“There!”
Some eighty feet away, behind a huge spread of pepper trees, was a small cottage half-sunk in the earth. Fire hadn’t touched it, but rain had worn its paint and battered its roof.
“There’s got to be a body in there,” Crumley said as we walked toward it.
“Isn’t there always a body, or else why come see?”
“Go check. I’ll stand here hating myself for not bringing more booze.”
“Some detective.” I ambled over to the cottage and had one helluva time yanking its door wide. When it finally whined and gave way, I lurched back, afraid, and peered in.
“Crumley,” I said at last.
“Yeah?” he said, sixty feet away.
“Come see.”
“A body?” he said.
“Even better,” I said in awe.
Chapter Ten
We entered a labyrinth of newsprint. A labyrinth; hell, a catacomb with narrow passages between stacks of old newspapers—the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle News, the Detroit Free Press. Five feet on the left, six on the right, and a pathway between which you might jockey through, fearful of avalanches that could crush and kill.
“Holy magoly!” I breathed.
“You can say that again,” Crumley groused. “Christ, there must be ten thousand Sunday and daily papers stacked here, in layers—look, yellow down below, white on top. And not just one stack, ten dozen—my God, a hundred!”
For indeed the catacomb of newsprint hollowed back through twilight shadow to curve out of sight.
It was a moment, I later said, like Lord Carnarvon opening Tut’s tomb in 1922. All those ancient headlines, those obituary piles, that led to what? More news stacks and more beyond. Crumley and I sidled through with hardly enough space for bellies or behinds.
“God,” I whispered, “if ever a real earthquake hit—”
“It did!” came a voice from far down the stacked tunnel of print. A mummy cried. “Kicked the stacks! Almost pancaked me!”
“Who’s there?” I called. “Where in hell are you?”
“A great maze, yeah?” The mummy’s voice yelled i
n glee. “Built it myself ! Morning extra by night final, race specials, Sunday comics, you name it! Forty years! A museum library of news, unfit to print. Keep moving! Around the bend to your left. I’m here somewhere!”
“Move!” Crumley panted. “There’s gotta be a space with fresh air!”
“That’s it!” the dry voice called. “You’re close. Bear left. Don’t smoke! Damn place’s a firetrap of headlines: ‘Hitler Takes Power,’ ‘Mussolini Bombs Ethiopia for Kindling,’ ‘Roosevelt Dead,’ ‘Churchill Builds Iron Curtain,’ swell, huh?”
We turned a final corner among tall flapjack stacks of print to find a clearing in the forest.
On the far side of the clearing was an army cot. On the cot lay what seemed a long bundle of beef jerky or a mummy rampant from the earth. There was a strong smell. Not dead, I thought, not alive.
I approached the cot slowly, with Crumley behind. I knew the odor now. Not death, but the great unwashed.
The rag bundle stirred. Some ancient blanket shreds flaked from a face like watermarks on mud shallows. A faint crack of light glinted between two withered lids.
“Pardon my not rising,” the withered mouth trembled. “Chez Monsieur from Armentières, haven’t got up in forty years.” It cackled a cackle that almost killed it. It began to cough.
“No, no, I’m okay,” it whispered. The head fell back. “Where the hell you been?”