City Under the Moon (27 page)

More bookshelves divided the floor into private reading nooks with cherry leather seats and handcrafted tables. A reading desk, stacked with a filing pile of books, sat at the base of a spiral staircase.

Ilecko immediately knew which bookcase led to the hidden stairwell.

He pulled a trigger behind a book on a lower row, and then put his shoulder into pushing the invisibly segmented shelves. A section of the bookcase rotated on an axis hidden beneath the floor, revealing a short, narrow tunnel leading to infinite blackness.

Ominous, and yet so deliciously inviting! Lon cracked his knuckles, trying to channel patience as Ilecko crammed into the stairwell and motioned for them to follow.

The descent was slow and, eventually, excruciating. The darkness between Mantle and Jaguar felt like it was closing in on Lon’s throat. Time and moisture had made the narrow stairs weak enough to crumble, so they were forced to take slow, vigilant steps. Their breathing grew thick and loud.

“How much farther?” he asked.

“Breathe through your mouth,” Tildascow responded, not at all answering his question. And yet, when he did as she said, the knots in his chest loosened. If she ever wanted to give up being an FBI assassin, she could have a great career as a snarky but sage grandmother.

They finally reached the bottom, where Ilecko lit a wall-mounted gas lamp that threw a dim glow over the team. A narrow passage led to a heavy wooden door, which was once locked by a sliding bolt retrofitted with modern steel. Like all of the others in the castle, the lock had been destroyed—but this time someone had broken out, not in. The anchors had been torn from the stone walls.

The cellar was wide and round, matching the diameter of the castle’s eastern tower. Lon thought it was probably built as a dungeon, but the Valenkovs had converted it into a workshop, part study and part laboratory. Far more cluttered than the ostentatious library above, this was obviously the place where the Valenkovs rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

Ancient books and sour chemicals mixed with a more pungent version of the estate’s native scent to make the air feel gummy. No electricity down here, but the gas lamps on the walls had seen a lot of use.

Every inch of wall space was covered with drawings and notes, and Lon couldn’t consume them fast enough.

Breathe, Lon.

His eyes fell first on a section dedicated to theoretical origins of lycanthropy, where Valenkov had compiled accounts from the ancient Greek writings of Petronius, the sixteenth-century Swedish author Olaus Magnus, and the medieval chronicles of Gervase of Tilsbury, along with related lore about Native American Skinwalkers, shapeshifting spells of witchcraft, and demonic tales of the Roman Catholic Church.

All the same research! The same reference materials! Yes!!

The notes were arranged in a thematic cascade and often accompanied by sketches, photographs, flowcharts, or diagrams. Thick stacks of weathered documents were piled on the floor, along with journals and files and books associated with the topics covered on the wall above them. The entire rear section was dedicated to both supernatural- and scientific-based research for potential cures. Exorcism. Surgery. Arcane medicines crafted from nigh-mythical ingredients. Voodoo, black magic, more witchcraft. So many of the same references Lon had used for his own website, “ofwolvesandmen.com.”

Lon wondered if Valenkov had ever seen his site.

Could he have read my lycanthropy thesis?

An excited chuckle burst from his throat. Thankfully, nobody noticed.

“He was trying to find his own cure,” Tildascow said. She was investigating the chamber’s centerpiece, a wooden worktable blanketed with deep piles of handwritten journals, occult references, and science and medical texts. Mostly Romanian, with scatterings of English, Greek, and—
interesting
—Chinese. Her eyes moved in a robotic manner, like they were recording rather than reading.

“Trying hard,” Mantle said. He was looking straight up at images on the ceiling: geometric diagrams, mechanically drawn to precision. A spiral divided by right angles, a cone of pentagrams progressing in size, and a variety of triangles divided by smaller triangles with identical ratios.

Wow wow wow!
Lon wondered what the diagrams meant to Valenkov. Did the pentagram hold some kind of mathematical or scientific relevance beyond its traditional occult implications? He couldn’t wait to research the images.

Deeper into the workshop, the research topics shifted to hard science: sketched studies of werewolves and their evolving forms under the moon’s phases; calendars marked with lunar calculations; physical maps of greater Transylvania annotated with landmarks and dates spanning back to the 1400s; and dozens of complex molecular formulae scarred by revision scratchings, including chemical diagrams of silver alloyed with palladium, rhodium, and indium.

