The Cabinet of Curiosities

There was a silence. Then Pendergast spoke again. “I am very, very sorry. I should have expected the trap. How brutal, using Sergeant O’Shaughnessy to bait us like that. Unutterably brutal.”

“Is O’Shaughnessy—?”

“He was dying when we found him. He cannot have survived.”

“God, how awful,” Nora sobbed. “How horrible.”

“He was a good man, a loyal man. I am beyond words.”

There was a long silence. So great was Nora’s fear that it seemed to choke off even her grief and horror at what had happened to O’Shaughnessy. She had begun to realize the same was in store for them—as it may have already been for Smithback.

Pendergast’s weak voice broke the silence. “I’ve been unable to maintain proper intellectual distance in this case,” he said. “I’ve simply been too close to it, from the very beginning. My every move has been flawed—”

Abruptly, Pendergast fell silent. A few moments later, Nora heard a noise, and a small rectangle of light slid into view high up in the wall before her. It cast just enough light for her to see the outline of their prison: a small, damp stone cellar.

A pair of wet lips hovered within the rectangle.

“Please do not discompose yourself,” a voice crooned in a deep, rich accent curiously like Pendergast’s own. “All this will be over soon. Struggle is unnecessary. Forgive me for not playing the host at the present moment, but I have some pressing business to take care of. Afterward, I assure you, I will give you the benefit of my undivided attention.”

The rectangle scraped shut.

For a minute, perhaps two, Nora remained in the darkness, hardly able to breathe in her terror. She struggled to retake possession of her mind.

“Agent Pendergast?” she whispered.

There was no answer.

And then the watchful darkness was rent asunder by a distant, muffled scream—strangled, garbled, choking.

Instantly, Nora knew—beyond the shadow of a doubt—that the voice was Smithback’s.

“Oh my God!” she screamed. “Agent Pendergast, did you hear that?”

Still Pendergast did not answer.

“Pendergast!”

The darkness continued to yield nothing but silence.

In the Dark

ONE

PENDERGAST CLOSED HIS eyes against the darkness. Gradually, the chessboard appeared, materializing out of a vague haze. The ivory and ebony chess pieces, smoothed by countless years of handling, stood quietly, waiting for the game to begin. The chill of the damp stone, the rough grasp of the manacles, the pain in his ribs, Nora’s frightened voice, the occasional distant cry, all fell away one by one, leaving only an enfolding darkness, the board standing quietly in a pool of yellow light. And still Pendergast waited, breathing deeply, his heartbeat slowing. Finally, he reached forward, touched a cool chess piece, and advanced his king’s pawn forward two spaces. Black countered. The game began, slowly at first, then faster, and faster, until the pieces flew across the board. Stalemate. Another game, and still another, with the same results. And then, rather abruptly, came darkness—utter darkness.

When at last he was ready, Pendergast once again opened his eyes.

He was standing in the wide upstairs hallway of the Maison de la Rochenoire, the great old New Orleans house on Dauphine Street in which he had grown up. Originally a monastery erected by an obscure Carmelite order, the rambling pile had been purchased by Pendergast’s distant grandfather many times removed in the eighteenth century, and renovated into an eccentric labyrinth of vaulted rooms and shadowy corridors.

Although the Maison de la Rochenoire had been burned down by a mob shortly after Pendergast left for boarding school in England, he continued to return to it frequently. Within his mind, the structure had become more than a house. It had become a memory palace, a storehouse of knowledge and lore, the place for his most intense and difficult meditations. All of his own experiences and observations, all of the many Pendergast family secrets, were housed within. Only here, safe in the mansion’s Gothic bosom, could he meditate without fear of interruption.

And there was a great deal to meditate upon. For one of the few times in his life, he had known failure. If there was a solution to this problem, it would lie somewhere within these walls—somewhere within his own mind. Searching for the solution would mean a physical search of his memory palace.

He strolled pensively down the broad, tapestried corridor, the rose-colored walls broken at regular intervals by marble niches. Each niche contained an exquisite miniature leather-bound book. Some of these had actually existed in the old house. Others were pure memory constructs—chronicles of past events, facts, figures, chemical formulae, complex mathematical or metaphysical proofs—all stored by Pendergast in the house as a physical object of memory, for use at some unknown future date.