The stone house loomed blacker than the black night. In the basement they found the well room dark and empty. On the ground lay the rope Rose had used to bind Lyman’s wrists and ankles.
“Our hen has flown its coop,” said Rose. “He’s probably miles from here. Now I have to hunt him down again.”
“You already have his money,” said Grosvenor. “The bounty will wait.” He dangled his lantern over the edge of the well, peering into the depths. “Though I do wish he had left the extra lamp.” His voice betrayed a certain misgiving for what would come next.
Rose also stared with reluctance into the pit. “How do you know it’s not down there? Waiting for us?”
“It’s gone. It could wait no longer.”
“But how do you know?”
In truth Grosvenor knew little but intuited much. Its slyness was uncanny, he admitted. It was easy to see how Garrick could attribute intelligence to it, to credit its instinctual navigation of matters both conjectural and practical. Yet always upon reflection, nothing in its behavior or words struck him as originating from anything other than a very smart dog, assuming dogs could speak. A dog was fawning and servile. The thing—it had no proper name, and so Grosvenor always thought of it as just the thing—had a knack for ingratiation, for knowing just how to present itself. It wanted to please its master and therefore fetched or herded or ratted according to breed; the benefit to man seemed purposeful but was merely a consequence of the dog’s desire for scraps or a spot by the hearth. Whatever cunning it displayed was illusory.
Grosvenor said in reply, “If it wanted us, it could have taken us the instant we walked out of the Consulate door. It would’ve heard our footsteps across the porch and down the stairs. Even now it would know exactly where we stand, were it still on the farm.”
“Its hearing is that good?”
“Believe me, Mr. Rose—it hears everything.”
With nothing else to be said, they descended the ladder to the floor of the pit. Grosvenor did his best to ignore the muck that littered it and the suggestions in its odors and shapes. Instead he waved his lantern in the mouths of the various passages. Finally he chose one tunnel, which seemed smoother and cleaner than the others, and ducking his head, led the way down its course.
They did not travel far when something glittered under the lamp’s beams.
Grosvenor stepped forward and picked up the raw nugget, held it close to his face. He judged it near twenty-two karat purity—it was no pyrite—and weighing close to three pounds. By far the largest yet, worth at least nine hundred dollars.
The things Grosvenor could do with that money.
Rose let out one of his whistles and held up his lantern to see it. “You mean to say your creature leaves gold laying around here like pennies at the beach? You’re right, Mr. Grosvenor—that animal is worth something.”
Quickly the nugget vanished inside Grosvenor’s deepest coat pocket. He knew the first thing anyone wants when unexpected money is received is a percentage.
“No, Mr. Rose,” he said. “It never leaves such things by accident. What you saw just now was a small token left here on purpose, intended to be found by me alone.” As a cat leaves a dead sparrow on the doorstep, Grosvenor thought. A parting gift left for its master, whom it imagined it would never see again.
Or was it something else? Perhaps it suspected Grosvenor would follow it—perhaps it intuited the dark errand Grosvenor was on. A bribe, a dissuasion from further harassment. A payoff.
But this was attributing too much to it. Grosvenor considered the attack on Minerva and Judith earlier in the day; he knew to ascribe logic to an animal was itself irrational. The girls had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong hour. The appetence that seized it, the passion of what every fiber drove it to do, only made the creature more bestial than ever. Grosvenor was the one who wielded carrots and sticks, not the animal.
The possibility of a third interpretation of the gold never entered Grosvenor’s mind.
The tunnel ran as crooked as a nightcrawler pulled from under a log, and often they arrived at crossroads where other passages crossed the main before curving into shadow. Many of these lay either partially or completely collapsed, making the decision of which course to take easy; and in cases when it wasn’t, Grosvenor always selected the smoother bored of the choices, reasoning that these were more trafficked by their quarry and therefore more stable.
As they walked—or rather staggered, both men having to stoop as if in a low-ceilinged cellar—Grosvenor endeavored to keep his mind from thinking too much about the confined arteries they traveled. He began to babble. He identified the composition of protruding rocks, he noted the strata of the soil. He soon digressed into the phenomenon of the Moodus Noises, explaining how they resulted from tunnels dug by the beast that collapsed after its passage through them—an infelicitous topic, considering their circumstance.
“This is why the beast could never leave the farm by tunneling,” Grosvenor said, “for the whole is surrounded by a ring of rock too precarious and dense for it to penetrate. That’s why it must travel aboveground to escape.”
“But why couldn’t it do that before?” Rose massaged his lower back with a free hand, sore from the bending. “Why tonight?”
Arrived at another nexus, Grosvenor chewed his lip before plunging forward. “Doubtless you’ve heard tales of a man dying and his dog waiting patiently on the doorstep for him to come home. The two
