The Book of the Dead

by Richard Preston

“Look out!” Smithback cried as the man abruptly lunged at Pendergast. The agent stepped aside deftly, tripping the stumbling figure and pushing him to one side. The man fell heavily to the ground and rolled, unable to get up.

  They moved into a third room, Pendergast following the lines of molding with his flashlight. They appeared to all converge at a fake half-pilaster set into the far wall. Beneath stood a large XX Dynasty chest, gilded and intricately carved. It was set within a glass display case, unbroken despite the carnage.

  “There!” Pendergast walked over, picked up a broken chariot wheel, and swung it into the case, shattering the glass. He stepped back and, raising his gun again, shot the ancient bronze lock off the chest. After holstering his weapon, he swept away the lock and the broken glass and lifted the lid from the heavy chest. Inside, a large generator hummed and vibrated. Pendergast slipped a knife out of his pocket, reached in, and cut a wire; the generator coughed, choked, and died—plunging the tomb into utter darkness and silence.

  And yet the silence was not complete. Smithback could now hear a cacophony of cries and shrieks from the front section of the tomb: a moblike hysteria. He stood up, probing the darkness with his own flashlight.

  “Nora!” he cried out. “Nora!”

  Suddenly the beam of his light was arrested by a figure standing, half hidden, in a far alcove. Smithback stared in surprise. Although the man was dressed in impeccable white tie and tails, he wore a black mask over his face, and a set of headphones covered his ears. A small device that looked like a remote control was in his hand. He was standing so still Smithback wondered if perhaps he was just another holographic projection, but then, as if on cue, he reached up and pulled off the mask.

  Pendergast had been staring at the man, and the effect of his unmasking was remarkable. He stiffened and jerked, like a man who has received an electric shock. His face, normally so pale, flushed crimson.

  It seemed to Smithback that the tuxedoed figure’s reaction was even stronger. He went into a sudden, instinctive crouch, like a man poised to spring. Then he gathered himself together and slowly rose to his full height.

  “You!” he said. For a moment, he went still again. And then—with a long, spidery hand—he removed the headphones and earplugs, and slowly and deliberately dropped them to the floor.

  Fresh surprise blossomed over Smithback. He recognized this man: it was Nora’s boss, Hugo Menzies. And yet he looked so different. His eyes were flaming red, his limbs quivered. His face was flushed as deeply as Pendergast’s was—he was filled with rage.

  Pendergast’s hand went for his gun. Then he stopped, weapon half drawn, as if paralyzed.

  “Diogenes . . . ,” he said in a strangled voice.

  At the same time, Smithback heard his own name being called from a far corner. He looked over to see Nora staggering to her feet, supported by Viola Maskelene. Pendergast glanced over, noticing them as well.

  In that moment, Menzies darted to one side with incredible speed and vanished into the darkness. Pendergast turned, tensed for pursuit—and then he turned back again toward Viola, face contorted with indecision.

  Smithback dashed over to the two women and helped them to their feet. A moment later, Pendergast was beside him, taking Viola into his arms.

  “Oh my God,” she said, gasping and half weeping. “Oh my God, Aloysius . . .”

  But Smithback barely heard. His arms were around Nora, one hand caressing her smudged and bloodied face. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She winced. “A headache. A few scratches. It was so horrible.”

  “We’ll get you out.” Smithback turned back to Pendergast. The agent was still holding Viola in his embrace, his hands resting on her shoulders, but again, his gaze had darted toward the darkness into which Hugo Menzies had vanished.

  Behind, from the burial chamber, Smithback heard the muffled blaring of police radios. Flashlight beams lanced through the murk, and the police were there, a dozen or more uniformed officers looking confused, moving into the Hall of the Chariots, guns drawn.

  “What the hell’s going on?” said the commander, a lieutenant. “What is this place?”

  “You’re in the Tomb of Senef,” said Pendergast.

  “What about the explosion?”

  “Necessary to gain entry, Lieutenant,” said Captain Hayward, walking toward them and showing her shield. “Now, listen carefully. We have injured in here, and a lot more up ahead. We’re going to need EMTs, mobile first-aid stations, ambulances. Do you understand? Lieutenant D’Agosta is in the front of the tomb, about to escort the trapped victims back here to the exit. He needs help.”

  “Understood, Captain.” The lieutenant turned to his officers and began barking orders. Several of them holstered their weapons and began moving deeper into the tomb, flashlight beams bobbing. Beyond them, Smithback could hear the approach of the crowd, the sounds of moaning, sobbing, and coughing, punctuated now and again by angry, incoherent cries. It sounded like an insane asylum on the move.

  Pendergast was already helping Viola toward the exit. Smithback put his arm around Nora, and they fell in behind, headed for the gap blown in the corner of the burial chamber. Moments later, they were out of the mephitic tomb and inside the brightly lit subway station. A group of EMTs came running down the platform toward them, some carrying collapsible stretchers.

  “We’ll take them, gentlemen,” one of the medical technicians said as they came up, while the rest rushed through the gap into the tomb.

