The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [263]
Nora stopped. No sign of a triceratops. And once again, the aisles led away in half a dozen directions. She chose one at random, followed it through one jog, then another, coming abruptly to another intersection.
This was getting ridiculous. “Mr. Puck!” she called out loudly.
The echoes of her voice gradually faded away. The hiss of forced air filled the ensuing silence.
She didn’t have time for this. She would come back later, and she’d call first to make sure Puck was waiting at his desk. Better still, she’d just tell him to take whatever it was he wanted to show her directly to Pendergast. She was off the case, anyway.
She turned to walk out of the Archives, taking what she thought would be the shortest path. After a few minutes, she came to a stop beside a rhino and several zebras. They looked like lumpy sentinels beneath the omnipresent plastic, giving off a strong smell of paradichlorobenzene.
These aisles didn’t look familiar. And she didn’t seem to be any closer to the exit.
For a moment, she felt a small current of anxiety. Then she shook it away with a forced laugh. She’d just make her way back to the giraffes, then retrace her steps from there.
As she turned, her foot landed in a small puddle of water. She looked up just as a drop of water splattered on her forehead. Condensation from the pipes far overhead. She shook it away and moved on.
But she couldn’t seem to find her way back to the giraffes.
This was crazy. She’d navigated through trackless deserts and dense rainforests. How could she be lost in a museum in the middle of New York City?
She looked around, realizing it was her sense of direction she had lost. With all these angled aisles, these dimly lit intersections, it had become impossible to tell where the front desk was. She’d have to—
She abruptly froze, listening intently. A soft pattering sound. It was hard to tell where it had come from, but it was close.
“Mr. Puck? Is that you?”
Nothing.
She listened, and the pattering sound came again. Just more water dripping somewhere, she thought. Even so, she was more eager than ever to find the door.
She chose an aisle at random and moved down it at a brisk walk, heels clicking rapidly against the marble. On both sides of the aisle, the shelves were covered with bones stacked like cordwood, each with a yellowing tag tied to its end. The tags flapped and fluttered in the dead air stirred by her passage. The place was like a crypt. Amid the silence, the darkness, and the ghoulish specimens, it was hard not to think about the set of grisly murders that had occurred just a few years before, within this very subbasement. It was still the subject of rumor and speculation in the staff lounge.
The aisle ended in another jog.
Damn it, thought Nora, looking up and down the long rows of shelving that vanished into the gloom. Another welling of anxiety, harder to fight down this time. And then, once again, she heard—or thought she heard—a noise from behind. This time it wasn’t a pattering, so much as the scrape of a foot on stone.
“Who’s there?” she demanded, spinning around. “Mr. Puck?”
Nothing save the hiss of steam and the drip of water.
She began walking again, a little faster now, telling herself not to be afraid; that the noises were merely the incessant shiftings and settlings of an old, decrepit building. The very corridors seemed watchful. The click of her heels was unbearably loud.
She turned a corner and stepped in another puddle of water. She pulled back in disgust. Why didn’t they do something about these old pipes?
She looked at the puddle again. The water was black, greasy—not, in fact, water at all. Oil had leaked on the floor, or maybe some chemical preservative. It had a strange, sour smell. But it didn’t look like it had leaked from anywhere: she was surrounded by shelves covered with mounted birds, beaks open, eyes wide, wings upraised.
What a mess, she thought, turning her expensive Bally shoe sideways to find that the oily liquid had soiled