Scavenger (15 page)

Balenger couldn’t help thinking of the Paragon Hotel.

Professor Graham considered him. “I’ve heard that police officers play first-person shooter games as a way of maintaining their reflexes when they’re not on the shooting range, and they often play them to prime themselves before they go on a raid.”

Balenger’s impatience must have showed.

“Sorry. My enthusiasm often gets the better of me. On the phone, you said that Professor Donovan suggested I could help you. My specialty’s the American frontier, but I’m as fascinated by time capsules as he is. What do you want to know?”

Balenger was conscious of how fast his heart pounded as he told her what happened during the lecture in the row house on 19th Street.

“The Manhattan History Club,” she said when he finished. “I never heard of it.”

“Because it doesn’t exist.”

“The coffee was drugged?”

“That’s right. When I regained consciousness, my friend was gone.”

“Your left forearm. What’s the matter? You keep massaging it.”

Balenger peered down. The impulse had become reflexive. “While I was unconscious, someone injected me with a sedative. The place where the needle went in is red and swollen.”

“Sounds like it’s infected. You ought to see a doctor.”

“I don’t have time.” Balenger leaned forward. “Professor Donovan says you know a lot about something called the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires.”

She looked surprised. “Where on earth did you hear about
that
?”

“Whoever took my friend left those words as some kind of clue. I think it’s part of a game, an extremely deadly one.” Balenger couldn’t help glancing at the computer.

“The Sepulcher of Worldly Desires.” Professor Graham nodded. “It’s fascinated me for years. On January third, 1900, a man named Donald Reich staggered into a town called Cottonwood near the Wind River mountain range in central Wyoming. He was delirious. Not only was the temperature below zero, but snow had been falling for several days. He was taken to the local doctor, who determined that his nose, ears, toes, and fingers had frostbite and would need to be amputated before gangrene spread through his body. In Reich’s few lucid periods, he told an amazing story about traveling on foot from a town called Avalon. The place, located in a valley within the Wind River range, was once a mining town. But after the mine stopped producing, Avalon fell on hard times. It was a hundred miles from Cottonwood, and Reich claimed to have set out on New Year’s Eve, traveling that distance in some of the worst weather in years.”

Balenger listened intently.

“Reich was barely coherent,” Professor Graham continued, “but the doctor was able to learn that he was Avalon’s minister and that the purpose of his desperate journey wasn’t to summon help for the town. He wasn’t seeking medicine to fight an epidemic or trying to get food for a starving community. No, Reich’s motive was to escape.”

Balenger straightened. “Escape from what?”

“Reich kept talking about the new century. Recall the date I gave you. January third, 1900. Three days earlier, the 1800s became the 1900s. The start of the new century terrified him. He kept babbling about being a coward, about how he should have stayed and tried to help, about how he’d damned his soul by surrendering to his fear and running away.”

Balenger felt a nervous ripple in his stomach. “But what on earth so frightened him that he abandoned his congregation and fled a hundred miles in the dead of winter?”

“The Sepulcher of Worldly Desires.”

9

Balenger’s fingers tightened on the arms of his chair.
Amanda
, he thought. I need to find you.

“My book
The American West at the End of the Nineteenth Century
has a chapter devoted to end-of-century hysteria.” Professor Graham went to a bookshelf, pulled out a volume, and flipped through it until she found the section she wanted. “Take a look at the indented material. It comes from Reich. He had handwritten pages stuffed in his clothing.”

Balenger read what she pointed at.

Dec. 31, 1899

The year hurtles to an end. So does the century. I fear I am losing my mind. I do not mean “losing my grasp of reality.” I know perfectly well what is happening. But I am powerless to prevent the outcome. Each day, I have less strength of mind to resist.

On this last day, it is supposedly dawn, but outside there is only the darkness of a howling blizzard. The swirl of shrieking snow matches my confusion. I pray that writing these pages will give me clarity. If not, and if the world impossibly survives for another hundred years, you who find this within the Sepulcher will perhaps understand what I cannot.

Balenger lowered the book. “Sounds insane.”

