The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (33 page)

The first sign, at least,
was accurate. Behind the museum was, sure enough, a parking lot and
it looked large enough to handle several hundred cars. At the
moment, however, only two automobiles and one covered truck the
size of a moving van were here ahead of me. One of the autos was a
new silver-gray Lincoln Continental, the other a black Mercedes
Benz, four door sedan.

I parked next to the
Mercedes, checked its rear plate: CVY176. That pleased me. Pleased
me because before leaving my apartment I had made nine phone calls
trying to get a phone number for Hobart Belking, or at least a hint
as to where I might find the man. Results, nine blanks. So I’d
simply headed for the Museum, assuming—since its grand opening was
less than forty-eight hours away—there was a pretty good chance I’d
find my man there.

Ahead of me were half a
dozen cement steps leading up to a large double doors, closed now.
The steps weren’t as wide, or gracefully curving, as those out
front, but the doors appeared to be just as intricately carved.
After climbing the steps, I could see that those carvings were of
jungle foliage and palm trees and bushy plants, among which within
the bas-relief of the carvings on the door were parts of numerous
animals: the eyes of a great cat, the trunk and fanlike ear of an
elephant, horn of rhino, mane of lion, forelegs and claws
of...something, leaping and reaching, skin and flesh retracted from
claws like curved knives.

Odd, I thought. Carvings,
not of animals, but parts of animals.

I shrugged. Sign on the
left-hand door, red letters on smooth white paint: “NO ADMITTANCE!”
“DO NOT ENTER!”

I was prepared to bang on
the door, or even kick the hell out of it, but when I pulled on the
large curving brass, or maybe gold-plated handle the door began
moving noiselessly open.

I eyeballed the signs
again, “NO ADMITTANCE!” and “DO NOT ENTER!” and pulled the door
open, and entered.

Entered brightness; all of
the interior lights—overhead, concealed lights, even a profusion of
spotlights were on—perhaps as a final check before Monday’s
opening. So I entered that brightness and walked, roamed, without
interruption for a minute or more.

But I also entered a hush,
and strangeness.

Entered a freeze-frame
world of immobile animals, frozen in unending moments, beautiful
and once-vital beings caught and held in thin slices of
time—snarling black bear, whooping hyena, coughing lion, zebra,
gazelle, sprinting cheetah, and dozens of others, scores of others.
Each stuffed or freeze-dried or otherwise-preserved animal was
posed in a disturbingly believable but still strangely unreal
mini-landscape—artfully crafted segment of desert, rock-pocked
mountainside, green oasis, jungle clearing—that faithfully
reproduced the original habitat where it lived, when it had
lived.

Some of those displays
were in separate rooms along the rear of the museum, where I’d
entered. Each room was three-walled, with its front—where a fourth
wall would normally have been—entirely open, so that anyone walking
before that series of rooms would have an unobstructed view at the
exhibits inside.

The animals looked out of
those rooms toward me, toward Macadamia Street, outside, or past me
to the great central space of the museum, the piece de resistance.
Because the three walled rooms at the rear and sides of the
building, perhaps a dozen in all, were obviously “extras,”
subsidiary to the stunningly impressive displays occupying the
enormous open center of the Museum and filling at least
three-fourths of the building’s available space.

Most of that space was
filled with exhibits much like those I’d glanced at in the separate
rooms, but these were bigger, brighter, more colorful and
seemed—briefly, only briefly—more vibrant and alive.

Even from where I
stood—and, having entered from the back of the Museum, I was
obviously not getting my initial look at Belking’s handiwork as it
was designed to be seen for the first time—the sight was
stunning.

At least twenty separate
exhibits filled that central space, including among them what I
guessed were a hundred or more animals, each not only appropriately
posed but in its appropriate setting. Most of them, however, were
facing away from, or at right angles to me. So I walked to the
approximate center of the room, skirting a couple of exhibits to
get there, and then turned with my back toward Macadamia Street. It
was very quiet, and an odd musty smell filled my
nostrils.

