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The lid had been pried open; it was surprising that the Aht have struggled with such a task

Jean-Luc looked toward the Stygian darkness of the exit vaults Brent was not returning, yet

He edged his away around the coffin to the side where his work partner had stood He could not resist

He lifted the lid of the coffin, hearing again the blood-chilling creaking as the hinges, hundreds of years old, gave way He steeled hihastly look of the ancient dead; he had become quite accustomed to skulls; to open jaws that appeared to have been captured in a victiainst death Decayed flesh, withered flesh, gray andthroughthis would be nothing new

Yet he gasped as he stared into the tomb There was no scent of decay, not even the musty smell that came when centuries had passed since death There was no bone to be seen What he stared upon was

Eyes

Eyes wide open, black as pitch, but open Staring, staring straight into Jean-Luc’s own As if the corpse had never died but slept, and waited

And then

The corpsescreaht have wakened the dead not only in Paris, but in all of France

Darkness, wavering light, filled the torave, the white of the flickering light

The brilliant cri in the vault, about to accost their unwelco hi her

"My God!" she cried

The wo the vaults with their s to the site of the dig Why? Who the hell was she? What was she doingat this site, here, and now?

She forgot to hide as they heard Jean-Luc’s screah the corridors of the vault like the haunted shrieking of the damned

And so she cried out herself Cried out, and

She saw Brent, saw his eyes

Her scream echoed Jean-Luc’s

She turned to run

Too late

Oh, yes, by God

Far too late

Tara had never heard anything quite like the sound that still seemed to echo within the walls of the crypt

She had felt a strange sense of the ages while going down into the underground ruins, and she had felt a sadness for all the lives gone by, and even a bit of awe for lives lived so very long ago, and the intense history of mankind She hadn’t felt entirely coraves of the dead, but she hadn’t been afraid Not even in the darkness and the glooht in the bowels of the earth gave life to the savage grins and leers of gargoyles, grotesques, and angels alike

Sound seerow closer, darker

And there, ahead of her, as frozen by the sound as she, stood the American

And the look on his face as he stared at her, in that split second when they were both paralyzed by the echoes that seemed to rise from hell, from the shrieks that still seemed to fill the hellish world of the dead in which they stood, transfixed her

He stood some distance away, and she knew that he had come after her, soenda of her own

He was some distance down the corridor, where the torown darker as the work lighting had dimmed, as lamps had shattered She couldn’t possibly see his face, not really, he was just a silhouette there, and yet one filled withat her with fury, and with a vengeance that seemed to make the hair at her nape rise

Seconds, flew by, seconds, and yet in that time, she could feel his tension, as if it were an ancient wind, roiling down the length of the tunnel toward her He would come after her, he wanted to kill her, do to her what she had heard in that bloodcurdling screaainst stone and concrete

But he didn’t co back toward the sound of the screah the earth below the crypt, and if he could stop exploding fires that had risen from hell

And yet she knew He had seen her face And every single line and nuance of her countenance had been embedded in his memory

He would still come after her

She turned and ran As fast as he had run back toward hell, she ran away from it Down the corridors that had been hoh the darkness Desperate, almost blinded by fear The stairs to the new church at last loomed before her She flew up the the steps She arose near the doors at the rear, raced across a length of ainst the doors that would lead back into the sanity of the French night

The doors were locked