He sheathed the large knife and chose the wall nearest the foot of the stairs. One of the highest platforms, almost seven feet off the floor, bore the name Isabella Lopez in Ronny Jessup’s fancy, painted script.

The catafalque was five feet deep, the body less wide than that. Four feet of clearance between the deceased and the ceiling. He hesitated, assuring himself that he could do this. If he was beyond terror, he was beyond horror, as well. The survival instinct trumped all. In a moment this extreme, the heart became a stone, temporarily beyond a capacity for emotion, incapable of abhorrence and pity, filled only with the furious determination to live.

Isabella had evidently been petite, her wrapped remains hardly more than five feet long. The shelf on which she rested was about seven feet from end to end.

Standing on the lowest catafalque, gripping the highest with his right hand to steady himself, David used his left hand to tug the body toward one end of the shelf. It moved more easily than he expected. If a flood of adrenaline could empower a mother to lift one end of a wrecked automobile off her trapped child, as had been recorded more than once, David’s feat of strength was unremarkable by comparison.

He climbed onto Isabella’s catafalque and eeled behind her and then dragged her back into place in front of him, she on her back, he on his left side. She crowded him into the shadows against the back wall. When he raised his head to look across her, he could see the lower half of the flight of steps that led down from the higher crypt.

| 82 |

Disturbing the mummified woman had stirred a stronger smell from her, and David lay in that suffusion. The astringent chemical stink remained dominant, but there was no longer a mere suggestion of an underlying organic odor; it was insistent. He would have been less unnerved if the smell had been profoundly foul, but it had a sweetness to it, an unappealing sweetness, cloying and spicy, that turned his stomach solely because of its strangeness.

He withdrew the large knife from its sheath. Held it in his right hand. Breathed through his mouth without gagging. Quiet now.