Taking up a long piece of metal, she pried out the bolts, one after another, working them loose from the rotting stone, until the cabinet could be moved away from the wall. Behind, she discovered an ancient, worm-eaten leather valise, the leather moldy and chewed by vermin.
It was a valise of the kind a patent-medicine salesman might have carried with him to hold his samples. As she drew it out and turned it over, she saw the remains of elaborate Victorian gold stamping, forming a large design dense with curlicues and intertwined vines, leaves, and flowers. She could just barely make out the lettering:
HEZEKIAH’S
~COMPOUND~
ELIXIR
and
GLANDULAR
RESTORATIVE
Moving aside some glassware, she laid the valise out on a table and tried to open it. It was locked. A quick tug, however, tore off the old hinges.
The case was empty, save for a desiccated mouse.
She shook out the mouse, picked up the case, and turned it over to inspect the back. Nothing there; not even slots or seams. Turning the case over again, she paused, held it up, hefted it.
There was something heavy concealed beneath a false bottom, it seemed. A quick slash with a knife along the base of the valise exposed a hidden compartment, in which was snugged an old leather notebook. She pulled the notebook out carefully and opened it to the first page. It was covered with crabbed, spiky handwriting.
Constance glanced over the page for a moment. Then she flipped quickly through the journal until she reached the final pages. At this point, she settled down to read—to read about the other woman named Constance, known lovingly to the family by her nickname of Stanza…
6 Sept. 1905
Darkness. I found her in darkness—a state so very unlike my Stanza! She of all people has ever sought out the light. Even in inclement weather, with gloom lowering over the city, she would always be the first to put on her bonnet and shawl, ready to walk along the banks of the Mississippi at any sign of sunlight seeping through clouds. But today I found her half-asleep on the chaise longue in her sitting room, blinds shut fast against the light. She seemed surprised by my presence, starting almost guiltily. No doubt it is some passing fit of nerves, or perhaps a female complaint; she is the strongest of women, and the best, and I will think of it no more. I administered a dose of the Elixir via a Hydrokonium, and that calmed her considerably.
H.C.P.
19 Sept. 1905
I grow concerned about Stanza’s state of health. She seems to alternate between fits of euphoria—gay, almost giddy spells, characterized by an antic nature most unlike her—and black moods in which she takes to either her sitting room or her bed. She complains of a smell of lilies—initially pleasant, but now rotten and sickly-sweet. Beyond the mention of the lilies, however, I note that she does not confide in me the way she has always done in the past, and this is perhaps most concerning of all. I would I could spend more time with her, perhaps discern what is troubling her, but, alas, these all-consuming business difficulties of late take up my waking hours. A plague on these meddlesome busybodies and their misinformed attempts to undermine my curative!
H.C.P.
30 Sept. 1905
This Collier’s article, coming as it does just now, is the most damnably infernal stroke of bad fortune. My Elixir has proven itself time and again to be both rejuvenative and salubrious. It has brought life and vigor to countless thousands. And yet this is forgotten amidst the cries of the ignorant, uneducated “reformers” of patent medicines. Reformers—bah! Envious, meddling pedants. What boots it struggling to better the human condition, if only to be assailed as I am at present?
H.P.
4 Oct. 1905
I believe I have found the cause of Stanza’s malaise. Although she has been at pains to hide it, I have learned—from my monthly inventory—that nearly three dozen bottles of the Elixir are missing from the storage cabinets. Only three souls on earth have keys to those cabinets: myself, Stanza, and of course my assistant Edmund, who is at present abroad, collecting and analyzing new botanicals. Just this morning, watching unobserved from the bow window of the library, I saw Stanza slipping out of doors to pass empty bottles to the dustman.
Taken in proper amounts, the Elixir is, of course, the best of remedies. But as with all things, lack of moderation can have serious consequences.
What shall I do? Must I confront her? Our entire relationship has been built on decorum, etiquette, and trust—she abhors scenes of any kind. What shall I do?
H.P.
11 Oct. 1905
Yesterday—after finding another half dozen bottles of the Elixir missing from their cabinets—I felt compelled to confront Stanza on the matter. A scene of the most disagreeable nature ensued. She said things to me uglier than I ever imagined her capable of uttering. She has now taken to her rooms and refuses to come out.
Attacks on my reputation, and on my Elixir in particular, continue in the yellow papers. Normally, I would—as I have always done—repulse them with every fiber of my being. However, I find myself so distraught at my own domestic condition that I cannot concentrate on such matters. Thanks to my diligent efforts, the fiscal stability of the family has been restored beyond any future vicissitudes—and yet I take but little comfort in this, given the more intimate difficulties I now find myself in.
H.P.
13 Oct. 1905
Will she not respond to my pleas? I hear her crying in the night, behind her locked door. What sufferings does she endure, and why will she not accept my ministrations?
H.P.
18 Oct. 1905
Today I at last gained admittance to my wife’s rooms. It was only due to the kind offices of Nettie, her faithful lady’s maid, who is almost prostrate with worry over Stanza’s well-being.
