The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Douglas Preston

  She glanced at the head of the table, at the rack of machines monitoring the vital signs. She recognized an EKG screen, a ghostly line of green tracing a course from left to right. Tracing a heartbeat. My God, she thought suddenly, is it possible Bill’s still alive?

  Nora took a rapid step forward, reached over the gaping incision, and lifted the sheet away from his shoulders. Smithback’s features came into view: the familiar tousled hair with the unrepentant cowlick, the skinny arms and shoulders, the curl of hair at the nape of his neck. She reached forward and touched his neck, felt the faint pulse of the carotid artery.

  He was alive. But barely.

  Had he been drugged? What should she do? How could she save him?

  She realized she was hyperventilating, and struggled to slow both her breathing and her thoughts. She scanned the machines, thinking back to the pre-med classes she’d taken in college; to the courses in gross anatomy, biological and forensic anthropology in graduate school; her brief experience as a hospital candy striper.

  She quickly moved on to the next machine, trying to frame the overall situation. The machine was clearly a blood pressure monitor. She glanced at the systolic and diastolic readouts: 91 over 60. At least he had pressure as well as pulse. But it seemed low, too low. Beside it was another machine, connected to a line leading to a clip on Smithback’s index finger. Nora’s uncle had worn one of these when he’d been in the hospital a year before, suffering from congestive heart failure: it was a pulse-oximeter. It shone a light upon the fingernail, and measured the oxygen saturation of the blood. The readout was 80. Could that be right? She seemed to recall that anything less than 95 was cause for concern.

  Nora looked back now at the EKG machine, at the pulse readout in its lower right corner. It stood at 125.

  Abruptly, the blood pressure meter began bleating a warning.

  She knelt toward Smithback, listening to his breathing. It was rapid and shallow, barely audible.

  She straightened, gazing around at the machines with a moan of despair. God, she had to do something. She couldn’t move him; that would mean certain death. Whatever she did, she would have to do it here and now. If she couldn’t help him, Smithback would die.

  She fought to control her panic, struggled with her memory. What did this all mean: low blood pressure; abnormally fast heart rate; low blood oxygen?

  Exsanguination. She looked at the appalling pool of blood in the collecting basin at the bottom of the table. Smithback was suffering from massive blood loss.

  How did the body react in such cases? She thought back to the distant lectures she’d only half paid attention to. First, by tachycardia, as the heart beat faster in an attempt to profuse the tissues with oxygen. Next, by—what was the damn term?—vasospasm. She quickly stretched out a hand, felt Smithback’s fingers. As she expected, they were ice cold, the skin mottled. The body had shut down blood to the extremities to maximize oxygen in the critical areas.

  The blood pressure would be the last to go. And Smithback’s was already dropping. After that…

  She did not want to think about what would happen after that.

  A wave of sickness passed over her. This was insane. She wasn’t a doctor. Anything she did could easily make things worse.

  She took a deep breath, staring at the raw wound, forcing herself to concentrate. Even if she knew how, closing and suturing the incision would not help: the blood loss was already too great. There was no plasma around for a blood transfusion, and had there been any, administering a transfusion was beyond her abilities.

  But she knew that patients who had lost a lot of blood could be rehydrated with crystalloids or a saline solution.

  She looked again at the IV rack beside the table. A thousand-cc bag of saline solution hung from it, tube drooping down from the metal stand and into the vein in Smithback’s wrist. The stopcock had been shut off. A hypodermic syringe, half empty, dangled near the bottom, its needle inserted into the tube. She realized what it was: a local monitored anaesthetic, probably Versed, given as a drip because Versed doesn’t last much more than five minutes. It would keep the victim conscious, but reduce any resistance, perhaps. Why hadn’t the Surgeon used general, or spinal, anesthesia for the procedure?

  It didn’t matter. The point was to replace Smithback’s fluids as quickly as possible, get his blood pressure up—and here were the means to do it.

