The question, Pendergast realized, became: had Leng succeeded? Or had he died in 1935?
Death seemed by far the most likely result. And yet, Pendergast had remained uneasy. Antoine Leng Pendergast was a man of transcendental genius, combined with transcendental madness.
So Pendergast waited and watched. As the last of his line, he’d felt it his responsibility to keep vigil against the unlikely chance that, someday, evidence of his ancestor’s continued existence would resurface. When he heard of the discovery on Catherine Street, he immediately suspected what had happened there, and who was responsible. And when the murder of Doreen Hollander was discovered, he knew that what he most dreaded had come to pass: Antoine Pendergast had succeeded in his quest.
But now, Antoine was dead.
There could be no doubt that the mummified corpse in the glass case was that of Antoine Pendergast, who had taken, in his journey northward, the name Enoch Leng. Pendergast had come to the house on Riverside Drive expecting to confront his own ancestor. Instead, he had found his great-grand-uncle tortured and murdered. Someone, somehow, had taken his place.
Who had killed the man who called himself Enoch Leng? Who now held them prisoner? The corpse of his ancestor was only recently dead—the state of the corpse suggested that death had occurred within the last two months—pegging the murder of Enoch Leng before the discovery of the charnel on Catherine Street.
The timing was very, very interesting.
And then there was that other problem—a very quiet, but persistent feeling that there was a connection still to be made here—that had been troubling Pendergast almost since he first set foot within Leng’s house.
Now, inside the memory crossing, he continued down the hall. The next door—the door that had once been his brother’s—had been sealed by Pendergast himself, never to be opened again. He quickly moved on.
The hallway ended in a grand, sweeping staircase leading down to a great hall. A heavy cut-glass chandelier hovered over the marble floor, mounting on a gilt chain to a domed trompe l’oeil ceiling. Pendergast descended the stairs, deep in thought. To one side, a set of tall doors opened into a two-story library; to the other, a long hall retreated back into shadow. Pendergast entered this hall first. Originally, this room had been the monastery’s refectory. In his mind, he had furnished it with a variety of family heirlooms: heavy rosewood chiffoniers, oversized landscapes by Bierstadt and Cole. There were other, more unusual heirlooms here, as well: sets of Tarot cards, crystal balls, a spirit-medium apparatus, chains and cuffs, stage props for illusionists and magicians. Other objects lay in the corners, shrouded, their outlines sunken too deeply into shadow to discern.
As he looked around, his mind once again felt the ripples of a disturbance, of a connection not yet made. It was here, it was all around him; it only awaited his recognition. And yet it hovered tantalizingly out of grasp.
This room could tell him no more. Exiting, he re-crossed the echoing hall and entered the library. He looked around a moment, savoring the books, real and imaginary, row upon comforting row, that rose to the molded ceiling far above. Then he stepped toward one of the shelves on the nearest wall. He glanced along the rows, found the book he wanted, pulled it from the shelf. With a low, almost noiseless click, the shelf swung away from the wall.
… And then, abruptly, Pendergast found himself back in Leng’s house on Riverside Drive, standing in the grand foyer, surrounded by Leng’s astonishing collections.
He hesitated, momentarily stilled by surprise. Such a shift, such a morphing of location, had never happened in a memory crossing before.
But as he waited, looking around at the shrouded skeletons and shelves covered with treasures, the reason became clear. When he and Nora first passed through the rooms of Leng’s house—the grand foyer; the long, low-ceilinged exhibit hall; the two-storied library—Pendergast had found himself experiencing an unexpected, uncomfortable feeling of familiarity. Now he knew why: in his house on Riverside Drive, Leng had recreated, in his own dark and twisted way, the old Pendergast mansion on Dauphine Street.
He had finally made the crucial connection. Or had he?