  In moments, Viola and Nora were strapped into stretchers and being carried up the stairs. Pendergast led the way. The flush had gone from his face, leaving it ashen and unreadable. Smithback walked beside Nora.

  She smiled and reached up to grasp his hand. “I knew you’d come,” she said.

  67

  We serve breakfast beginning at six, sir,” the porter said to the handsome, impeccably dressed gentleman in the private compartment.

  “I would prefer to be served in my bedroom. Thank you in advance for obliging me.”

  The porter glanced down at the twenty-dollar bill being pressed into his hand. “No problem, sir, not a problem at all. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yes. You could bring me a chilled glass, some crushed ice, a bottle of cold spring water, and a tin of sugar cubes.”

  “Very good, sir. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” The man stepped out of the compartment, smiling and bowing, and shut the door with almost reverential caution.

  Diogenes Pendergast watched the dwarfish man disappear down the corridor and out of sight. He heard the footsteps patter away, heard the clunk of the heavy door at the end of the railroad car. He heard the myriad sounds of Penn Station, commingled and yet disparate in his mind: the ebb and flow of conversation outside the train, the sonorous droning of the stationmaster’s announcements.

  He shifted his gaze to the window, looked idly out at the platform. A landscape in shades of gray greeted him. A portly conductor stood there, patiently giving directions to a young woman, baby in her arms. A commuter trotted by, briefcase in hand, hurrying to catch the last Midtown Express to Dover on the adjoining track. An elderly woman tottered slowly by, frail and thin. She stopped to stare at the train, then at her ticket, before continuing on her precarious way.

  Diogenes saw them all, yet he paid them little heed. They were simply visual ephemera, a distraction for his mind . . . to keep it from drifting toward other, more maddening thoughts.

  After the first few minutes—moments of anguish, disbelief, and white-hot rage—he had more or less managed to keep the thought of his failure at arm’s length. The fact was, under the circumstances he had managed quite well: he always had multiple exit plans in place, and this evening he’d followed the most appropriate one to the letter. Barely half an hour had passed since he’d fled the museum. And yet already he was safely aboard the Lake Champlain, the overnight Amtrak train to Montreal. It was an ideal train for his purposes: it stopped at Cold Spring, on the
Hudson, to change from electric to diesel, and all passengers were given thirty minutes to stretch their legs.

  Diogenes would use the time to pay a final visit to his old friend Margo Green.

  The hypo was already filled and lovingly nestled in its gift box, beautifully wrapped and beribboned. It was tucked safely away in his valise along with his most precious items—his scrapbooks, his personal pharmacopoeia of hallucinogens and opioids, his ghastly little trinkets and playthings of which nobody who’d ever caught sight had been permitted to live—all stowed in the overhead compartment. Enough clothing and disguises to get him safely home were hanging in the garment bag inside the small closet by the door. And safely tucked into his pocket were his documents and passports.

  Now all that remained was to think as little as possible about what had happened. He did this by turning again, contemplatively, to Margo Green.

  In his exhaustive, disciplined preparations for the sound-and-light show, she was the one indulgence he allowed himself. She was the only carryover from the earlier stage of his plan. Unlike the others, she was a sitting duck, to be played with and dispatched with little risk, time, or effort.

  What about her, in particular, had drawn him back—more than, say, William Smithback, Nora Kelly, Vincent D’Agosta, or Laura Hayward? He wasn’t sure, but he guessed it was her long connection to the museum—to the pontificating, pedestrian, whoreson, didactic, beggarly, jejune, ossified, shit-encrusted minds amongst whom he had been buried—as Hugo Menzies—for more years than he cared to count. It had been an insufferably extended torture. The whole lot of them would have been dispatched by the sound-and-light show—except for her. He had failed with the others, but he would not fail with her.

  It had pleased him to pay her frequent sympathetic visits in her comatose state—which he had been at pains to extend, keeping her on the brink of expiration, teasing out her widowed mother’s pain to the greatest possible extent. It was a brew of suffering from which he drank deep, and whose astringent taste renewed his own thirst for the living death that was his life.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Diogenes said.

  The porter entered rolling a portable bar, which he set up on an adjoining table. “Anything else, sir?”

  “Not at the moment. You may make up my bed in an hour.”

  “Very good, sir. I’ll get your breakfast order then.” The man retreated with another deferential bow.

  Diogenes sat for a moment, once again glancing out at the platform. Then, slowly, he drew a silver flask from his breast pocket. Opening it, he poured several ounces of a brilliant green liquid—which to him looked pale gray—into the glass on the portable bar. Then he retrieved a spoon from his leather valise: a silver spoon with the Pendergast family crest stamped on its handle, somewhat melted at one corner. He handled it as one might handle one’s newborn child. Carefully, lovingly, he laid the spoon across the top of the glass and placed a sugar cube inside it. Then, taking the chilled water, he poured it onto the cube, drop by drop. Spilling over the edges of the spoon like a sugary fountain, the sweetened water fell into the liqueur below, turning it first a milky green, then a beautiful opalescent jade—if his eyes could only see in color.

  All of this was done without the slightest trace of hurry.

