Page 136 of The Instruments of Darkness

Sabine, trembling, shaking on the mattress, the bedsprings singing a near coital song…

Then the Michauds had done what comes naturally to those who try to map the numinous.

In the darkness between worlds, what was left of Henry Clark stirred at the sound of footsteps in the dirt.

Sabine opened her eyes.

“Get out!” she screamed. “Get out!”

The Michauds had built a shrine.

CHAPTER XC

The beam of Lars Ungar’s flashlight was fixed on the far wall of the basement. What he was looking at was so extraordinary that it served to distract him momentarily from the stench. Ungar had smelled dead animals and knew the fetor of putrefaction, but this was many degrees worse. Beneath the dirt floor, he guessed, was a body, or more than one.

Ungar did not move to investigate further, not yet, but stayed perfectly still as the beam illuminated the creation on the wall, a vision formed of paint, soot, and blood. It was vast, covering all the available space, and resembled the interior of a volcano, a whirlpool formed of fire glimpsed through a fracture in the air-cooled black lava. But this was not a depiction of rock: the striations were too organic. It was closer to the carapace of a great insect, and what Ungar had at first taken for columns of smoke, or even charred branches, started to resemble an irregular multitude of limbs surrounding a slit that was almost vaginal. Taken as a whole, Ungar thought he might also be looking at a face, the features arrayed into some blighted approximation of humanity, as though the creator of the mural had set out to combine the most unsettling aspects of creatures that crawled through mud and lightless places with those that walked above them.

Ungar let the flashlight drift down with the muzzle of his gun to catch objects carved from wood, stone, and bone, some barely the size of his little finger, others as long as his arm, but each an attempt to replicate, either in whole or in part, the drawing on the wall. Some bore the yellow patina of age, while others were more recent, the material still fresh and white.

He moved the light away from the wall and allowed it to play over the floor. The dirt had been raked, the tool used for the task still standing upright by the stairs with a spade beside it. Ungar squatted low to examine the earth and thought it looked higher in the far corner. He expanded the beam and laid the M4 on the ground, so he would have illumination by which to work. He took the crowbar and probed at the dirt, pushing deeper until he met resistance. Whatever was down there felt soft; it yielded to the pressure.

Ungar set the crowbar aside, grabbed the spade, and began to dig until he uncovered cloth: an unbuttoned check shirt, and beneath it an exposed, distended male belly. Ungar progressed upward, from the navel to the head. He did not recognize the face, but the man’s mouth was taped shut and his nostrils were filled with compacted dirt. He’d breathed it in because he’d been buried alive. Beside the first body was a second, but smaller: a child, male.

Ungar sat back on his heels and stared around him. He was in a charnel house, and now that he knew what the Michauds had been hiding, it was time to leave. The police would have to be called, but not before Pinette had moved the guns and materiel off Hickman’s land. In the meantime, Ungar would assign someone to watch this place. He didn’t want the Michauds to discover the incursion and try to move the bodies.

He reached for the M4 and was deafened by a blast that came from everywhere and nowhere at once, while simultaneously he felt a tug at his lower right arm. An instant later came the pain, and an absence where his right hand used to be, the wrist now ending in bone and torn flesh. He cried out, cradling the ruined limb, and turned to see the silhouette of a woman holding an over-under shotgun. The woman stepped onto the dirt floor, gradually moving into the ambit of the flashlight.

“You stupid, nosy fuck,” said Eliza Michaud.

She raised the shotgun and squinted down the barrel.

“No,” said Ungar, “I got a—”

“I don’t care.”

Eliza pulled the trigger, and Lars Ungar’s head was gone.

CHAPTER XCI

Sabine Drew was waiting up for us in the living room when we got back. The innkeeper had retired to her quarters in a converted coach house at the back of the property, leaving the coffeepot, a decanter of sherry, and a classical music station playing low on the stereo. Sabine stood as we walked in.

“Something’s happening at the Michaud property,” she said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know for sure. I think someone was out there who shouldn’t have been. I heard—no, Henry heard—a noise, like gunshots.”

She saw the expression on Louis’s face. It might have been described as neutral, but only if one were inclined to be charitable. Then again, it could be hard to tell what Louis was thinking. Rocks gave more away.

“I can tell that you don’t believe me,” she said to him, “but I’m not the only one who led you here. It was Mattia Reggio as much as I who brought you to this town.”

Louis continued to say nothing, leaving me to speak.

“I got a call while we were out,” I said. “Reggio’s car was found parked at a motel down in Pittsfield.”

Moxie Castin, a generous donor to the Maine State Troopers Foundation and an advertiser in the twice-yearly Maine State Trooper magazine, had received a boon in return from the state police. While it would have been premature to declare Reggio a missing person, the make and license of his car had been circulated, with a request for notification should it be spotted. Reggio’s vehicle had been discovered less than an hour earlier in the parking lot of a motel on Somerset Avenue. The motel shared the lot with a strip mall and a couple of restaurants, although technically the motel’s spaces were reserved, with signs on the wall requesting that mall and restaurant patrons park elsewhere. People often failed to notice them, or chose not to, and it wasn’t worth the hassle of towing an errant car unless the motel was unusually busy, which it rarely was. It hadn’t even registered with them until late in the day that Reggio’s car didn’t belong to a guest, and the police had spotted it before the manager had gotten around to deciding what to do about it. All of this I explained to Sabine.

“Do you really think he went down there after leaving Gretton?” she asked.

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