Fever Dream

by Douglas Preston

  The daughter’s room was even more creepy for showing a complete lack of personality: the only feature of note was a row of similarly bound red volumes in a bookshelf that was otherwise empty, save for an anthology of poetry.

  They gradually walked through the empty rooms, D’Agosta trying to make sense of the senselessness of it.

  At the very end of the hall, they came to a locked door.

  Pendergast slid out his lockpicking tools, jimmied the lock, and attempted to open the door. It wouldn’t budge.

  “There’s a first,” said D’Agosta.

  “If you will observe the upper doorjambs, my dear fellow, you’ll see that the door, in addition to being locked, has been screwed shut.” His hand fell from the knob. “We’ll return to this. Let’s take a look at the attic first.”

  The attics of the old house were a warren of tiny rooms packed under the eaves, full of moldy furniture and old luggage. They made a thorough inspection of the boxes and trunks, raising furious choking clouds of dust in the process, but found nothing more interesting than some musty old clothes, piles of newspapers sorted and stacked and tied with twine. Pendergast rummaged through an old toolbox and removed a screwdriver, slipping it into his pocket.

  “Let’s check the two towers,” he said, brushing dust from his black suit with evident distaste. “Then we’ll tackle the sealed room.”

  The towers were drafty columns of winding stairs and storage niches full of spiders, rat droppings, and piles of yellowing old books. Each tower staircase dead-ended into a tiny lookout room, with windows like the arrow slits of a castle, looking down over the lightning-troubled forest. D’Agosta found himself growing impatient. The house seemed to have little to offer them other than madness and riddles. Why had Helen Pendergast come here—if she’d come here at all?

  Finding nothing of interest in the towers, they returned to the main house and the sealed door. As D’Agosta held the light, Pendergast drew out two long screws. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. D’Agosta followed—and almost staggered backward in surprise.

  It was like stepping into a Fabergé egg. It was not a large room, but it seemed to D’Agosta jewel-like—filled with treasures that glowed with internal brilliance. The windows had been boarded over and nailed with canvas, leaving the interior almost hermetically preserved, every surface so lovingly polished that even a decade of abandonment could not dull the luster. Paintings covered every square inch of wall space, and the interior was crowded with gorgeous handmade furniture and sculptures, the floor spread with dazzling rugs, sparkling jewelry laid out on pieces of black velvet.

  In the middle of the room stood a single divan, covered in richly tanned leather that had been tooled into an astonishing cascade of abstract floral designs. The ebb and flow of the hand-worked lines were so cunningly wrought, so hypnotically beautiful, that D’Agosta could scarcely take his eyes from them. And yet other objects in the room cried out for his attention. At one end, several fantastical sculptures of elongated heads, carved in an exotic wood, stood beside an array of exquisite jewelry in gold, gems, and lustrous black pearls.

  D’Agosta walked through the room in an astonished silence, hardly able to focus his attention on any one thing before some fresh marvel drew it away. On one table stood a collection of small, handmade books in elegant leather bindings with gold tooling. D’Agosta picked one up and thumbed through it, finding it full of poems handwritten in a beautiful script, signed and dated by Karen Doane. The loom-woven rugs formed several layers on the floor, and they displayed geometric designs so colorful and striking that they dazzled the eye. He flashed the light around the walls, marveling at the oil paintings, landscapes lustrous with life, of the forest glades around the house, old cemeteries, vivid still lifes, and ever-more-fantastical landscapes and dreamscapes. D’Agosta approached the closest one and squinted, playing the light over it—observing that it was signed M. DOANE along the bottom margin.

  Pendergast came up beside him, a silent presence. “Melissa Doane,” he murmured. “The novelist’s wife. It would appear that these paintings are hers.”

  “All of them?” D’Agosta played the beam over the other walls of the little room. There was no painting in a black frame, no painting, in fact, not signed M. DOANE.

  “I’m afraid it’s not here.”

  Slowly, D’Agosta let his flashlight drop to his side. He realized he was breathing fast, and that his heart was racing. It was bizarre—beyond bizarre. “What the hell is this place? And how has it stayed like this without being robbed?”

  “The town protects its secrets well.” Pendergast’s silvery eyes darted about, taking everything in, an expression of intense concentration on his face. Slowly, once again, he paced the room, finally stopping at the table of handmade books. He quickly sorted through them, flipping the pages and putting them back. He left the room, and D’Agosta followed him down the hall as he entered the daughter’s room. D’Agosta caught up as he was examining the shelf of identical red-bound volumes. His spidery hand reached out and plucked the last one down. He riffled through the pages; every one was blank. Pendergast put it back and drew out the penultimate volume. This one was full of nothing but horizontal lines, made apparently with a ruler, so densely drawn that each page was almost black with them.

  Pendergast selected the next book, flipped through it, finding more dense lines and some crude, stick-like, childish sketches in the beginning. The next volume contained disjointed entries in a ragged hand that climbed up and down across the pages.

