Walking Dead

CHAPTER 9

The museum was a new building, funded by one percent for the arts and, much more helpfully, by a big fat grant from Seattle’s favorite multiconglomerate powerhouse. I wished I thought that was noble and wonderful, but mostly I thought it was a tax write-off. Still, at least some good had come out of the evil that corporations do.

I didn’t consider myself much of an artist, but even my eye took in the curved sweep of the museum building with its slim arched wing rising into the air and grasped that I was looking at the architectural representative of a killer whale. It was white, not black, but it worked, and made for a very pretty modern building.

Inside was considerably more open and airy than I expected from a killer whale’s belly. Billy’d read the museum’s mission statement aloud on the way over, so I knew the left wing—the tail—held the permanent Seattle display, with cultural material on loan from local tribes, fragile bits of the past preserved behind glass. I’d suggested, brightly, that if we came up dry with our research on Halloween murders, we could visit the museum’s bits and bobs and try getting psychic readings off them. There were people who could do that, though Billy and I didn’t number amongst them, and I’d probably deserved the dirty look he gave me.

We were met by the museum director, a tall man who looked more like the rugged-adventurer type—scruffy, slightly battered clothes, good solid boots, that kind of thing—than a behind-the-desk fund-raiser. He introduced himself as Saul Sandburg and ushered us into the right wing, the killer whale’s head, and I suffered a moment of one of these things is not like the others.

Actually, two of those things did not belong. The second was the security guard lying on the marble floor. His head had lolled to the side, showing clearly how the back of his skull was broken in. Blood had caked on his ears, making his head seem even more mis-shapen, but worse, it was smeared in a wide brownish circle around a display unit. I was pretty certain bits of bone and brain were squished through that smear: he’d pretty clearly been dragged around the whole room. Everything stank of blood and other body fluids.

The first thing that didn’t belong was the massive, gaping hole in the display unit where something was obviously missing. It was so obviously missing that it somehow overshadowed the dead man and the huge bloody smear around the room.

An enormous variety of supplementary material surrounded the gaping area: glass-encased books, a few manuscript pages, bronze and iron swords, a tattered remnant of leather armor. I was too far away to read the information docket set slightly to one side, but I had no doubt we’d get to it.

I exchanged glances with Billy. He nodded, which told me there was a ghost, and I put away my curiosity to give him space to work. My part of the esoteric investigation was less pressing: ghosts faded fast, and their ability to communicate depended on how fresh they were. Billy’d told me that before, but the previous night’s experiences had hammered it home. I took Sandburg’s elbow and directed him a few steps away from the dead man, partly so he didn’t have to look at the body and partly so Billy could do his thing.

“What’s he doing?” Sandburg looked over his shoulder as Billy crouched beside the corpse. I turned him back toward me as gently as I could.

“Preliminary investigation. The forensics team’s on its way, but I’d like you to tell me what happened in your own words. Then I’m going to need you to help calm everyone else down so we can talk to them individually. I know it’s a lot to ask.” That was true. It was a lot to ask. However, many people—especially men—seemed to function better if they knew they had a specific and helpful task to perform. If I could make him an ally who felt important in the investigative process without actually getting in our way, it was good for everybody.

Sandburg bucked right up. He was holding it together pretty damn well as it was, but his posture straightened and his gaze cleared as he pulled his thoughts together. “We open late on Sundays, not until noon. There’s twenty-four-hour security, but the first staff don’t come in until eleven to set up.”

“Are you among that staff?” It seemed unlikely. Directorial bigwigs didn’t typically do the drudge work alongside their minimum-wage employees. I was flummoxed when Sandburg nodded.

“The museum’s only open for four hours on Sunday. I work so I don’t feel wholly divorced from the day-to-day running of the facility. Besides, sacrificing a few hours of my time means someone else can spend a weekend day at home with their family. I don’t have any myself, but I appreciate its importance.”

“That must make you popular. So you’re here every Sunday?”

