The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Douglas Preston

  Years of self-discipline, of high-level corporate brinksmanship, had taught Fairhaven never to reveal anything: not in the facial expression, not in the questions asked. Yet the sudden stab of surprise he felt, followed immediately by disbelief, was hard to conceal. What real work? What was Pendergast talking about?

  He would not ask. Silence was always the best mode of questioning. If you remained silent, they always talked out the answer in the end. It was human nature.

  But this time it was Pendergast who remained silent. He simply stood there, leaning almost insolently against the doorframe, glancing around at the walls of the chamber. The silence stretched on, and the man began to think of his resource, lying there on the gurney. Gun on Pendergast, he glanced briefly at the vitals. Good, but starting to flag. If he didn’t get back to work soon, the specimen would be spoiled.

  Kill him, the voice said again.

  “What real work?” Fairhaven asked.

  Still, Pendergast remained silent.

  The merest spasm of doubt passed through Fairhaven, quickly suppressed. What was the man’s game? He was wasting his time, and there was no doubt a reason why he was wasting his time, which meant it was best just to kill him now. At least he knew the girl could not escape from the basement. He would deal with her in good time. Fairhaven’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  At last, Pendergast spoke. “Leng didn’t tell you anything in the end, did he? You tortured him to no avail, because you’re still thrashing about, wasting all these people. But I do know about Leng. I know him very well indeed. Perhaps you noticed the resemblance?”

  “What?” Again Fairhaven was taken off guard.

  “Leng was my great-grand-uncle.”

  It hit Fairhaven then. His grip on the weapon loosened. He remembered Leng’s delicate white face, his white hair, and his very pale blue eyes—eyes that regarded him without begging, without pleading, without beseeching, no matter how hideous it had become for him. Pendergast’s eyes were the same. But Leng had died anyway, and so would he.

  So would he, the voice echoed, more insistently. His information is not as important as his death. This resource is not worth the risk. Kill him.

  The man reapplied pressure to the trigger. At this distance, he could not miss.

  “It’s hidden here in the house, you know. Leng’s ultimate project. But you’ve never found it. All along you’ve been looking for the wrong thing. And as a result, you will die a long, slow, wasting death of old age. Just like the rest of us. You cannot succeed.”

  Squeeze the trigger, the voice in his head insisted.

  But there was something in the agent’s tone. He knew something, something important. He wasn’t just talking. Fairhaven had dealt with bluffers before, and this man was not bluffing.

  “Say what you have to say now,” said Fairhaven. “Or you will die instantly.”

  “Come with me. I’ll show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  “I’ll show you what Leng was really working on. It’s in the house. Here, right under your nose.”

  The voice in his head was no longer little; it was practically shouting. Do not allow him to continue talking, no matter how important his information may be. And Fairhaven finally heeded the wisdom of that advice.

  Pendergast was leaning against the wall, off balance, his hands clearly in view. It would be impossible for the man, in the time it took to squeeze off one shot, to reach inside his suit and pull out a backup weapon. Besides, he had no such weapon; Fairhaven had searched him thoroughly. He took a fresh bead on Pendergast, then held his breath, increasing the pressure on the trigger. There was a sudden roar and the gun kicked in his hand. And he knew instantly: it had been a true shot.

  FOUR

  THE CELL DOOR stood open, allowing a faint light to filter in from the passageway beyond. Nora waited, shrinking back into the pool of darkness behind the cell door. Ten minutes. Pendergast had said ten minutes. In the dark, with her heart pounding like a sledgehammer, every minute seemed an hour, and it was almost impossible to tell the passage of time. She forced herself to count each second. A thousand one, a thousand two… Each count made her think of Smithback, and what might be happening to him. Or had happened to him.

  Pendergast had told her he thought Smithback was dead. He had said this to spare her the shock of discovering it for herself. Bill is dead. Bill is dead. She tried to absorb it, but found her mind would not accept the fact. It felt unreal. Everything felt unreal. A thousand thirty. A thousand thirty-one. The seconds rolled on.

