The Cabinet of Dr. Leng, page 34
“Have you brought him?” the man asked. His eyes were red-rimmed, and sweat beaded his face. “Have you brought Pendergast?”
On hearing this name, a shock like a bolt of electricity passed through Leng’s body.
“Listen, you’ve got to find Pendergast—he’ll clear everything up.” The man’s voice was trembling, on the verge of hysteria.
Leng recovered his presence of mind. “Pendergast? May I have a first name, please?”
At this, the man hesitated. “I don’t know it.”
“And you claim to come from the future?”
“Yes, yes! Look, just find Pendergast, he’ll explain everything!”
Leng took a step away from the cell and turned to Norcross. “May I see his possessions?” he murmured.
Norcross led the way back along the corridor to a tenantless cell that served as a storage area. He unlocked a metal drawer, slid it out, placed it on a table in the center of the room, and opened it. He handed Leng a pair of white cotton gloves, then stepped away.
Leng glanced at the two items inside the tray. Then he reached in and removed one of them, holding it in his hand. A very queer feeling came over him as he gazed at the object. A glowing rectangle was set in a black frame, backlit as if by a candle. But there was no candle or even the sensation of heat, and the source of the light was mysterious. Within this illuminated rectangle, black numbers in an ugly font were blinking. The biggest set of numbers read 2:01 27, with the last two incrementing every second. He watched until these two numbers reached 59, and then they reset to 00, and the time changed from 2:01 to 2:02.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his heavy gold pocket watch, which told him the time was six minutes after two. It always did run a little fast, he thought to himself as he slipped it back into his waistcoat pocket.
The object was held by a wrist strap that resembled gutta-percha or India rubber, but of marvelous flexibility and strength. Leng was reminded of the “wristlet watches” currently in vogue on the Continent: women’s bracelets with small clocks attached, instead of the far more sensible and reliable pocket watch.
The silence lengthened as Leng pondered the blinking numbers.
Then he laid the object aside and took out the other one. It was much less impressive, but finely made, a thin rectangle of glass on one side, set into a case of brushed metal like aluminum. The glass surface on one face was blank. There were a few buttons on the side, which did not respond when he pushed them. The metal back had several round pieces of glass in one corner and, bizarrely, the image of an apple in the middle, polished to a high gloss. The object was entirely inert, appearing to have no function whatsoever.
He put both devices back in the tray and indicated for Norcross to lock it up once again. Then he followed the resident down the hall a second time.
“Are you getting Pendergast?” the man in the cell asked eagerly as they once more came into view.
“May I have your name?” asked Leng.
“Ferenc. Gaspard Ferenc.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ferenc. I should like to ask you a few questions.”
The man wiped sweat from his forehead with the butt of his wrist. “Can you please make it quick? It’s been at least four hours. I have to get back, right away…” His voice started to rise again.
“I shall be quick.” Already—from years of observation—Leng sensed this man was not insane. But he kept this to himself. “Now, Mr. Ferenc, would you please repeat for me the information you’ve given to others? Especially about this man you seek—Pendergast.”
The man fought back another spasm of panic and impatience. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m from the future. Well, not the future in a literal sense, but an alternate timeline.”
Leng was careful to betray no expression. “What was your purpose in coming here?”
The man hesitated. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then tell me what you did do.”
The man hung his head. “I came back to purchase some coins. Coins that would be very valuable in…the future.”
“And how, exactly, did you ‘come back’?”
“I used Pendergast’s machine.”
“Tell me about this machine.”
“It’s complicated. It involves a lot of quantum theory, and…forget it.” He fetched a long, shuddering sigh. “Pendergast hired me to fix it. You see, I worked on the Mars Perseverance mission—but of course you’d know nothing about that. I used the machine to come here and exchange some money. Nothing wrong about that.” He was babbling.
The Mars Perseverance mission, Leng repeated in his mind. “And this man Pendergast? What is his role in this situation?” He spoke in a calm, coaxing voice.
