This wouldn’t stop her pursuer, she knew. She could hear the loud but easy breathing of this remorseless woman, an athlete’s breathing, relaxed, confident, jumping over the Dong Sang drums, vaulting them, almost, like a graceful animal, a predatory feline. Julia threw herself at a door that terminated the corridor; she twisted and yanked it open and slammed it shut behind her. Four seconds. She had maybe four seconds to barricade the door.
With what? She was back in the archives, the vast echoing hangarlike spaces, racked with endless open corridors and a shadowed infinity of shelves.
A totem pole. A British Columbian totem pole, maybe two meters high, carved with eagle heads, vicious beaks of pine and cedar, was tilted against the door, directly to her left. Julia had just enough time to topple it over; it fell as the door was kicked open, blocking the door — but it wasn’t enough, she knew that at once. This had gained her another five seconds.
She needed more than that, much more than that — she needed five minutes, ten minutes, before the police got here, or she was going to die. She ran. Hard. Burning up the energy inside her, burning the will to live, running on the fuel of life. Straight into the vast darkened labyrinth of steel shelving and lofty racks of boxes and sarcophagi.
It was a true maze — a labyrinth of ancient anthropology. It was like being lost in a dream, a bad dream of her own teenage studies: anthropology and ethnology and archaeology — the sinister and beautiful cultures of ancient man, now her own death trap. Julia fled past grimy camel palanquins, slowly desiccating in the dryness. A rack of death masks, Senegalese or Cameroonian, smirked in the semidark. One of them fell to the floor as she brushed past, a mask of real human skin, a ghastly wig of real human hair, smiling at the roof.
Then more drums. Running. Perfume bottles of the Maghreb. Running. Moroccan rugs, knotted and ancient. Running. Okuyi helmets from Gabon. Running. All the lessons she’d ever had in ethnology were here — condensed into a nightmare. She ran.
A Soto lyre stone, carved in rock, nearly tripped her over. More bronze drums, dinted and somber, knocked at her heels.
And the killer was still coming, stalking the passages and open-ended corridors, seeking her, hunting her down. Julia felt like a small fish in coral, hiding, pathetically, from a shark, shirking the effortless and superior species, the top of the food chain.
No. She wouldn’t let it happen. She needed to fight back. If she was going to die, she was going to fight back first — but how? A sword. There was nothing here like that. No metal. A club? Yes. A club. A cudgel. Pausing in her heart-straining sprint, she grasped at a human sacrificial club, Tupinamba, Brazilian, a wooden killing club, decorated with scarlet feathers and white jaguar teeth. She could swing that around and maybe — yet even as she practiced she knew it was pointless — one swing and she would miss and then the killer would be on her, the long steel knife gutting her open, like the bison at Lascaux. Abject, despairing, she hurled down the club.
What else?
Carpets. Tunisian carpets. A shamanic cloak, musty, made of reindeer, still more drums, then dusty boxes, then another corner to run around and more miles of shelving. At last she began to slow down, her energy was sapping. The sad and angry despair flushed her with fury, but she was running out of life, out of that desire to resist. She grasped at herself — no, she couldn’t die like this, not here. Not like this. Not here. But how?
Seconds left. The killer was in the next steel corridor. Those yellow eyes, white in the darkness, glanced through the grille and the cardboard boxing — and narrowed on Julia. Got you.
She’d been spotted. Julia was trapped in one of the very last racks of shelves, which ended in a wall, the exterior wall — she was cornered. There was a door, probably an exterior door, beyond the next steel rack, but she was trapped. Entirely trapped. Dragging the last ingenuity from her brain, Julia stopped. This was it. Think of something.
If she couldn’t fight back, what could she do? If she couldn’t run away, how could she escape?
Hide. Protect. Defend? She needed to conceal herself. Now. Flailing and desperate, she reached for some wooden armor. A breastplate, from Japan, made for a samurai. But this was futile, the killer would tear it away. So what? What could she possibly do? The killer was fifty yards away, rounding the corner. A raptor descending.
There. A coffin, long and black and lacquered with dragons, loomed at the end of the steel corridor. A Chinese coffin, Ming dynasty, from Jiangxi province. She recognized the type: made of nunma wood, fire-tempered, incredibly hard. Sprinting to the coffin, she pulled at the heavy lid; even as she stooped, she could hear the rubber squeak of footsteps behind her, running, approaching, attacking. Julia strained to lift the great coffin lid, which rose slowly.
Three seconds. She bent herself double—two seconds — and tried to squeeze inside—one second — but the killer was here. It was surely too late. The killer was on her. But Julia was in. The lid collapsed shut, sealing her inside, with a great booming thud. Now she was encased in this ancient long box. Would it hold?
The knife slammed straight through the crack between the lid and the casket, but it didn’t reach her eye. The killer kicked at the coffin, frustrated, then the knife came again, trying to pry the box open. Julia pulled the lid down, tighter, desperately. The crack was widening. The lid was being lifted. Julia kicked, furiously, at the murdering fingers, the hands trying to get at her, to open the wooden sarcophagus.
Again the blade plunged, phallically, through the gap — but the point jarred and halted, and juddered, a centimeter from Julia’s pulsing neck. Now the blows were frenzied. The killer was stabbing and hacking, trying to kick the lid off, to expose Julia’s face, her body. Another crazy swoop of the blade came lunging through. How long could she resist this assault? More hacking swipes of steel blade slashed at the gap. Julia felt the first cut. A tiny nick of her flesh, and the first blood drawn.
With a rush of terminal horror, she realized that the wood was strong, but the hinges were bending and giving way — the lid was going to be shunted hard aside, leaving space for the killer; the next blow through the widening crack would go deeper, the next plunging blade swoop would reach her, stab her deep in the kidneys. She would be a corpse, floating in blood. Julia screamed.
A siren.
Outside, way out there, but quite distinct, Julia heard the caterwaul of police sirens.
The killer seemed to think, and to pause. The kicks and the stabbings stopped.
Julia crouched, fetally, inside her wooden box, tasting the sour and ferric spit of primeval emotion, of instinctive fear and will to live. She listened, tensed and coiled.
Then she heard that distinct, repetitive squeak. The rubber shoes of the killer. Running away? Could it be? The pounding of the shoes faded and was instantly replaced by voices, loud voices, and flashlights, real lights, proper lights. Doors were flung open. The police were in the building.
The killer had gone—she had fled, somewhere else, somewhere not here, leaving Julia encased inside her nunma wooden box.
A petite American archaeologist in a 2, 500-year-old Ming dynasty coffin allowed herself two sad, angry, urgent tears. Then she turned and strained, threw the lid open, and rose from the casket.
24
Closing the call with Tyrone, Jake resisted the desire to panic. Then he began to panic. So he got going instead, closed his bag, ran downstairs, and joined Chemda and Sonisoy in the back of the tuk-tuk. The soft morning air smelled of fish sauce and garbage and sweet jasmine and two-stroke engines. And danger.