The lid had been pried open; it was surprising that the American had managed it so easily. A sumo wrestler might have struggled with such a task.
Jean-Luc looked toward the Stygian darkness of the exit vaults. Brent was not returning, yet.
He edged his away around the coffin to the side where his work partner had stood. He could not resist.
He lifted the lid of the coffin, hearing again the blood-chilling creaking as the hinges, hundreds of years old, gave way. He steeled himself against the ghastly look of the ancient dead; he had become quite accustomed to skulls; to open jaws that appeared to have been captured in a victim’s last scream against death. Decayed flesh, withered flesh, gray and moldy, fragments of clothes, boots, with bits of bone poking through ... this would be nothing new.
Yet he gasped as he stared into the tomb. There was no scent of decay, not even the musty smell that came when centuries had passed since death. There was no bone to be seen. What he stared upon was
Eyes.
Eyes wide open, black as pitch, but open. Staring, staring straight into Jean-Luc’s own. As if the corpse had never died but slept, and waited ...
And then ...
The corpse moved.
Jean-Luc let out a shrill, bloodcurdling scream that might have wakened the dead not only in Paris, but in all of France ...
Darkness, wavering light, filled the tomb as the lamps suddenly swung. The black of the grave, the white of the flickering light...
The brilliant crimson of blood ...
All filled the tomb.
Standing in the vault, about to accost their unwelcome visitor, Brent heard the scream.
And he swore, damning himself. And damning her.
“My God!” she cried.
The woman had been returning to the vault. Sliding along the vaults with their smell of rot and decay, she had been returning to the site of the dig. Why? Who the hell was she? What was she doing. .. at this site, here, and now?
She forgot to hide as they heard Jean-Luc’s scream tear through the corridors of the vault like the haunted shrieking of the damned.
And so she cried out herself. Cried out, and ...
She saw Brent, saw his eyes ...
Her scream echoed Jean-Luc’s.
She turned to run.
Too late ...
Oh, yes, by God.
Far too late ...
Tara had never heard anything quite like the sound that still seemed to echo within the walls of the crypt.
She had felt a strange sense of the ages while going down into the underground ruins, and she had felt a sadness for all the lives gone by, and even a bit of awe for lives lived so very long ago, and the intense history of mankind. She hadn’t felt entirely comfortable with the mausoleums and graves of the dead, but she hadn’t been afraid. Not even in the darkness and the gloom.
Then she heard the scream.
The shadowy light in the bowels of the earth gave life to the savage grins and leers of gargoyles, grotesques, and angels alike.
Sound seemed to rise from the dead.
The walls to grow closer, darker.
And there, ahead of her, as frozen by the sound as she, stood the American.
And the look on his face as he stared at her, in that split second when they were both paralyzed by the echoes that seemed to rise from hell, from the shrieks that still seemed to fill the hellish world of the dead in which they stood, transfixed her.
He stood some distance away, and she knew that he had come after her, somehow aware that she hadn’t left the tomb, that she had an agenda of her own.
He was some distance down the corridor, where the tombs had been laid out as shelves. The shadows had grown darker as the work lighting had dimmed, as lamps had shattered. She couldn’t possibly see his face, not really, he was just a silhouette there, and yet one filled with menace. And she was certain that he was staring at her with fury, and with a vengeance that seemed to make the hair at her nape rise.
Seconds, flew by, seconds, and yet in that time, she could feel his tension, as if it were an ancient wind, roiling down the length of the tunnel toward her. He would come after her, he wanted to kill her, do to her what she had heard in that bloodcurdling scream, still seeming to echo against stone and concrete.
But he didn’t come toward her.
He turned, racing back toward the sound of the scream, as if hell had come bursting through the earth below the crypt, and if he could stop exploding fires that had risen from hell.
And yet she knew. He had seen her face. And every single line and nuance of her countenance had been embedded in his memory.
He would still come after her.
She turned and ran. As fast as he had run back toward hell, she ran away from it. Down the corridors that had been home to centuries of the dead.
Down through the darkness. Desperate, almost blinded by fear. The stairs to the new church at last loomed before her. She flew up them, barely aware of her feet touching the steps. She arose near the doors at the rear, raced across a length of marble and threw herself against the doors that would lead back into the sanity of the French night.
The doors were locked.
