Free The Extinction Event by David Black Page A

huge doors were unlocked.
    â€œWhy not?” Jack asked about the unlocked doors. “Who’d come here uninvited?”
    â€œWe did,” Caroline said.
    The door creaked.
    â€œInner Sanctum,” Jack said in a Boris Karloff voice; and, before Caroline could ask him what Inner Sanctum was, Jack added, “Prehistory. Don’t worry about it.”
    The central hall was stacked like a warehouse with moldy furniture: chairs with torn brocade; a bureau with a clouded and cracked mirror; two refectory tables, one upside down on the other like a mirror image; a forest of standing lamps; a rolled oriental rug, which, furred with dust, looked like a huge cocoon. Naked marble gods and goddesses with hairless pudenda stood like giant chess pieces randomly in the hall, gleaming in the dusty light from high smudged windows. A half-open steamer trunk revealed mildewed drawers. A grand divided staircase rose in front of them, leading to a balcony that ran around the second floor—a second floor thirty feet above the ground floor. The walls were covered in faded green cloth with darker patches where pictures had been removed.
    â€œHello?” Jack called. “Robert?”
    His voice was swallowed by the vast space.
    Hesitantly, they wandered through sliding double doors into a library, which smelled like old dog. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Hundreds of books with rotting leather bindings. A mahogany ladder was hooked on to an overhead stained brass bar. Laid out on a long table was a Union uniform: red fez, blue jacket, red pants, New York’s Zouaves. A captured Dufilho Confederate officer sword, unsheathed and gleaming, recently polished, lay across the arms of a tall chair at the head of the table. Logs blazed in a fireplace large enough for half a dozen tall men to stand in.
    â€œRobert?” Caroline called. She lowered her voice, “Maybe they’re out?”
    â€œWhy are you whispering?” Jack asked.
    Caroline blushed. Or maybe her cheeks reddened from the fireplace heat.
    â€œYeah, out,” Jack said. “Probably to Wendy’s for burgers.”
    Caroline opened a door in the far wall. Jack followed her into a glass-ceilinged atrium enclosing a scummy half-filled reflecting pool, flanked by twin gargoyle-faced fountains set into the wall. Coppery stains in the gargoyles’ mouths made the creatures look as if they had just feasted on flesh and blood. Their eyes were blind. Passing clouds shifted shadows across the room. In the corner, in a yellow-and-blue enameled pot, a dead palm rattled.
    â€œSounds like bones,” Caroline said.
    â€œYou think we’re scaring the skeleton?” Jack asked.
    â€œWhy not?” Caroline said. “They’re scaring me.”
    â€œI don’t see any skeletons,” Jack said.
    â€œThe whole house,” Caroline said, “is a skeleton.”
    A cracked glass door opened onto a small back parlor filled with oil portraits, surfaces spidery with cracks, stacked against the peeling wallpaper. Facing a window, which looked out onto an unkempt lawn rolling down to the stagnant lake, its back to Jack and Caroline, was a deep rust-colored upholstered wingback chair. An old man’s bony elbow perched on one of the chair arms, the cloth of a white linen suit hanging from his gaunt frame.
    â€œI think we found our skeleton,” Jack whispered. To the figure in the chair, louder, Jack said, “Mr. Flowers…” Slowly, he approached. “Sorry to disturb you, sir.…”
    Jack came around the chair and stopped, staring at what looked like Keating Flowers’ mummified corpse, dressed and positioned as if alive.
    â€œOh, my God,” Caroline cried.
    â€œLooks like he’s been dead for years,” Jack said.
    â€œDead?” a voice behind them said. “Resin.”
    Jack and Caroline turned. Keating Flowers came through the cracked glass door from the room with the reflecting pool. He