  Pendergast began to read out loud, at random, prose written in poetic stanzas.

  I cannot

  Sleep I must not

  Sleep. They come, they whisper

  Things. They show me

  Things. I can’t tune it

  Out, I can’t tune it

  Out. If I sleep again I will

  Die… Sleep = Death

  Dream = Death

  Death = I can’t tune it

  Out

  Pendergast flipped a few pages. The ravings continued until they seemed to dissolve into disjointed words and illegible scratchings. More thoughtfully, he put the book back and drew out another, much earlier in the set, opening it in the middle. D’Agosta saw lines of strong and even writing, evidently that of a girl, with doodles of flowers and funny faces in the margins and i’s that were dotted with cheerful circles.

  Pendergast read off the date.

  D’Agosta did a quick mental calculation. “That would be about six months before Helen’s visit,” he said.

  “Yes. When the Doanes were still new to Sunflower.” Pendergast paged through the entries, scanning them swiftly, pausing at one point to read out loud:

  Mattie Lee razzed me again about Jimmy. He may be cute but I can’t stand the goth clothes and that thrash metal he’s into. He slicks his hair back and smokes, holding the cigarette up close to the burning ash. He thinks it makes him look cool. I think it makes him look like a nerd trying to look cool. Even worse: it makes him look like a dweeb who looks like a nerd who’s trying to be cool.

  “Typical high-school girl,” said D’Agosta, frowning.

  “Perhaps a bit more incisive than most.” The agent continued flipping forward through the volume. He stopped abruptly at an entry made some three months later. “Ah!” he exclaimed, sudden interest in his voice, and began to read.

  When I got home from school I saw Mom and Dad in the kitchen hovering over something on the counter. Guess what it was? A parrot! It was gray and fat, with a stumpy red tail and a big fat metal band around its leg with a number but no name. It was tame and would perch right on your arm. It kept cocking its head at me and peering into my eyes, like it was checking me out. Dad looked it up in the encyclopedia and said it was an African Grey. He said it had to be somebody’s pet, it was too tame for anything else. It just showed up around noon, sitting in the peach tree next to the back door, making noise to announce its presence. I begged Dad to l
et us keep it. He said we could until he found the real owner. He says we have to run an ad. I told him to run it in the Timbuctoo Times and he thought that was pretty funny. I hope he never finds the real owner. We made a little nest for it in an old box. Dad is going to the pet store in Slidell tomorrow to get him a real cage. While he was hopping around the counter he found one of Mom’s muffins, gave a squawk, and started gorging on it, so I named him Muffin.

  “A parrot,” D’Agosta muttered. “Now, what are the chances of that?”

  Pendergast began flipping pages, more slowly now, until he reached the end of the book. He took down the next volume and began methodically examining the dates of the entries—until he came to one. D’Agosta heard a small intake of breath.

  “Vincent, here is the entry she wrote on February ninth—the day Helen paid them a visit.”

  The worst day of my life!!!

  After lunch a lady came and knocked on our front door. She was driving a red sports car and was all dressed up with fashionable leather gloves. She said she’d heard we had a parrot and wanted to know if she could see it. Dad showed Muffin to her (still inside her cage) and she asked how we got it. She asked a lot of questions about the bird, when we got it, where it came from, if it was tame, if it let us handle it, who played with it the most. Stuff like that. She spent all sorts of time looking at it and asking questions. The woman wanted to see the band up close but my father asked her first if she was the bird’s owner. She said yes and wanted the parrot back. My dad was suspicious. He asked if she could name the number on the parrot’s bracelet. She couldn’t. And she wasn’t able to show us any kind of proof that she owned it, either, but told us a story that she was a scientist and it had escaped from her lab. Dad looked like he didn’t believe a word of it and said firmly that when she brought back some proof he’d be glad to give up the bird, but until then Muffin would stay with us. The lady didn’t seem too surprised and then she looked at me with a sad expression on her face. “Is Muffin your pet?” I said yes. She seemed to think for a while. Then she asked if Dad could recommend a good hotel in town. He said there was only one, and that he’d get her the number. He walked back into the kitchen for the phone book. No sooner had he gone than the woman grabbed Muffin’s cage, stuffed it into a black garbage bag she took from her purse, ran out the door, threw the bag in her car, and took off down the driveway! Muffin was screeching loudly the whole time. I ran outside screaming and Dad came running out and we got in the car and chased her, but she was gone. Dad called the sheriff but he didn’t seem all that interested in finding a stolen bird, especially since it might have been her bird to begin with. Muffin was gone, just like that.

  I went up to my room and I just couldn’t stop crying.

  Pendergast closed the diary and slipped it into his jacket pocket. As he did so, a flash of lightning illuminated the black trees beyond the window and a rumble of thunder shook the house.

  “Unbelievable,” said D’Agosta. “Helen stole the parrot. Just like she stole those stuffed parrots of Audubon’s. What in the world was she thinking?”

