The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Douglas Preston

  Nora felt a twinge of offense at this abrupt dismissal. She reminded herself that this was what she had wanted… Wasn’t it? After a moment she spoke. “Thanks for saying so. But if you ask me, this business sounds totally unfinished. If you’re right about this, 99 Doyers Street seems like the next logical stop.”

  “That is correct. The basement apartment is currently unoccupied, and an excavation below the living room floor would be most instructive. I plan to rent the apartment myself and undertake that excavation. And that is why I must recover as quickly as possible. Take care, Dr. Kelly.” He shifted with an air of finality.

  “Who’s going to do the excavation?” she asked.

  “I will find another archaeologist.”

  Nora looked at him sharply.“Where?”

  “Through the New Orleans field office. They are most flexible when it comes to my, ah, projects.”

  “Right,” said Nora briskly. “But this isn’t a job for just any archaeologist. This requires someone with special skills in—”

  “Are you offering?”

  Nora was silent.

  “Of course you’re not. That’s why I didn’t ask. You’ve more than once expressed your desire to return to a more normal course of work. I’ve imposed upon you too much as it is. Besides, this investigation has taken a dangerous turn, far more so than I initially assumed. An assumption I have paid for, as you can see. I would not wish you exposed to any more danger than you have been already.”

  Nora stood up.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s settled. I’ve enjoyed working with you, Mr. Pendergast—if ‘enjoy’ is the right word. It’s certainly been interesting.” She felt vaguely dissatisfied with this outcome, even though it was what she had come down here to achieve.

  “Indeed,” said Pendergast. “Most interesting.”

  She began to walk toward the door, then stopped, remembering something. “But I may be in touch with you again. I got a note from Reinhart Puck in the Archives. Says he’s found some new information, asked me to stop by later this afternoon. If it seems useful, I’ll pass it on.”

  Pendergast’s pale eyes were still regarding her attentively. “Do that. And again, Dr. Kelly, you have my thanks. Be very careful.”

  She nodded, then turned to leave, smiling at the baleful stares that greeted her as she passed the nurses’ station.

  FIFTEEN

  THE DOOR TO the archives gave out a sharp creak as Nora eased it open. There had been no response to her knocking, and the door was unlocked, in clear violation of regulations. Very strange.

  The smell of old books, papers, and the odor of corruption that seemed to suffuse the entire Museum hung in her nostrils. Puck’s desk lay in the center of a pool of light, a wall of darkness beyond. Puck himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Nora checked her watch. Four P.M. She was right on time.

  She released the door and it sighed back into place. She turned the lock, then approached the desk, heels clicking on the marble floor. She signed in automatically, scrawling her name at the top of a fresh page in the logbook. Puck’s desk was neater than usual, and a single typewritten note sat in the middle of the green felt pad. She glanced at it. I’m on the triceratops in the back.

  The triceratops, Nora thought, looking into the gloom. Leave it to Puck to be off dusting old relics. But where the hell was the triceratops? She didn’t recall having seen one. And there were no lights on in the back that she could see. The damn triceratops could be anywhere. She looked around: no diagram of the Archives, either. Typical.

  Feeling an undercurrent of irritation, she moved to the banks of ivory light switches. She snapped a few on at random. Lights sprang up here and there, deep within the Archives, casting long shadows down the rows of metal shelving. Might as well turn them all on, she thought, flipping whole rows of switches with the edge of her hand. But even with all the lights, the Archives remained curiously shadowy and dim, large pools of darkness and long dim aisles predominating.

  She waited, half expecting Puck to call out to her. There was no sound except the distant ticking of steam pipes and the hiss of the forced-air ducts.

  “Mr. Puck?” she called tentatively.

  Her voice reverberated and died. No answer.

  She called again, louder this time. The Archives were so vast she wondered if her voice could penetrate to the rear.

  For a minute, she considered coming back another time. But Puck’s message had been most insistent.

