Douglas Preston - The Cabinet of Curiosities

That Nora Kelly again. Custer made a mental note to question her himself once he was done here. She’d be his prime suspect, if he thought her capable of hoisting a heavyset man onto a dinosaur horn. Maybe she had accomplices.

Custer jotted some notes. “Has anything been moved in or out of here in the past month?”

“There may have been some routine additions to the collection. I believe that once a month or so they send dead files down here.” Manetti paused. “And, after the discovery of the letter, it and all related documents were sent upstairs for curating. Along with other material.”

Custer nodded. “And Collopy ordered that, did he not?”

“Actually, I believe it was done at the order of the Museum’s vice president and general counsel, Roger Brisbane.”

Brisbane: he’d heard that name before, too. Custer made another note. “And what, exactly, did the related documents consist of?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Mr. Brisbane.”

Custer turned to the two museum employees behind the desk. “This guy, Brisbane. You see him down here a lot?”

“Quite a bit, recently,” said one.

“What’s he been doing?”

The man shrugged. “Just asking a lot of questions, that’s all.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Questions about Nora Kelly, that FBI guy… He wanted to know what they’d been looking at, where they went, that kind of thing. And some journalist. He wanted to know if a journalist had been in here. I can’t remember the name.”

“Smithbrick?”

“No, but something like that.”

Custer picked up his notebook, flipped through it. There it was. “William Smithback, Junior.”

“That’s it.”

Custer nodded. “How about this Agent Pendergast? Any of you see him?”

The two exchanged glances. “Just once,” the first man said.

“Nora Kelly?”

“Yup,” said the same man: a young fellow with hair so short he looked almost bald.

Custer turned toward him. “Did you know Puck?”

The man nodded.

“Your name?”

“Oscar. Oscar Gibbs. I was his assistant.”

“Gibbs, did Puck have any enemies?”

Custer noticed the two men exchanging another glance, more significant this time.

“Well…” Gibbs hesitated, then began again. “Once, Brisbane came down here and really lit into Mr. Puck. Screaming and yelling, threatening to bury him, to have him fired.”

“Is that right? Why?”

“Something about Mr. Puck leaking damaging information, failing to respect the Museum’s intellectual property rights. Things like that. I think he was mad because Human Resources hadn’t backed up his recommendation to fire Mr. Puck. Said he wasn’t through with him, not by a long shot. That’s really all I remember.”

“When was this, exactly?”

Gibbs thought a moment. “Let’s see. That would have been the thirteenth. No, the twelfth. October twelfth.”

Custer picked up his notebook again and made another notation, longer this time. He heard a shattering crash from the bowels of the Archives; a shout; then a protracted ripping noise. He felt a warm feeling of satisfaction. There would be no more letters hidden in elephants’ feet when he was done. He turned his attention back to Gibbs.

“Any other enemies?”

“No. To tell you the truth, Mr. Puck was one of the nicest people in the whole Museum. It was a big shock to see Brisbane come down on him like that.”

This Brisbane’s not a popular guy, thought Custer. He turned to Noyes. “Get this man Brisbane for me, will you? I want to talk to him.”

Noyes moved toward the front desk just as the Archives door burst open. Custer turned to see a man dressed in a tuxedo, his black tie askew, brilliantined hair hanging across his outraged face.

“What the hell is going on here?” the man shouted in Custer’s direction. “You just can’t come bursting in here like this, turning the place upside down. Let me see your warrant!”

Noyes began fumbling for the warrant, but Custer stayed him with a single hand. It was remarkable, really, how steady his hand felt, how calm and collected he was during all this, the turning point of his entire career. “And who might you be?” he asked in his coolest voice.

“Roger C. Brisbane III. First vice president and general counsel of the Museum.”

Custer nodded. “Ah, Mr. Brisbane. You’re just the man I wanted to see.”

SMITHBACK FROZE, STARING into the pool of darkness that lay at the far corner of the room. “Who is that?” he finally managed to croak.

There was no response.

“Are you the caretaker?” He gave a strained laugh. “Can you believe it? I’ve locked myself in.”

Again, silence.

Perhaps the voice had been his imagination. God knows, he’d seen enough in this house to cure him of ever wanting to watch another horror movie.

He tried again. “Well, all I can say is, I’m glad you happened by. If you could help me find my way to the door—”

The sentence was choked off by an involuntary spasm of fright.

A figure had stepped out into the dim light. It was muffled in a long dark coat, features in deep shadow under a derby hat. In one upraised hand was a heavy, old-fashioned scalpel. The razor edge gleamed faintly as the man turned it slowly, almost lovingly, between slender fingers. In the other hand, a hypodermic syringe winked and glimmered.

“An unexpected pleasure to see you here,” the figure said in a low, dry voice as he caressed the scalpel. “But convenient. In fact, you’ve arrived just in time.”

Some primitive instinct of self-preservation, stronger even than the horror that had seized him, spurred Smithback into action. He spun and ran. But it was so dark, and the figure moved so blindingly fast…

Later — he didn’t know how much later — Smithback woke up. There was a torpor, and a strange, languorous kind of confusion. He’d had a dream, a terrible dream, he remembered; but it was over now and everything was fine, he would wake to a beautiful fall morning, the hideous fragmented memories of the nightmare melting away into his subconscious. He’d rise, dress, have his usual breakfast of red flannel hash at his favorite Greek coffeeshop, and slowly take on once again, as he did every morning, his mundane, workaday life.

But as his mind gradually grew more alert, he realized that the broken memories, the horrible hinted fragments, were not evaporating. He had somehow been caught. In the dark. In Leng’s house.

Leng’s house…

He shook his head. It throbbed violently at the movement.

The man in the derby hat was the Surgeon. In Leng’s house.

Suddenly, Smithback was struck dumb by shock and fear. Of all the terrible thoughts that darted through his mind at that terrible moment, one stood out from the rest: Pendergast was right. Pendergast was right all along.

Enoch Leng was still alive.

It was Leng himself who was the Surgeon.

And Smithback had walked right into his house.

That noise he was hearing, that hideous gasping, was his own hyperventilation, the suck of air through tape covering his mouth. He forced himself to slow down, to take stock. There was a strong smell of mold around him, and it was pitch black. The air was cold, damp. The pain in his head increased. Smithback moved his arm toward his forehead, felt it stop abruptly — felt the tug of an iron cuff around his wrist, heard the clank of a chain. What the hell was this?

His heart began to race, faster and faster, as one by one the holes in his memory filled: the endless echoing rooms, the voice from the darkness, the man stepping out of the shadows… the glittering scalpel. Oh, God, was it really Leng? After 130 years? Leng?