  She plucked the hypodermic from the IV tube and threw it across the room. Then, reaching for the stopcock at the base of the liter bag of saline, she turned it clockwise as far as it would go.

  It isn’t enough, she thought as she watched the solution drip rapidly through the tube. It’s not enough to replace the fluid volume. Oh, Jesus, what else can I do?

  But there seemed to be nothing else she could do.

  She stepped back, helplessly, eyes darting once again to the machines. Smithback’s pulse had risen to 140. Even more alarmingly, his blood pressure had dropped to 80 over 45.

  She leaned toward the gurney, took Smithback’s cold, still hand in hers.

  “Damn you, Bill,” she whispered, pressing his hand. “You’ve got to make it. You’ve got to.”

  She waited, motionless beneath the lights, her eyes fixed on the monitors.

  SEVEN

  IN THE STONE chambers deep beneath 891 Riverside, the air smelled of dust, ancient fungus, and ammonia. Pendergast moved painfully through the darkness, lifting the hood from the lantern infrequently, as much to inspect Leng’s cabinet as to get his bearings. He paused, breathing hard, at the center of a room full of glass jars and specimen trays. He listened intently. His hyperacute ears picked up the sound of Fairhaven’s stealthy footsteps. They were at most one, perhaps two chambers away. There was so little time. He was gravely wounded, without a weapon, bleeding heavily. If he was to find any way to level the playing field, it would have to come from the cabinet itself. The only way to defeat Fairhaven was to understand Leng’s ultimate project—to understand why Leng had been prolonging his life.

  He uncovered the lantern again and examined the cabinet in front of him. The jars contained dried insects, shimmering with iridescence in the beam of light. The jar was labeled Pseudopena velenatus, which Pendergast recognized as the false featherwing beetle from the Mato Grosso swamps, a mildly poisonous insect natives used for medicine. In the row below, another series of jars contained the dried-up corpses of deadly Ugandan bog spiders in brilliant purples and yellows. Pendergast moved down the case, uncloaked the lantern again. Here were bottle after bottle of dried lizards: the harmless albino cave gekko from Costa Rica, a bottle full of dried saliva glands from the Gila monster of the Sonoran Desert, two jars full of the shriveled corpses of the tiny red-bellied lizard of Australia. Farther along were numberless cockroaches, from the giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches to beautiful green Cuban roaches, winking in their jars like tiny emerald leaves.

  Pendergast realized these creatures had not been collected for taxonomic or classification purposes. One did not need a thousand bog spiders in order to do taxonomic studies—and drying insects was a poor way to preserve their biological details. And they were arranged in these cabinets in no conceivable taxonomic order.

  There was only one answer: these insects had been collected because of the complex chemical compounds they contained. This was a collection of biologically active compounds, pure and simple. It was, in fact, a continuation of the inorganic chemical cabinets he had observed in the preceding rooms.

  Pendergast now felt even more certain that this grand, subterranean cabinet of curiosities—this stupendous collection of chemicals—was directly related to Leng’s real work. The collections here perfectly filled the hole he’d noticed in the collections displayed in the house above. This was Antoine Leng Pendergast’s ultimate cabinet of curiosities.

  In contrast to those other collections, however, this was clearly a working cabinet: many of the jars were only partially full, and some almost empty. Whatever Leng had been
doing had required an enormous variety of chemical compounds. But what had he been doing? What was this grand project?

  Pendergast covered the lantern again, trying to will the pain away long enough to think. According to his great-aunt, just before heading north to New York, Leng had talked of saving the human race. He remembered the word his great-aunt had used: healing. Leng would heal the world. This vast cabinet of chemicals and compounds was central to that project. It was something Leng believed would benefit humanity.

  Pendergast felt a sudden spasm of pain that threatened to bend him double. With a supreme effort of will, he recovered. He had to keep going, to keep looking for the answer.

  He moved out of the forest of cabinets, through an archway of hanging tapestries, into the next room. As he moved, he was racked by a second intense spasm of pain. He stopped, waiting for it to pass.