On my left, half a dozen
small Rhesus monkeys perched or clung in real-looking trees; on the
ground below, a ten-foot-long snake slithered over grass and
leaves. Beyond that exhibit was another one entirely, even
shockingly, different: a sinewy almost-white snow leopard, one
front leg extended, appearing to glide over powdery white plastic
that glistened like ice.

Near on my right was a
great lion with an almost black mane, neck arched and head raised
with jaws stretched wide and white fangs reflecting the room’s
light, as it roared silently in the Museum, as it must once have
roared awesomely on African plains. It appeared—briefly—to be
bursting with health and almost uncontrolled energy; and it was
wonderfully beautiful, massive, twice the size of any lion I’d ever
seen in a zoo.

That thought blended with
another, a growing sense that all this “life” captured in a
paralysis of movement was like a zoo of death, not much different
from “Henry” in his casket being put on display. Or a whole
collection of Henrys and Marthas and Janes and Bills, plus dead
little Billies and Jane-Janes and Dickies and Juniors.

I looked at the
magnificent black-maned lion again and noticed to his right, nearer
me but half concealed by leaves and trailing ropelike vines, one of
the females of his pride, prone, head slanting forward and resting
on large front paws, eyes turned slightly toward me and glistening
like polished gems.

Perhaps the most
impressive—or depressing, depending on your point of view—feature
of that great room was an astonishing collection of mounted animal
heads hanging like three-dimensional artwork high upon the walls. I
was standing at the middle of the main room, with the entrance
doors behind me, and I could see at least thirty animal heads form
an irregular line across the room’s rear wall. That line extended
toward the front of the Museum continuing on both left and right
walls; but for seconds my attention was almost hypnotically held by
the bizarre sight of what briefly and weirdly resembled a giant
necklace of severed animal heads stretching from left to right
before me.

Each head was centered at
a spot about twelve feet above the floor, but the line was
irregular because there were small heads, medium-sized heads, and
large heads. The largest of all, the one in the middle of all the
others, absolutely riveting and impossible to miss or ignore, was
the looming gray-black head of an elephant, trunk raised above
thick white tusks curving outward and upward to narrower points
like bulky scimitars fashioned of polished bone.

Far left, at the junction
of the rear and left walls, the head of a rhinoceros; at the
opposite end, against the right wall, what remained of a
hippopotamus; and in between, two dozen or more others, smaller,
some familiar like antelope, wart hog, zebra, Oryx and ram, others
unknown to me. Each of a different species and each posed in a
slightly different way, but all of them staring at unseen horizons
through immobile eyes of glass.

Gradually the unsettling
conviction grew in me that I might be looking at one of the most
ugly expressions of virulent pathology that I had ever seen in my
life. Even though some of the heads, some of the full-size animals
and entire exhibits, were unquestionably remarkable, even
beautiful—if beauty is merely form and color and mass and line. But
beauty is more than that, has to be more, or life itself is a fraud
on the living. I turned, letting my gaze follow that uneven line of
heads and more heads on the left wall, wondering if there were even
more of them on the fourth or front wall of the museum as
well—wondering as sourness began to gather in my stomach, and wisps
from last night’s dream crawled through my mind like the worms that
eat through corpses, what I would see there, and if seeing it would
pour more sourness into the already churning uneasiness in my
stomach—and stared, eyes suddenly widening, at the enormous
animal-like head of Hobart Belking, not more than three feet
away.

For a crazy moment, a
truly startling and almost frightening moment, I imagined—a trick
of perspective, born of mentally gazing toward the distant wall and
then having almost my entire field of vision overwhelmed by a face
only a yard or less away, a beefy, jut-jawed, unsmiling face, which
was doing a lot of unsmiling at me—that stuck to, and jutting from
the wall ahead of me, above the closed entrance-and-exit doors, was
the gargantuan severed head of a gigantic Hobart Belking,
approximately the last thing to be seen by visitors leaving Hobart
Belking’s Wild Animal Museum.

