the corpse, he turned his attention to the statue above it, going over it with the same care and diligence he’d shown with the body.
Jake didn’t want to be in the room with either the statue or the corpse. His earlier excitement had quickly died when he and Sam had discovered Kyle’s body. Now all he wanted to do was retreat back up the stairs into the bright sunshine and forget about what he’d found.
He stepped back into the passage, a glimpse of movement catching his eyes as he did so.
He turned in the doorway, staring at the statue, watching its eyes, watching its hands.
Must have been the sheriff.
Statues don’t move.
The sheriff called out to him as he turned away.
“Where does this go?” Damon asked, pointing behind him to something that Jake could not see because of the intervening statue.
“Where does what go?” Jake asked. He stepped to his left and gaped in surprise at the doorway visible on the other side of the chamber.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Jake asked.
Damon watched Jake examine the door and knew he wasn’t faking it. He really hadn’t known it was there. The iron door had been coated with a thick layer of dust and dirt, causing it to blend with the wall in the dim light. In the horror of finding the statue looming over Kyle’s body, it had been overlooked.
The sheriff intended to let the forensics team open the door once they had thoroughly checked the chamber. He hadn’t counted on Jake’s curiosity. Before the sheriff could stop him, Jake placed his hands against the door and pushed with all his strength.
The door swung outward with a groan.
Sunlight flooded the chamber.
Without a word Damon stepped over to stand next to Jake.
The two men stared out the doorway onto the carefully trimmed green of the Forest Green Cemetery.
“Holy shit,” Jake said under his breath.
The sheriff agreed.Holy shit is right. We must have traveled a couple of hundred yards underground, clear off the Blake property and onto the adjoining one. He hadn’t realized they’d gone that far.
He stepped out into the sunshine with Jake at his heels. As one, they turned to face the doorway.
The door proved to be the entrance to a white marble mausoleum that was built into the side of a small hill. Across the lintel of the doorframe was carved a name.
SEBASTIAN BLAKE.
8
RESURRECTION
Inside the tomb.
Movement.
It began as nothing more than a subtle shifting in the darkness, a change in the rank air that filled the buried structure, a stirring sense of motion that was more felt than seen, as if the air pressure had suddenly lowered.
Gradually, as the moments passed, the motion became more substantial until at last it could be seen with the naked eye, had anyone been watching.
A patch of darkness, darker than even the heavy gloom filling the tomb’s every nook and cranny, detached itself from the shadows in one corner and drifted like a curtain of mist into the center of the chamber. It churned about in rich, lazy spirals, a bubbling, seething witch’s brew that whirled and spun about itself.
The mist became a haze; the haze became a fog, and still it writhed and rolled. With each revolution it slowly gathered substance from the darkness around it. When the cloud was several feet in diameter, it slowly wrapped the statue in its inky embrace.
The murk began to adhere to the finely wrought stone, slowly at first, then faster, as the intelligence guiding it gradually awakened from a long sleep, its senses progressively becoming more in tune with physical reality.
The human blood shed earlier acted as a catalyst, providing the ingredients required for him again to assume a corporeal form. The dark union of forces that had sustained him for so long did the rest.
A light sparked about the statue, a tiny flash of crimson the size and shape of a cigarette ember, located somewhere near the center of the thing’s chest. With each pulsation it grew slowly brighter, bit by bit, until it reached the intensity of a carefully contained fire. There was no heat. The strange light seemed to give off an unnatural chill that wafted forth and turned the air inside the tomb several degrees colder than it had been moments before. The bloodred light flickered across the face of the statue, causing its teeth to gleam eerily in the glow.