“It helps me avoid the pointy-haired boss label, at least.” Sandburg offered a brief smile, then shook his head. “Three Sundays out of four. We usually have two people on, one for reception and ticket sales, the other to give guided tours every hour. The first one begins at twelve-fifteen.” He looked at his watch like he was already running late, and his features crumpled. I gave him a few seconds, waiting to see if he’d recover on his own. After a couple of long breaths, he did.

“I did the usual morning routine, which is to glance at the security tapes, count the till, that sort of thing. Meghan came in at a quarter to twelve. She’s the one who found the—” He broke again, then drew himself up with a shudder. “She found Jason when she went to check the security ropes around the exhibits. It’s always the last thing we do before we open. Security does it, too, obviously, but children like to play on them and they get knocked out of place, so we double-check to keep it tidy. Appearances, you know…” It was a strange comment from a man with scruff and cargo pants, but I could see where he might lend a certain romanticism to a cultural arts museum. It probably needed all the romance it could get.

“What time did the deceased arrive at work?” Jason. Jason Chan, who was twenty-four years old and who would never be twenty-five. It didn’t help to think about him in those terms; the deceased was much easier, and in some ways, much worse.

“Six last night. Our security works twelve-hour shifts, six to six. Jason and Archie just worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights,” Sandburg replied. I nodded and wrote it down—I’d been writing everything down, in a semi-comprehensible shorthand that I’d be able to read later because what Sandburg was saying was too hard to forget.

“Archie. That would be Archie Redding, your missing guard?” I knew he was; it’d been in the hysterical call that had brought us to the museum, but I’d learned two things as a detective. One, if your witnesses start babbling, listen, because they might say something important, and two, try to deal with one subject at a time when talking to them, even if it’s all interconnected. It was the focus thing again: chances were their thoughts were already fractured and running amok. Asking them to deduce concurrent events was asking for trouble.

Right on cue, Sandburg sagged, as if the thought of another crisis was too much to bear. “Yes. He was a lot older than Jason, in his fifties—”

“Was?” I put too much emphasis on the word, but couldn’t stop myself. “Is there another body, Mr. Sandburg?” I shot a look at Billy, wondering if he had more than one ghost to chat up.

Sandburg turned a bleak expression on me. “No, but isn’t it just a matter of time?”

“Not necessarily. If Mr. Redding is missing but there’s neither blood nor a body, he may have been kidnapped. We can hope our perpetrator has no reason to resort to more violence.” Perpetrator. I felt all official, using words like that. I could’ve said perp, but I’d realized that made me feel like I was in a Chicago crime story, so I stuck with the multisyllabic version.

Sandburg’s face didn’t lighten any. “It’s a thin hope, though, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so. Still, I’d rather assume the best.” We went through another round of routine questions before I finally bit back a sigh and brought my attention around to the elephant missing from the room. “What’s been taken from the display, Mr. Sandburg?”

I’d been avoiding asking for two reasons. One, I wanted to get the details about the dead and missing men out of the way before moving on to missing property, which, in my opinion, wasn’t as important. Two, I suspected whatever had disappeared was a lot nearer and dearer to Sandburg’s museum-director heart than a couple of security guards, and I’d been afraid letting him focus on it would wipe out any details he might remember about our victims.

I was right. Sandburg very nearly moaned, not at all a sound I expected from a hale-looking man in his late fifties. If he’d sagged when I mentioned the second guard, he deflated now. “The Cauldron of Matholwch.”

Billy looked up from his conversation with dead people and said, “The what?”

So did I, but when I said it, it was with bewilderment, and when Billy said it, it was with dread and amazement. I’d spent a lot of quality time online and in libraries the last few months, reading up on shamanism and the occult, but all it took was one phrase to let me know just how far at the back of the class I still was.

Fortunately, Sandburg didn’t seem to expect that I’d recognize the name. “You might know it by its more common name, the Black Cauldron. It—”

“Wait! Wait! I know this one!” I bounced and waved my hand in the air, then remembered there was a dead man not fifteen feet away and tried to pull together a little decorum. “Like from the movie, right? I saw it when I was little. There’s an army of undead in it, right?”

