Douglas Preston - The Cabinet of Curiosities

Nora took a step back. Her mind took in the details, as if from a long distance away: the balding head with a fringe of gray hair; the flabby skin; the withered arms. Where the horns had speared through the lower back, the flesh was one long, open wound. Blood had collected around the base of the horns, running in dark rivulets around the torso and dripping onto the marble.

I’m on the triceratops in the back.

In the back.

She heard a scream, realized that it had come from her own throat.

Blindly, she wheeled away and ran, veering once, and again, and then again, racing down the aisles as quickly as she could move her legs. And then, abruptly, she found herself in a cul-de-sac. She spun to retrace her steps — and there, blocking the end of the row, stood an antique, black-hatted figure.

Something gleamed in his gloved hands.

There was nowhere to go but up. Without an instant’s thought, she turned, grabbed the edge of a shelf, and began climbing.

The figure came flying down the aisle, black cloak billowing behind.

Nora was an experienced rock climber. Her years as an archaeologist in Utah, climbing to caves and Anasazi cliff dwellings, were not forgotten. In a minute she had reached the top shelf, which swayed and groaned under the unexpected weight. She turned frantically, grabbed the first thing that came to hand — a stuffed falcon — and looked down once again.

The black-hatted man was already below, climbing, face obscured in deep shadow. Nora aimed, then threw.

The falcon bounced harmlessly off one shoulder.

She looked around desperately for something else. A box of papers; another stuffed animal; more boxes. She threw one, then another. But they were too light, useless.

Still the man climbed.

With a sob of terror, she swung over the top shelf and started descending the other side. Abruptly, a gloved hand darted between the shelving, caught hold of her shirt. Nora screamed, ripping herself free. A dim flash of steel and a tiny blade swept past her, missing her eye by inches. She swung away as the blade made another glittering arc toward her. Pain abruptly blossomed in her right shoulder.

She cried out, lost her grip. Landing on her feet, she broke her fall by rolling to one side.

On the far side of the shelving, the man had quickly climbed back down to the ground. Now he began climbing directly through the shelf, kicking and knocking specimen jars and boxes aside.

Again she ran, running wildly, blindly, from aisle to aisle.

Suddenly, a vast shape rose out of the dimness before her. It was a woolly mammoth. Nora recognized it immediately: she’d been here, once before, with Puck.

But which direction was out? As she looked around, Nora realized she would never make it — the pursuer would be upon her in a matter of seconds.

Suddenly, she knew there was only one thing to do.

Reaching for the light switches at the end of the aisle, she brushed them off with a single movement, plunging the surrounding corridors once again into darkness. Quickly, she felt beneath the mammoth’s scratchy belly. There it was: a wooden lever. She tugged, and the trap door fell open.

Trying to make as little noise as possible, she climbed into the hot, stuffy belly, pulling the trapdoor up behind her.

Then she waited, inside the mammoth. The air stank of rot, dust, jerked meat, mushrooms.

She heard a rapid series of clicks. The lights came back on. A stray beam worked through a small hole in the animal’s chest: an eyehole, for the circus worker.

Nora looked out, trying to control her rapid breathing, to push away the panic that threatened to overwhelm her. The man in the derby hat stood not five feet away, back turned. Slowly, he rotated himself through 360 degrees, looking, listening intently. He was holding a strange instrument in his hands: two polished ivory handles joined by a thin, flexible steel saw with tiny serrations. It looked like some kind of dreadful antique surgical instrument. He flexed it, causing the steel wire to bend and shimmy.

His gaze came to rest on the mammoth. He took a step toward it, his face in shadow. It was as if he knew this was where she was hiding. Nora tensed, readying herself to fight to the end.

And then, just as suddenly as he’d approached, he was gone.

“Mr. Puck?” a voice was calling. “Mr. Puck, I’m here! Mr. Puck?”

It was Oscar Gibbs.

Nora waited, too terrified to move. The voice came closer and, finally, Oscar Gibbs appeared around the corner of the aisle.

“Mr. Puck? Where are you?”

With a trembling hand, Nora reached down, unlatched the trapdoor, and lowered herself out of the belly of the mammoth. Gibbs turned, jumped back, and stood there, staring at her open-mouthed.

“Did you see him?” Nora gasped. “Did you see him?”

“Who? What were you doing in there? Hey, you’re bleeding!”

Nora looked at her shoulder. There was a spreading stain of blood where the scalpel had nicked her.

Gibbs came closer. “Look, I don’t know what you’re doing here, or what’s going on, but let’s get you to the nurse’s office. Okay?”

Nora shook her head. “No. Oscar, you have to call the police, right away. Mr. Puck”—her voice broke for a moment—“Mr. Puck’s been murdered. And the murderer is right here. In the Museum.”

BILL SMITHBACK HAD managed, with a little name-dropping here and a little intimidation there, to get the best seat in the house. “The house” was the press room of One Police Plaza, a cavernous space painted the institutional color known universally as Vomit Green. It was now filled to overflowing with scurrying television news crews and frantic journalists. Smithback loved the electric atmosphere of a big press conference, called hastily after some dreadful event, packed with city officials and police brass laboring under the misapprehension that they could spin the unruly fourth estate of New York.

He remained in his seat, calm, legs folded, tape recorder loaded, and shotgun mike poised, while pandemonium raged around him. To his professional nose, it smelled different today. There was an undertone of fear. More than fear, actually: closer to ill-suppressed hysteria. He’d seen it as he’d ridden the subway downtown that morning, walked the streets around City Hall. These three copycat killings, one on top of another, were just too strange. People were talking of nothing else. The whole city was on the verge of panic.

Off to one side he caught sight of Bryce Harriman, expostulating with a policeman who refused to let him move closer to the front. All that fine vocational training at Columbia journalism school, wasted on the New York Post. He should have taken a nice quiet professorship at his old alma mater, teaching callow youth how to write a flawless inverted pyramid. True, the bastard had scooped him on the second murder, on the copycat angle, but surely that was just luck. Wasn’t it?

There was a stir in the crowd. The wing doors of the press room belched out a group of blue suits, followed by the mayor of New York City, Edward Montefiori. The man was tall and solid, very much aware that all eyes were upon him. He paused, nodding to acquaintances here and there, his face reflecting the gravity of the moment. The New York City mayoral race was in full swing, being conducted as usual at the level of two-year-olds. It was imperative that he catch this killer, bring the copycat murders to an end; the last thing the mayor wanted was to give his rival yet more fodder for his nasty television advertisements, which had been decrying the city’s recent upsurge in crime.

More people were coming onto the stage. The mayor’s spokesperson, Mary Hill, a tall, extremely poised African-American woman; the fat police captain Sherwood Custer, in whose precinct this whole mess had started; the police commissioner, Rocker — a tall, weary-looking man — and, finally, Dr. Frederick Collopy, director of the Museum, followed by Roger Brisbane. Smithback felt a surge of anger when he saw Brisbane, looking urbane in a neatly tailored gray suit. Brisbane was the one who had screwed up everything between him and Nora. Even after Nora’s horrible discovery of Puck’s murdered corpse, after being chased and nearly caught herself by the Surgeon, she had refused to see him, to let him comfort her. It was almost as if she blamed him for what happened to Puck and Pendergast.