Valenkov had also dedicated wall space to advanced mathematics and geometry. Here was the classic pentagram within the pentagon and circle, labeled as the “Golden Pentagram.” And the cone of progressive pentagrams, the “Lute of Pythagoras.” More geometric formulas and a series of mind-boggling mathematical equations under the title “Golden Ratio.” Those notes spilled over to a copy of the logarithmic spiral on the ceiling, the “Golden Spiral.” Beneath that, Valenkov had juxtaposed large, colorful photographs of a galaxy, a winter storm, and a seashell, all of which were natural re-creations of the same pattern as the Golden Spiral.

Above all of the mathematical research, Valenkov had posted a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, from
Trattato della Pittura:

Non sai tu che la nostra anima è composta di armonia, ed armonia non s’ingenera se non in istanti, ne’ quali le proporzionalità degliobietti si fan vedere o udire?

It was Italian, not Romanian. Lon had almost flunked ninth grade Italian, but it wasn’t a hard translation:

Do you not know that our soul is composed of harmony, and that harmony is only produced when proportions of things are seen or heard simultaneously?

The space on the floor beneath these notes wasn’t dedicated to math, but to music. Valenkov had custom-built a wooden soundbox with dozens of strings stretched across its surfboard length. It rested on a frame for adjustable inclination, causing Lon to tilt his head and wonder if you could lie on top of it and play the strings so the box vibrates into your chest. A sketched study of the design lay partially unfurled beneath a nearby desk.

An assortment of recording equipment surrounded the instrument, including a vintage phonograph, a reel-to-reel, and a digital audio tape deck. He even had an iPod and a massive, expensive-looking pair of headphones, both disconnected from a missing laptop. The electronics were plugged into a strip retrofitted into the wall, probably leading to the power cables far above.

“Demetrius studied many years for cure for his father,” Ilecko said. He was examining a chemistry set that looked like it’d been stolen from the set of
Frankenstein
. All of the lab equipment looked antique, except for anachronistic touches like a calculator and modern centrifuges and microscopes.

“And the western world wouldn’t help,” Lon said. “They didn’t believe in werewolves. I understand his frustration.”

“That don’t mean you try to kill the world,” Mantle said. “You send a videotape of yourself turnin’ into a werewolf. That’d get some attention.”

“You think we have the resources to respond to every weird video we get?” Tildascow asked. “We couldn’t have found Bin Laden if we’d been looking for Bigfoot.”

“Demetrius is smart man,” Ilecko said, in a tone both matter-of-fact and threatening. “Very smart man.”

“Not questioning that,” Tildascow agreed, flipping through the journals at her mechanical pace.

Lon wanted to dive into those diaries, but he also wanted to go back to Valenkov’s masterwork sketches, especially the—

He tripped and ate shit into a bookcase thick with hand-labeled journals. He managed to keep himself and the bookcase upright and he held up his hands:
No harm done.
Everyone went back to their investigations.

He’d stumbled over a pair of heavy iron manacles, which were fastened to the wall by thick chains. Werewolf restraints! Valenkov must have used them to imprison himself during moonlight hours.

They’d been broken open.

“What’s all this about meditation?” Tildascow asked Ilecko. “Samadhi and Qigong?” She was examining the books on Valenkov’s reading table.

“He prepares. For that when his father died, he would be in control,” Ilecko said. “He swore there would be no more.”

“Something changed his mind.”

“The villagers,” Lon suggested. “They attacked the castle.”

“Maybe they live in fear too long,” Ilecko said, still occupied by the flasks. “Maybe they want the werewolf to end forever.”

Lon waited for Ilecko to continue, but he didn’t. Asking wouldn’t help, so he went back to those sketches.

There were precision pencil works on modern manufactured paper, intermingled with charcoals, brushworks and silverpoints on parchment and vellum and other materials Lon didn’t recognize. Many of them were ancient, maybe even hundreds of years old. Each one was a masterwork.