  The trick he’d intended to play on Fairhaven—ducking through the secret panel without being shot—had required exquisite timing. During their encounter, Pendergast had watched Fairhaven’s face intently. Almost without exception, people betrayed by their expression the moment they decided to kill, to pull the trigger, to end the life of another. But Fairhaven had given no such signal. He had pulled the trigger with a coolness that had taken Pendergast by surprise. The man had used Pendergast’s own custom Colt. It was regarded as one of the most dependable and accurate .45 semiautomatics available, and Fairhaven clearly knew how to use it. If it hadn’t been for the man’s pause in breathing just before squeezing off the shot, Pendergast would have taken the bullet dead center and been killed instantly.

  Instead, he had taken the bullet in his side. It had passed just below the left rib cage and penetrated into the peritoneal cavity. In as detached a way as possible, Pendergast once again considered the precise form and nature of the pain. The bullet had, at the very least, ruptured his spleen and perhaps perforated the splenetic flexure of the colon. It had missed the abdominal aorta—he would have bled to death otherwise—but it must have nicked either the left colic vein or some tributaries of the portal vein, because the blood loss was still grave. The law enforcement Black Talon slug had done extensive damage: the wound would prove fatal if not treated within a few hours. Worse, it was severely debilitating him, slowing him down. The pain was excruciating, but for the most part he could manage pain. He could not, however, manage the growing numbness that was enfeebling his limbs. His body, bruised from the recent fall and still not fully recovered from the knife wound, had no reserves to fall back on. He was fading fast.

  Once again, motionless in the dark, Pendergast reviewed how his plans had miscarried; how he had miscalculated. From the beginning, he had known this would be the most difficult case of his career. But what he had not anticipated were his own psychological shortcomings. He had cared too much; the case had become too important to him. It had colored his judgment, crippled his objectivity. And now for the first time he realized that there was a possibility—indeed, a high probability—of failure. And failure meant not only his own death—which was inconsequential—but also the deaths of Nora, Smithback, and many other innocent people in the future.

  Pendergast paused to explore the wound with his hand. The bleeding was growing worse. He slipped off his jacket and tied it as tightly as he could around his lower torso. Then he uncloaked the lantern and, once again, held it briefly aloft.

  He was in a smaller room now, and he was surprised at what he found. Instead of more chemical compounds, the tiny space was crowded with cases of birds, stuffed with cotton. Migrating birds. All arranged taxonomically. A superb collection, even including a suite of now-extinct passenger pigeons. But how did this collection fit with the rest? Pendergast felt staggered. He knew, deep down, that all this fit together, was part of some great plan. But what plan?

  He stumbled on, jostling his wound as little as possible, into the next room. He lifted his light once again, and this time froze in utter astonishment.

  Here was a collection entirely different from the others. The lantern revealed a bizarre aggregation of clothing and accessories, arrayed on dressmaker’s dummies and in cases along both walls: rings, collars, hats, fountain pens, umbrellas, dresses, gloves, shoes, watches, necklaces, cravats—all carefully preserved and arranged as if in a museum, but this time with no apparent systemization. It seemed very unlike Leng, this haphazard collection from the past two thousand years, from all over the world. What did a nineteenth-century Parisian man’s white kid glove have to do with a medieval gorget? And what did a pair of ancient Roman earrings have to do with an English umbrella, or to the Rolex watch sitting next to it, or to the flapper-era high-heeled shoes beside that? Pendergast moved painfully forward. Against the far wall, in another case, were door handles of all kinds—none holding the slightest aesthetic or artistic interest—beside a row of eighteenth-century men’s powdered wigs.

  Pendergast hid the lantern, pondering. It was an utterly bizarre collection of commonplace objects, none of them particularly distinguished, arranged without regard to period or category. Yet here they were, preserved in cases as if they were the most precious objects in the world.

  As he stood in the dark, listening to the drip of his blood against the stone floor, Pendergast wondered for the first time if Leng had not, in the end, gone mad. This certainly seemed the last collection of a madman. Perhaps, as he prolonged his life, the brain had deteriorated even while the body had not. This grotesque collection made no sense.