There’s an expression of betrayal that I associate with deceptions on the magnitude of learning there’s no Santa Claus. It says, You have taken my childhood and crushed it utterly. There is nothing left in this world for me to remember kindly, or to hope for in the future. I am lost, and you are dead to me for all time.

Billy and Sandburg both had that look. My hand sank and I looked between them, finally venturing, “No?” in a small, apologetic voice.

Sandburg recovered first. From Billy’s expression, he might never recover, and he would definitely never forgive me. “That cauldron,” Sandburg said a bit frostily, “originated from the true Cauldron, which belonged to an ancient Welsh king called Bran, who gave it to the Irish king Matholwch as a wedding gift when Matholwch married Bran’s sister, Branwyn. The dead could be resurrected into undying warriors by placing them in the cauldron. It was reputedly destroyed in battle between Matholwch and Bran, by a living man climbing within it.”

I held my hand up again, a finger lifted. “Battle between the king who gave the cauldron and the one he gave it to?”

Sandburg lost a little of his despondency, obviously enjoying the chance to lecture. “Matholwch mistreated Branwyn, and so Bran invaded Ireland to rescue her.” He brightened further, adding, “Of course, there’s no way of knowing for certain that this is Matholwch’s cauldron. It was found several years ago at an ancient battlefield and gathering place in Ireland, with the remnants you see there.” He gestured toward the display. “All of the artifacts are Celtic in origin, but compositional and artistic differences in the pieces suggest some are Welsh, while others are Irish. Combined with the cauldron’s presence, it lends credence to the legend, and makes a wonderful story and artifact to draw audiences to museums. It’s on tour.”

His pleasure faded again and he looked at the empty space where the cauldron had been. “We must recover it, Detectives. It’s insured, but there’s no way of realizing its true value in monetary terms. It’s a piece of legend and of history.”

“How big is this thing?” I asked dubiously. “Big enough to put a dead man in, I assume. And made of iron?” A full-grown man could fit into, say, a fifty-five-gallon barrel, though not comfortably. I looked at the gaping spot in the display, and at Sandburg. “Even empty, that’s got to weigh a ton.”

“Some seventy gallons,” Sandburg said, “and made of oak with iron bands. It’s not quite a ton, but it’s very heavy.”

I stared at him a moment before questions poured out in the order of least relevance: “How long ago was this supposed to be? Wouldn’t oak have rotted away? Wouldn’t you have noticed somebody waltzing out of here with a seventy-gallon barrel bumping along behind them? Wouldn’t the security cameras have footage?” No wonder Billy hadn’t let me interrogate the ghosts.

“It was preserved in a peat bog.” Sandburg got all bright-eyed and enthusiastic again. “Two partial bodies were recovered, as well. They’re considered too fragile to travel, bu—”

“Sorry, Mr. Sandburg.” Billy came over with his best wryly sympathetic look. “I’d love to hear about the bog men sometime, but right now Detective Walker’s questions have to take precedence. Could I see the security-camera footage? Walker, you can oversee the forensics team.” We’d been working together long enough that I understood the code in the simple phrase.

It meant I could oversee the forensics team.

All right, all right, it also meant he’d gotten what he could out of Jason Chan’s ghost, and that it was my turn to study the crime scene on the supernatural level.

I’d consciously decided not to use the Sight when I first walked in. I’d done it first thing on at a few scenes, and I’d learned it superseded the real world too much. I could never quite see things the way they were supposed to be seen once they’d been tainted with the colors and emotional impact the Sight brought along. It was worth more to me to go in clear-headed and then move into the unusual. That, and Billy couldn’t turn his off; if there were ghosts, he’d see them, so one of us seeing the unadulterated world while the other studied the magical one seemed like a good idea to both of us.

