The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Douglas Preston

  This hall was full of an odd assortment of displays Nora was unable to comprehend: weird tables, cabinets, large boxes, iron cages, strange apparatus.

  “A magician’s warehouse,” Pendergast murmured in answer to her unspoken question.

  They passed through the room, beneath an archway, and into a grand reception hall. Once again, Pendergast stopped to study several lines of footprints that crossed and recrossed the parquet floor.

  “Barefoot, now,” she heard him say to himself. “And this time, he was running.”

  He quickly probed the immense space with his beam. Nora saw an astonishing range of objects: mounted skeletons, fossils, glass-fronted cabinets full of wondrous and terrible artifacts, gems, skulls, meteorites, iridescent beetles. The flashlight played briefly over all. The scent of cobwebs, leather, and old buckram hung heavy in the thick air, veiling a fainter—and much less pleasant—smell.

  “What is this place?” Nora asked.

  “Leng’s cabinet of curiosities.” A two-toned pistol had appeared in Pendergast’s left hand. The stench was worse now; sickly sweet, oily, that filled the air like a wet fog, clinging to her hair, limbs, clothes.

  He moved forward, warily, his light playing off the various objects in the room. Some of the objects were uncovered, but most were draped. The walls were lined with glass cases, and Pendergast moved toward them, his flashlight licking from one to the next. The glass sparked and shimmered as the beam hit it; dark shadows, thrown from the objects within, reared forward as if living things.

  Suddenly, the beam stopped dead. Nora watched as Pendergast’s pale face lost what little color it normally had. For a moment, he simply stared, motionless, not even seeming to draw breath. Then, very slowly, he approached the case. The beam of the flashlight trembled a bit as he moved. Nora followed, wondering what had had such a galvanic effect on the agent.

  The glass case was not like the rest. It did not contain a skeleton, stuffed trophy, or carven image. Instead, behind the glass stood the figure of a dead man, legs and arms strapped upright between crude iron bars and cuffs, mounted as if for museum display. The man was dressed in severe black, with a nineteenth-century frock coat and striped pants.

  “Who—?” Nora managed to say.

  But Pendergast was transfixed, hearing nothing, his face rigid. All his attention was concentrated on the mounted man. The light played mercilessly about the corpse. It lingered for a long time on one particular detail—a pallid hand, the flesh shrunken and shriveled, a single knucklebone poking from a tear in the rotten flesh.

  Nora stared at the exposed knuckle, red and ivory against the parchment skin. With a nauseous lurch in the pit of her stomach, she realized that the hand was missing all its fingernails; that, in fact, nothing remained of the fingertips but bloody stumps, punctuated by protruding bones.

  Then—slowly, inexorably—the light began traveling up the front of the corpse. The beam rose past the buttons of the coat, up the starched shirtfront, before at last stopping on the face.

  It was mummified, shrunken, wizened. And yet it was surprisingly well preserved, all the features modeled as finely as if carved from stone. The lips, which had dried and shriveled, were drawn back in a rictus of merriment, exposing two beautiful rows of white teeth. Only the eyes were gone: empty sockets like bottomless pools no light could illuminate.

  There was a hollow, muffled sound of rustling coming from inside the skull.

  The journey through the house had already numbed Nora with horror. But now her mind went blank with an even worse shock: the shock of recognition.

  She automatically turned, speechless, to Pendergast. His frame remained rigid, his eyes wide and staring. Whatever it was he had expected to find, it was not this.

  She shifted her horrified gaze back at the corpse. Even in death, there could be no question. The corpse had the same marble-colored skin, the same refined features, the same thin lips and aquiline nose, the same high smooth forehead and delicate chin, the same fine pale hair—as Pendergast himself.

