The first thing Grove noticed upon entering the Pithead building at exactly 6:51 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, after flipping on his heavy-duty flashlight and playing it across Peg-Board panels laden with rows of old dented miner hats, long forgotten and furry with dust, was the absence of a hole in the ground.
Where the hell was the shaft?
He stood there for endless moments, his back against the wall, his heart thumping. He had no idea when and where and how he would ambushed—the killer could be lurking right there in that vestibule building—so he didn’t move for a quite a long while, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, allowing his heart to calm down.
At length he got a fix on the immediate area just inside that rusted metal door—the lock bore the scars of a recent jimmy-stick, undoubtedly the entrance through which John Q had passed at some point over the last few days—and then, very slowly, he scanned the light beam across filthy aluminum walls. The beam flitted across dusty objects that confirmed Old Man Clinger’s overview of the place.
An old rolltop desk sat nearby, probably once stationed there to induct new miners or process time cards but now congealed shut in the eternal darkness, lined with filth and age. Ramshackle wooden chairs lay along the wall to the left, most of them overturned and cocooned in spiderwebs. Stalactites of dust-lined calcium deposits hung down from the ceiling like fuzzy icicles. Kerosene lanterns spoke of old-fashioned eras.
It was hard to tell in the dark, with his one good eye, but the room seemed to stretch at least fifty feet or so, terminating at a wall drifted with trash. A doorway to the right—now boarded with Sheetrock—most likely led to the washhouse, and to the left, another sealed door was probably the lamp cabin.
According to Clinger, miners would emerge at the end of each day, exhausted, wheezing, their faces black with dust, hauling their lunch buckets and water jugs. They would go to the lamp cabin and return their headlamp and battery for recharging. In return they would receive a brass tag, like a coatroom token, embossed with their ID number. Batteries were engraved with the same numbers.
A Peg-Board wall full of hooks near the door, like the board on which keys are hung in a parking garage, displayed the brass ID tags of miners currently on shift. In the event of a cave-in or some other disaster, the board would tell rescuers how many souls were trapped. At Wormwood, with all its misadventures, some of the miners had come to call the board “Death Row.”
The second thing Grove noticed about that outer building was the smell. The moldy rock floor and cobweb-filmed walls exuded a kind of acrid metallic must, like the inside of a book that hadn’t been opened for centuries. Grove’s nose—finely tuned from years of failed gourmet cooking experiments—recognized lower notes beneath the mélange of filth. Assorted vermin long since decayed to dust, dried animal droppings, desiccated rats.
He froze.
Right up until that very moment—as his body became very still, very rigid and tense—he had secretly harbored doubts that John Q Public was indeed waiting for him there, somewhere in the depths of that deserted mine. Grove’s intuition had tricked him more than once in the past. His calculations had frequently been wrong, his inner voice off the mark. And he knew if he allowed himself to think too hard about the wisdom of walking into a trap, he would check himself into a rubber room. But right then, as the beam of his flashlight brushed along the edge of something shiny on the far wall, he knew with unalloyed certainty that he had come to the right place.
His destiny had brought him here, his whole life leading up to this single act.
Death waited for him in the darkness below.
A few minutes passed. Hard to tell how many. The passage of time had already started breaking down in the dark, like a yolk separating from the white. At last Grove managed to make his legs work and went over to the far wall.
He dropped his duffel bag. It made a loud clanking noise that did not echo in the dark airless chamber. He knelt and unzipped the bag, trying to gather his thoughts, ignoring the voices whispering like night breezes in his midbrain. He found his surgical gloves and snapped one on each hand.
The blood on the wall was fresh. It looked like raspberry jam clinging to the ancient aluminum bulwark.
Grove went over to it and brushed a rubber-tipped finger across the outer lines of the design. Was it human or animal blood? It didn’t really matter—the drawing was proof positive that John Q lurked somewhere in the labyrinth below, and it made the back of Grove’s neck prickle: the gun-target silhouette from his class.
