Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [135]
Her light revealed a room, tiled in white on the floor, ceiling, and all four walls. A naked steel chair was bolted in the middle, and under the chair was a drain. Steel cuffs dangled from the arms and legs of the chair. In the corner a hose was coiled up, detached from a rusty faucet.
She retreated, feeling faintly sick, and moved to the door on the other side of the basement room. This one led to a narrow staircase.
At the top of the landing was another closed door. Corrie listened for a long time, then grasped the doorknob and eased it open a quarter of an inch. A quick examination with the dental mirror showed a dusty, disused kitchen. She pushed the door wide and looked around the kitchen, then passed quietly through to a dining room, and then into an ornate sitting room beyond. It was decorated in a heavy, encrusted Bavarian hunting-lodge style: antlers mounted on paneled walls, massive carved furniture, landscapes in heavy frames, racks of antique rifles and carbines. A shaggy boar’s head with gleaming yellow tusks and fierce glass eyes dominated the mantelpiece. She quickly scanned the bookcases and searched a few cabinets. The documents and books were all in German.
She moved into the hall. Here she stood, barely breathing, listening intently. All remained silent. At last she climbed the stairs, one at a time, pausing on each tread to listen. At the second-floor landing she waited again, examining the closed doors, and then opened one at random. It disclosed a room almost devoid of furniture beyond a skeletal bed frame, a table, a chair, and a bookshelf. A broken window looked onto the back garden, shards of glass still littering the sill. The window was barred.
She checked the other rooms on the second floor. All were similar—all bedrooms, all stripped—except for the last room. That one turned out to be a dust-choked photographic workshop and darkroom, and in addition contained several printing presses and primitive-looking photocopying machines. Racks of copper printing plates of all sizes lined one wall, many engraved with elaborate and official-looking patterns and seals. It appeared to have been an old document-counterfeiting operation.
Back in the hall, she climbed the stairs to the third floor. She found herself in a large attic that had been divided into two rooms. The first—the room in which she now stood—was very strange. The floor was covered by thick, Persian-looking rugs. Dozens of candles, large and fat, sat in ornate freestanding holders, pools of melted wax hanging stalactite-like from their bases. On the walls were black tapestries covered with bizarre yellow-and gold-colored symbols, some sewn on, others fashioned from thick felt: hexagrams, astronomical symbols, lidless eyes, interlocking triangles, five- and six-pointed stars. At the base of one such tapestry was emblazoned a single word: ARARITA. In one corner of the room, a series of three marble steps led up to what looked like an altar.
This was just too creepy, and she backed away. One last room, and then she’d get the hell out.
Shivering, she moved through a low doorway into the attic’s second room. It was full of bookshelves and had once been a library, or perhaps a research room. But now all the bookshelves were empty, the walls barren save for a single, moth-eaten Nazi flag hanging limply against the far wall.
In the middle of the room stood a large industrial paper shredder of new manufacture, plugged into the wall and looking ludicrously out of place in what was otherwise a midcentury time capsule. On one side of it stood a dozen tottering stacks of paper, and on the other a series of black garbage bags full of the shredded result. A closet door stood open in the far wall.
She thought of the empty filing cabinets downstairs, the vacant bedrooms. Whatever