Brent felt as if he had been physically torn in two. And in the minuscule span of time during which he had heard the scream and stared at the woman down the corridor, eons of thought had passed through his mind.
He’d been the biggest fool in the world to leave Jean-Luc alone with the coffin.
But he had known that the woman remained in the crypts, and he knew he must get her out. He hadn’t even been certain that he had been right about the tomb. He had taken on the job of digging just as a precaution. Because of a vague legend that had circulated hundreds of years ago, a nightmare story told by schoolgirls and boys around the fire on a cold winter night.
And yet...
He should have known.
Despite her loafers, the woman could run. She had been far ahead of him. And she had run like a cougar, and he knew, even as he raced back to the tomb, his heart sinking, that she had taken off again, and she was sure to be trouble.
She had heard the scream as he had. And no one with any sanity or instinct or sense of self-preservation could ever be fooled into thinking that it was the sound of an owl in the night or a wolf howling in the far off woods.
He swore, even as he ran.
The scream ...
As much as he had heard, had seen in life, the scream still seemed alive. Within the walls, within his soul.
He swore to himself. He should have come to know Jean-Luc better. The scream that had echoed throughout the ancient stone had indicated that he had been a greedy fool, that he had opened the coffin.
That legend was true.
And Jean-Luc had already paid the price of greed.
Brent raced with lightning speed back to the site of the excavation. But as quickly as it had all occurred, he was too late. Which, of course, he knew. Too late for Jean-Luc. And yet had hoped that he would not be too late for ... others.
Yet he knew that he would be.
Time might have been a trick of the light.
The lanterns that had illuminated the room had been cast down, broken, shattered. Only a few, down but not broken, remained to provide even a trickle of sickly, ash-colored light. Shadows ruled.
Brent damned himself over and over for leaving.
In the near darkness, he moved cautiously, all his senses attuned to the slightest movement. Yet even as he took reasonable care, he was certain that it would not matter. The tomb was empty of the living.
Of any creature ... with even a semblance of life. Even the rats had fled.
His eyesight was excellent in darkness and shadows. He found his way back through piles of earth and stone and around other craters of the dig.
He found the hole in the floor. So carefully dug. The centuries-old tomb.
In the pit, the open lid displayed an empty coffin. Jean-Luc lay on the floor beside it. Brent bent down, touching the shoulder of the man, seeking to roll him and try to find any facsimile of a pulse.
The head rolled to the side at his attempt, completely detached from the body. Jean-Luc was like a doll seized by a child in a frenzy, ripped into pieces.
Brent noticed the stains on the floor. Blood vessels had been completely severed, but there were no great pools of blood.
He stood, closing his eyes. He held dead silent, taking a moment to listen, but the crypt was empty. He couldn’t hear so much as the scratch of a rat’s claw or the scamper of a spider across the floor.
But then ...
There was something, a sound, far above him.
A banging. He closed his eyes and listened intently. Far, far above. From here, in the bowels of the earth, the next sound was faint, almost like the crying of the wind. It was the woman, screaming.
The crypt was empty.
The coffin’s occupant was gone, and despite her years of incarceration, she would be carefully testing the new world now. Hidden in the night, in the shadows. Carefully exploring.
A long night lay ahead. Yet...
He stared down at the remains of Jean-Luc.
She had feasted. He might have the night, and the following hours of daylight, to find her before she felt the thirst again.
There was nothing else to do here ... except see that he was not arrested himself. He turned, and moved with fluent speed back along the corridors he had followed earlier. He moved in silence, still.
He noted the bag against the wall and stopped. A small leather shoulder bag. It belonged to the woman in the crypt. He knelt down beside it, feeling no qualms as he dug into its contents. She had said that her name was Genevieve Marceau. She had lied. Her name was Tara Adair. He studied her passport, her other IDs, and the contents of her purse. He stuffed the contents back into the small leather bag, and fit the bag into the leg pocket of the painter-style denim jeans he wore.
She hadn’t realized that she had lost her purse.
Hadn’t known? Or hadn’t cared.
She had been desperate to escape. Naturally. Anyone would have wanted out after hearing the pure, unadulterated terror in Jean-Luc’s scream.
But just what the hell had she been doing here? What did she know? And more importantly, just who the hell was she, and why had she come here the way she had, questioning Professor Dubois, hiding after she had said she was leaving?
Her name meant nothing to him. Adair ... he wondered if had ever known anyone named Adair.