The Dante Chamber

by Matthew Pearl

  “Do not dwell over the punishments,” Fallow advised him of his writing, “they only last until the final judgment.”

  Camp searched his mind, recalling a verse from Purgatory he had just read, in which Dante Alighieri exhorts his poem’s readers: Do not fix your thoughts on the punishments, think of what comes later; at worst it will not reach beyond the great judgment.

  Fallow had transported his entire being, his identity, even his language, into Dante’s vision.

  There was something comforting in believing that even our faults, especially faults, could be converted into a higher plan. Camp could understand that as well as any man. He considered this only for a flash, cursing his own physical and mental exhaustion.

  The latest place Camp was ushered was in a dark and narrow woodshed on the settlement, where one man and one woman, arms and legs tied, had been placed flat on their stomachs. They moaned and cried for mercy; the man pleaded for the Virgin Mary. Camp was less interested in the grotesque suffering of these poor people than in its proximity to the maniacs’ central operations.

  That piqued his curiosity.

  The earlier deaths were meant to be discovered and witnessed. The unseasonable weather at the moment made travel toward London trying. But the masterminds could have waited, so Camp surmised they must have been in a rush to complete their so-called “missions.” They were being hunted from all sides and knew it—a distraction Camp could use to his advantage if luck provided him even the slightest opportunity for escape.

  Back at the standing desk, Camp was composing his latest enforced chapter to the new sensation pamphlet. He wrote about the despair he had just witnessed of the bound and tied pair—styled after the terrace in Dante’s Purgatory cleansing humanity’s sins of the Avaricious and the Prodigal. As he worked on the chapter, he perked up to hear the agitated voice of the Great Mad Preacher. Since the return of the woman called Sibbie, the minister’s demeanor had cracked and curdled. He struggled to maintain the semblance of authority. Camp had not yet spoken to Sibbie—instead he had heard about her from Fallow and the other interview subjects he was given, and had observed her from afar.

  That was about to change.

  Sibbie swept into the chamber and walked right up to Camp. “This,” she said with undisguised contempt, “is the one you’re talking about?”

  “The work he does will be vital, and he has just the right experience for it,” Fallow said, trying to keep pace with her while maintaining a respectful distance. “Sibbie, he is the author of that very booklet of Dante phenomena that helped us stir the imaginations of so many, that brought them to Dante in the first place.”

  Sibbie grabbed the pages on top of Camp’s blotter and examined them with a tightly set jaw.

  Fallow gave a conspiratorial glance of support to Camp, as though they were allies—which perhaps for this very brief moment they were, more than Camp realized. “Sibbie, we have already begun to put this chronicle in type. When our full story emerges, so will the next epoch for what we are to achieve.”

  She began to respond, when they were interrupted by an unannounced visitor. Once again it was the imposing Ironhead Herman.

  “Well! She is finally back,” the swarthy visitor said without pausing for any greetings or trying to quiet his voice. “Just as I heard. Which means my time to collect has come.”

  “You heard? How?” Fallow inserted himself between Herman and Sibbie. “She’s only just returned, Brother Herman. We need some more time to put our affairs and our mission in order, to recruit more men and women and replenish our funds.”

  “I made certain you were amply supplied with what you needed for your so-called sanatorium, and my patience, and that of the superiors I answer to, is a good deal shorter than you seem to believe.”

  Camp interrupted. “Say, fellow,” he said, turning to Herman, “perhaps you would allow me to ask some questions for the chronicle I’m writing?”

  “Enough of that,” Fallow snapped at Camp. Then, back to the other man: “A compromise, then, Brother Herman. Circumstances and police interest have strained our resources. A partial amount, perhaps.”

  “You have one more week,” Herman replied.

  “We do not need a week,” said Sibbie. “Why not give us until sunset?”

  Herman fixed his eyes to her. “Very well.”

  “If you require some assurance from us now, apparently I have something of value right here,” Sibbie said.

  “Please, Sibbie,” Fallow whispered, trying to steer her away before she provoked Herman.

  She grabbed a handful of pages from Camp’s table and pushed them hard into Herman’s chest. “Here. These gentlemen around me apparently believe in the efficacy of a profitable sensation. Payment.”

  “Say!” Camp cried out, objecting to the treatment of his literary property.

  “Sibbie, I beg you!” Fallow exclaimed.

  Herman took the pages and tossed them into the air back at Sibbie. He stormed out without another word. Camp, against all logic, felt rather offended at the exchange, both the woman so roughly offering his work and the rogue throwing it around carelessly. Camp was almost relieved when Fallow, groping for his old dominance, ordered him to get down on the ground to collect the papers.

  As Camp gathered the sheets of paper, the preacher was trying to delicately reason with the woman who gave him his orders. Camp slowed his chore in order to take in their conversation.

  “Ironhead Herman’s too dangerous to cross. We must find a way to pay our debt immediately. He’ll destroy us.”

  “Let him try. The debts we tend to are of another kind. He cannot stop what we are doing here. Nobody can.”