Ferenc suddenly fell silent. Then he said calmly, “Doctor, I don’t believe I caught your name.”
Leng ignored the question. “Are you saying that this man you’re looking for, Pendergast, also used the machine to come back here?”
Ferenc hesitated, as if warned by some sixth sense. “I’ve answered your questions.”
“I am not done asking, Mr. Ferenc. Now tell me: what is this man Pendergast doing here?”
Again, Ferenc went silent. The only noise was the gibbering and muttering from other cells down the passage.
“Speak up!” Norcross said sharply. “Dr. Leng is trying to help you.”
“Leng!” Ferenc repeated in alarm, jumping back from the bars as if shocked.
Leng gazed upon the man’s face, now white as a sheet. He was sorry that Norcross had spoken his name. But no matter; he could find out everything he needed to know despite that.
“Thank you, Mr. Ferenc.” He nodded to Norcross, signaling he was done. They both departed, leaving the prisoner in his cell.
Down the hall, Leng turned to Norcross. “A most interesting case indeed. I’m much obliged to you for calling my attention to it.”
“I had hoped as much,” said Norcross, a glow of pleasure on his face.
“Definitely worthy of further study. We shall file the paperwork to have him immediately discharged into my care. There is much to be learned from this rare presentation.”
“An excellent idea, Dr. Leng.”
“Please inform Dr. Cawley and complete the paperwork posthaste.”
It was the work of thirty minutes. Leng exercised his standing authority to transfer any patient at Bellevue under his purview to his own facility. Norcross took care of the paperwork with his usual efficiency and dispatch, glowing inside with the great interest Leng had taken in the case as well as his own role in it. As he watched Dr. Leng proceed down the hallway with the patient, now heavily sedated and gentle as a kitten, Norcross realized something: He had seen the good doctor remove many female patients to his private sanatorium in the past. But this was the first time Dr. Leng had taken a man.
68
VINCENT D’AGOSTA, DRESSED in a shabby greatcoat and gloves, watch cap pulled down and collar turned up against the chill, stood in the little newsstand on the south side of Forty-Eighth Street, around the corner from Fifth Avenue. The owner of the newsstand, which in addition to newspapers sold broadsheets and penny novels, had been given a handsome fee to take a few days off, no questions asked. D’Agosta had taken his place that morning. The newsstand gave him a clear view of the marble town house Constance Greene now owned. It was a beautiful building, but D’Agosta could see the place was well fortified against unauthorized entry. The front door was massive and banded with iron. Around the corner on Forty-Eighth Street was the entrance to the carriage driveway, leading to the stables and stone garage where the three horses and carriage were kept. All the first-floor windows had iron bars across them—bars that looked freshly installed. An eight-foot wrought iron fence topped by spikes screened the building on two sides, and the dark service alleyway that ran behind it parallel to the avenue was barred by an even taller fence. It was a marvel of urban design that all these precautionary measures still allowed the place to resemble a mansion instead of a fortress.
As the afternoon wore on, he kept a constant eye on the residence, occasionally interrupted by buyers of papers but always remaining hyperalert.
The only weakness in his position was that he had no direct view of the mansion’s front façade. There was no way to surveil that without loitering on Fifth Avenue and making oneself conspicuous. In this well-policed Gilded Age neighborhood, anyone hanging around for any length of time would arouse suspicion. For the same reason, it seemed unlikely that Leng or one of his henchmen would choose to spy on the town house from the avenue. D’Agosta was pretty confident anyone watching the house would likely approach from the bustling Forty-Eighth Street corner—a corner busy with traffic and, in addition to his newsstand, hosting a bootblack and a peddler selling roasted chestnuts from a cart.