  Vaguely, she recalled seeing some mounted fossil skeletons on her last visit. Maybe she would find the triceratops among them.

  With a sigh, she began walking down one of the aisles, listening to the clatter of her shoes against the marble. Although the entrance to the aisle had been brightly lit, it soon grew shadowy and dim. It was amazing how poorly illuminated the place was; in the middle sections of the aisles, far from the lights, one almost needed a flashlight to make out the objects stacked on the shelves.

  At the next pool of light, Nora found herself at a junction from which several aisles wandered away at a variety of angles. She paused, considering which to take. It’s like Hansel and Gretel in here, she thought. And I’m fresh out of bread crumbs.

  The aisle closest to her left went in a direction that, she remembered, led to a grouping of stuffed animals. But its few lights were burned out and it vanished into darkness. Nora shrugged and took the next aisle over.

  It felt so different, walking these passages alone. The last time, she’d been with Pendergast and Puck. She had been thinking about Shottum and hadn’t paid much attention to her surroundings. With Puck guiding their steps, she hadn’t even bothered to notice the strange jogs these aisles took, the odd angles at which they met. It was the most eccentric layout imaginable, made even more eccentric by its vast size.

  Her thoughts were interrupted as the aisle took a sharp turn to the left. Around the corner, she unexpectedly came upon a number of freestanding African mammals—giraffes, a hippo, a pair of lions, wildebeests, kudu, water buffalo. Each was wrapped in plastic, bestowing a muffled, ghostly appearance.

  Nora stopped. No sign of a triceratops. And once again, the aisles led away in half a dozen directions. She chose one at random, followed it through one jog, then another, coming abruptly to another intersection.

  This was getting ridiculous. “Mr. Puck!” she called out loudly.

  The echoes of her voice gradually faded away. The hiss of forced air filled the ensuing silence.

  She didn’t have time for this. She would come back later, and she’d call first to make sure Puck was waiting at his desk. Better still, she’d just tell him to take whatever it was he wanted to show her directly to Pendergast. She was off the case, anyway.

  She turned to walk out of the Archives, taking what she thought would be the shortest path. After a few minutes, she came to a stop beside a rhino and several zebras. They looked like lumpy sentinels beneath the omnipresent plastic, giving off a strong smell of paradichlorobenzene.

  These aisles didn’t look familiar. And she didn’t seem to be any closer to the exit.

  For a moment, she felt a small current of anxiety. Then she shook it away with a forced laugh. She’d just make her way back to the giraffes, then retrace her steps from there.

  As she turned, her foot landed in a small puddle of water. She looked up just as a drop of water splattered on her forehead. Condensation from the pipes far overhead. She shook it away and moved on.

  But she couldn’t seem to find her way back to the giraffes.

  This was crazy. She’d navigated through trackless deserts and dense rainforests. How could she be lost in a museum in the middle of New York City?

  She looked around, realizing it was her sense of direction she had lost. With all these angled aisles, these dimly lit intersections, it had become impossible to tell where the front desk was. She’d have to—

  She abruptly froze, listening intently. A soft pattering sound. It was hard to te
ll where it had come from, but it was close.

  “Mr. Puck? Is that you?”

  Nothing.

  She listened, and the pattering sound came again. Just more water dripping somewhere, she thought. Even so, she was more eager than ever to find the door.

  She chose an aisle at random and moved down it at a brisk walk, heels clicking rapidly against the marble. On both sides of the aisle, the shelves were covered with bones stacked like cordwood, each with a yellowing tag tied to its end. The tags flapped and fluttered in the dead air stirred by her passage. The place was like a crypt. Amid the silence, the darkness, and the ghoulish specimens, it was hard not to think about the set of grisly murders that had occurred just a few years before, within this very subbasement. It was still the subject of rumor and speculation in the staff lounge.

  The aisle ended in another jog.

  Damn it, thought Nora, looking up and down the long rows of shelving that vanished into the gloom. Another welling of anxiety, harder to fight down this time. And then, once again, she heard—or thought she heard—a noise from behind. This time it wasn’t a pattering, so much as the scrape of a foot on stone.