It was a perfect rendering, carefully drawn in simple thick outlines, the bulbous head, the rounded-off shoulders, the circle around it. The style was like a finger painting done by a brilliant child: the faceless archetype in all its blank, dead, impassive glory.
Grove stepped back and shone the light around its edges. There was a second blood-painting about eight feet away: another rendering of the silhouette, almost an exact copy, staring blankly back at him. Two generic silhouettes of every-killers.
A perfect pair.
Grove’s spine went cold. It was a message meant for him and him alone.
Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. He stared at the twin silhouettes, stared and pondered. In the space between the symbols, a stack of uneven panels of plywood leaned against the wall—the wood so old and gray and petrified it looked like flint—and he realized there was something behind the plywood.
He reached for the panels and shoved them aside with a grunt.
The doorway behind the wood was molded out of aluminum casting. About the size of a submarine hatch, it lay wide open, displaying the utter darkness on the other side, a darkness that seemed to have a weight and texture to it not unlike tar. Now Grove remembered the old man explaining the mine’s layout, and the fact that access to the shaft would not be in the outer building, but would instead lie further in.
Grove went over to the duffel bag, knelt down, and as carefully and silently as possible started removing his “hit kit.”
Since traditional sidearms were out of the question, he pulled out an eleven-inch-long Randall-style knife made by a Kenyan blacksmith. The blade was serrated along one edge and sheathed in buttery brown leather—a family heirloom meant to kill ibex that he had thrown into his bag back at Pelican Bay because he was going on instinct now. The sheath was engraved with a Swahili phrase: Ukwenda babili kwali wama pa chalo.
He aimed the flashlight at the sheath, and looked at the engraving. He blinked. The darkness must have already been working on him. He blinked again, and shook his head, because he saw something crawling across the end of the sheath like delicate little veins spreading in the grain, like silken spiderwebs branching in the darkness, beginning to form words: Nnn nn nn nn n n nnnn d d d d d deya ndeya ndeya no mwana ndeya ndeya no mwana wandi munshila ba mpapula—
Grove dropped the knife.
It made an inordinately loud clatter in the dead stillness of the Pit shed, and Grove tensed all over, his testicles shrinking up into his pelvic bone, because the knife sheath was telling him to cross over into the land of shadows, to sacrifice himself, to martyr himself, but if there was one thing Grove didn’t need right now it was more advice from visions. He was there to kill a killer, and that’s all he was going to do. Nothing fancy. Nothing mystical.
He looked at the sheath.
It had returned to normal.
Grove let out a tense sigh. He realized he was breathing very quickly already, almost panting. He had to get his brain under control.
He attached the sheath to his belt, then dug in the duffel for the rest of his supplies. He found the stun gun—about the size of a cigarette pack, with a pistol grip—its hardwired spike carrying fifty thousand watts of persuasive voltage. He stuffed the stun gun into the back pocket of his jeans. His hands shook slightly. But it wasn’t unmanageable.
Nearly a dozen other items came out of the duffel and went into the pockets of his duster, into small nylon packs attached to his belt, or onto a strap around his neck: night-vision goggles, oxygen mask, small digital camera, batteries, stainless-steel handcuffs, a smaller halogen penlight with a head strap, protein bars, a small pickax, a bottle of water, and the poison pellet in its sinister little government-issue vial.
That last item—which he stashed in the inside pocket of his duster—screamed madness at him. The futility of what he was doing, the folly, the hubris, the waste—it all came bubbling up through him like a wave of doom. He was supposed to be the master of this strange obscure corner of law enforcement called behavioral profiling. Now look at him. Obliging a madman, walking into certain death. Was it possible the monster shared his DNA?
His bloodline?
The final item transferred from the duffel to Grove’s person was a small handcrafted pouch made of doeskin by an anonymous African artisan. Inside the pouch were essential talismans—bones, feathers, beads, animal paws, and lucky charms—acquired over a lifetime of secret ruminations. He put the pouch in his pants pocket and zipped the duffel bag shut.
It was time to surgically remove the cancer. He rose and took a deep breath.
Then he passed through the door into the darkness on the other side.