“The doctor found a dozen scrawled pages in Reich’s clothing. What you read comes from the start of the manuscript.”

Balenger indicated the last sentence. “Reich mentions the Sepulcher.”

“But not its full name. That comes later in the manuscript.”

“What’s this about ‘If the world impossibly survives for another hundred years’?”

The professor spread her aging hands. “Apocalyptic fears are often part of end-of-century hysteria.”

“So, in a failing town in a valley in the middle of nowhere, this minister let his imagination get the better of him. But why did he run? Surely Reich didn’t think he could escape the end of the world by fleeing to another location.”

“In my research, I sometimes come across apocalyptic fears associated with specific locations: a flood that will destroy a particular area or a hill where the Second Coming will occur,” Professor Graham said. “But I don’t believe Reich was afraid the world would end. As the manuscript continues, what he really seems afraid of is the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires—and a person. Another minister, in fact. A man named Owen Pentecost.”

“Pentecost?”

“In the Bible, when the Holy Spirit descended on Christ’s apostles, they had visions. The transcendent experience was called Pentecost.”

“Good name for a minister. Too good to be true, I bet. Sounds like he made it up.”

“Reich’s manuscript describes how Reverend Owen Pentecost, who was tall and extremely thin and wore black, who had long hair and a beard that made him look like Abraham Lincoln, walked into Avalon nine months earlier, in April. There was a terrible drought. Winds caused dust storms. Pentecost seemed to materialize from one of the dust clouds. A man looking for a cow that wandered from its pen saw him first, and the first words out of Pentecost’s mouth were ‘The end of the century is coming.’”

“Sounds like he had some theatrical training,” Balenger said.

“Or else he was crazy. When he reached Avalon, the first thing he did was march down the main street and up a hill to the church. Reich wasn’t there. He was taking care of a sick child. The next people to meet Pentecost were a man and woman who ran the general store and supervised the upkeep of the church. They found Pentecost praying in front of the altar. He had a sack with him. It squirmed.”

“
Squirmed
?”

“We learn why it squirmed in a later section of the manuscript. In the coming weeks and months, Reich spoke to everyone who had contact with Pentecost. He summarizes conversations. When the couple in the church asked Pentecost if they could help him, the newcomer explained that he had come a long way. He could use food and water, but first he needed to know if anyone in town was ill. They told him that a boy was very sick with sharp pains in his lower right abdomen. The boy also had a fever and was vomiting.”

“Sounds like appendicitis,” Balenger said.

“Indeed. At the time, appendicitis was almost a death sentence. Few physicians had the surgical skills to remove the diseased organ. Even if a physician knew how to perform the operation, anesthetic in the form of ether was hard to find on the frontier. An operation without it risked killing the patient because of pain-induced shock. Avalon didn’t have any ether.

“When Pentecost reached the sick boy, he found Reich praying with the boy’s father. Because Avalon’s doctor left a year earlier, Reich also functioned as a sort of male nurse because of medical knowledge he acquired in his years of administering to sick members of his church. But appendicitis was far beyond Reich’s skills. Basically, Reich and the father were on a death watch. Pentecost asked if there was a forest nearby. In the mountains, Reich told him, but how would that help the boy? Was there anything closer? Yes, there was a grove of aspen by the lake. Reich, who was curious about the newcomer, accompanied Pentecost to the aspens, but there, Pentecost told him to wait and entered the trees by himself. A short while later, Pentecost returned with herbs he’d gathered. At the boy’s home, he made a tea from the herbs and encouraged the boy to drink it. The boy fell into a stupor. Pentecost then operated on him.”

“Operated?”

“Not only did he operate,” Professor Graham said, “but the boy survived. Pentecost then asked permission from Reich to conduct a church service and give public thanks to the Lord for saving the boy. During his sermon, he opened the sack and dumped its contents on the floor. You asked what was in it. Snakes. People screamed and charged toward the door, but Pentecost stomped the head of each snake without being bitten and told the congregation that they must be vigilant and stomp out evil just as he had stomped the snakes.”

