Petrified (35 page)

‘And God bless you, too. All of you.'

Back in his van, Ed Freiburg opened his laptop and brought up a map of Philadelphia and its western suburbs. He tapped in the compass bearings that he had taken, and three red lines converged on Clifton Heights, less than eight miles to the west.

‘Got him,' he said. He magnified the map and brought up the street view. It showed a single-story concrete building with a double garage door at one side. ‘Thirty-three East Baltimore Avenue. It's an abandoned factory where they used to repair fire extinguishers.'

Jenna said, ‘Right. This is where I have to explain everything to my captain and ask for some serious backup. I just hope that he believes me.'

‘After what happened last night, Detective, I don't think he has much alternative, do you?'

‘Well, we'll see. Wish me luck, won't you?'

‘Before you do that,' said Nathan, ‘I think I know a way in which we can destroy those gargoyles once and for all. But I'm going to need you to trust me and give me some support. Believe me, if you go in there with all guns blazing, Theodor Zauber will have every chance of reviving at least some of his gargoyles and it could be a massacre.'

‘So what are you suggesting?' asked Jenna. ‘You go in alone and appeal to his better nature?'

‘No . . . I want to take my colleagues in with me. But that's all. No SWAT team. No tear gas. No guns.'

‘I don't think I can allow that, Professor. If anything goes wrong—'

‘If anything goes wrong, it will be my own fault, Detective. But my colleagues and I are the only people who have the knowledge and the means to destroy these gargoyles so that they never come back to plague us again.'

‘I really don't know,' said Jenna. She puffed out her cheeks in indecision. ‘If you or your colleagues get yourselves killed, I'm going to lose my shield for sure.'

Ed said, ‘What's your gut feeling, Jenna? Remember what I said to you before, when you didn't believe that statues could fly?'

‘You said that I should trust my instinct, once in a while.'

‘And your instinct in this particular case is what?'

Jenna checked her wristwatch. ‘I'll give you two hours, Professor. If you haven't managed to find Zauber and finish off his gargoyles by then, I'll have to call for backup. But let me tell you this: if you die, I'll kill you.'

THIRTY-NINE

Tuesday, 2:07 p.m.

B
y the time Aarif and Kavita arrived at 33 East Baltimore Avenue, ragged black clouds were sailing in from the west like a fleet of pirate ships with torn sails, and lightning was flickering on the horizon. The wind was getting up, so that dust devils whirled up all around them and sheets of newspaper came tumbling down the street.

Nathan and Jenna and Ed Freiburg had parked their car and their van two blocks away, outside a tired-looking convenience store called Skippy-Save. The former fire-extinguisher factory looked deserted. There were no vehicles outside it, and all of the windows were covered with corrugated iron, except for two grimy wired-glass windows in the front door.

Aarif and Kavita pulled their red Explorer into the parking lot and climbed out. Aarif was still wearing a blue Band-Aid across the bridge of his nose, and both of his eyes were still rainbow-colored. Kavita was wearing a brown headscarf that made her look even more Mohawk than usual, a tight black sweater and black jeans, with black thigh-boots.

‘So this is where our villain is hiding out?' asked Aarif.

‘We don't know for sure,' Nathan told him. ‘But it looks to me like a pretty likely location to hide a couple of hundred gargoyles.'

Jenna checked her wristwatch again. ‘Can we move this along?' she said, impatiently. ‘I'm
this
close to changing my mind and calling my captain.'

‘Go on,' Nathan told Aarif, with a nod, and Aarif went around to the rear of the Explorer and lifted the tailgate. Between them, he and Kavita lifted out a large bell-shaped object covered with a black cloth. As they slammed the tailgate shut, there was a screaming sound from inside the cloth, like a frustrated child.

‘What the hell have you got in there?' asked Jenna.

‘That, Detective, is our secret weapon. Show her, Kavita.'

Kavita lifted up the cloth to reveal Torchy, his feathers gleaming so brightly he looked as if he had been fashioned out of twenty-four karat gold. He was warbling indignantly and jerking his head from side to side as if he refused to look at any of these humans who were treating him with such disrespect.

‘That's the bird from your laboratory,' said Jenna.

