“I prefer the moniker of ‘Deerslayer,’ thank you,” Constance retorted.
Ahead, their path was blocked by a shabby door. Constance opened it to reveal a large storeroom. It was, or appeared to be, a graveyard of old hotel furniture. Most everything was covered in moldering sheets, tears here and there exposing the bones of discarded armoires and bedposts. Constance led them through the cluttered space, which ended in a large wardrobe pushed up against the far wall. Constance tried the wardrobe’s doors. They were locked.
“Aloysius?” she said, stepping back.
Once again, Pendergast applied his lock-picking set. The doors swung open obediently, revealing rows of old clothes.
“Perhaps our friend Ellerby was a fan of C. S. Lewis?” asked Pendergast drily.
Constance stepped in and, sweeping aside the hangers, revealed a half-height panel. “If so, here’s Narnia.” She drew it back, exposing a dark hole.
“I’ll go first,” said Pendergast.
He ducked through, and they followed. A moment of blackness, and then Pendergast switched on a light to reveal a modestly sized room, more than half taken up by a machine that sat against the rear wall. Coldmoon stared at it, unsure what to think. Machine didn’t do it justice, nor did contraption. He’d never seen anything like it. It appeared to be a fusion of two large pieces of apparatus, wired together. The first was a device with a dazzling array of finely machined brass gears, wheels, knobs, dials, chain belts, and springs, almost like the inner workings of a gigantic clock. This was connected via thick bundles of wires to an untidy rack of computer equipment—motherboards, disk drives, keyboards, and monitors, bolted into place in a seemingly haphazard way. Two brilliantly polished stainless steel wands with copper bulbs attached protruded from opposite ends of the machine and pointed to each other at ninety-degree angles.
“How…how do you turn that baby on?” Coldmoon asked. “I don’t see any switch.”
Pendergast moved toward it gingerly and examined the fantastical device in silence, moving from one end to the other, peering at it with glittering eyes. He took out a penlight and began probing its innards.
Coldmoon breathed in deeply, then forced himself to look away and examine the rest of the room. There was a small metal table on the wall opposite the machine, with a chair and a cheap lamp. Sitting on the table was an ordinary laptop, next to a disorganized stack of papers and a notebook. A nearby wastebasket was filled to overflowing with balled-up paper.
The room itself was half-ruined. A brick wall to the left of the machine had a large hole bashed through it, broken bricks strewn about as if hit with a wrecking ball. Beyond, a black hole yawned. Several deep grooves raked the wall surrounding the opening, and it was splattered with what appeared to be the same strange lubricant or grease that they’d found on the bodies of the bloodless dead. The floor was littered with debris—wires, tubes, broken glass, plastic. And it was covered with more dead insects, most heavily in the spot under the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. They weren’t moths, as Coldmoon initially thought. Perhaps they were dragonflies. But as he looked closer, he saw this, too, was incorrect: although the dead insects had wings like dragonflies’， these were attached to bodies that more closely resembled hornets’。
Coldmoon walked over to the broken wall. Beyond lay what appeared to be an old coal tunnel. Lumps of coal were still scattered on the stone floor amid puddles of water, and the walls and ceiling were whitened with lime.
A faint whisper of fabric, and Coldmoon realized that Constance was now standing beside him. “I imagine this is how the creature escaped the building.”
Coldmoon blinked once, twice. “Creature?”
“Yes. The one plaguing Savannah.”
“This is just too strange.”
She turned her violet eyes on him and quoted. “‘Not only is the universe stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose.’”
“And whose deathless pearl of wisdom was that?”
“Heisenberg, some say.”
“You mean the guy in Breaking Bad?”
Constance issued a low, mirthless laugh.
Coldmoon stared at the machine, shaking his head. “That’s the most insane-looking thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I imagine,” Constance replied, “that the true insanity will start once Aloysius determines how to turn it on.”
As if on cue, a honeyed voice rang out. “I do believe I’ve found the switch.”
59