Messiah. Instead, the lever worked as noiselessly as if it had been
installed and oiled only yesterday.
With my body, I pushed open the door, holding the Glock in one hand and
the flashlight in the other.
The room was large, about forty feet wide by eighty feet long.
I could only guess at the precise dimensions, because my small
flashlight barely reached the width of the space and could not penetrate
the entire depth.
As far as I could see, no machinery or furniture or supplies had been
left behind. Most likely, everything had been hauled off to the fog
wreathe mountains of Transylvania to re-equip Victor Frankenstein’s
laboratory.
Strewn across the vast gray tile floor were hundreds of small skeletons.
For an instant, perhaps because of the frail-looking rib cages, I
thought these were the remains of birds which made no sense, as there is
no feathered species with a preference for subterranean flight. As I
played the flashlight over a few calcimine skulls and as I registered
both the size of them and then the lack of wing structures, I realized
that these must be the skeletons of rats. Hundreds of rats.
The majority of the skeletons lay alone, each separate from all the
others, but in places there were also piles of bones, as though a score
of hallucinating rodents had suffocated one another while competing for
the same imaginary hunk of cheese.
Strangest of all were the patterns of skulls and bones that I noted here
and there. These remains appeared to be curiously arranged not as though
the rats had perished at random dropping points, but as though they had
painstakingly positioned themselves with an intricacy similar to the
elaborate lines in a Haitian priest’s voodoo veves.
I know all about veves because my friend Bobby Halloway once dated an
awesomely beautiful surfer, Holly Keene, who was into voodoo.
The relationship didn’t last.
A ve ve is a design that represents the figure and power of an astral
force. The voodoo priest prepares five large copper bowls, each
containing a different substance, white flour, cornmeal, red brick
powder, powdered charcoal, and powdered tannis root. He makes the sacred
designs on the floor with these substances, allowing each to dribble in
a measured flow from his cupped hand. He must be able to draw hundreds
of complex veves freehand, from memory. For even the least ambitious
ritual, several veves are needed to force the attention of the gods to
the Oumphor, the temple, where the rites are conducted.
Holly Keene was a practitioner of good magic, a self-proclaimed Hougnon,
rather than a black-magic Bocor. She said it was maximum uncool to
create zombies by reanimating the dead, cast curses that transformed her
enemies’ beating hearts into rotting chicken heads, and stuff like that
even though, as she made clear, she could do those things by renouncing
her Hougnon oath and getting a Bocor union card.
She was basically a sweet person, if a little odd, and the only time she
made me uneasy was when, with passionate advocacy, she declared that the
greatest rock-‘n’-roll band of all time was the Partridge Family.
Anyway, the rat bones. They must have been here a long time, because no
flesh adhered to them as far as I could see or cared to look. Some were
white, others were stained yellow or rust red, or even black.
Except for a few scattered gray puffballs of hair, the rats’ pelts
surprisingly had not survived decomposition. This led me to wonder
briefly if the creatures’ bodies had been rendered elsewhere, their
boiled bones later arranged here by someone with more sinister motives
than those of Holly Keene, bikinied Bocor.
Then, under many of the skeletons, I saw that the tile floor was
stained. This vile-looking residue appeared to be gummy but must have
been brittle with age, because otherwise it would have lent an appalling
odor to the cool dry air.
In a deeply hidden facility on these grounds, experiments in genetic
engineering had been conducted perhaps were still being conducted with
catastrophic results. Rats are widely used in medical research.
I had no proof but plenty of reason to suppose that these rodents had