“The guy definitely had a sense of drama,” Balenger said. “Those herbs he found. It’s awfully convenient that the exact ingredients he needed were in that grove but nobody else knew about them. Any bets that he already had a sedative hidden in his clothes and he added it to the tea when no one was looking?”

“As a former police officer, you see the manipulation from the distance of more than a century, but at the time, in that isolated mountain valley, it would have been hard to resist the spell Pentecost was weaving. I can’t explain the surgery. Maybe he took a risk and happened to succeed, or maybe he had medical training.”

Balenger felt the seconds speeding by.
Amanda
, he kept thinking. “Tell me about the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires.”

“We’re not certain what it was, but it sounds like a time capsule. Of course, the term wasn’t invented until the New York World’s Fair in 1939, but the concept’s the same. With each day, Pentecost emphasized that a new century was coming. He warned that their souls would soon be tested, that the Apocalypse was on its way. As autumn approached, he urged everyone to select the physical things they most cared about. In December, he ordered them to put these cherished objects into the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. ‘Vanity. All is vanity,’ he told them. ‘As the new century begins, material things will no longer matter.’”

“What did the Sepulcher look like?”

“No one knows.”

Balenger couldn’t subdue his frustration. “
What
?”

“Reich’s manuscript was hurried. He leapt from topic to topic, trying to compress as much information as he could in the limited time he had before midnight arrived—midnight of what was possibly the last day of the world. The passage you read indicates that he planned to put the pages into the Sepulcher. But then his courage snapped, and he fled, cramming the unfinished pages into his clothes.”

“Okay, the Sepulcher wasn’t described in the manuscript,” Balenger said. “But Reich could have told the doctor what it was.”

“Reich never became fully conscious. The infection from his injuries spread through him like a storm. He lapsed into a coma and died the next day.”

“The Sepulcher was supposed to contain all the treasured objects of the town, so it must have been large,” Balenger said. “Didn’t anybody find it later? The people in Cottonwood must have been curious. Surely, when spring came and the snow melted, they’d have gone to Avalon to learn what was happening there.”

“Indeed, they did.”

“Then ...?”

“They never found anything that they thought might be the Sepulcher.”

“But the people in Avalon could have shown them where the Sepulcher was. A name like that, it was probably buried in the cemetery.”

“The search party from Cottonwood found a deserted town. The buildings were abandoned. There wasn’t any sign of violence, of the population having been caught by surprise. No half-eaten meals on tables. No objects on the floor that might have been dropped in a sudden panic. On the contrary, everything was neat and tidy. Beds were made. Clothes were hung up. There were gaps in the rooms, where furniture might have been removed or vases or pictures carried away. Even pets were gone. As for the larger animals—pigs, sheep, cows, and horses—those were found dead on the grassland, killed either by the freezing weather or starvation.”

“This doesn’t make any . . . How many people lived in Avalon?”

“Over two hundred.”

“But that many people can’t just disappear and not leave a trace. They must have gone to another town.”

“There’s no record of that,” Professor Graham said. “As word of the mystery spread, someone from Avalon who’d packed up in the middle of winter and moved to another town would have explained what happened. Out of two hundred people, someone would have spoken up.”

“Then where did they go? All those people, for God’s sake.”

“Some religious zealots in other towns in the area began to believe that the Second Coming had indeed occurred in Avalon and that everyone there had been transported to heaven.”

“But that’s preposterous! Jesus.”

She smiled. “You see how easy it is to revert to religious terms when a seemingly impossible event occurs?”

Balenger stared dismally at the floor. “This hasn’t helped. I don’t know anything more than when I started.” His voice tightened. “I have no idea how to find Amanda.”

10

Behind him, Balenger heard the elevator open. He turned toward the open door, beyond which footsteps grew louder, heavy, a man’s.

Ortega stepped into the doorway. “I was beginning to think I was in the wrong building.” He didn’t look happy.

Balenger introduced him to Professor Graham. “We’ve been talking about the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires, but there’s not much solid information about it. Did you find Karen Bailey?”