I hesitated. I had seen too many films where the vault doors slammed and people were trapped, yelling, forever. And if the Beast was out there now—?
“Christ! Here!” Crumley shoved the door, leaving the merest quarter-inch crack for air. “Now.” He turned.
The room was empty, except for a large stone sarcophagus at its center. There was no lid. Inside the sarcophagus there should have been a coffin.
“Hell!” said Crumley.
We looked down. There was no coffin.
“Don’t tell!” said Henry. “Lemme put on my dark glasses helps me smell better! There!”
And while we stared down, Henry bent, took a deep breath, thought about it behind his dark glasses, let it out, shook his head, and snuffed another draught. Then he beamed.
“Shucks. Ain’t nothin’ there! Right?”
“Right.”
“J. C. Arbuthnot,” murmured Crumley, “where are you?”
“Not here,” I said.
“And never was,” added Henry.
We glanced at him quickly. He nodded, mightily self-pleased.
“Nobody by that name or any other name, any time, ever here at all. If there had been, I’d get the scent, see? But not so much as one flake of dandruff, one toenail, one hair from one nostril. Not even a sniff of tuberose or incense. This place, friends, was never used by a dead person, not for an hour. If I’m wrong, cut my nose off!”
Ice water poured down my spine and out my shoes.
“Christ,” muttered Crumley, “why would they build a tombhouse, put no one in, but pretend they did?”
“Maybe there never was a body,” said Henry. “What if Arbuthnot never died?”
“No, no,” I said. “The newspapers all over the world, the five thousand mourners. I was there. I saw the funeral car.”
“What did they do with the body then?” Crumley said. “And why?”
“I—”
The tombhouse door slammed shut!
Henry, Crumley, and I shouted with the shock. I grabbed Henry, Crumley grabbed us both. The flashlight fell. Cursing, we bent and knocked heads, sucked breaths, waited to hear the door locked on us. We blundered, tussling at the flashlight and then swiveling the beam toward the door, wanting life, light, the night air forever.
We hit the door in a mob.
And, God, it was really locked!
“Jesus, how do we get outa this place?”
“No, no,” I kept saying.
“Shut up,” said Crumley, “let me think.”
“Think fast,” said Henry. “Whoever shut us in is gone for help.”
“Maybe that was just the caretaker,” I said.
No, I thought: the Beast.