  Diogenes put the spoon carefully aside and lifted the glass to his lips, savoring the faintly bitter taste. He screwed the cap back on the flask and returned it to his pocket. It was the only modern absinthe he had found that had the same high proportion of essences of wormwood as the old nineteenth-century brands. As such, it deserved to be drunk in the traditional manner.

  He took another sip, settling back comfortably into the chair. What was it Oscar Wilde had said of drinking absinthe? “The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage, where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.”

  Strange how, no matter how much he drank, Diogenes never seemed to get past the second stage—nor did he particularly care to.

  A small speaker set high up in the wall came to life.

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is the conductor speaking. Welcome aboard the Lake Champlain, making stops at Yonkers, Cold Spring, Poughkeepsie, Albany, Saratoga Springs, Plattsburg, St.-Lambert, and Montreal. This is your final boarding call. All visitors, please exit the train at this time . . .

  Listening, Diogenes smiled faintly. The Lake Champlain was one of only two luxury passenger trains still operated by Amtrak. By taking two adjoining first-class bedrooms and having the partition between them unlocked, Diogenes had secured himself a passably comfortable suite. It was a criminal disgrace the way politicians had allowed America’s passenger train system, once the envy of the world, to fall into insolvency and disrepair. But this, too, was but a passing inconvenience: he would soon be back in Europe, where people understood how to travel in dignity and comfort.

  Outside the window, a heavyset woman wobbled quickly by, a porter burdened down with suitcases trotting in her wake. Diogenes held up his glass, stirring the pearly liquid gently. The train would depart within moments. And now for the first time—cautiously, like a man approaching a dangerous animal—he allowed himself a brief moment of reflection.

  It was almost too dreadful to contemplate. Fifteen years of planning, careful disguise, artful intrigue, ingenious contrivance . . . all for naught. The thought of all the work and time he had put into Menzies alone—fashioning his backstory, learning his trade, obtaining employment, working for years and years, attending vapid meetings and listening to the asinine mutterings of desiccated curators—was almost enough to send him spiraling into a pit of madness. And then there was the final extravaganza, in all its intricate and fearsome glory: the meticulous medical research into how one could contrive to transform ordinary people into murderous sociopaths using nothing more than sound and light—the ablation of the inhibitory cerebral pathway by laser light, traumatizing the entorhinal cortex and amygdala and allowing for disinhibition of rudimentary function . . . And then, there had been the painstaking implementation of his own special sound-and-light show hidden within the multimedia presentation everybody else had slaved over—and the testing of it on the technician and that ass, Wicherly . . .

  It had all been so perfect. Even the tomb’s curse, which he’d exploited so beautifully, added an exquisite touch: softening people up, preparing them psychologically for the terror of his sound-and-light show. It would have worked. In fact, it did work—except for the one element he could never have predicted: his brother escaping from Herkmoor. How had he managed that? And then he had appeared on the scene just in time to once again ruin everything.

  How very like Aloysius. Aloysius, who—as the less gifted brother—had always taken grim pleasure in tearing down those things he himself lovingly constructed. Aloysius who, realizing he would always be bested intellectually, had taken the ultimate step of subjecting him to an Event that would ensure . . .

  But here the hand holding the glass began to shake, and Diogenes immediately shut down this line of thought. Never mind: he would leave his brother one more gift for the delectation of his conscience: the gruesome death of Margo Green.

  There was a hiss of brakes; another announcement from the conductor; and then, with a squealing of metal wheels, the train began to creep forward along the platform. He was on his way: Cold Spring, Canada, Europe, and home.

  Home. Just the thought of being back in his library, among his treasured possessions, within the embrace of a structure lovingly designed to spoil his every whim, helped restore his equanimity. It was from home that, over many years, he’d planned his perfect crime. From there he could do it again. He was still relatively young. He had many years left, more than enough to develop a plan—a better plan.

  He took a deeper sip of absinthe. In his rage and shock, he was forgetting something. He had succeede
d, at least in part. He had hurt his brother terribly. Aloysius had been publicly humiliated, charged with the murders of his own friends, sent to prison. He might be free, temporarily, but he was still a wanted man: the prison break would only deepen the hole he was in. He could never rest, never take an easy breath. He would be hunted endlessly. For somebody so private, the prison ordeal must have been mortifying.

  Yes, he had accomplished much. He had struck his brother in a most vital, most sensitive spot. While Aloysius had been languishing in prison, he had seduced his brother’s ward. What an abominable, delicious pleasure it had been. Remarkable: a hundred years of childhood . . . and yet still so fresh, so innocent and naive. Every web he had spun, every cynical lie he had told, had been a joy: especially his long and windy disquisitions on color. She would be dead by now, lying in a pool of her own blood. Yes, murder was one thing: but suicide, genuine suicide, struck the hardest blow of all.

  He took another slow sip and watched the platform glide by over the rim of the glass. He was approaching Oscar Wilde’s second stage of absinthe drinking, the contemplation of monstrous and cruel things—and he wanted to hold in his mind, like a soothing balm, one particular image: his brother standing over the dead body of Constance, reading the letter. This was the image that would comfort, nourish, and sustain him until he reached home . . .