  At six minutes and twenty-five seconds, the sound of a gunshot came, deafening in the confined spaces of the cellar.

  Her whole body kicked in fear. It was all she could do not to scream. She crouched, waiting for the absurd skipping of her heart to slow. The terrible sound echoed and re-echoed, rumbling and rolling through the basement corridors. Finally, silence—dead silence—returned.

  She felt her breath coming in gasps. Now it was doubly hard to count. Pendergast had said to wait ten minutes. Had another minute passed since the shot? She decided to resume the count again at seven minutes, hoping the monotonous, repetitive activity would calm her nerves. It did not.

  And then she heard the sound of rapid footsteps ringing against stone. They had an unusual, syncopated cadence, as if someone was descending a staircase. The footfalls quickly grew fainter. Silence returned once again.

  At ten minutes, she stopped counting. Time to move.

  For a moment, her body refused to respond. It seemed frozen with dread.

  What if the man was still out there? What if she found Smithback dead? What if Pendergast was dead, too? Would she be able to run, to resist, to die, rather than be caught herself and face a fate far worse?

  Speculation was useless. She would simply follow Pendergast’s orders.

  With an immense effort of will, she rose from her crouch, then stepped out of the darkness, easing her way around the open door. The corridor beyond the cell was long and damp, with irregular stone floor and walls, streaked with lime. At the far end was a door that opened into a bright room: the lone source of light, it seemed, in the entire basement. It was in that direction Pendergast had gone; that direction from which the shot had come; that direction from which she’d heard the sound of running feet.

  She took a hesitant step forward, and then another, walking on trembling legs toward the brilliant rectangle of light.

  FIVE

  THE SURGEON COULD hardly believe his eyes. Where Pendergast should have been lying dead in a pool of blood, there was nothing. The man had vanished.

  He looked around wildly. It was inconceivable, a physical impossibility… And then he noticed that the section of wall Pendergast had been leaning against was now a door, swiveled parallel to the stone face that surrounded it. A door he never knew existed, despite his diligent searches of the house.

  The Surgeon waited, stilling his mind with a great effort of will. Deliberation in all things, he had found, was absolutely necessary for success. It had brought him this far, and with it he would prevail now.

  He stepped forward, Pendergast’s gun at the ready. On the far side of the opening, a stone staircase led downward into blackness. The FBI agent obviously wanted him to follow, to descend the staircase whose end was hidden around the dark curve of the stone wall. It could easily be a trap. In fact, it could only be a trap.

  But the Surgeon realized he had no choice. He had to stop Pendergast. And he had to find out what lay below. He had a gun, and Pendergast was unarmed, perhaps even wounded by the shot. He paused, briefly, to examine the pistol. The Surgeon knew something about weapons, and he recognized this as a Les Baer custom, .45 Government Model. He turned it over in his hands. With the tritium night sights and laser grips, easily a three-thousand-dollar handgun. Pendergast had good taste. Ironic that such a fine weapon would now be used against its owner.

  He stepped back from the false wall. Keeping a watchful eye on the stairway, he retrie
ved a powerful flashlight from a nearby drawer, then darted a regretful glance toward his specimen. The vital signs were beginning to drop now; the operation was clearly spoiled.

  He returned to the staircase and shone the flashlight down into the gloom. The imprint of Pendergast’s footsteps was clearly visible in the dust that coated the steps. And there was something else, something besides the footsteps: a drop of blood. And another.

  So he had hit Pendergast. Nevertheless, he would have to redouble his caution. Wounded humans, like wounded animals, were always the most dangerous.

  He paused at the first step, wondering if he should go after the woman first. Was she still chained to the wall? Or had Pendergast managed to free her, as well? Either way, she posed little danger. The house was a fortress, the basement securely locked. She would be unable to escape. Pendergast remained the more pressing problem. Once he was dead, the remaining resource could be tracked down and forced to take the place of Smithback. He’d made the mistake of listening to Pendergast once. When he found him, he wouldn’t make that mistake again. The man would be dead before he even opened his mouth.