Upon entering the chambers I found Nettie’s fears only too well founded. My dearest one is fearfully pale and drawn. She will take no nourishment, and will not leave her bed. She is in constant pain. I have had no doctors in—my own medical knowledge is superior to those New Orleans mountebanks and quacks who pass themselves off as physicians—but I can see in her a wasting and dissipation almost shocking in its rapidity. Was it only two months ago we took a carriage ride along the levee, Stanza smiling and singing and laughing, in the full flush of health and youthful beauty? My one consolation is that Antoine and Comstock, away at school, are spared the sight of their mother’s pitiable state. Boethius has his nurse and tutors to occupy his time, and thus far I have been able to deflect his inquiries as to his mother’s condition. Maurice, bless him, is too young to understand.
H.
21 Oct. 1905
God forgive me—today, despairing of all other physics, I brought Stanza the Hydrokonium and Elixir she has been begging for. The relief, the almost animal hunger, she showed at its sight was perhaps the worst pang my heart has ever borne. I allowed her but a single deep inhale; her cries and imprecations upon my retiring with bottle in hand are too painful to recall. I find our prior situation now painfully reversed—it is she who must be locked in, rather than herself being the instrument of locking me out.
… What have I done?
26 Oct. 1905
It is very late, and I sit here at my desk, inkstand and writing lamp before me. It is a dirty night; the wind howls and the rain lashes against the mullions.
Stanza is crying in her bedroom. Now and then, from behind the securely locked door, I can hear a stifled groan of pain.
I can no longer deny that which I have for so long refused to accept. I told myself I was working only for the commonweal, for the greater good. I believed it in all sincerity. Talk of my Elixir causing addiction, madness, even birth defects—I ascribed it to the whisperings of the ignorant, or to those chemists and druggists who would benefit from the Elixir’s failure. But even my hypocrisy has its limits. It took the sad, indeed grievous, state of my own wife to lift the scales from my eyes. I am responsible. My Elixir is not a cure-all. It treats the sympto
ms rather than the underlying problem. It is habit forming, and its initially positive effects are finally overwhelmed by mysterious and deadly side effects. And now Stanza, and by extension myself, is paying the cost of my shortsightedness.
1 Nov. 1905
Darkest of all Novembers. Stanza seems to grow weaker by the day. She is now racked with hallucinations and even the occasional seizure. Against my own better judgment, I am attempting to ease her pain with morphine and with additional inhalations of the Elixir, but even these do little good; if anything, they seem to speed her enfeeblement. My God, my God, what am I to do?
5 Nov. 1905
In the blackness that is my present life a ray of light now gleams. I see a desperate possibility—small, but nevertheless existent—that I may effect a cure; an antidote, so to speak, to the Elixir. The idea occurred to me the day before yesterday, and since then I have immersed myself in nothing else.
From my observations of Stanza, it seems that the deleterious effects of the Elixir are caused by its peculiar combination of ingredients, in which the conjoined effect of excellent and proven remedies, such as cocaine hydrochloride and acetanilide, are canceled and reversed by the rare botanicals.
The botanicals are what produce the evil effects. Logically, those effects can therefore be reversed by other botanicals. If I could block the effects of the botanical extracts, it might thus reverse the wasting physical and mental damage it seems to have caused, much in the way the extract of the Calabar bean will neutralize poisoning by the Bella Donna plant.
With this antidote, I may be able to aid not only my poor ailing Stanza, but those others who, through my greed and shortsightedness, have suffered as well.
… If only Edmund would return! His was a three-year voyage to collect healing herbs and botanicals from the equatorial jungles. I daily await the arrival of his packet steamer. Unlike many of my supposedly learned brethren, I firmly believe the natives of this planet can teach us many things about natural remedies. My own travels amongst the Plains Indians taught me as much. I am making progress, but the plants I have tested so far—save for Thismia americana, for which I hold out great hope—do not seem effective in counteracting the wasting effects of my accursed tonic.
8 Nov. 1905
Edmund has returned at last! He has brought dozens of the most interesting plants with him, to which the natives ascribe miraculous healing properties. The spark of hope I barely dared foster a few days ago now burns bright within me. The work consumes all my time; I cannot sleep, I cannot eat—I think of nothing else. To the list of botanicals in the Elixir, I have a number of counter-effectives, including cascara bark, calomel, oil of chenopodium, extract of Hodgson’s Sorrow; and extract of Thismia americana.
But no time to write—there is much to do. And very little time in which to do it—every day, Stanza fades. She is now a mere shadow of herself. If I do not succeed—and succeed quickly—she will slip into the realm of shadow.
12 Nov. 1905
I have failed.
Up until the last moment I was confident of my success. The chemical synthesis made perfect sense. I was certain I had worked out the precise series, and proportions, of compounds—listed inside the back cover of this journal—that, when boiled, would produce a tincture capable of counteracting the effects of the Elixir. I gave Stanza a series of doses—the poor suffering creature can keep nothing solid on her stomach—but to no avail. Very early this morning, her suffering became so ungovernable that I assisted her into the next world.
