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Rose tried not to be too angry with Jake for not letting her come along to the Grolier Club. On the one hand, she understood how breaking and entering a place like that wasn’t something you did with tourists tagging along. But she was capable and had got Crowley out of trouble on several occasions. She didn’t like being sidelined. “It’s just that it’s really a one-person operation,” Crowley had said.
Well, Rose thought that was bulldust, but she’d given in. Mainly because she knew there was something else she could be doing while Crowley was crawling around the Grolier Club like a ninja. The last number in Jazz’s message pad had given her a lead. When she’d rung it, and on a whim had simply said, “Revenant,” the concise reply she’d received was mysterious.
Tonight. Midnight. The park. Behind Jacob’s Witch.
She’d had no idea what any of that meant. But while Crowley had been studying city plans for his great heist, Rose had been doing research of her own. She thought she had discovered what it meant when she came across the story of George Jacobs Sr, who had been hanged in Salem Village, Massachusetts, on August 19th, 1692, a victim of the infamous Salem Witch Trials. Among his accusers were his granddaughter, Margaret, who implicated him through an attempt he had made to save her life. His daughter-in-law also accused him, though she was thought to be mentally ill and suffering from a brain tumor. Others were said to have fits at his trial, caused by his witchcraft. Rose reflected on the collective madness that had infected that terrible time and thought the stain of it might never be washed away. But George Jacobs story was a dead end with regards to “the park.”
So Rose searched using the only park she thought the message could mean, Central Park, and she discovered a stone carving of a witch that had been made in the 1800s by an architect called Jacob Wrey Mould. It was a strong possibility this was what the cryptic message had been referencing, though she had no idea how it might be of any use. Regardless, as Crowley had gone off adventuring without her, she intended to check it out all the same.
New York never slept, so the story went, and the streets were indeed far from deserted, but there was a weight of nighttime over Rose as she walked from the hotel to Central Park. Once she left the streets behind and moved into the much quieter green space, her senses were on alert. She watched everywhere, checked the shadows. It would be foolish to stumble into an assault or mugging while wandering around at nearly midnight as she was. Then again, let them try, She was a fighter, had beaten men bigger than her before and would again if necessary. But it was always better not to fight, so caution was the preferred course of action.
The Bethesda Terrace, leading to the Bethesda Fountain overlooking The Lake, was about dead center of the park between 5th Avenue and Central Park West, only a quarter of the way north from the park’s southern boundary. The start of the terrace was on the road above, sandstone pillars and balustrades intricately carved in a variety of designs. A person could walk either side for a higher view, or take stone steps down through a gallery, with arches at either end, that passed under the wide roadway and led to the fountain at the lake’s edge.
Rose searched and found that several of the square pillars had a bas relief design carved deep into them, each within a clover-shaped indentation. An owl on a branch with a bat flying behind, an open book lying atop a lectern, a sun rising over rocks and flowers, and then she found Jacob’s witch. The design had the classic fairy tale witch astride a flying broomstick, a jack-o-lantern below her and a house, or maybe a stone church, in the background. It was an artistically rendered carving, somehow both cartoonish but also imbued with a weight of meaning. Or perhaps that was simply because it was late at night and Rose had been reading about witch trials.
Looking around to ensure no one was watching, Rose reached out and ran her fingers over the carving. She pushed and pulled, wondering if there was something beyond the mere sandstone that she might discover, but nothing happened. Frowning, she stepped back. Was she being foolish, wasting her time? Or maybe she just needed to wait here, and someone would come to her, but that option seemed fraught with danger. And the message had said Behind Jacob’s Witch. But there was no behind really, it was a square pillar in the open.
The scuffle of footsteps, someone hurrying along, made her nervous. “Come on, we’re late!” a voice said urgently. Rose quickly ducked around the low stone wall and crouched in shadows across the bridge from the witch carving. Two young men jogged up to where she had just been standing, their faces concealed in the pulled-up hoods of sweatshirts. They didn’t look around, and she was thankful for that. Her hiding place was rudimentary and wouldn’t have passed even cursory scrutiny, but it sufficed for these young men in a hurry. One of them trotted straight up to the witch pillar and put his thumb against the carved jack-o-lantern half concealed by the witch’s flapping cloak. He pressed hard, and the pumpkin sank back. With his other hand, he took hold of the witch and twisted anti-clockwise. There was a deep click, and the man stepped quickly back as the ground at his feet, right at the base of the pillar, sank two or three inches, and slid back. The two men hurried down the stone steps it revealed and disappeared into the darkness. Almost immediately, the stone trapdoor slid closed again.
Rose shook her head in wonder. Would she have figured it out? It didn’t matter now, she knew she was onto something. More voices. This time Rose moved further away, chose a better hiding place, and waited. Two more people, a man and woman of early middle age, checked quickly around themselves to ensure they were alone, and then copied precisely what the two young men had done, and disappeared below the bridge.