  SIX

  CUSTER OBSERVED THE perp—he’d already begun to call him that—with deep satisfaction. The man stood in his office, hands cuffed behind him, black tie askew and white shirt rumpled, hair disheveled, dark circles of sweat beneath his armpits. How are the mighty fallen, indeed. He’d held out a long time, kept up that arrogant, impatient facade. But now, the eyes were red, the lips trembling. He hadn’t believed it was really going to happen to him. It was the cuffs that did it, Custer thought knowingly to himself. He had seen it happen many times before, to men a lot tougher than Brisbane. Something about the cool clasp of the manacles around your wrists, the realization that you were under arrest, powerless—in custody—was more than some people could take.

  The true, the pure, police work was over—now it was just a matter of collecting all the little evidentiary details, work for the lower echelons to complete. Custer himself could take leave of the scene.

  He glanced at Noyes and saw admiration shining in the small hound face. Then he turned back to the perp.

  “Well, Brisbane,” he said. “It all falls into place, doesn’t it?”

  Brisbane looked at him with uncomprehending eyes.

  “Murderers always think they’re smarter than everyone else. Especially the police. But when you get down to it, Brisbane, you really didn’t play it smart at all. Keeping the disguise right here in your office, for example. And then there was the matter of all those witnesses. Trying to hide evidence, lying to me about how often you were in the Archives. Killing victims so close to your own place of work, your place of residence. The list goes on, doesn’t it?”

  The door opened and a uniformed officer slipped a fax into Custer’s hand.

  “And here’s another little fact just in. Yes, the little facts can be so inconvenient.” He read over the fax. “Ah. And now we know where you got your medical training, Brisbane: you were pre-med at Yale.” He handed the fax to Noyes. “Switched to geology your junior year. Then to law.” Custer shook his head again, wonderingly, at the bottomless stupidity of criminals.

  Brisbane finally managed to speak. “I’m no murderer! Why would I kill those people?”

  Custer shrugged philosophically. “The very question I asked you. But then, why do any serial killers kill? Why did Jack the Ripper kill? Why Jeffrey Dahmer? That’s a question for the psychiatrists to answer. Or maybe for God.”

  On this note, Custer turned back to Noyes. “Set up a press conference for midnight. One Police Plaza. No, hold on—let’s make it on the front steps of the Museum. Call the commissioner, call the press. And most importantly, call the mayor, on his private line at Gracie Mansion. This is one call he’ll be happy to get out of bed for. Tell them we collared the Surgeon.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Noyes, turning to go.

  “My God, the publicity…” Brisbane’s voice was high, strangled. “Captain, I’ll have your badge for this…” He choked up with fear and rage, unable to continue.

  But Custer wasn’t listening. He’d had another masterstroke.

  “Just a minute!” he called to Noyes. “Make sure the mayor knows that he’ll be the star of our show. We’ll let him make the announcement.”

  As the door closed, Custer turned his thoughts to the mayor. The election was a week away. He would need the boost. Letting him make the announcement was a clever move; very clever. Rumor had it that the job of commissioner would become vacant after reelection. And, after all, it was never too early to hope.

  SEVEN

  AGAIN, NORA LOOKED at Pendergast. And again she was unnerved by the depth of his shock. His eyes seemed glued to the face of the corpse: the parchment skin, the delicate, aristocratic features, the hair so blond it could have been white.

  “The face. It looks just like—” Nora struggled to understand, to articulate her thoughts.

  Pendergast did not respond.

  “It looks just like you,” Nora finally managed.

  “Yes,�
�� came the whispered response. “Very much like me.”

  “But who is it—?”

  “Enoch Leng.”

  Something in the way he said this caused Nora’s skin to crawl.

  “Leng? But how can that be? I thought you said he was alive.”

  With a visible effort Pendergast wrenched his eyes from the glass case and turned them on her. In them, she read many things: horror, pain, dread. His face remained colorless in the dim light.

  “He was. Until recently. Someone appears to have killed Leng. Tortured him to death. And put him in that case. It seems we are now dealing with that other someone.”

  “I still don’t—”

  Pendergast held up one hand. “I cannot speak of it now,” was all he said.

  He turned from the figure, slowly, almost painfully, his light stabbing farther into the gloom.