  “Who’s there?” she demanded, spinning around. “Mr. Puck?”

  Nothing save the hiss of steam and the drip of water.

  She began walking again, a little faster now, telling herself not to be afraid; that the noises were merely the incessant shiftings and settlings of an old, decrepit building. The very corridors seemed watchful. The click of her heels was unbearably loud.

  She turned a corner and stepped in another puddle of water. She pulled back in disgust. Why didn’t they do something about these old pipes?

  She looked at the puddle again. The water was black, greasy—not, in fact, water at all. Oil had leaked on the floor, or maybe some chemical preservative. It had a strange, sour smell. But it didn’t look like it had leaked from anywhere: she was surrounded by shelves covered with mounted birds, beaks open, eyes wide, wings upraised.

  What a mess, she thought, turning her expensive Bally shoe sideways to find that the oily liquid had soiled the sole and part of the stitching. This place was a disgrace. She pulled an oversized handkerchief from her pocket—a necessary accoutrement to working in a dusty museum—and wiped it along the edge of the shoe. And then, abruptly, she froze. Against the white background of the handkerchief, the liquid was not black. It was a deep, glistening red.

  She dropped the handkerchief and took an involuntary step back, heart hammering. She looked at the pool, stared at it with sudden horror. It was blood—a whole lot of blood. She looked around wildly: where had it come from? Had it leaked out of a specimen? But it seemed to be just sitting there, all alone—a large pool of blood in the middle of the aisle. She glanced up, but there was nothing: just the dim ceiling thirty feet above, crisscrossed with pipes.

  Then she heard what sounded like another footfall, and, through a shelf of specimens, she glimpsed movement. Then, silence returned.

  But she had definitely heard something. Move, move, all her instincts cried out.

  Nora turned and walked quickly down the long aisle. Another sound came—fast footsteps? The rustle of fabric?—and she paused again to listen. Nothing but the faint drips from the pipes. She tried to stare through the isolated gaps in the shelves. There was a wall of specimen jars, snakes coiled in formaldehyde, and she strained to see through. There seemed to be a shape on the other side, large and black, rippled and distorted by the stacks of glass jars. She moved… and it moved in turn. She was sure of it.

  She backtracked quickly, breath coming faster, and the dark shape moved as well. It seemed to be pacing her in the next aisle—perhaps waiting for her to reach either one end or the other.

  She slowed and, struggling to master her fear, tried walking as calmly as she could toward the end of the aisle. She could see, hear, the shape—so near now—moving as well, keeping pace.

  “Mr. Puck?” she ventured, voice quavering.

  There was no answer.

  Suddenly, Nora found herself running. She arrowed down the aisle, sprinting as fast as she could. Swift footfalls sounded in the adjoining aisle.

  Ahead was a gap, where her aisle joined the next. She had to get past, outrun the person in the adjoining aisle.

  She dashed through the gap, glimpsing for a split second a huge black figure, metal flashing in its gloved hand. She sprinted down the next aisle, through another gap, and on down the aisle again. At the next gap, she veered sharply right, heading down a new corridor. Selecting another aisle at random, she turned into it and ran on through the dimness ahead.

  Halfway to the next intersection, she stopped again, heart pounding. There was silence, and for a moment relief surged through her: she had managed to lose her pursuer.

  And then she caught the sound of faint breathing from the adjoining aisle.

  Relief disappeared as quickly as it had come. She had not outrun him. No matter what she did, no matter where she ran, he had continued to pace her, one aisle over.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  There was a faint rustle, then an almost silent laugh.

  Nora looked to the left and right, fighting back panic, desperately trying to determine the best way out. These shelves were covered with stacks of folded skins, parchment-dry, smelling fearfully of decay. Nothing looked familiar.