Rose waited a few more minutes, but no one else came along. Maybe that was the last of them. The first two lads had said they were late, so perhaps anyone coming was already inside. Whatever inside was. Crowley would go in, she knew that. If she were with him, she’d most definitely go along. The question was, did she have the courage to go alone? Well, if Crowley would go, and he definitely would, Rose could summon the courage too. Hurrying over, before nerves got the better of her, she pressed the pumpkin, twisted the witch, and stepped back. The ground slid open. The steps led down a fair distance, disappearing into gloomy shadows. But orange light, flickering like flames, leaked up, so it wasn’t pitch dark down there. Taking a deep breath, Rose started down, and the bridge closed over the top of her.
The steps led down to an arched tunnel, and she heard voices, a kind of monotone chanting. The passageway went along a short way, then grew brighter as it opened out. There were steps at the end leading down to a vast open space, brick walls, and an arched ceiling. Flaming brands stood on poles all around the edges of the walls. Above the brands, a narrow gallery, a kind of thin mezzanine, encircled half of the room, accessed from either side of the tunnel she stood in, instead of taking the steps down.
Rose moved as quietly as she could to one side of the gallery and squatted in the deep shadows there, watching between thick stone balusters. In a semi-circle around one side of the large room were a couple of dozen people, their voices providing the chanting, all wearing long masks that concealed their features completely. She spotted the two hooded lads among them.
Before them stood a raised dais, on it an altar covered in a black silk cloth. Atop the cloth were eight tall, thick black wax candles, burning brightly. A man in a heavy black robe, lined with red silk, stood at the altar, his arms raised as if accepting their worship. The hood of the robe was up, the man’s face lost in shadow. The voices seemed to be speaking a form of corrupted Latin, but Rose couldn’t quite pick out the phrases. Either way, this wasn’t some pagan ritual or modern Wicca. This was black magic, surely. Modern Wicca was a fairly benign belief system, but this had the feel of something entirely more malevolent.
Then someone started screaming. The voices chanting rose suddenly over it, in volume and passion, the delivery fevered. A man was dragged out, shouting and hollering, his eyes wide in terror. The masked men holding him either side lifted him roughly and slammed him face down onto the altar, his scream ending sharply in a whoosh of air. He began babbling, shouting “No, no, no!” over and over as the two men held him down by pulling his arms out to either side and leaning their weight into them. A third masked man stepped up and leaned over the unfortunate man’s thrashing legs, pinning him to the altar. His protestations continued.
The leader, his hood still up, moved around to the man’s head and held up a large silver tool of some strange design. It looked like a hand drill, but with a broad, serrated bit. The chants of those who had congregated in this dark place increased pitch and fervor again. Rose clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide in horror. Surely this couldn’t be happening. What could she do about it? Against this many people, she was impotent.
The high priest, or whatever he was, pressed one hand hard into the top of the prone victim’s head, squashing his face into the altar. With the other hand, he placed the disturbing metal instrument just at the base of the man’s skull and squeezed a trigger-like control. The toothed bit spun, and the man screamed, high and long, in pain and terror. Rose realized the priest was coring out a section of the man’s skull. She felt dizzy with shock and disgust. The drill punched through, and the man’s scream ended abruptly. Blood flooded from the hole. The chanting continued as the hooded man extracted something from his victim’s brain with a syringe, his own voice rising over the chant, claiming, “The brothers will be reunited again!”
He repeated the phrase over and over as he took a small silver knife and slipped it into the hole in the skull. With a deft movement, he cut a chunk out of the victim’s brain and ate it right off the shining, blood-soaked blade. Rose gasped, despite her hand pressed over her face, her body shaking. This practiced ritual was so efficient, the priest-like man had obviously done it dozens, maybe hundreds of times before.
The man threw back his head in ecstasy, his hood falling away, and Rose saw Matthew Price’s face clearly. Even though it confirmed all her worst suspicions, it was a shock that made her heart skip a beat, the breath lock in her throat.
Price looked right at her and Rose stilled as if frozen instantly. His dark eyes flickered in the torchlight, then his gaze moved on. He must not have seen her in the shadows, but for a second, it had been as if their eyes locked. Taking no more chances, Rose scurried away and ran back up the tunnel as fast as she could. At the end, she ran up the stairs, and a new panic struck her. How did she get out? How did the ground open from the inside?
She scrabbled around the stone walls, doing her best to suppress sobs that threatened to burst out of her like a flock of startled birds. Her hand brushed over something, and she turned to look. A simple lever, cold metal in a narrow slot in the wall. She yanked down on it, and the deep click sounded, the stone above her sinking down and sliding back. Gasping in the fresh air of Central Park, Rose ran up the last few steps and out next to the pillar with Jacob’s Witch carved into it.
She jerked as a heavy hand grasped her shoulder.