  The staircase spiraled down, down, corkscrewing endlessly into the earth. The Surgeon descended slowly, treating each curve as a blind corner behind which Pendergast might be lying in wait. At last he reached the bottom. The stairs debouched into a dark, murky room, heavy with the smell of mildew, damp earth, and—what? Ammonia, salts, benzene, the faint smell of chemicals. There was a flurry of footprints, more drops of blood. Pendergast had stopped here. The Surgeon shone his light on the nearest wall: a row of old brass lanterns, hanging from wooden pegs. One of the pegs was empty.

  He took a step to one side, then—using the stone pillar of the staircase as cover—lifted his heavy flashlight and shone it into the gloom.

  An astonishing sight met his eye. A wall of jewels seemed to wink back at him: a thousand, ten thousand glittering reflections in myriad colors, like the reflective surface of a fly’s eye under intense magnification. Suppressing his surprise, he moved forward cautiously, gun at the ready.

  He found himself in a narrow stone chamber, pillars rising toward a low, arched ceiling. The walls were lined with countless glass bottles of identical shape and size. They were stored on oaken shelving that rose from floor to ceiling, row upon row upon row, crowded densely together, shut up behind rippled glass. He had never seen so many bottles in his life. It looked, in fact, like a museum of liquids.

  His breath came faster. Here it was: Leng’s final laboratory. No doubt this was the place where he had perfected the arcanum, his formula for life prolongation. This place must hold the secret for which he had unsuccessfully tortured Leng. He remembered his feeling of disappointment, almost despair, when he’d discovered that Leng’s heart had stopped beating—when he realized he had pushed a little too hard. No matter now: the formula was right here, under his nose, just as Pendergast had said.

  But then he remembered what else Pendergast had said: something about Leng working on something completely different. That was absurd, clearly a red herring. What could be bigger than the prolongation of the human life span? What else could this huge collection of chemicals be for, if not that?

  He shook these speculations from his mind. Once Pendergast was dealt with and the girl harvested, there would be plenty of time for exploration.

  He raked the ground with his light. There was more blood, along with a ragged set of footprints that headed straight through the corridor of bottles. He had to be careful, exceedingly careful. The last thing he wanted to do was begin shooting up these rows of precious liquids, destroying the very treasure he had strived so hard to find. He raised his arm, aimed the handgun, applied pressure to the grip. A small red dot appeared on the far wall. Excellent. Although the laser would not be sighted in precisely, it would nevertheless leave little margin for error.

  Releasing his pressure on the laser grip, the Surgeon moved cautiously through the vast apothecary. Each bottle, he could see now, had been meticulously labeled in a spidery script, with both a name and a chemical formula. At the far end, he ducked beneath a low archway into an identical narrow room. The bottles in the next room were full of solid chemicals—chunks of minerals, glittering crystals, ground powders, metal shavings.

  It seemed that the arcanum, the formula, was far more complicated than he had envisioned. Why else would Leng need all these chemicals?

  He continued following Pendergast’s trail. The footsteps were no longer a single-minded beeline past the endless rows of glass. Instead, the Surgeon began to notice quick detours in the footsteps toward a particular cabinet or other, almost as if the man was looking for something.

  In another moment he had reached a Romanesque vault at the end of the forest of cabinets. A hanging tapestry with a fringe of gold brocade covered the archway beyond. He edged nearer, keeping his body once again behind a pillar, and parted the curtain with the gun barrel while shining his torch through the gap. Another room met his eye: larger, broader, filled with oaken cases fronted by glass. Pendergast’s trail led right into the thick of them.

  The Surgeon crept forward with infinite care. Again, Pendergast’s tracks seemed to explore the collection, stopping at occasional cases. His tracks had begun to take on an irregular, weaving pattern. It was the spoor of a gravely wounded animal. The blood was not diminishing. If anything, the bleeding was getting worse. Almost certainly that meant a shot to the gut. There was no need to hurry, to force a confrontation. The longer he waited, the weaker Pendergast would become.