‘That's right. The mythical phoenix. And if there's one thing I've learned, it takes one myth to fight another myth.'

‘Are you going to explain to me exactly how you think you can stop Zauber with a
bird
?'

‘No,' said Nathan. ‘For beginners, I don't have any idea if this is going to work or not. But we won't know for sure until we try. Are we ready to go over and pay Theodor Zauber a visit?'

Ed had armed himself with a crowbar and a pair of bolt cutters. ‘Let's just hope he's really in there, and that this isn't a wild phoenix chase.'

They skirted around the side of the factory in case Theodor Zauber was keeping a watch on the street outside through one of the two small windows in the front door.

Jenna went first, with her gun drawn, followed by Ed and Nathan and then Aarif carrying the phoenix cage, and Kavita bringing up the rear. Torchy, under his black cloth, was unusually silent, as if he could sense that there was something evil and dangerous very close by.

Jenna went up the concrete steps to the front door and jiggled the handle.

‘Locked,' she said. ‘Ed – do you want to do the honors?'

‘You know that we don't have a warrant,' Ed reminded her.

‘Of course I know that we don't have a warrant. But we heard screaming from inside the building and so we had cause to break in and investigate, didn't we?'

Ed gave his bolt cutters to Nathan to hold, and then wedged his crowbar into the side of the front door. It took only three hefty tugs before the wood splintered and the lock gave way. They stepped into what had once been the factory's reception area. There was a plywood desk, a tipped-over chair, and a very dead yucca, its leaves trailing black and dry over the sides of its pot like a giant tarantula.

Their shoes crunched on grit and broken glass. Jenna checked the back of the door and said, ‘There's a key in it. That means that somebody locked it from the inside.'

They paused, and listened. Torchy shuffled on his perch but still didn't warble or screech. On the walls around them there were half a dozen yellowed posters for different kinds of fire extinguisher, as well as a group photograph of the staff of Flame-Ban, Inc, all grinning inanely.

‘Maybe Theodor Zauber is not here after all,' said Aarif. He sounded almost hopeful.

Jenna went across to the door beside the reception desk labeled PRIVATE: STAFF ONLY. The door was slightly ajar, and so she leaned close to it and listened. At first there was nothing, but then she thought she heard humming. It sounded like classical music, the
Blue Danube
or something else Strauss-like.

‘There's somebody here,' she said.

Nathan joined her by the door and listened, too. After a few seconds, he said, ‘Zauber. I'm sure of it.'

‘So what do we do now?'

‘We go in,' he said. ‘Or at least,
I
go in, with Aarif and Kavita. You cover me.'

Jenna said, ‘If Zauber's armed, or if he attempts any kind of violent retaliation, I do warn you that I'll shoot him.'

‘Of course you will. You're a police officer. That's what police officers do for a living, isn't it?'

Nathan turned around and beckoned to Aarif and Kavita. ‘Come on, you two. Keep close behind me.'

He opened the door. He found himself in a short corridor, with offices on either side, both empty except for a bent filing cabinet and a bicycle wheel. The corridor gave out on to a metal platform with a handrail, which overlooked the main factory building.

Nathan walked along the corridor as quickly and as quietly as he could, with Aarif and Kavita following him. When he reached the platform, he stopped and said, ‘
Holy shit
.' He could hardly believe what he was looking at.

The factory floor was over a hundred feet square, and it was filled with at least three hundred gargoyles – a grotesque crowd scene of hideous creatures with wings and claws and hunched backs, and faces that represented every kind of depravity that nature could devise. Nathan recognized gargoyles from churches and cathedrals in every European country, from France and Belgium and Germany and Poland, but there were many that he couldn't identify, which looked as if they might be Japanese or Indian.

Their faces were contorted into snarls, leers, and maniacal stares. Some of them had the beaks of vultures or carrion crows, while others had the faces of pigs or wolves.

Although all of them had been turned into stone, and none one of them was moving, there was an overwhelming aura of malevolence in the factory, as if all of the oxygen had been taken out of the air and replaced with a cold, odorless gas that made anybody who breathed it in feel weak and hopeless and afraid.