  Pendergast shook his head. Once again, he was reacting emotionally, allowing his judgment to be affected by feelings of familial guilt. Leng had not gone mad. No madman could have assembled the collections he had just passed through, perhaps the greatest collection of chemicals, inorganic and organic, the world had ever seen. The tawdry objects in this room were related. There was a systematic arrangement here, if only he could see it. The key to Leng’s project was here. He had to understand what Leng was doing, and why. Otherwise…

  Then he heard the scrape of a foot on stone, saw the beam of Fairhaven’s flashlight lance over him. Suddenly, the small red dot of a laser appeared on the front of his shirt. He threw himself sideways just as the crash of the gun sounded in the confined space.

  He felt the bullet strike his right elbow, a sledgehammer blow that knocked him off his feet. He lay on the ground for a moment, as the laser licked through the dusty air. Then he rolled to his feet and limped forward, ducking from case to case as he crossed the room.

  He had allowed himself to become distracted by the strange collection; he had neglected to listen for Fairhaven’s approach. Once again, he had failed. With this thought came the realization that, for the first time, he was about to lose.

  He took another step forward, cradling his shattered elbow. The bullet seemed to have passed above the medial supracondlar ridge and exited near the coronoid process of the ulna. It would aggravate the blood loss, render him incapable of resistance. He must get to the next room. Each room had its own clues, and perhaps the next would reveal Leng’s secret. But as he moved a wave of dizziness hit him, followed by a stab of nausea. He swayed, steadied himself.

  Using the reflected light of Fairhaven’s searching beam, he ducked beneath an archway into the next room. The exertion of the fall, the shock of the second bullet, had drained the last of his energy, and the heavy curtain of unconsciousness drew ever closer. He leaned back against the inside wall, breathing hard, eyes wide against the darkness.

  The flashlight beam stabbed abruptly through the archway, then flicked away again. In its brief illumination, Pendergast saw the glitter of glass; rows of beakers and retorts; columnar distillation setups rising like city spires above long worktables.

  He had penetrated Enoch Leng’s secret lab.

  EIGHT

  NORA STOOD OVER the metal table, her gaze moving from the monitoring machines to Smithback’s pallid form, then back again. She had removed the retractors, cleaned and dressed the wound as best she could. The bleedi
ng had finally stopped. But the damage was already done. The blood pressure machine continued to sound its dire warning. She glanced toward the saline bag: it was almost empty, but the catheter was small, and even at maximum volume it would be difficult to replenish lost fluids quickly enough.

  She turned abruptly as the sound of a second shot echoed up from the dark staircase. It sounded faint, muffled, as if coming from deep underground.

  For a moment she stood motionless, lanced by fear. What had happened? Had Pendergast shot—or been shot?

  Then she turned back toward Smithback’s inert form. Only one man was going to come up that staircase: Pendergast, or the other. When the time came, she’d deal with it. Right now, her responsibility lay with Smithback. And she wasn’t going to leave him.

  She glanced back at the vitals: blood pressure down to 70 over 35; the heart rate slowing too, now, down to 80 beats per minute. At first, this latter development sent relief coursing through her. But then another thought struck, and she raised her palm to Smithback’s forehead. It was growing as cold as his limbs had been.

  Bradycardia, she thought, as panic replaced the transitory feeling of relief. When blood loss is persistent, and there are no more areas for the body to shut down, the patient decompensates. The critical areas start to go. The heart slows. And then stops for good.

  Hand still on Smithback’s forehead, Nora turned her frantic gaze back to the EKG. It looked strangely diminished, the spikes smaller, the frequency slower. The pulse was now 50 beats per minute.

  She dropped her hands to Smithback’s shoulders, shook him roughly. “Bill!” she cried. “Bill, damn it, come on! Please!”

  The peeping of the EKG grew erratic. Slowed.

  There was nothing more she could do.