  He reached a spot where a larger pool of blood shone in the beam of his flashlight. Clearly, Pendergast had stopped here. He had been looking at something, and the Surgeon peered into the case to see what it was. It wasn’t more chemicals, as he had assumed. Instead, the case was filled with thousands of mounted insects, all exactly alike. It was an odd-looking bug with sharp horns on its iridescent head. He moved to the next case. Strange: this contained bottles housing only insect parts. Here were bottles filled with gossamer dragonfly wings, while over there were others with what looked like curled-up abdomens of honeybees. Yet others held innumerable tiny, dried-up white spiders. He moved to the next case. It contained desiccated salamanders and wrinkled frogs in a multitude of bright colors; a row of jars containing a variety of scorpion tails; other jars full of numberless evil-looking wasps. In the next case were jars holding small dried fish, snails, and other insects the Surgeon had never seen before. It was like some vast witch’s cabinet for brewing potions and concocting spells.

  It was quite strange that Leng had felt the need for such a vast collection of potions and chemicals. Perhaps, like Isaac Newton, he had ended up wasting his life in alchemical experiments. The “ultimate project” Pendergast mentioned might not be a red herring, after all. It could very well have been some useless attempt to turn lead into gold, or similar fool’s challenge.

  Pendergast’s trail led out of the cabinets and through another arched doorway. The Surgeon followed, gun at the ready. Beyond lay what looked like a series of smaller rooms—closer to individual stone crypts or vaults, actually—each containing a collection of some kind. Pendergast’s trail weaved back and forth between them. More oaken cabinets, filled with what looked like bark and leaves and dried flowers. He stopped a moment, staring around curiously.

  Then he reminded himself that Pendergast was the pressing issue. Judging from the weaving tracks, the man was now having trouble walking.

  Of course, knowing Pendergast, it could be a ruse. A new suspicion arose within him, and the Surgeon crouched beside the nearest scattering of crimson droplets, touching his fingers to one, rubbing them together. Then he tasted it. No doubt about it: human blood, and still warm. There could be no way of faking that. Pendergast was definitely wounded. Gravely wounded.

  He stood up, raised the gun again, and moved stealthily forward, his flashlight probing the velvety darkness ahead.

  SIX

  NORA STEPPED WARILY
through the doorway. After the darkness of the cell, the light was so bright that she shrank back into shadow, temporarily blinded. Then she came forward again.

  As her eyes adjusted, objects began to take form. Metal tables, covered with gleaming instruments. An empty gurney. An open door, leading onto a descending staircase of rough-hewn stone. And a figure, strapped facedown onto a stainless steel operating table. Except the table was different from others she had seen. Gutters ran down its sides into a collecting chamber, full now with blood and fluid. It was the kind of table used for an autopsy, not an operation.

  The head and torso of the figure, as well as the waist and legs, were covered by pale green sheets. Only the lower back remained exposed. As Nora came forward, she could see a ghastly wound: a red gash almost two feet long. Metal retractors had been set, spreading the edges of the wound apart. She could see the exposed spinal column, pale gray amidst the pinks and reds of exposed flesh. The wound had bled freely, red coagulating tributaries that had flowed down either side of the vertical cut, across the table, and into the metal gutters.

  Nora knew, even without drawing back the sheet, that the body was Smithback’s. She suppressed a cry.

  She tried to steady herself, remembering what Pendergast had said. There were things that needed to be done. And the first was to verify that Smithback was dead.

  She took a step forward, glancing quickly around the operating theater. An IV rack stood beside the table, its clear narrow tube snaking down and disappearing beneath the green sheets. Nearby was a large metal box on wheels, its panel festooned with tubes and dials—probably a ventilator. Several bloody scalpels sat in a metal basin. On a nearby surgical tray were forceps, sterile sponges, a squirt bottle of Betadine solution. Other instruments lay in a scatter on the gurney, where they had apparently been dropped when the surgery was interrupted.