This was a host of evil; a legion of sheer terror. This, petrified, was a representation of the depths to which men and animals were capable of sinking. This was the massed army of hell itself.

On the far right of the factory floor stood a long trestle table, cluttered with glass jars and copper bowls and test tubes, as well as bunches of different grasses and twigs. Two gas burners were flickering at one end of it, and behind them, his face distorted by the reflection from the flames, was Theodor Zauber, wearing a long dark brown lab coat. He was loudly humming the melody from the
Voices of Spring
waltz.

With a long glass rod he was stirring a pale blueish liquid in a large glass globe, and spooning into it some carefully-measured powder. He looked up and saw Nathan standing on the metal platform. Immediately, he stopped humming, but he continued to stir the liquid and drop more powder into it.

Nathan looked up. There were fire-sprinkler pipes all the way across the ceiling, and he just hoped that the system hadn't been shut off. He walked down the steps and across the factory floor, weaving in between the gargoyles.

‘Well, well, you have discovered my lair!' said Theodor Zauber. ‘You are even more astute than I imagined, Professor. You like Strauss?
Frühlingstimmen
, my favorite.'

‘Do you know how many people you murdered last night?' Nathan demanded. Unexpectedly, he found that he was so angry that his voice was shaking.

‘I listened to the news at noon,' said Theodor Zauber. ‘At last count, three hundred and forty-one. But I did warn you, did I not? You are responsible for those deaths, just as much as I am. So – tell me – why have you come here today? To join me and to help me, or to tell me how much you regret the consequences of your own stubbornness?'

‘I've come here to finish this,' Nathan told him. ‘It's over – you and your gargoyle project.'

Theodor Zauber stirred the pale blue liquid a little more, and then smiled. ‘I think not, Professor. You know what this is? This is the quenching water that brings these poor petrified creatures back to life. A combination of calcium, sodium and potassium to create a strong electrolyte which will induce muscle activity, as well as the secret ingredients which Artephius mixed in, including the finely-ground bark of the fortune tree.'

‘You're not hearing me, Zauber. It's over. You need to stop stirring and give yourself up. The police are outside. They agreed to give me the chance to persuade you to surrender yourself without any violence.'

Theodor Zauber flared his nostrils. ‘You think this is over? This is only the beginning! Look at all of these gargoyles! Look at them! They are magnificent in all of their ugliness, and they will make me great one day! You think you can stop me?
You
? You and your petty dabbling with birds and worms? This is where evil can be used for the greater good! This is where God and Satan join together to conquer death!'

Nathan said, ‘You're crazy, do you know that? You're worse than your father, and he was hanging off by his hinges. Use some intelligence, Zauber. The police are outside and it's over!'

Theodor Zauber stopped stirring. He looked down at the quenching water that he had prepared, as if he were thinking. Then he picked up the glass globe, held it high over his head in both hands, and tossed it over the nearest gargoyles. It smashed, and splashed over at least three of them.

‘
Es ist Zeit, damit Sie zum Leben kommen
!' he screamed. ‘
Es its Zeit, damit Sie
kämpfen
!'

With that, he took hold of the trestle table and heaved it over, along with everything on it – jars, test tubes, gas burners and bunches of grass. It fell on top of Nathan and knocked him backward on to the floor, with smashed glass and ceramic scattered all around him. Theodor Zauber pushed his way between the gargoyles and headed for the steps that led up to the metal platform.

‘
Aarif, stop him
!' Nathan shouted, levering himself out from underneath the table. Aarif whipped the black cloth from Torchy's cage, and held it up high. The phoenix screamed and spread his wings, as aggressive as he had been when he was first recreated.

‘You think I am afraid of some bird in a cage?' shouted Theodor Zauber. He started to clamber up toward the platform, but Kavita went to the top of the steps, gripped the handrails for support, and kicked him hard in the chest with her black high-heeled boot.

Theodor Zauber staggered backward, his shoes clanging, but he managed to snatch at the handrail and stop himself from losing his balance. Grunting with effort, he hoisted himself back up the steps and when Kavita kicked out at him a second time, he seized her boot and pulled her down with him. The two of them rolled over and over in a tangle of arms and legs until they hit the bottom step.