I took a look at Sandburg on his way out. He was agitated, darkness and discomfort whirling through what were otherwise very mild colors: for all his adventurer-clothing style, his aura was made up of pastels and whites. If I’d looked at him that way first, I’d have called him lily-livered, which wouldn’t have been fair at all. Billy, beside him, looked much richer in color, which pleased me. I’d need to remember to give him another energy boost, just in case, but it looked as if his ghost riders weren’t gaining any toeholds. The men disappeared around a curve, and I turned to look at the crime scene.

Knowing Billy saw ghosts made me surprised that I didn’t, especially when I knew one was there. But aside from last night, my only experience in seeing the dead had been on a different plane of existence. I called it the Dead Zone, a vast purgatory-like nothingness. I’d told Billy the door in my garden led to a place people went when they were dying. The Dead Zone was where the already-dead hung out, at least briefly. I was absolutely terrible at calling them to me, and had very nearly gotten myself killed trying. My mentor, Coyote, had saved my sorry ass more than once. I missed him.

I sighed and pulled myself back to the job at hand. No ghosts for me. That was okay. There were plenty of other things to see.

Foremost was the cauldron. Even gone, it left a mark of darkness in the air, intense enough where it had rested that I had to move in order to see some of the artifacts. A general malaise hung over them, their energy—because everything had energy, which I’d eventually learned was one of the tenets of shamanism; all things were inhabited by a spirit of some sort, one that lent the object purpose and definition—their energy drained to a dull tarry brown. Well, they’d been buried in a peat bog for who knows how long. I’d be brown and sticky, too.

But it was more than that, at least where the cauldron had rested. There was—I hesitated to call it evil. Evil was a human conceit, and I wasn’t sure an object could be imbued with it. But there was death there, intense, concentrated death. I walked forward cautiously, half-certain the thin tendrils left behind would spring to life and draw me in.

They only wrapped around me, cool and uncomfortably inviting. I hadn’t seen a death aura before, and if I’d been asked, I’d have guessed it would be terrifying, an unknown slash of black and fear. This glimpse made me think the auras surrounding illness were worse; there was fight left in the sick, and what encompassed me now had moved far beyond that.

I backed up, uneasy with the accepting nature of the cauldron’s remnants. If its shadow took away the edges of pain and the sharpness of worry, the cauldron itself would be much more potent. If it offered that kind of peace to everyone, I didn’t think a living body diving in would be the charm that broke it apart. It’d be an easy suicide, climbing into that thing. I shuddered and took another step back.

With distance, and maybe with my rejection, the cauldron’s shadow lessened. The books and manuscript fragments burned away most of their murk, as though they’d been freed of the cauldron’s touch. They were gorgeous, ciphers standing out in gold against creamy backgrounds. I edged closer, peering at the display-case information to learn what was oldest, and turned to the piece—barely more than a sliver of parchment—to see what ancient knowledge looked like with the Sight. I had the idea that if I could hold my gaze just right, then a picture or an answer would leap out at me, like a magic-eye optical illusion.

For a while the gold cipher on the page simply wavered at me. Then it twinned, a scarlet streak racing through it, and dizziness made my eyes cross. The Sight vanished, and I clapped a hand over my face, muttering. Aside from turning the Sight off, that was basically what the magic-eye illusions did to me, too. I should’ve known better.

My cell phone buzzed and I slipped it free, glad of something real to focus on. Billy’s voice came over the line, exasperated but not surprised: “The security tapes have been looped. We’ve got nothing. Is forensics there yet?”

I looked toward the entryway, where the team was just moving in. “Yeah. Look, did you get anything?”

“We’ll talk about it in the car. You?”

A frown creased my forehead as I turned the Sight back on, looking toward the forensics team and the museum’s entrance. Wisps of black tar caught against the floor, minute smears I wouldn’t have seen if the cauldron hadn’t tried to draw me in. The forensics team walked over them, smearing their slight presence into even less, and I started to jog down the hall, cell phone still at my ear as I passed the team. A few seconds later I charged out the front door, Sight still blazing.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think I did.”