two of us quickly excavated the hole until the coffin stood revealed
under Rankin's flashlight. We jumped down and heaved the coffin
up.
Numbed, I watched Rankin swing the spade at the locks and seals.
After a few blows it gave and we lifted the lid. The body of Daniel
Wheatherby looked up at us with glazed eyes. I felt horror gently
wash over me. I had always thought that the eyes closed when one
died.
'Don't just stand there,' Rankin whispered, 'it's almost four.
We've got to get out of here!'
We wrapped the body in a sheet and lowered the coffin back into
the earth. We shoveled rapidly and carefully replaced the sod. The
dirt we had missed was scattered.
By the time we picked up the white-sheeted body, the first traces
of dawn were beginning to lighten the sky in the east. We went
through the hedge that skirted the cemetery and entered the woods
that fronted it on the west. Rankin expertly picked his way through
it for a quarter of a mile until we came to the car, parked where we
had left it on an overgrown and unused wagon track that had once
been a road. The body was put into the trunk. Shortly thereafter,
we joined the stream of commuters hurrying for the 6.00 train.
I looked at my hands as if I had never seen them before. The dirt
under my fingernails had been piled up on top of a man's final
resting place not twenty-four hours ago. It felt unclean.
Rankin's attention was directed entirely on his driving. I looked at
him and realized that he didn't mind the repulsive act that we had
just performed. To him it was just another job. We turned off the
main road and began to climb the twisting, narrow dirt road. And
then we came out into the open and I could see it, the huge
rambling Victorian mansion that sat on the summit of the steep
grade. Rankin drove around back and wordlessly up to the steep
rock face of a bluff that rose another forty feet upward, slightly to
the right of the house.
There was a hideous grinding noise and a portion of the hill large
enough to carve an entrance for the car slid open. Rankin drove in
and killed the engine. We were in a small, cube-like room that
served as a hidden garage. Just then, a door at the far end slid open
and a tall, rigid man approached us.
Steffen Weinbaum's face was much like a skull; his eyes were
deep-set and the skin was stretched so tautly over his cheekbones
that his flesh was almost transparent.
'Where is it?' His voice was deep, ominous.
Wordlessly, Rankin got out and I followed his lead. Rankin opened
the trunk and we pulled the sheet-swaddled figure out.
Weinbaum nodded slowly.
'Good, very good. Bring him into the lab.'
CHAPTER TWO
When I was thirteen, my parents were killed in an automobile
crash. It left me an orphan and should have landed me in an
