“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.
Now, he stood before the heavy oaken door of his own room. Normally he would unlock the door and linger within, surrounded by the familiar objects, the comforting iconography, of his childhood. But today he continued on, pausing only to pass his fingers lightly over the brass knob of the door. His business lay elsewhere, below, with things older and infinitely stranger.
He had mentioned to Nora his inability to maintain proper intellectual distance in the case, and this was undeniably true. This was what had led him, and her—and, to his deepest sorrow, Patrick O’Shaughnessy—into the present misfortune. What he had not revealed to Nora was the profound shock he felt when he saw the face of the dead man. It was, as he now knew, Enoch Leng—or, more accurately, his own great-grand-uncle, Antoine Leng Pendergast.
For Great-Grand-Uncle Antoine had succeeded in his youthful dream of extending his life.
The last remnants of the ancient Pendergast family—those who were compos mentis—assumed that Antoine had died many years ago, probably in New York, where he had vanished in the mid ninteenth century. A significant portion of the Pendergast family fortune had vanished with him, much to the chagrin of his collateral descendants.
But several years before, while working on the case of the Subway Massacre, Pendergast—thanks to Wren, his library acquaintance—had stumbled by chance upon some old newspaper articles. These articles described a sudden rash of disappearances: disappearances that followed not long after the date Antoine was supposed to have arrived in New York. A corpse had been discovered, floating in the East River, with the marks of a diabolical kind of surgery. It was a street waif, and the crime was never solved. But certain uncomfortable details caused Pendergast to believe it to be the work of Antoine, and to feel the man was attempting to achieve his youthful dream of immortality. A perusal of later newspapers brought a half-dozen similar crimes to light, stretching as far forward as 1935.