  Something in her voice chilled Camp’s blood and sent his heart racing. As he crawled around collecting the last of the pages, he saw what he looked for. There were two sword-wielding guards, but neither blocked the door left open by Herman’s exit; plus, springing up from his position on his hands and knees could sufficiently surprise them.

  At the right moment Camp bolted through the exit. Fallow shouted to the guards to follow, but both of the green-clad men stopped cold when Sibbie ordered that they wait.

  “Brothers, I do not want that man Simon Camp to blemish our home again,” she said. “He breaks the divine order.” She then released them to the chase with the slightest nod of her head.

  “We need him,” Fallow said. “We need Camp.”

  She shook her head and, with a meaningful grin, replied, “Our needs have changed. Besides, a far more sublime writer is among us.”

  * * *

  —

  When she returned to consciousness, Christina suspected almost at once that she had been dosed with opium—not the slight unpleasant aftertaste of it that she, like everyone, had experienced from medicine but a rush of the drug coursing and battling through her body. She now found herself in a poorly lit, cold chamber but felt a source of heat coming from somewhere. Earlier, after being carried by Gabriel onto the grounds of the sanatorium, she had been left dazed and physically sickened by Sibbie’s absolute control over the people gathered there—people Christina now realized were Sibbie’s followers, Gabriel included, in a settlement of true believers. Reverend Fallow and all the others had been doing the bidding of this mesmerizing woman all along. Christina had been shivering, her teeth chattering as the assembly stood out barefoot in the snow. Fallow began to gently escort Christina out of the cold. They were accompanied by two golden-haired guards in green robes with swords at their sides.

  It was just how Dante described the angels guarding the divisions of Purgatory. I clearly discerned their blond heads, but their faces dazzled my eyes, a faculty conquered by excess.

  As Fallow had led her away, she had been writhing and struggling, reaching out for Gabriel. “Darling, darling, you will be safe here,” her brother called out. Fallow brought her into a building whe
re a hot drink awaited her—it tasted bitter but she could not resist the warmth that wrapped itself around her body. Then, the heavy odor struck her. It was familiar. Familiar from the haze that often surrounded Gabriel and Lizzie, from women and girls she had helped pull from crammed rooms off of narrow alleyways to bring into Saint Mary’s. Opium. She began spitting out what she still could. Her vision thickened, and her mind fell into a dreamy, almost peaceful state of blankness.

  She came to in the cold chamber with her heart racing. At first she heard voices. A chorus of voices, ten, twenty that became one—her father. The professore.

  “You failed, my bantling. You grew to try to control everything around you, but you never could control your dreams. Nor could you stop the coming of Dante against our enemies.”

  She thought back to the day after the professore died, the night her mother fed all the copies she could find of the professore’s Dante treatise into the fire like fresh wood on a long winter night. Christina could see her mother’s face. In it mingled horror and relief. Christina, then twenty-three, stood behind her mother and watched the flames curl up around the covers, lick at the pages, ingest the words inside—the words that had simultaneously kept the professore alive and devoured him from the inside.

  She’d noticed the stealthy movements of a figure in the next room. It was Gabriel, smuggling out as many copies of their father’s book as he could.

  She shook away the professore’s voice. She felt her eyes closing but struggled hard to keep them open. The worst of her predicament was that she had been separated from Gabriel after swearing to herself she would not let him out of her sight again.

  She tried to recite some of her verses to herself to clear her mind.

  I planted a hand

  And there came up a palm,

  I planted a heart

  And there came up balm.

  I planted a wish,

  But there sprang a thorn,

  While heaven frowned with thunder

  And earth sighed forlorn.

  She groped the brick walls and felt her way through a long corridor, then another, toward the warmth. She waited until the poisons in her body lost just a little more of their power. Finally she reached a chamber where there was ample light and heat. She had to blink several times, sure that what she saw before her eyes must have been another illusion of the opium.

  Spread across the table was a sumptuous, almost biblical banquet: fruits, nuts, honey, milk, wine. Nothing disappeared when she blinked.

  “Darling sister.”

  She jumped up, startled.

  The words came out as a kind of chant.

  As she turned around, her eyes landed upon Gabriel’s face. Like the food, this was no opium dream. “Oh, my dear Gabriel! Thank heavens!” Because she was so filled with joy and relief at the sight of him—and perhaps because the opium still clouded her vision—it took another moment to realize he was on the other side of two rows of iron bars.

  “Gabriel, what is this place? What’s happening here?”

  The chamber was separated by the bars into two extreme divisions. Her side had light and a small furnace. Gabriel’s compartment was dark and cold, except for the heat that escaped from the furnace on her side of the bars. Gabriel sat on the ground in a white robe. His eyes returned again and again to the feast. She noticed what she hadn’t observed in the carriage ride, when she had still bathed in the glow of being reunited with her brother: he didn’t look well, his usually florid face pale and drawn. The skin around his eyes was much darker than the rest of his face. She recalled something Dolly had told her at the police station. He’s refusing to eat, all the excitement of talking of his release is not good for him, I’d say.

