Douglas Preston - The Cabinet of Curiosities

Nora felt a twinge of offense at this abrupt dismissal. She reminded herself that this was what she had wanted… Wasn’t it? After a moment she spoke. “Thanks for saying so. But if you ask me, this business sounds totally unfinished. If you’re right about this, 99 Doyers Street seems like the next logical stop.”

“That is correct. The basement apartment is currently unoccupied, and an excavation below the living room floor would be most instructive. I plan to rent the apartment myself and undertake that excavation. And that is why I must recover as quickly as possible. Take care, Dr. Kelly.” He shifted with an air of finality.

“Who’s going to do the excavation?” she asked.

“I will find another archaeologist.”

Nora looked at him sharply. “Where?”

“Through the New Orleans field office. They are most flexible when it comes to my, ah, projects.”

“Right,” said Nora briskly. “But this isn’t a job for just any archaeologist. This requires someone with special skills in—”

“Are you offering?”

Nora was silent.

“Of course you’re not. That’s why I didn’t ask. You’ve more than once expressed your desire to return to a more normal course of work. I’ve imposed upon you too much as it is. Besides, this investigation has taken a dangerous turn, far more so than I initially assumed. An assumption I have paid for, as you can see. I would not wish you exposed to any more danger than you have been already.”

Nora stood up.

“Well,” she said, “I guess that’s settled. I’ve enjoyed working with you, Mr. Pendergast — if ‘enjoy’ is the right word. It’s certainly been interesting.” She felt vaguely dissatisfied with this outcome, even though it was what she had come down here to achieve.

“Indeed,” said Pendergast. “Most interesting.”

She began to walk toward the door, then stopped, remembering something. “But I may be in touch with you again. I got a note from Reinhart Puck in the Archives. Says he’s found some new information, asked me to stop by later this afternoon. If it seems useful, I’ll pass it on.”

Pendergast’s pale eyes were still regarding her attentively. “Do that. And again, Dr. Kelly, you have my thanks. Be very careful.”

She nodded, then turned to leave, smiling at the baleful stares that greeted her as she passed the nurses’ station.

THE DOOR TO the Archives gave out a sharp creak as Nora eased it open. There had been no response to her knocking, and the door was unlocked, in clear violation of regulations. Very strange.

The smell of old books, papers, and the odor of corruption that seemed to suffuse the entire Museum hung in her nostrils. Puck’s desk lay in the center of a pool of light, a wall of darkness beyond. Puck himself was nowhere to be seen.

Nora checked her watch. Four P.M. She was right on time.

She released the door and it sighed back into place. She turned the lock, then approached the desk, heels clicking on the marble floor. She signed in automatically, scrawling her name at the top of a fresh page in the logbook. Puck’s desk was neater than usual, and a single typewritten note sat in the middle of the green felt pad. She glanced at it. I’m on the triceratops in the back.

The triceratops, Nora thought, looking into the gloom. Leave it to Puck to be off dusting old relics. But where the hell was the triceratops? She didn’t recall having seen one. And there were no lights on in the back that she could see. The damn triceratops could be anywhere. She looked around: no diagram of the Archives, either. Typical.

Feeling an undercurrent of irritation, she moved to the banks of ivory light switches. She snapped a few on at random. Lights sprang up here and there, deep within the Archives, casting long shadows down the rows of metal shelving. Might as well turn them all on, she thought, flipping whole rows of switches with the edge of her hand. But even with all the lights, the Archives remained curiously shadowy and dim, large pools of darkness and long dim aisles predominating.

She waited, half expecting Puck to call out to her. There was no sound except the distant ticking of steam pipes and the hiss of the forced-air ducts.

“Mr. Puck?” she called tentatively.

Her voice reverberated and died. No answer.

She called again, louder this time. The Archives were so vast she wondered if her voice could penetrate to the rear.

For a minute, she considered coming back another time. But Puck’s message had been most insistent.

Vaguely, she recalled seeing some mounted fossil skeletons on her last visit. Maybe she would find the triceratops among them.

With a sigh, she began walking down one of the aisles, listening to the clatter of her shoes against the marble. Although the entrance to the aisle had been brightly lit, it soon grew shadowy and dim. It was amazing how poorly illuminated the place was; in the middle sections of the aisles, far from the lights, one almost needed a flashlight to make out the objects stacked on the shelves.

At the next pool of light, Nora found herself at a junction from which several aisles wandered away at a variety of angles. She paused, considering which to take. It’s like Hansel and Gretel in here, she thought. And I’m fresh out of bread crumbs.

The aisle closest to her left went in a direction that, she remembered, led to a grouping of stuffed animals. But its few lights were burned out and it vanished into darkness. Nora shrugged and took the next aisle over.

It felt so different, walking these passages alone. The last time, she’d been with Pendergast and Puck. She had been thinking about Shottum and hadn’t paid much attention to her surroundings. With Puck guiding their steps, she hadn’t even bothered to notice the strange jogs these aisles took, the odd angles at which they met. It was the most eccentric layout imaginable, made even more eccentric by its vast size.

Her thoughts were interrupted as the aisle took a sharp turn to the left. Around the corner, she unexpectedly came upon a number of freestanding African mammals — giraffes, a hippo, a pair of lions, wildebeests, kudu, water buffalo. Each was wrapped in plastic, bestowing a muffled, ghostly appearance.

Nora stopped. No sign of a triceratops. And once again, the aisles led away in half a dozen directions. She chose one at random, followed it through one jog, then another, coming abruptly to another intersection.

This was getting ridiculous. “Mr. Puck!” she called out loudly.

The echoes of her voice gradually faded away. The hiss of forced air filled the ensuing silence.

She didn’t have time for this. She would come back later, and she’d call first to make sure Puck was waiting at his desk. Better still, she’d just tell him to take whatever it was he wanted to show her directly to Pendergast. She was off the case, anyway.

She turned to walk out of the Archives, taking what she thought would be the shortest path. After a few minutes, she came to a stop beside a rhino and several zebras. They looked like lumpy sentinels beneath the omnipresent plastic, giving off a strong smell of paradichlorobenzene.

These aisles didn’t look familiar. And she didn’t seem to be any closer to the exit.

For a moment, she felt a small current of anxiety. Then she shook it away with a forced laugh. She’d just make her way back to the giraffes, then retrace her steps from there.

As she turned, her foot landed in a small puddle of water. She looked up just as a drop of water splattered on her forehead. Condensation from the pipes far overhead. She shook it away and moved on.

But she couldn’t seem to find her way back to the giraffes.