  Nora inhaled the antique, dust-laden air. Everything was so strange, so terrible and unexpected; the kind of weirdness that happened only in a nightmare. She tried to calm her pounding heart.

  “Now he is unconscious, being dragged,” whispered Pendergast. His eyes were once again on the floor, but his voice and manner remained dreadfully changed.

  With the flashlight as a guide, they followed the marks across the reception hall to a set of closed doors. Pendergast opened them to reveal a carpeted, well-appointed space: a two-story library, filled with leather-bound books. The beam probed farther, slicing through drifting clouds of dust. In addition to books, Nora saw that, again, many of the shelves were lined with specimens, all carefully labeled. There were also numerous freestanding specimens in the room, draped in rotting duck canvas. A variety of wing chairs and sofas were positioned around the library, the leather dry and split, the stuffing unraveling.

  The beam of the flashlight licked over the walls. A salver sat on a nearby table, holding a crystal decanter of what had once been port or sherry: a brown crust lined its bottom. Next to the tray sat a small, empty glass. An unsmoked cigar, shriveled and furred with mold, lay alongside it. A fireplace carved of gray marble was set into one of the walls, a fire laid but not lit. Before it was a tattered zebra skin, well chewed by mice. A sideboard nearby held more crystal decanters, each with a brown or black substance dried within. A hominid skull—Nora recognized it as Australopithecine—sat on a side table with a candle set into it. An open book lay nearby.

  Pendergast’s light lingered on the open book. Nora could see it was an ancient medical treatise, written in Latin. The page showed engravings of a cadaver in various stages of dissection. Of all the objects in the library, only this looked fresh, as if it had been handled recently. Everything else was layered with dust.

  Once again, Pendergast turned his attention to the floor, where Nora could clearly see marks in the moth-eaten, rotting carpet. The marks appeared to end at a wall of books.

  Now, Pendergast approached the wall. He ran his light over their spines, peering intently at the titles. Every few moments he would stop, remove a book, glance at it, shove it back. Suddenly—as Pendergast removed a particularly massive tome from a shelf—Nora heard a loud metallic click. Two large rows of adjoining bookshelves sprang open. Pendergast drew them carefully back, exposing a folding brass gate. Behind the closed gate lay a door of solid maple. It took Nora a moment to realize what it was.

  “An old elevator,” she whispered.

  Pendergast nodded. “Yes. The old service elevator to the basement. There was something exactly like this in—”

  He went abruptly silent. As the sound of his voice faded away, Nora heard what she thought was a noise coming from within the closed elevator. A shallow breath, perhaps, hardly more than a moan.

  Suddenly, a terrible thought burst over Nora. At the same time, Pendergast stiffened visibly.

  She let out an involuntary gasp. “That’s not—” She couldn’t bring herself to say Smithback’s name.

  “We must hurry.”

  Pendergast carefully examined the brass gate with the beam. He reached forward, gingerly tried the handle. It did not move. He knelt before the door and, with his head close to the latching mechanism, examined it. Nora saw him remove a flat, flexible piece of metal from his suit and slide it into the mechanism. There was a faint click. He worked the shim back and forth, teasing and probing at the latch, until there was a second click. Then he stood up and, with infinite caution, drew back the brass gate. It folded to one side easily, almost noiselessly. Again, Pendergast approached, crouching before the handle of the maple door, regarding it intently.

  There was another sound: again a faint, agonized attempt to breathe. Her heart filled with dread.

  A sudden rasping noise filled the study. Pendergast jumped back abruptly as the door shot open of its own accord.

  Nora stood transfixed with horror. A figure appeared in the back of the small compartment. For a moment, it remained motionless. And then, with the sound of rotten fabric tearing away, it slowly came toppling out toward them. For a terrible moment, Nora thought it would fall upon Pendergast. But then the figure jerked abruptly to a stop, held by a rope around its neck, leaning toward them at a grotesque angle, arms swinging.

  “It’s O’Shaughnessy,” said Pendergast.

  “O’Shaughnessy!”