  Christina grabbed a plate of food and tried to push bits through to him. The rows of bars were arranged in such a way that nothing from one side could reach the other.

  Gabriel shook his head at her attempts. “This food shall not be for me.”

  “What did you say?” Christina asked, horrified, barely able to push her voice past a whisper.

  “This food,” he repeated, “shall not be for me.”

  It was a line from Purgatory—a voice Dante hears on the terrace of the Gluttonous. The penultimate level of Mount Purgatory, where the thirsty and famished shades suffer as they observe delicious food just out of reach.

  It was happening again.

  Purgatory reborn in 1870.

  This time, Gabriel was the so-called shade, the repenting soul. Gabriel would be the one to die.

  Her mind was spinning. “You stopped eating days ago. You knew this was coming.”

  Gabriel turned away.

  She could not let him bury himself in silence, to yield to physical weakness and hopelessness—she needed him fighting, and she needed to know more in order to help him. Her body trembling with frustration, Christina had an idea. As the words of Dante’s canto flooded her thoughts, she knew all at once how to provoke him to say more. She recited the words spoken by Dante when coming upon a shade in the region of the Gluttonous:

  “‘O Soul, who seems to desire to talk with me, speak so that I may hear, with your words content you and me.’”

  He slowly turned back to her.

  “You stopped eating days ago,” she repeated.

  Gabriel hummed his agreement under his breath. “Of course.”

  Christina’s mind was suddenly sharper, and she thought about where she was when she first made her vow to find Gabriel. Saint Mary’s, the woman’s penitentiary in Highgate. Penitentiary. It was not enough for the women who came there to stop participating in their world of the night, it was not enough to reform themselves. It was a penitentiary—they had to be penitent, to demonstrate and display it in order to earn their change.

  Christina next thought about Lillian Brenner, the singer impaled with her eyes sewn shut, overheard talking about wine by witnesses who thought her words indicated she was a drunkard. In the second terrace of Purgatory, the shades being cleansed of Envy hear the voice of the Virgin Mary imploring Jesus Christ to turn water into wine at a wedding that had none. Mary’s action was the opposite of envy because it ensured happiness in other people. Brenner’s words about wine were part of the design, the experience. Gibson, running to his death, called out to Christina and Browning, I hope you do not think me rude. It was not merely a morbid example of the art patron’s usual obtuse eccentricity. When Dante encounters the Slothful on the fourth terrace, now driven to extreme zeal in their movements, they cry out: “We cannot linger, and your pardon I pray, if you take our penance for discourtesy.” Gibson, Brenner, Gabriel, surely Morton and Loring, too, performed their own parts in their deaths.

  “Those were not murders. Morton, Brenner, Gibson, Loring. They knew . . . they all knew what was happening to them. You knew. This is a suicide club.”

  “Those who know justice are blessed.”

  “You prepared for this; you stopped eating in order to stage this purgation of the Gluttonous. Why?”

  Gabriel pushed himself to his feet. “Sibbie found that each of us possessed a sin that had to be purged more than any other, just as the shades who travel through Dante’s Purgatory—just as Dante himself, who knows he is most beset by pride. Me? I always took more than I needed in life—food, wine, women, opium—I loved, yes. I loved excessively. We all saw where it led. It had to come to an end. My child taken away from us, then Lizzie herself gone. Even then, I could not stop, could I? I was greedy still, this time for my art.”

  “Your art?”

  “I had Lizzie’s grave torn up to get my precious pages back. A moment of gluttony like no other. Ever since, I was on the path to this. For the first time in history, we have believed in our modern world that we can transgress without consequence and without punishment, as long as not many people see—here, on these sacred grounds, we change that. Sibbie
led us to that. To serve as a witness is the first step.”

  “What do you mean ‘a witness’?”

  “You’re witnessing this next step toward Paradise, this purgation, Christina, just as I witnessed past ones.”

  “That’s why you were at those places? At the deaths of Morton and Brenner. You were there to be a witness, as was Loring—then you were at Loring’s. Sibbie, she was there, too, wasn’t she?”

  Sibbie had been at Loring’s death, of course. Before that, there were the unidentified women at Morton’s and Brenner’s deaths, a blonde and a brunette they had never located: both were Sibbie as she had begun to alter her appearance to avoid any outside interference.

  Gabriel’s notation on his sketch of the terrace of gluttony, with the faceless shade suffering. CR—need your help. He had needed her as witness to this, as planned out by Sibbie. The suffering shade in the drawing was him.

  “You don’t realize all that has happened,” Christina said. “She and Fallow have been dosing you with drugs to control all of you.”

  Gabriel’s eyes were glassy. A moment later, he wobbled, then fell back to the ground.

  “Gabriel!” Receiving no response, she tried: “Dante!”

  His eyes were shut tightly.

  Glancing around for some way out, the comforts of her compartment increasingly appeared as a mirage of safety. There was food, light, heat, but no windows, no doors. Running back through the winding corridor she came in, she slammed her body against a locked door made of iron, weakening herself even more. Through the keyhole she cried out.