I will write no more. I have lost that which was dearest to me. I am no longer in thrall to this earth. I pen these last words, not as a living being, but as one who is already with my own dead wife in spirit, and soon in body, as well.
D’entre les morts,
Hezekiah Comstock Pendergast
Constance’s gaze lingered on these last words for a long time. Then, thoughtfully, she turned over the page—and went quite still. There was a complex list of compounds, plants, extraction, and preparation steps, all under the label ET CONTRA ARCANUM:
The antidote formula.
Below the list was another handwritten message, but in another hand altogether and in much fresher ink—a beautiful, flowing script that Constance knew very well indeed.
My dearest Constance,
Knowing your innate curiosity, your interest in Pendergast family history, and your penchant for exploring the basement collections, I have no doubt that—at some point in your long, long life—you will stumble upon these jottings.
Did you find that this journal made for rather disquieting reading? Of course you did. Imagine then, if you can, how much more painful I myself have found it—chronicling as it does my own father’s search to cure an affliction he himself bestowed upon my mother, Constance. (The fact that your name and hers are the same is not an accident, by the way.)
The greatest irony is that my father came so close to success. You see, according to my own analysis, his antidote should have worked. Except that he made a wee mistake. Do you suppose he was simply too blinded by grief and guilt to see his one small oversight? One grows curious.
Be careful.
I remain, Constance,
Your devoted, etc.
Dr. Enoch Leng
Vincent D’Agosta sat back in his chair and stared morosely at his computer screen. It was after six. He had canceled a date with Laura at the Korean place around the corner and he was determined not to let up until he’d done all he could. So he sat, staring mulishly at the screen as if trying to force it to yield up something useful.
He’d spent over an hour digging into NYPD files and elsewhere, looking for information on John Barbeaux and Red Mountain Industries, and had come up with precisely squat. NYPD had no files on the man. An online search yielded little more. After a brief but distinguished career in the Marine Corps, Barbeaux—who came from money—had founded Red Mountain as a military consulting company. The firm had grown into one of the country’s largest private security contracting organizations. Barbeaux had been born in Charleston; he was sixty-one years old and a widower; his only son had died of an unknown illness not two years before. Beyond that, D’Agosta had learned nothing. Red Mountain was notoriously secretive; its own website gave him little to go on. But secretiveness wasn’t a crime. There were also online rumors of the kind that swirled around many military contractors. A few lone voices, crying in the digital wilderness, linked the company to various South American and African coups, mercenary actions, and shadow military ops—but these were the same types of people who claimed Elvis was still alive and living on the International Space Station. With a sigh, D’Agosta reached out to turn off the screen.
Then he remembered something. About six months back, a program had been put in place—spearheaded by a police consultant, formerly of the NSA—to digitize all NYPD documents and run them through OCR software. The idea had been to ultimately cross-link every scrap of information in the department’s files, with the goal of looking for patterns that might help solve any number of “cold” cases. But, as with so many other initiatives, this one had gone off the rails. There were cost overruns, the consultant had been fired, and the project was limping along with no completion date in sight.
D’Agosta stared at the computer screen. The team was supposed to start with the newest documents logged into the system and then work backward chronologically through the older ones. But with the size of the team slashed, and the volume of new material that came in every day, the word was they were basically treading water. No one used the database—it was a mess.
Still, a search would take only a moment. Luckily, Barbeaux was not a common name.
He logged back into the departmental network, moused his way through a series of menus, and accessed the project’s home page. A spartan-looking screen appeared:
New York Police Department I.D.A.R.S.
Integrated Data Analysis and Retrieval System
** NOTE: Beta testing only **
<
br /> Below was a text box. D’Agosta clicked on it to make it active, typed in “Barbeaux,” then clicked on the ENTER button beside it.
To his surprise, he got a hit:
Accession record 135823_R
Subject: Barbeaux, John
Format: JPG (lossy)
Metadata: available
“I’ll be damned,” he murmured.
There was an icon of a document next to the text. D’Agosta clicked on it, and the scan of an official document appeared on the screen. It was a memo from the Albany police, sent—as a departmental courtesy—to the NYPD about six months back. It described rumors, from “unnamed third parties,” of illicit arms deals being made by Red Mountain Industries in South America. However—the document went on to say—the rumors could not be confirmed, the firm in all other ways had a stellar record, and so instead of bumping the investigation up the hierarchy to federal agencies such as the ATF, the case had been closed.
D’Agosta frowned. Why hadn’t he discovered this factoid through normal channels?
He clicked on the screen and examined the attached metadata. It showed that the physical copy of the memo had been filed in the “Barbecci, Albert” folder of the NYPD’s archives. The record header showed that the person who had filed it had been Sergeant Loomis Slade.
With a few more mouse clicks, D’Agosta opened up the file on Albert Barbecci. Barbecci had been a small-time mobster who had died seven years ago.
Barbeaux. Barbecci. Misfiled. Sloppy work. D’Agosta shook his head. That sort of sloppiness didn’t seem like Slade. Then he picked up his phone, consulted a directory, dialed a number.
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