  “Yes. And he’s still alive.” He took a step forward and grabbed the body, wrestling it upright, freeing the neck from the rope. Nora came quickly to his side and helped him lower the sergeant to the floor. As she did so, she saw a huge, gaping hole in the man’s back. O’Shaughnessy coughed once, head lolling.

  There was a sudden jolt; a protesting squeal of gears and machinery; and then, abruptly, the bottom dropped out of their world.

  EIGHT

  CUSTER LED THE makeshift procession down the long echoing halls, toward the Great Rotunda and the front steps of the Museum that lay beyond. He’d allowed Noyes a good half hour to give the press a heads-up, and while he was waiting he’d worked out the precedence down to the last detail. He came first, of course, followed by two uniformed cops with the perp between them, and then a phalanx of some twenty lieutenants and detectives. Trailing them, in turn, was a ragged, dismayed, disorganized knot of museum staffers. This included the head of public relations; Manetti the security director; a gaggle of aides. They were all in a frenzy, clearly out of their depth. If they’d been smart, if they’d assisted rather than tried to impede good police work and due process, maybe this circus could have been avoided. But now, he was going to make it hard on them. He was going to hold the press conference in their own front yard, right on those nice wide steps, with the vast spooky facade of the Museum as backdrop—perfect for the early morning news. The cameras would eat it up. And now, as the group crossed the Rotunda, the echoes of their footsteps mingling with the murmuring of voices, Custer held his head erect, sucked in his gut. He wanted to make sure the moment would be well recorded for posterity.

  The Museum’s grand bronze doors opened, and beyond lay Museum Drive and a seething mass of press. Despite the advance groundwork, he was still amazed by how many had gathered, like flies to shit. Immediately, a barrage of flashes went off, followed by the sharp, steady brilliance of the television camera lights. A wave of shouted questions broke over him, individual voices indistinguishable in the general roar. The steps themselves had been cordoned off by police ropes, but as Custer emerged with the perp in tow the waiting crowd surged forward as one. There was a moment of intense excitement, frantic shouting and shoving, before the cops regained control, pushing the press back behind the police cordon.

  The perp hadn’t said a word for the last twenty minutes, apparently shocked into a stupor. He was so out of it he hadn’t even bothered to conceal his face as the doors of the Rotunda opened onto the night air. Now, as the battery of lights hit his face—as he saw the sea of faces, the cameras and outstretched recorders—he ducked his head away from the crowd, cringing away from the burst of flash units, and had to be propelled bodily along, half dragged, half car
ried, toward the waiting squad car. At the car, as Custer had instructed, the two cops handed the perp over to him. He would be the one to thrust the man into the back seat. This was the photo, Custer knew, that would be splashed across the front page of every paper in town the next morning.

  But getting handed the perp was like being tossed a 175-pound sack of shit, and he almost dropped the man trying to maneuver him in the back seat. Success was achieved at last to a swelling fusillade of flash attachments; the squad car turned on its lights and siren; and nosed forward.

  Custer watched it ease its way through the crowd, then turned to face the press himself. He raised his hands like Moses, waiting for silence to fall. He had no intention of stealing the mayor’s thunder—the pictures of him bundling the cuffed perp into the vehicle would tell everyone who had made the collar—but he had to say a little something to keep the crowd contained.

  “The mayor is on his way,” he called out in a clear, commanding voice. “He will arrive in a few minutes, and he will have an important announcement to make. Until then, there will be no further comments whatsoever.”

  “How’d you get him?” a lone voice shouted, and then there was a sudden roar of questions; frantic shouting; waving; boomed mikes swinging out in his direction. But Custer magisterially turned his back on it all. The election was less than a week away. Let the mayor make the announcement and take the glory. Custer would reap his own reward, later.

  NINE

  THE FIRST THING that returned was the pain. Nora came swimming back into consciousness, slowly, agonizingly. She moaned, swallowed, tried to move. Her side felt lacerated. She blinked, blinked again, then realized she was surrounded by utter darkness. She felt blood on her face, but when she tried to touch it her arm refused to move. She tried again and realized that both her arms and legs were chained.