The Obsidian Chamber

by Lincoln Child

  He had a sporting chance to survive this; to walk out of the desert alive. No doubt Diogenes knew that, too.

  The real question was why Diogenes had set up this elaborate deception in the first place. And it was elaborate indeed: involving multiple chartered jets, feints and double blinds, a long vehicle chase. Along the way, some people he’d met had been duped; others, he felt sure, had provided paid “assistance.” He was not sure what was true and what was false. Who had told him actual lies? The pilot of the Bombardier, the Land Rover salesman—Proctor felt certain of them. The rest had seen what Diogenes wanted them to see. But those two, he believed, were part of his plan. They had told lies to Proctor’s face—even though they both, undoubtedly, realized the extreme danger they’d been in. Was it possible, actually possible, the car salesman had stuck to Diogenes’s script—even after the treatment he’d received at Proctor’s hands?

  Then there was the question of Constance herself. Proctor had only once seen her face directly: in the security video of the Namibian airport. If Diogenes was capable of such a thorough deception in every other way, surely he could have misled Proctor there, too. It was unlikely…but it was possible. Was she dead or alive?

  Why? Why? The incomprehensibility of it all filled Proctor with useless rage.

  Taking a deep breath, he recognized that he was at the extreme edge of exhaustion, almost to the point of sleep psychosis. He had been going flat-out for over sixty hours straight. He could do nothing more without sleep.

  As he lay back in the cool of the night, he heard a swelling sound in the distance, a throbbing crescendo that he recognized as the roar of a large male lion. The roar was joined by another, and then another: a call and response. It was a coalition of young, aggressive males not old enough to have their own prides, roaring together to establish a bond in preparation for a hunt.

  A cooperative hunt.

  He would deal with that later. He closed his eyes and immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  12

  ALTHOUGH A SETTING late-autumn sun gilded the west-facing Manhattan façades overlooking the Hudson River, the library of 891 Riverside was cloaked, as always, in perpetual dusk. The tall, iron-framed windows were locked and barred, and covered by heavy tapestries, richly embroidered. But now no fire crackled in the large fireplace; no lamps of antique Tiffany glass were lit against the gloom.

  As afternoon turned to evening, and evening to night, the house remained perfectly silent, in watchful repose. No footsteps rang against the marble floor of the reception room; no fingers touched the keys of the Flemish virginal. No movement of any sort, in fact, could be detected—at least, none above the level of the subterranean.

  Behind twin bookcases in the library, a private elevator led down to the basement. Here, a labyrinth of corridors, heavy with efflorescence and redolent of dust, led past a number of stone chambers, including one that gave every indication of being an operating room, apparently unused for some time. The passageways terminated in a small space with a low, vaulted ceiling. Into one wall, the Pendergast family crest had been carved: a lidless eye over two moons, one crescent, the other full, with a lion couchant, along with the Pendergast motto LUCRUM, SANGUINEM: “To gain honor, blood.” Manipulating the crest with the proper motion caused the stone wall to swing away, revealing a circular staircase, cut out of the living bedrock and spiraling down into further darkness. This in turn led to a sub-basement of almost unguessable extent. A central brick pathway led along an earthen floor, below Romanesque arches, past chamber after veiled chamber: burial vaults, storerooms, and collections of every imaginable sort. There were rows of chemicals in ancient glass bottles; rare minerals; insects large and small, with iridescent abdomens and desiccated antennae; Old Master paintings and medieval tapestries; illuminated manuscripts and incunabula; military uniforms and weapons; and a large collection of instruments of torture. This seemingly endless and almost uncatalogable trove was the cabinet of curiosities that had been assembled over many years and at great cost by Antoine Pendergast, Agent Pendergast’s great-grand-uncle—more commonly known by his pseudonym, Enoch Leng.

