On each wall were six catafalques, two ascending rows of three each, eighteen in all, fourteen occupied. The remains were wound about with strips of bandage, immense cocoons in which dead women, preserved by an obsessed madman, waited for rebirth, though they would never emerge like butterflies cloaked in greater beauty.
The layered cotton dressings appeared unstained, as if what waited within them had survived uncorrupted. But whatever Jessup might have learned about the art of mummification, death could not be undone by chemicals and creams and elixirs any more than by a jolt of electricity.
The crazy hateful bastard had done it, but to no meaningful end. The soft-spoken honey-eyed god of this grim underworld could no more resurrect beauty than he could create it.
Nevertheless, as the beam of the Tac Light slid across the bodies on the catafalques, David startled when something moved in the shadows of its wake. More than once, he twitched and swung the light back to the corpse it had revealed a moment earlier, but each time the threat proved to be a phantom conjured by his imagination.
With obvious care and calculated flourishes, a name was painted on the edge of each catafalque. For the moment, however, David was too emotional to go closer and read them.
In the center of the room stood a four-foot-square table, and on it lay a collection of personal objects that apparently belonged to these fourteen victims, arranged as if the deceased had offered their small treasures to the cruel deity of this domain. Perhaps Jessup intended to ornament the women on their revival as they had been in their first life. Dust seemed not to intrude in this realm; the rings and bracelets and necklaces and brooches still glittered. Wristwatches, hair barrettes, gold chains, pop beads, scarves.
And a gold locket in the shape of a heart, inlaid with a rare red diamond.
At the sight of it, David could not get his breath. Although he had resigned himself to what he would discover here, he felt as if his heart had been pierced by a thorn immensely larger than the tiny one surely contained within this locket.
His hands shook so badly that he almost dropped the pendant, and he fumbled interminably with the clasp. When he opened it at last, the thorn was fixed therein, just as it had been when he had given the piece to Emily so many years earlier, before he discovered that a nettle of deceit waited in his own heart.
He tucked the bright locket into a pocket of his jeans and played the light across the catafalques and murmured, “Oh God, oh God,” as the task awaiting him almost brought him to his knees.
| 75 |
He had no choice but to circle the room, reading the names that Jessup had painted in a calligraphic script on the leading edge of each catafalque.
There’s real magic in that deep secret room. You don’t need no electricity, Dave. All you need to do is whisper her name in her ear and peel back the bandage from her mouth and kiss her. Kiss her good, and she’ll be woke and ready.
David had no intention of kissing a corpse. When he found her, she would not be Sleeping Beauty, bewitched by a spell that a kiss could undo.
However, he would need to do something almost as terrible. He would unwind the bandages from her face to be sure that the name on the catafalque belonged to she who lay at rest thereon. Unwind or cut. He had brought scissors. One way or the other, he would do it. The unsoiled appearance of the cotton winding, the dry air, and the eye-watering chemical smell suggested that Jessup had to some degree preserved the bodies. But Emily would be at least withered, her once glowing skin now heavily creped and gray, her face drawn tight on her skull, as the faces of mummies usually were, her lips a thinness of flesh shaped to the teeth beneath them, her eyes sunken in their sockets. The sight of her in that condition—if not in one worse—would shrink his already shrunken soul, but he must look because there would likely be enough resemblance to confirm her identity, and because this was his duty.
As David moved from corpse to corpse, reading names, he heard himself saying, “I’ll take you out of here, Emily. I’ll take you out of here tonight and home to Newport. I have a place for you in the shade of a lovely pepper tree, overhung by those cascading boughs you always liked so much.”
If he wasn’t mad, he sounded mad. He didn’t care. The world had gone insane, and madmen belonged here more than those who had held fast to their sanity. He would carry her out in his arms, and to hell with the law.
“I’ve had the stone engraved with lines from your favorite sonnet. ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May And summer’s lease hath all too short a date . . . But thy eternal summer shall not fade.’”