The most prominent image was some kind of scraped charcoal on aged parchment. It was placed in a position of honor, perhaps the only thing tacked to the wall that wasn’t overlapped by something else. But it would have struck Lon like a snakebite if only one detail was visible from beneath a stack: the eyes.

It was a lifelike drawing of a beautiful woman, probably in her thirties, with mischievous eyebrows and thick black hair loosely pulled beneath a babushka. The textures and tones cast her so vibrantly that Lon could see the wide-eyed child from her past and the crow’s feet in her future.

And her eyes! Pale and shallow, with a demonic sparkle that was both enticing and merciless, like she could thrust a shiv into your belly without breaking a long, luxurious kiss.

She was a goddess. A Gypsy goddess.

A
Gypsy
—

Could this be
the
Gypsy? The one who cursed the Valenkovs?

Lon backed away from the drawing… but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she had him harpooned.

Please don’t curse me, Gypsy goddess. I didn’t mean to stare at you.

He took another step back and bumped into Mantle, who pointed at his feet as if to remind him that they existed.

“This is interesting stuff,” Tildascow finally said to Ilecko. “It might be of help the CDC, but how is it going to help us f
ind him
?”

“It is not here.” Ilecko hadn’t found what he was looking for in the flasks. “We must go to the mausoleum.”

Mantle and Lon spoke at the same time: “The what?”

Eight

Manhattan

January 1

5:56 p.m.

Moonrise

As the moon crested the northeast horizon over Harlem, the season’s first snow kissed the streets of Manhattan.

A million citizens were still on the island, half as many as the night before. They barricaded their homes, businesses, or churches; they whispered goodbyes and bargained with their divinities.

Despite the mandatory curfew, up to sixty thousand people still roamed the streets. The biggest crowds were massed at the exits. A few, like Elizabeth Golden, shrewdly abandoned hopes for escape and fled home for safety. But there were plenty of looters and rioters and malcontents, making the streets perilous long before the wolves arrived.

Authorities prepared for the worst. They were too optimistic.

The werewolves in custody were unexpectedly powerful. They snapped handcuffs, shattered reinforced glass, and scaled sheer walls. Escapes were reported at almost every holding facility.

***

The most horrific breakout was in The Tombs.

One of New York’s most infamous jails, the Manhattan Detention Complex on the Lower East Side was known as “The Tombs” because its original incarnation was a dank underground complex straight out of Milton.

That morning, rumor spread among the inmates that they would be relocated to Riker’s Island for their own safety. Tensions boiled as the prisoners were doubled up rather than transferred, and the lower levels were filled with potentially infected victims from New Year’s Eve.

A riot broke out just before sunset. The short-handed staff was quickly overwhelmed, and the electronic cell doors were released, inadvertently freeing the potential werewolves. The moon rose, the fangs came, and the trapped inmates were easy pickings.

When authorities arrived the next morning, they found dismembered limbs floating in pools of blood. Bodies dangling from the balconies. Bones scattered like jigsaw pieces, picked clean of their flesh.

More than a thousand inmates and workers were sealed inside the complex overnight. Fewer than twenty survived.

***

The trees of Central Park were an early draw for the werewolves, a rare stroke of luck for the authorities because most of the human stragglers were at the fringes of the island. But once the park’s wildlife was exhausted, the monsters spread out, running in packs of up to ten.

The FDNY were assisted by ground- and air-based military support as they fought to keep up with dozens of fires. Only two firefighters lost their lives, both in the same collision between an ambulance and a fire truck.

Sometime around 1:30 a.m., local power grids began to fail. Sewer fires damaged feeder cables and steam pipes on the Upper East Side. Another fire at the Con Ed substation beneath 7 World Trade Center shut down all of their transformers, blacking out a good portion of Lower Manhattan. Finally, an explosion at 74
th
Street Station put crushing weight on the grid. The entire island was dark by 3 a.m., with the steam system right behind. Thermostats dipped to six degrees Fahrenheit.

Despite strict warnings, many panicked civilians took to their vehicles. Distraction and snow-slicked streets caused hundreds of accidents, which became pile-ups when the streetlamps and traffic lights went dark. Many ambulances, military vehicles, NYPD, and FDNY were caught in standstills.