Not long after my night with Joy, a rumor began to circulate that one of the plumes had become pregnant, and when I discovered that the plume in question was Bianca, I tried to find her. I gave the rumor little credit. Yet she had claimed she could prove something to me, and thus I could not completely discredit it. I was unsure how I would react if the rumor reflected the truth, but what chance was there of that? My intention was to debunk the rumor. I would be doing her a favor by forcing her to face reality. That, at any rate, is what I told myself. When I was unable to track her down, informed that she was sequestered, I decided the rumor must be a ploy designed to win me back, abandoned my search, and once again focused my energy upon the mural. Though a third of the walls remained unfinished, I now had a more coherent idea of the figures that would occupy the dome, and I was eager to finalize the conception. Despite this vitality of purpose, I felt bereft, dismally alone, and when Richard Causey came to visit, I greeted him effusively, offering him refreshment from my store of junk food. Unlike my other visitors, he had almost nothing to say about the mural, and as we ate on the lowest platform of the scaffolding, it became obvious that he was preoccupied. His eyes darted about; he cracked his knuckles and gave indifferent responses to everything I said. I asked what was on his mind and he told me he had stumbled upon an old tunnel beneath the lowest of the sub-basements. The door leading to it was wedged shut and would take two people to pry open. He believed there might be something significant at the end of the tunnel.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I ran across some papers in the archives. Letters, documents. They suggested the tunnel led to the heart of the law.” He appeared to expect me to speak, but I was chewing. “I figured you might want to have a look,” he went on. “Seeing that’s what you’re painting about.”
I worried that Causey might want to get me alone and finish what he had started years before; but my interest was piqued and after listening for several minutes more, I grew convinced that his interest in the tunnel was purely academic. To be on the safe side, I brought along a couple of the chisels I used to scrape the walls—they would prove useful in unwedging the door as well. Though it was nearly three in the morning, we headed down into the sub-basements, joined briefly by Colangelo, who had been sleeping in the corridor outside the anteroom. I brandished a chisel and he retreated out of sight.
The door was ancient, its darkened boards strapped with iron bands, a barred grille set at eye level. It was not merely stuck, but sealed with concrete. I shined Causey’s flashlight through the grille and was able to make out moisture gleaming on brick walls. With both of us wielding chisels, it required the better part of an hour to chip away the concrete and another fifteen minutes to force the door open wide enough to allow us to pass. The tunnel angled sharply downward in a series of switchbacks, and by the time we reached the fifth switchback, with no end in view, I realized that the walk back up was going to be no fun whatsoever. The bricks were slimy to the touch, rats skittered and squeaked, and the air… dank, foul, noisome. None of these words or any combination thereof serve to convey the vileness of the stench it carried. Molecules of corruption seemed to cling to my tongue, to the insides of my nostrils, coating my skin, and I thought that if the tunnel did, indeed, lead to the heart of the law, then that heart must be rotten to the core. I tied my shirt across the lower half of my face and succeeded in filtering the reek, yet was not able to block it completely.
I lost track of the passage of time and lost track, too, of how many switchbacks we encountered, but we traveled far beneath the hill, of that much I am certain, descending to a level lower than that of the river flowing past the gate of the prison annex before we spotted a glimmer of light. Seeing it, we slowed our pace, wary of attracting the notice of whatever might occupy the depths of Diamond Bar, but the space into which we at length emerged contained nothing that would harm us—a vast egglike chamber that gave out into diffuse golden light a hundred feet above and opened below into a black pit whose bottom was not visible. Though the ovoid shape of the chamber implied artificiality, the walls were of natural greenish-white limestone, configured by rippled convexities and volutes, and filigreed with fungal growths, these arranged in roughly horizontal rows that resembled lines of text in an unknown script; the hundreds of small holes perforating the walls looked to have been placed there to simulate punctuation. A considerable ledge rimmed the pit, populated by colonies of rats, all gone still and silent at the sight of us, and as we moved out onto it, we discovered that the acoustics of the place rivaled that of a concert hall. Our footsteps resounded like the scraping of an enormous rasp, and our breath was amplified into the sighing of beasts. The terror I felt did not derive from anything I have described so much as from the figure at the center of the chamber. Dwarfed by its dimensions, suspended from hooks that pierced his flesh at nine separate points and were themselves affixed to chains that stretched to the walls, was the relic of a man. His begrimed skin had the dark granite color of the prison’s outer walls, and his long white hair was matted down along his back like a moldering cape; his limbs and torso were emaciated, his ribs and hipbones protruding and his ligature ridged like cables. Dead, I presumed. Mummified by some peculiar process.
“Quires!” Causey’s whisper reverberated through the chamber. “Jesus Christ! It’s Quires.”
The man’s head drooped, his features further hidden by clots of hair. I had no evidence with which to argue Causey’s claim and, indeed, not much inclination to do so. Who else, according to the history of the prison, merited the torment the man must have experienced? It did not seem possible. Quires had been in his eighties when he stepped down as warden more than eighty years before. But the existence of the chamber undermined my conception of the possible. Its silence was so liquid thick and chilling, it might have been the reservoir from which the quiet of the prison flowed. A brighter fear flickered up in me.
“Let’s go back,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”
At the sound of my voice, the rats offered up an uneasy chittering chorus that swirled around us like the rushing of water in a toilet. Causey was about to respond to my urging when Quires—if it was he—lifted his head and gave forth with a cry, feeble at first, but swelling in volume, a release of breath that went on and on as if issuing not from his lungs but from an opening inside him that admitted to another chamber, another voice more capable of such a prolonged expression, or perhaps to a succession of openings and voices and chambers, the infinitely modulated utterance of a scream proceeding from an unguessable source. The chittering of the rats, too, swelled in volume. Half-deafened, hands pressed to my ears, I sank to my knees, recognizing that the cry and its accompanying chorus was pouring up through the holes that perforated the walls and into every corner of the prison, a shout torn from the heart of the law to announce the advent of a bloody dawn. Quires’ body spasmed in his chains, acquiring the shape of a dark thorn against the pale limestone, and his face… Even at a distance I could see how years of torment had compressed his features into a knot of gristle picked out by two staring white eyes. I felt those eyes on me, felt the majestic insistence of his pain and his blissful acknowledgment that this state was his by right. He was the criminal at the heart of the law, the one in whom the arcs of evil and the redemptive met, the lightning rod through which coursed the twin electricities of punishment and sacrifice, the synchronicity of choice and fate, and I understood that as such he was the embodiment of the purpose of Diamond Bar, that only from evil can true redemption spring, only from true redemption can hope be made flesh. Joyful and reluctant, willing servant and fearful slave, he was thaumaturge and penitent, the violent psychotic saint who had been condemned to this harsh durance and simultaneously sought by that service to transfigure us. Thus illuminated, in that instant I could have translated and read to you the fungal inscriptions on the walls. I knew the meaning of every projection and declivity of stone, and knew as well that the heart of the law was empty except for the exaltation of the damned and the luminous peace of the corrupted. Then Quires’ cry guttered, his head drooped. The rats fell silent again, returned to their petty scuttling, and all but a residue of my understanding fled.