The Cabinet of Curiosities

“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.