He clapped his gloved hands together and took a small turn around the space, trying to keep warm. Horses and carriages clattered by on the cobbled street, the sound of hooves echoing off the building façades, and he could smell the chestnuts roasting nearby. He tried not to think about the still-staggering fact that this was 1880. He’d seen some crazy shit working with Pendergast, but this was one thing he still couldn’t wrap his mind around. And how the hell was he ever going to explain it to Laura? He kept returning to his argument with Laura and the way she’d walked out. Sorry I vanished like that—you see, Pendergast and I went back in time to 1880 to rescue crazy Constance Greene, who was living on Fifth Avenue, passing herself off as a duchess and preparing to murder someone. He could just see Laura’s face as he tried to explain.
He made an effort to banish thoughts of Laura from his mind—there was nothing he could do about it now.
“The Herald,” came a crisp request from a gentleman, interrupting his thoughts. The man placed a nickel on the counter and D’Agosta handed him the paper. He dropped the nickel into the cash box and watched the man walk off toward Madison Avenue. Nothing suspicious there.
D’Agosta had taken up his position at ten that morning, less than twenty-four hours after he and Pendergast had returned to Longacre Square. Pendergast had previously arranged for him to take over at the newsstand, and as soon as D’Agosta was installed, Pendergast had rushed away in a God-awful hurry on some mysterious mission.
Not long after he’d manned the kiosk, he spied one of the children in an upstairs window. It was the girl, Constance, her dark hair cut in a short bob and tied with a ribbon on one side, playing with a deck of cards. And then he had seen the other Constance—the Constance he knew—approaching the town house by hansom cab and being let in by a maid. The same person, but of two different ages: coexisting not only in the same world, but in the same house. It was like no science fiction story he’d ever read—going back in the past and meeting yourself was a logical no-no. Yet it was happening before his eyes…and not only that: Constance had set herself up in a veritable palace. Where had she gotten the damn money? But he reminded himself that if anyone could pull it off, she could. D’Agosta had never met a more formidable woman. Scary and, quite possibly, not completely sane. He’d heard about her escapades—getting revenge on her seducer by hurling him into a live volcano in Sicily, spraying acid on the bastards trying to kill Pendergast at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—and he’d sure as hell seen the results.
Even though it was only four o’clock, the winter night was already falling. No daylight saving in 1880. A man came by with a long rod, lighting the gas lamps one by one. A horse and carriage clopped past. The bootblack packed up his kit and left. Soft lights went on in the marble mansion, and the shades were drawn.
And then an old man came down the street, walking slowly with a cane. D’Agosta watched him suspiciously. The man paused in front of the kiosk and fished a nickel from his pocket with a grubby hand and placed it on the counter.
“The Sun,” he said in a cracked voice.
D’Agosta turned to get the paper from the stack behind him. When he turned around again, he was startled to see the man had taken off his hat and Pendergast was standing before him, pale and agitated. “Sorry to surprise you, my friend,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve done a little more probing and I’m more concerned than ever. I fear Constance is overplaying her hand.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means things may come to a head even sooner than I expected. We must not make the mistake of underestimating how dangerous Leng is. It may no longer be a question of days anymore—it may be less. I fear for Mary, and I must find her.” He took up the newspaper.
“What’s your plan, then?” D’Agosta asked in an undertone as he dropped the nickel in the cash box.
“Through a combination of research, memory, and observation, I am reasonably confident of Mary’s location. I intend to rescue her tonight. I also have reason to believe his man Munck might appear after dark, to shadow Constance or provide Leng with intelligence on her activities, so keep an eye out for him.”
“How will I know this Munck guy?”
“He’s small, five foot four, very solid, and has a peculiar limp, a sort of hitch while lifting his right leg. It’s subtle, and he makes an effort to hide it, but you will see it if you look. He’s very good at blending into shadows.”
D’Agosta nodded.
“Remember: under no circumstances whatsoever are you to reveal yourself to Constance. If that happened, our entire mission here would be for naught. Constance believes herself to be free now, in control of her own destiny, without worrying about me or…our private relationship. If she learned I were here, meddling in her life—it would unhinge her.”
D’Agosta had seen Constance unhinged before, and he hoped never to see it again. “I understand.”