  About halfway down the length of this central corridor, an isolated room, hardly more than an alcove, stood to one side, containing a priceless collection of Japanese Ukiyo-e art: woodblock prints of seascapes; Mount Fuji, wreathed in clouds; courtesans playing the koto. The rear wall of the niche was covered by a large rice-paper depiction of the Okazaki Bridge from Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Behind the print was the massive stone wall that formed part of the building’s foundation.

  An almost invisible detent in the stone, however, acted much like the crest farther above: when turned to the proper notch, it released a spring that caused a portion of the wall to swing back, in the fashion of a small door. This led to a narrow passage that debouched onto a round chamber, lit faintly by candles, from which three rooms fanned out in the shape of a cloverleaf. One was a small library, containing a writing desk surrounded by old oaken shelves full of leather-bound volumes. Another room was devoted to reflection and meditation, containing only a chair set before a single work of art. And leading off from the far end of the round chamber was the third space: a bedroom-bath suite. The entire composed a small apartment, deep underground, furnished in a spare but nonetheless exquisite style.

  The bedroom was similar to the other two rooms: understated, yet somehow elegant in its very asceticism. The large bed had a satin coverlet with matching crimson pillows. One nightstand held a porcelain washbasin from the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King; another held a taper, set into a candlestick of Sheffield pewter.

  The set of rooms was as silent and still as the house above, save for the soft, almost inaudible breathing of a person dozing beneath the satin coverlet.

  That person was Constance Greene.

  Now Constance woke. A light sleeper by long habit, she was fully awake at once. Switching on an electric lantern and blowing out the bedside candle, she consulted her watch: five minutes past eight. Strange, how time felt so different down here, below the beat of the city above: if she was not careful, the days would start blending together so quickly she might lose track of them.

  Swinging her legs out of the bed and rising, she reached for a silk robe that hung on a nearby peg and wrapped it tightly around herself. Then she stood for a moment, quite still, reflecting—in the tradition of the monks of the Gsalrig Chongg monastery in Tibet, where she had been tutored—on her state of being and mind upon waking.

  She was aware, first and foremost, of an emptiness—an emptiness that, she knew, would never leave her and could never be filled. Aloysius Pendergast was gone. She had finally acknowledged this fact; her decision to retreat to these subterranean chambers—and to quit, at least for a time, the world of the living—was her way of accepting his death. In times of stress, or danger, or great grief, she had always retreated to these quiet, subterranean spaces, known to almost no others. Pendergast had, in his reserved yet gentle way, cured her of this habit; taught her the beauty of the world beyond the Riverside Drive mansion; taught her to tolerate the companionship of her fellow creatures. But now Pendergast was no longer with her. When she realized this, she faced the only two courses of action open to her: retreating belowground, or making use of the vial of cyanide pills that she kept as insurance against the world. She chose the former. Not because she feared death—quite the opposite—but because she knew Aloysius would have been irrevocably disappointed in her if she took her life.

  She passed out of the bedroom and into the small private library. A set of dishes from last night’s dinner—her first since retreating to the sub-basement some days before—sat on one corner of the writing table. It appeared that Mrs. Trask had just returned from her sister’s hospital stay, because dinner had been left in the elevator. Previously, Mrs. Trask’s meals had almost always been simple and fresh. But the dinner she’d left in the elevator for Constance the night of her return h
ad been anything but: saddle of veal with chanterelles, on a bed of roasted white asparagus with truffle coulis. The dessert had been a luscious slice of clafoutis aux cerises. While Mrs. Trask could be an excellent cook when the situation required it, Constance was surprised by the richness of the meal. It was not in keeping with the reasons she had taken up a solitary life underground—painful, private…and ascetic. Surely Mrs. Trask understood that. Such a gourmet meal, bordering on the decadent, seemed inappropriate. Perhaps it was just the housekeeper’s way of affectionately announcing her return. It put Constance off—but at the same time, she had enjoyed the meal despite herself.

  Gathering up the dishes and picking up a torch, Constance made her way out of her private chambers, down the narrow passage, through the secret doorway, and out into the sub-basement proper. She moved gracefully and surely through the succession of rooms, knowing every inch of the collections and needing very little light.