  Twenty feet farther down the aisle, she spied a gap in the shelving, on the side away from the unknown presence. She sprinted ahead and turned into the gap, then doubled back into yet another adjoining aisle. She stopped, crouched, waited.

  Footfalls sounded several aisles over, coming closer, then receding again. He had lost her.

  Nora turned and began moving, as stealthily as possible, through the aisles, trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and the pursuer. But no matter which way she turned, or how fast she ran, whenever she stopped she could hear the footfalls, rapid and purposeful, seeming to keep pace.

  She had to figure out where she was. If she kept running around aimlessly, eventually he—it—would catch her.

  She looked around. This aisle ended in a wall. She was at the edge of the Archives. Now, at least, she could follow the wall, make her way to the front.

  Crouching, she moved along as quickly as she could, listening intently for the sound of footsteps, her eye scanning the dimness ahead. Suddenly, something yawned out from the gloom: it was a triceratops skull, mounted on the wall, its outlines shadowy and vague in the poor light.

  Relief flooded through her. Puck must be around here somewhere; the intruder wouldn’t dare approach them simultaneously.

  She opened her mouth to call out softly. But then she paused, looking more closely at the dim outline of the dinosaur. Something was odd—the silhouette was all wrong. She began to move cautiously toward it. And then, abruptly, she stopped once again.

  There, impaled on the horns of the triceratops, hung a body, naked from the waist up, arms and legs hanging loose. Three bloody horns stuck right through the man’s back. It looked as if the triceratops had gored the person, hoisting him into the air.

  Nora took a step back. Her mind took in the details, as if from a long distance away: the balding head with a fringe of gray hair; the flabby skin; the withered arms. Where the horns had speared through the lower back, the flesh was one long, open wound. Blood had collected around the base of the horns, running in dark rivulets around the torso and dripping onto the marble.

  I’m on the triceratops in the back.

  In the back.

  She heard a scream, realized that it had come from her own throat.

  Blindly, she wheeled away and ran, veering once, and again, and then again, racing down the aisles as quickly as she could move her legs. And then, abruptly, she found herself in a cul-de-sac. She spun to retrace her steps—and there, blocking the end of the row, stood an antique, black-hatted figure.

  Something gleamed in his gloved hands.

  There
was nowhere to go but up. Without an instant’s thought, she turned, grabbed the edge of a shelf, and began climbing.

  The figure came flying down the aisle, black cloak billowing behind.

  Nora was an experienced rock climber. Her years as an archaeologist in Utah, climbing to caves and Anasazi cliff dwellings, were not forgotten. In a minute she had reached the top shelf, which swayed and groaned under the unexpected weight. She turned frantically, grabbed the first thing that came to hand—a stuffed falcon—and looked down once again.

  The black-hatted man was already below, climbing, face obscured in deep shadow. Nora aimed, then threw.

  The falcon bounced harmlessly off one shoulder.

  She looked around desperately for something else. A box of papers; another stuffed animal; more boxes. She threw one, then another. But they were too light, useless.

  Still the man climbed.

  With a sob of terror, she swung over the top shelf and started descending the other side. Abruptly, a gloved hand darted between the shelving, caught hold of her shirt. Nora screamed, ripping herself free. A dim flash of steel and a tiny blade swept past her, missing her eye by inches. She swung away as the blade made another glittering arc toward her. Pain abruptly blossomed in her right shoulder.

  She cried out, lost her grip. Landing on her feet, she broke her fall by rolling to one side.

  On the far side of the shelving, the man had quickly climbed back down to the ground. Now he began climbing directly through the shelf, kicking and knocking specimen jars and boxes aside.

  Again she ran, running wildly, blindly, from aisle to aisle.

  Suddenly, a vast shape rose out of the dimness before her. It was a woolly mammoth. Nora recognized it immediately: she’d been here, once before, with Puck.

  But which direction was out? As she looked around, Nora realized she would never make it—the pursuer would be upon her in a matter of seconds.

  Suddenly, she knew there was only one thing to do.