Actually, I didn’t sort it
out all that clearly in my head during the first instant when with
considerable dismay, I ogled it, or ogled him. That was a few
moments later. The very first instant, I cried out, “Baah!”
Apparently having started to say... hell, I don’t have any idea
what I’d started to say.

But then I pulled myself
together, got my bearings—or at least realized that normal-sized,
even three or four inches shorter than I, Hobart Belking was
standing only three feet, maybe two and a half feet from me with
his head on—and said, “Holy jumping Jehosaphet—man, I thought you
were going to swallow me or bite off my... Ah, how do you do, Mr.
Belking?”

“
What the hell do you think
you’re doing screwing around in here?”

“
Didn’t you see the goddamn
signs, Jack?”

It was a strange thing,
one more strange thing, but at the moment when I’d realized those
out-of-focus chops before me, were not giant-sized but merely
little normal ones distorted by unexpected closeness, I had also
seen the expression on those chops instantly change. It was just a
quick flickering of something—recognition, I felt pretty
sure—visible only momentarily before being replaced by glower. But
the wide-shouldered wide-hipped man near me was Belking for sure;
and it was better than eight to five that he’d recognized me when
I, at that moment, turned.

Perhaps not until then.
He’d approached, very silently, from behind my back. He didn’t have
a club in his hands, or a gun or knife. Nothing. But those were
big, hard-knuckled, beefy-looking hands; maybe this guy didn’t
think he needed a club.

I said, “Sorry, you
startled me. My name’s Shell Scott. I’m a private
detective.”

He stared for a moment
without speaking. Belking looked bigger than he had in photos, more
bulky, more solid, and I guessed most of the solid stuff was either
bone or muscle. He had to be close to twenty years older than I, no
kid by a long shot, but he impressed me as a man in better shape
than most kids in their teens.

I figured he was about
five-ten, four inches shorter than I am, but he probably weighed
thirty or forty pounds more than my two-hundred and five. He was
wearing khaki trousers and a sweat-stained T-shirt that revealed
the barrel chest and impressive width of meaty
shoulders.

When he spoke, Belking
pulled his lips apart to show those big, square, tusklike teeth,
prominent incisors a bit longer than the other tusks, giving him
the look of a man about to eat a steak raw, while it was still
being used by the animal.

What he said was, “I don’t
give a damn if you’re the king of all Siberia, Jack. Get your ass
out of here or I’ll throw it out in two pieces.”

“
No kidding?” I said,
grinding my teeth. “Two pieces?”

And then I deliberately
paused, reminding myself that this situation demanded logic and
coolness, not homicidal mania or the grinding of teeth.

So I continued quietly,
with only a slight sharpness in my voice, “Well, let’s put aside
the interesting question of whether it would be possible for you,
assisted by three or four other apes, to do what you—I hope in
jest—suggested. Let’s put it aside at least until I ask you how
many hoods you hauled away from the Halcyon Hotel’s parking lot
last night in that black Mercedes of yours. The S600 four-door
sedan, registration CVY176. Also, of course, I’d like their names,
addresses, and next of kin.”

No flicker of expression,
not even a raised eyebrow. Which told me what I’d wanted to know.
Part of anyhow. His eyes, I noticed, were green, a kind of dark
green. Not the luminous emerald of Dane’s eyes, but more the shade
of a dyspeptic’s digestive juices, or even, to borrow from his own
flavorful dialogue, a squashed frog’s poop. His thick lips were
very red, as though recently blistered.

There was something about
this guy that made me want to hit him. I mean, even if I’d known he
was Abraham Lincoln I would have wanted to hit him. And that’s bad;
it interferes with logical coolness, and can lead to unpremeditated
stupidity.

I merely nodded, sort of
smiling thinly, as Belking said, “So that’s it? Well, let me tell
you what I guess you want to know, then you can buzz out of here,
Jack.” He grinned, muscle bunching at both sides of his mouth like
fleshy parenthesis around his bony teeth. “In one
piece.”