  More slowly now, she made her way through the last set of chambers to the staircase that spiraled up to the basement level. Reaching the top of the stairs, she walked through the dim corridors to the private elevator. She would open it, put in the dishes from last night’s repast, and take back to her rooms the meal that she knew Mrs. Trask would have waiting there for her.

  She pulled back the brass gate, opened the door, put yesterday’s dishes inside, and turned to the fresh dinner arrayed on a silver tray, with a crisp linen tablecloth and elegant silver setting. The entrée was hidden beneath a silver dish cover. This was not surprising: Mrs. Trask’s way of helping keep the meal warm. What was surprising was the bottle of wine that stood on the tray beside it, along with an elegant crystal wineglass.

  As Constance regarded the bottle—it was a Pauillac, she saw, a Château Lynch-Bages 2006—she remembered the last time she had tasted a bottle of wine. It had been in Pendergast’s room at the Captain Hull Inn, back in Exmouth. The memory caused her to flush deeply. Had Mrs. Trask somehow learned about that unfortunate and awkward event…?

  But that was impossible. Still, on the heels of last night’s epicurean offering, this expensive wine was puzzling. It was out of character for Mrs. Trask, who never took it upon herself to choose wines from Pendergast’s extensive cellar, and who was far more likely to serve dinner accompanied by a bottle of mineral water and a pot of rose hip tea. Was this the housekeeper’s way of trying to coax her back upstairs?

  Constance was not ready for that—at least, not yet. Mrs. Trask was welcome to show her concern, but this was going a bit overboard, and if it continued she might have to write the housekeeper a note.

  Picking up the silver tray, she made her way back downstairs and along the listening galleries to her set of rooms.

  Entering her small library, she set down the wine and the glass and removed the cover from the dish. She stared. This evening’s meal was simpler than the previous night’s fare, but nevertheless far more extravagant: foie gras, pan-seared rare, with white truffles arranged over the buttery liver in papery, fragrant shavings. The dish was flanked by two minuscule carrots with their tops, dusted with fresh parsley—a droll culinary flourish that was a far cry from Mrs. Trask’s usual hearty helping of vegetables.

  Constance stared at the plate in puzzlement for a long time. Then she picked up the bottle of wine and looked at it intently.

  As she replaced the bottle on the table, she realized something else was not right. Earlier in the day, before withdrawing to her bedroom for a nap, she had been writing in her journal—a habit she had developed years ago and from which she never deviated. Now, however, she saw that another volume had been placed atop the distinctive orange cover of her Rhodia notebook.

  This was clearly a deliberate, calculated action. It couldn’t have fallen from a nearby shelf and, indeed, the volume wasn’t even one from her small private library, which had been lovingly hand-picked.

  She turned it over in her hands. Stamped gilt lettering on the slender spine told her it was a copy of the poems of Catullus, in the original Latin.

  Then she noticed something else. Slipped between two of the pages, like a place marker, lay a feather. She opened the book to the marked page and removed the feather, staring closely at it. This was not just any feather—but one of great peculiarity and distinction. Unless she was much mistaken, this was a feather from a Norfolk kaka: a large parrot, now extinct, last seen in the wild in the early nineteenth century. Its habitat had been limited to the trees and rocks of Norfolk and Phillip Islands, two tiny external territories of Australia, lost in the vast Pacific. The breathtakingly iridescent, almost cinnamon-colored throat feather she now held in her hand was unique to the Norfolk Island variety of the species.

  She immediately knew where the feather came from. Stuffed specimens of the Norfolk kaka could be found in only a dozen places, including Amsterdam’s Zoölogisch Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. But there was also a specimen in Enoch Leng’s cabinet of curiosities in that very basement, a male of unusual scarlet brilliance. The stuffed bird had been knocked over and damaged in the conflict that had taken place in the sub-basement two years before. She’d repaired it as best she could, but several of the feathers had remained missing.