“When you close up the newsstand at five, remain behind its shutters and continue watching the house. If Munck appears and, unexpectedly, does more than simply reconnoiter—in the unlikely event, say, he tries to enter—stop him. You may have to kill him—otherwise he will kill you. He is a brutally evil man who takes pleasure in opening people up to watch their lifeblood flow into the gutter. By ridding the world of him you will be saving lives.”
D’Agosta swallowed.
“Can you do that, my friend? We will escape to our own time quickly enough, and you’ll not have to face the law.”
D’Agosta finally nodded. “What if Leng shows up instead?”
“He would not expose himself in such a fashion—he will want more intelligence about the house first.” Pendergast removed a heavy object from his coat and passed it over: a revolver. D’Agosta took it and tucked it away.
And then Pendergast turned and walked off with his paper, vanishing into the darkening winter evening, as D’Agosta resumed his long watch.
69
A. X. L. PENDERGAST paused halfway down lower Manhattan’s Catherine Street, running his eye along the foul succession of grogshops, cheap lodging houses, and oyster cellars. The winter night was feebly illuminated by flickering gas lamps. A smell of rotten fish, urine, and boiling mutton permeated the air, and the noise was continuous: the clattering of hooves, the snatches of music from the taverns, the bellowing and singing of drunken sailors staggering along the street. From the waterfront two blocks away, he heard the clanging of a ship’s bell and the drawn-out reverberation of a steam whistle.
His attention finally settled at the far end of the block, specifically on a three-story brick building in the Gothic Revival style, streaked with soot. A small crowd was queueing up at an entrance, while a barker paced back and forth, crying out: “See the preserved body of the Ancient Mermaid of Mandalay!” Occasionally, he would alternate that invitation with another: “View the bones of the Countess de Brissac, executed by guillotine, and touch the blade that ended her life!”
Pendergast’s eye traveled upward to a wooden sign in gold letters that arched over the entrance, announcing the name of the establishment:
J.C. Shottum’s Cabinet
of
Natural Productions & Curiosities
Observations complete, Pendergast continued down the block and got into the queue filing into Shottum’s. He paid two pennies to a fat man in a greasy stovepipe hat and entered the building. He found himself in a large foyer, with a mammoth skull on one side and a badly stuffed Kodiak bear on the other. A miscellany of objects dominated the center, including a petrified log, a dinosaur thighbone, and a giant ammonite, crowded willy-nilly next to a totem pole and a meteorite.
Most of the crowd were streaming through the foyer to the entrance of the “Dinosaur Cyclorama,” which promised to put the viewer inside a 360-degree depiction of the “Savage Age of the Terrible Lizards.” The visitors to Shottum’s Cabinet, he noticed, were a mixture of young dandies in derby hats, working toughs, and longshoremen coming off work. To the left and right were doorways to further exhibits.
While he had, of course, never been inside this building—it had burned many decades before his birth—he had re-created it very carefully as an intellectual construct. He took a moment to inspect how the real thing compared to the Cabinet of his imagination and—where it differed—made a mental note for future consideration and refinement.
Then he moved across the hall to a doorway at the far end marked “The Gallery of Unnatural Monstrosities.” He slipped through the entrance into a dark passageway. This, he knew, was the oldest and least-visited part of Shottum’s Cabinet, its exhibits grown stale. He passed by a table displaying a sealed jar containing a human baby floating in yellow liquid, with two arms sticking out of its forehead. Beyond was a stuffed dog with a cat’s head sewn onto it. The exhibits were dusty and unkempt, and a faint smell of rot drifted through the air.
Moving swiftly down the dim passageway, he passed more grotesque exhibits in various alcoves—a giant rat from Sumatra; the alleged liver of a woolly mammoth found frozen in Siberia; a misshapen human skull labeled “The Rhinoceros Man of Cincinnati.” Several turns of the passageway brought him to the exhibit he was searching for. In a dead-end alcove big enough for only one person stood a glass case containing a desiccated human head, tongue still protruding from its mouth, with an identifying placard.