  Pendergast said nothing.

  “Did you ever see the parrot? Did she bring it back to Penumbra?”

  Pendergast shook his head wordlessly.

  “What about this scientific lab she talked about?”

  “She had no lab, Vincent. She was employed by Doctors With Wings.”

  “Do you have any idea what the hell she was doing?”

  “For the first time in my life I am completely and utterly at a loss.”

  The lightning flickered again, illuminating an expression on Pendergast’s face of pure shock and incomprehension.

  26

  New York City

  CAPTAIN LAURA HAYWARD, NYPD HOMICIDE, liked to keep the door of her office open to signal she hadn’t forgotten her roots as a lowly TA cop patrolling the subways. She had risen far and fast in the department, and while she knew she was good and deserved the promotions, she was also uncomfortably aware that being a woman hadn’t hurt at all, especially after the sex discrimination scandals of the previous decade.

  But on this particular morning, when she arrived at six, she reluctantly shut the door even though no one else was in. The investigation into a string of Russian mafia drug killings on Coney Island had been dragging its ass around the department, generating huge amounts of paperwork and meetings. It had finally reached the point where someone—her—needed to sit down with the files and go through them all so at least one person could get on top of the case and move it forward.

  Toward noon, her brain almost fried from the senseless brutality of it all, she rose from her desk and decided to get some air by taking a stroll in the small park next to One Police Plaza. She opened her door and exited the outer office, running into a gaggle of cops hanging out in the hall.

  They greeted her with a little more effusion than usual, with several sidelong, embarrassed glances.

  Hayward returned the greetings and then paused. “All right, what is it?”

  A telling silence.

  “I’ve never seen a worse bunch of fakers,” she said lightly. “Honestly, if you sat down to a game of Texas Hold ’Em, you’d all lose.”

  The joke fell flat, and after a moment’s hesitation, a sergeant spoke up. “Captain, it’s sort of about that, ah, FBI agent. Pendergast.”

  Hayward froze. Her disdain for Pendergast was well known in the department, as was her relationship with his sometime partner D’Agosta. Pendergast always managed to drag Vincent into deep shit, and she had a growing premonition that the present excursion to Louisiana would end as disastrously as the earlier ones. In fact, maybe it just had… As these thoughts flashed through her mind, Hayward tried to control her features, keep them neutral. “What about Special Agent Pendergast?” she asked coolly.

  “It isn’t Pendergast exactly,” said the sergeant. “It’s a relative of his. Woman named Constance Greene. She’s down in central booking, gave Pendergast as her next-of-kin. Apparently she’s his niece or something.”

  Another awkward silence.

  “And?” Hayward prompted.

  “She’s been abroad. She booked passage on the Queen Mary Two from Southampton to New York, boarded with her baby.”

  “Baby?”

  “Right. A couple months old at most. Born abroad. Anyway, after the ship docked she was held at passport control because the baby was missing. INS radioed NYPD and we’ve taken her into custody. They’re booking her for homicide.”

  “Homicide?”

  “That’s right. Seems she threw her baby off the ship somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

  27

  Gulf of Mexico

  THE DELTA 767 SEEMED ALMOST TO HOVER AT thirty-four thousand feet, the sky serene and cloudless, the sea an unbroken expanse of blue far below, sparkling in the afternoon light.

  “May I get you another beer, sir?” the stewardess asked, bending over D’Agosta solicitously.

  “Sure,” he replied.

  The stewardess turned to D’Agosta’s seatmate. “And you, sir? Is everything all right?”

  “No,” Pendergast said. He gestured dismissively toward the small dish of smoked salmon that sat on his seat-back tray. “I find this to be room temperature. Would you mind bringing me a chilled serving, please?”

  “Not at all.” The woman whisked the plate away with a professional gesture.

  D’Agosta waited until she returned, then settled back in the wide, comfortable seat, stretching out his legs. The only times he’d flown first-class were traveling with Pendergast, but it was something he could get used to.

  A chime sounded over the PA system, and the captain announced that the plane would be landing at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport in twenty minutes.

  D’Agosta took a sip of his beer. Sunflower, Louisiana, was already eighteen hours and hundreds of miles behind them, but the strange Doane house—with that single, jewel-like room of wonders surrounded by a storm of
decay and furious ruin—had never been far from his mind. Pendergast, however, had seemed disinclined to discuss it, remaining thoughtful and silent.

  D’Agosta tried once again. “I got a theory.”

  The agent glanced toward him.

  “I think the Doane family is a red herring.”

  “Indeed?” Pendergast took a tentative bite of the salmon.

  “Think about it. They went nuts many months after Helen’s visit. How could the visit have anything to do with what happened later? Or a parrot?”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said Pendergast, vaguely. “What puzzles me is this sudden flowering of creative brilliance before… the end. For all of them.”

  “It’s a well-known fact that madness runs in families—” D’Agosta thought better of concluding this observation. “Anyway, it’s always the gifted ones that go crazy.”