  Once again taking up the electric torch, she left her set of rooms and—gaining the central corridor—began walking in the opposite direction, until she reached a chamber devoted to stuffed animals. She quickly located the Norfolk kaka, set on a stand behind a rippled-glass case of mahogany.

  The feather fit perfectly into a bare spot on the throat.

  Back in her library, Constance glanced at the open book. The feather had been marking Poem 50.

  Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi

  multum lusimus in meis tabellis…

  She mentally translated the lines.

  Yesterday, Licinius, a day of leisure,

  We played many games in my little notebooks…

  Then she noticed that—at the very bottom of the page—a small notation had been made with an elegant hand, in violet ink. The ink looked remarkably fresh:

  Beloved one, I offer this poem for you.

  She recognized it as a loose translation of the poem’s line 16: hoc, iucunde, tibi poema feci.

  She turned the book over in her hands, amazed and perturbed. Where could this have come from? Could Proctor have brought it to her? But no—he would never presume to do any such thing, even if he thought it would ease her suffering. Besides, she was sure Proctor had never read a word of poetry in his life, Latin or otherwise. And in any case, he did not know of these secret rooms in which she’d taken residence.

  With Pendergast dead, nobody knew of them.

  She shook her head. Somebody had left her this book. Or was she starting to lose her mind? Maybe that was it; at times her grief was proving overpowering.

  She opened the bottle of wine, poured out a glass, took a sip. Even to her, hardly a connoisseur, it was remarkably complex and interesting. She took another sip and sat down to her meal. But before commencing, she turned once again to the poem. She had read it before, of course, but not for years, and now—as she again translated the lines in her head—the poem seemed far more beautiful, more provocative, than she had remembered…and despite all, she read it through from beginning to end, slowly, with absorption and pleasure.

  13

  CONSTANCE WOKE TO the sound of music. She sat up in bed and pushed the sheets to one side. She had been dreaming of music. But which piece? It had seemed full of longing, pathos, and unrequited passion.

  She rose and passed out of the bedroom into her small library. These late-afternoon naps, she decided, would need to be curtailed. It was not at all her way, and she did not want them to become habitual. Such behavior—excessive or uncharacteristic sleeping—was, she suspected, a manifestation of her grief.

  And yet grief was not, at the moment, what she felt—not precisely. She could not say exactly what mixture of emotions filled her, save that they were subtle and co
ntradictory.

  She had intended to spend the morning writing in her journal. Instead, she found herself translating and transcribing some of the poems of Catullus, and then—for some reason she could not quite fathom—several poems from Mallarmé’s collection, Poésies. Mallarmé’s style was notoriously difficult to translate effectively into English, and at last, growing fatigued, she turned her attention to music instead.

  Since “going underground”—as she referred to it in her own mind—she had been listening to the string quartets of Shostakovich, in particular the third. The final movements always reminded her of Madeline Usher and the strange, cataleptic death-in-life fit that sealed her doom in Poe’s story. In some ways Constance, too, had been feeling buried alive, like Madeline: living in self-enforced exile beneath the Manhattan streets. The restless, anxious dissonances of Shostakovich suited her mood; their grief mirrored her own.

  But this afternoon, she had reached for Brahms instead of Shostakovich: the Piano Trios, to be precise. While they, too, were complex and philosophical, they were also lush, beautiful, and without the deep sadness of Shostakovich.

  As she listened, a strange somnolence settled over her, and she had gone into her bedroom, intending just to lay her head on the pillow for ten minutes or so. But instead, three hours had passed: it was eight o’clock; and Mrs. Trask would have her daily meal waiting in the library elevator. Over the course of the day, rather than deciding to upbraid Mrs. Trask for the luxuriousness of the recent dinners, she had found herself wondering what the evening’s tray would contain.

  She gathered up the dishes from the previous night’s meal, along with an electric torch and the half-empty bottle of wine, and went down the corridor to the secret entrance to her rooms. She pressed the unlocking trigger; the improvised stone door opened into the chamber full of Japanese woodblock prints—and then she froze in shock.