Chapter XC

The beam of Lars Ungar's flashlight was fixed on the far wall of the basement. What he was looking at was so extraordinary that it served to distract him momentarily from the stench. Ungar had smelled dead animals and knew the fetor of putrefaction, but this was many degrees worse. Beneath the dirt floor, he guessed, was a body, or more than one.

Ungar did not move to investigate further, not yet, but stayed perfectly still as the beam illuminated the creation on the wall, a vision formed of paint, soot, and blood. It was vast, covering all the available space, and resembled the interior of a volcano, a whirlpool formed of fire glimpsed through a fracture in the air-cooled black lava. But this was not a depiction of rock: the striations were too organic. It was closer to the carapace of a great insect, and what Ungar had at first taken for columns of smoke, or even charred branches, started to resemble an irregular multitude of limbs surrounding a slit that was almost vaginal. Taken as a whole, Ungar thought he might also be looking at a face, the features arrayed into some blighted approximation of humanity, as though the creator of the mural had set out to combine the most unsettling aspects of creatures that crawled through mud and lightless places with those that walked above them.

Ungar let the flashlight drift down with the muzzle of his gun to catch objects carved from wood, stone, and bone, some barely the size of his little finger, others as long as his arm, but each an attempt to replicate, either in whole or in part, the drawing on the wall. Some bore the yellow patina of age, while others were more recent, the material still fresh and white.

He moved the light away from the wall and allowed it to play over the floor. The dirt had been raked, the tool used for the task still standing upright by the stairs with a spade beside it. Ungar squatted low to examine the earth and thought it looked higher in the far corner. He expanded the beam and laid the M4 on the ground, so he would have illumination by which to work. He took the crowbar and probed at the dirt, pushing deeper until he met resistance. Whatever was down there felt soft; it yielded to the pressure.

Ungar set the crowbar aside, grabbed the spade, and began to dig until he uncovered cloth: an unbuttoned check shirt, and beneath it an exposed, distended male belly. Ungar progressed upward, from the navel to the head. He did not recognize the face, but the man's mouth was taped shut and his nostrils were filled with compacted dirt. He'd breathed it in because he'd been buried alive. Beside the first body was a second, but smaller: a child, male.

Ungar sat back on his heels and stared around him. He was in a charnel house, and now that he knew what the Michauds had been hiding, it was time to leave. The police would have to be called, but not before Pinette had moved the guns and materiel off Hickman's land. In the meantime, Ungar would assign someone to watch this place. He didn't want the Michauds to discover the incursion and try to move the bodies.

He reached for the M4 and was deafened by a blast that came from everywhere and nowhere at once, while simultaneously he felt a tug at his lower right arm. An instant later came the pain, and an absence where his right hand used to be, the wrist now ending in bone and torn flesh. He cried out, cradling the ruined limb, and turned to see the silhouette of a woman holding an over-under shotgun. The woman stepped onto the dirt floor, gradually moving into the ambit of the flashlight.

"You stupid, nosy fuck," said Eliza Michaud.

She raised the shotgun and squinted down the barrel.

"No," said Ungar, "I got a—"

"I don't care."

Eliza pulled the trigger, and Lars Ungar's head was gone.