But Jack didn't care about this—his interest lay below. He knew a trapdoor lay somewhere near the center of the main room, but he couldn't see where.

He dropped to his hands and knees and began searching the knotty pine planks.

He heard Tom say, "What are you doing?"

"Looking for the edge of a trapdoor."

"What makes you think there's a trapdoor?"

"I just do. Help me look."

He couldn't tell Tom that he'd been peeking through one of these windows when Luther Brady had swung up a section of the floor and disappeared below… carrying a book… a large, old-looking book.

Jack was counting on that being the Compendium. Herta had told him Brady had it. And Charlie had said Jack had seen it. If they were right, this had to be the place.

Tom walked around in a wavering circle.

"I don't see anything."

Neither did Jack. But he knew it was here. He tried to remember if the trapdoor's opening edge had been irregular. If so, he wouldn't find an obvious seam cutting across the boards. He stretched himself flat for an ant's-eye view.

There—a tiny depression running along one of the planks. He rose to his knees and ran his finger along the edge. Yeah, definitely a space here.

Jack pictured Brady lifting the door. It had opened toward the rear of the house. He searched for a ring embedded in a plank. Had to be one. Brady couldn't have lifted it without—

One of the knots two planks away looked different. He touched it and noticed it didn't feel like wood. He worked his thumbnail along its edge and up popped a metal ring, painted to look like wood. Jack hauled back on it and a section of the floor angled upward.

"Jesus!" he heard Tom say. "How did you know?"

He ignored the question as he threw the trapdoor back. A wooden stairway led below.

Jack started down. "Wait here."

"No problem."

5

-65:26

At the bottom Jack found himself in a dark, tiny cube of a room, maybe eight by eight. Daylight through the door above provided faint illumination. Probably should have gone back to the car for the flashlight, but hadn't wanted to waste the time. The enlarging of Vicky's mark had filled him with a desperate urgency.

He looked around. Shelves lined the space, stacked with envelopes and magazines and books of all sizes. The one he'd seen had been large, somewhere between sixteen and twenty inches on a side.

He stepped to the nearest shelf and began pulling things off it. They felt soggy—water must have seeped through and worked its way down here. He caught sight of photos in the magazines as he tossed them on the floor—naked boys. No surprise there.

He worked his way along the shelves until he came to a steel cabinet, like a fuse box. He tugged on the handle. Locked.

Well, he'd fix that.

Jack pulled his Spyderco folder from his back pocket and snapped out the blade. He worked it along the edge, wiggling and pushing until he had a third of the blade inside, just above the lock. Then he leaned against the knife, prying… prying…

The door popped open.

Blessed be the man who invented tempered steel.

Jack pulled open the door and squinted into its dim interior. Only one thing inside: a book—big like the one he'd seen Brady bring down here. Had to be the same.

But was it the book?

Jack pulled it out and hefted it. Heavy. The covers and spine seemed to be made of stamped metal. He stepped to the center of the space and held it in the shaft of light under the trapdoor.

Markings embossed on the cover… he squinted at them… looked like random squiggles at first, then they swam into focus… words… in English…

Was this what the prof had talked about… the text changing to the reader's native language?

Compendium ran across the upper half in large serif letters; and below it, half size: Srem.

Jack felt his throat constrict. He'd found it. Goddamn it, he'd found it. But was it what he needed?

He pounded up the steps to the main floor where he'd found Tom standing by the rear wall with a shocked look on his face.

"Got it!"

Tom didn't seem to hear. He clutched a couple of torn, water-stained eight-by-ten photos. He held one up and looked at Jack.

"Here's a picture of some guy with Oprah." He held up the other. "And here's the same guy with President Clinton. I know I've seen him before but I just can't place him."

Might as well tell him, Jack thought. Sooner or later it'll come to him.

"That's Luther Brady."

Tom's eyes widened. "The Luther Brady? The Dormentalist? The pedophile?"

"The same. Look—"

"The indicted-for-murder Luther Brady?"

"Yes."

And you're talking to the guy who put him there.

"This must be his place!" Tom pointed to the open trapdoor. "How did you know about that?"

"I know about a lot of things." Jack jerked his thumb toward the front door. "We're getting out of here. And you're driving."

6

-65:14

With Tom ensconced behind the wheel and winding the car back toward Route 84, Jack hunched forward in the passenger seat with The Compendium of Srem balanced on his knees. This being the shortest day of the year, the sun had already set, so he switched on the courtesy light.

Took him only a few pages to realize this was the oddest book he'd ever seen. Not simply the metal covers with their unusual hinges, and not the curlicue handwriting, but the pages themselves. The page paper—if it was paper at all—felt thinner than onionskin, but was completely opaque. He'd figured that if the book was half as old as it was supposed to be he'd find some damage. But no. Not a tear, not a wrinkle, not a single dog ear.

And who or what was Srem? If he was the guy who'd put this thing together, he at least could have had the decency to include an index or table of contents.

Jack flipped through the unnumbered, single-ply-tissue pages—lots of illustrations, many in color—hoping to catch a glimpse of the Lilitongue. He went through twice, stopping on the second run and backtracking toward the rear when he thought he saw movement in one of the illustrations.

Couldn't be. Just a trompe l'oeil of the flipping pages, like the little animations he'd drawn in the corners of his loose-leaf sheets back in grammar school when he was bored and—

Christ!

He froze and gaped at a page with an illustration that moved.

More than simply moving: an animated globe spinning in a void. He recognized it as Earth by the layout of the continents. He also recognized the crisscrossing lines connecting the dots on its surface.

He'd seen that pattern on an oversized globe hidden away in Luther Brady's office.

And he'd seen the same pattern cut into the back flesh of two of the women with dogs.

He ran his fingers over the animation. It felt no different from the rest of the page—not a ripple, not the slightest vibration, not even a tingle.

"E pur si muove," he whispered.

Tom said, "What?"

"Nothing."

"Find anything yet?"

"Oh, yeah. But not what we're looking for."

Jack tore himself away from the animation and began to plow through the Compendium one page at a time. He'd never learned to speed read, but he could scan text at a decent pace. He set three key words as targets: Lilitougue, Gefreda, and infernal.

About a quarter of the way through he came upon an otherwise blank page that announced: