Douglas Preston: Extraction

“Go on with the story.”

“As I said, most of the young children believed that Old Dufour was the tooth fairy. Here is how it worked: when you lost a tooth, you had to wait for the next full moon. Then, just before bedtime, you would sneak over to the Dufour mansion and leave the tooth in a particular place on the front porch.”

“What kind of place?” Constance asked.

“It was a raised wooden box or a sort of pedestal, elaborately carved, with a hole in the top, inside of which had been affixed a small copper vessel. I would guess the original purpose had been as some sort of large ashtray or perhaps a small spittoon or cuspidor. It was set on the edge of the porch, right by the sagging front steps. You would have to sneak up to the porch without making a sound, drop the tooth in there, and then run for your life.”

“And the reward?” Constance asked. “What did you get in return?”

“Nothing. No reward.”

“Then why do it? Wouldn’t it be better to put it under your pillow and collect some money?”

“Oh, no. You see, you had to give it to Old Dufour. Because—” and here Pendergast lowered his voice a bit—“if you didn’t give the fairy your tooth, he would come to your house in the middle of the night, and… take it.”

“Take what?”

“His due.”

Constance gave a light laugh. “What a gruesome legend. I wonder if Monsieur Dufour was even aware this was going on.”

“He was well aware. As you shall hear.”

“So the children were, in essence, warding off the evil Dufour by leaving their teeth?”

“Precisely. The knowledge that the tooth fairy wouldn’t be paying you a dreadful visit in the middle of the night far surpassed the value of a dime, or quarter, or whatever you might receive if you’d placed that tooth under your pillow.” Pendergast paused again, recollecting. “At the time my story takes place, I had just turned nine. Naturally I thought the legend of the tooth fairy — Dufour or otherwise — to be pure rubbish. I looked on those who believed with disdain, even contempt. It was late August, the tail end of a long and hot summer. My mother was in the hospital, sick with malaria; my father was away in Charleston on business. A rather distant uncle of ours, a descendant of Erasmus Pendergast, had come to stay in our house on Dauphine Street, looking after us. His name was Everett Judgment Pendergast — Uncle Everett. He was a brandy-and-soda sort of fellow who kept to his books and pretty much left us to our own devices. As you might imagine, we liked that just fine.”

Pendergast shifted, threw one knee over the other. “My brother Diogenes had just turned six. This was before various, shall we say, aberrant interests had taken possession of him. He was still an impressionable child and, perhaps to his misfortune, highly precocious. He had somehow gotten into our great-grandfather’s locked library cabinet, and he’d been reading a lot of old books he shouldn’t have — tomes on demonology, witchcraft, the Inquisition, deviant practices of all imaginable sorts, alchemy — books that I believe had a deleterious effect on him in later life. He also had a habit of listening very quietly and carefully to the talk of the house servants. He was, even at six, a secretive, devious little boy.

“On the night in question — it was August twenty-fifth — I saw Diogenes hovering suspiciously around the back door, clutching something in one hand. I asked him what he was doing. He refused to say, so I seized his hand and tried to pry it open. We tussled. He was only six and lost the struggle. Inside the palm of his hand I found a grubby little baby tooth, with dried blood on it, obviously recently shed. I forced the story out of him. He had lost it two days before, and had been waiting for a full moon. That night, he was planning to sneak over to Montegut Street with his tooth, and place it in the copper pot on Old Dufour’s porch. He was terrified that if he didn’t, Dufour would come looking for him at night. Because Old Dufour had to have his due.”

Pendergast paused. A serious, even pained look had gathered on his pale face.

“I was a terrible older brother to Diogenes. I scoffed at his fear. I despised it. If one had to believe in a tooth fairy, I felt, one should at least believe in the traditional story, not some ridiculous tale whispered by house servants about a pathetic old man on the next block. It angered me that my own brother, a Pendergast, would fall victim to such a cretinous idea. I would not allow it.

“So I argued with him. I told him that he would not bring the tooth to Dufour’s place, but instead do what normal children his age did and leave it under his pillow, even if I had to force him to do so. I disparaged the legend, mocked it, and said no brother of mine should fall for such bunkum.

“But Diogenes was headstrong, and he snatched back the tooth while I was engaged in my heated argument. We wrestled for it again, but this time he broke away from me and ran out the back door… into the darkness of the night.

“I ran after him but could not find him — Diogenes was already remarkably adept at concealment. I roamed about the neighborhood, becoming angrier and angrier. Finally, since I couldn’t determine his whereabouts, I did the next best thing. I went down to Montegut Street, to the Dufour Mansion, and hid myself among the riot of half-dead palmetto trees that grew in the abandoned front garden before the porch, waiting for my brother to arrive.

“It was, I recall, an unsettled night. As I waited, the wind picked up, and I could hear faint rumbles of thunder from far away. There was a single dim light on in the house, high up in a broken oriel window, which cast no illumination. Several of the closest streetlamps were broken. The full moon was on the far side of the mansion, leaving the porch a pool of darkness. There was no chance of Diogenes detecting my presence. And so there I waited. The old Dufour place seemed to be waiting, too. Despite my scorn at my brother’s foolishness, as the minutes ticked by I nevertheless grew distinctly uneasy, hiding there in the shadow of that decaying pile. There was a feeling of something, some presence, that gathered about the mansion like a sickly miasma. On top of that, the heat and humidity in that forest of dying palmettos were unbearable, and a smell seemed to seep from the house: a foul odor that reminded me of the dead cat I had found in a dark corner of our garden a few months earlier.

“At half past ten Diogenes finally appeared. He crept silently from the shadows on the far side of the house, come to leave his tooth. He looked furtively in both directions. I could see his pale, frightened face in the darkness. Then he glanced directly at the stand of palmetto trees in which I’d hidden myself. For a second I feared that my presence had been betrayed. But no: Diogenes skulked up to the old mansion; looked around again; and with infinite caution crept up the steps and dropped the tooth into the old cuspidor at the top. I heard the faint rattle that it made as it rolled around the little copper bowl. Then he turned, slipped down the steps, and made his way along the street, his little footsteps just barely audible. Silence returned almost immediately. Looking back upon it today, I find myself amazed that one so young could move with such deliberate stealth. In later life he would improve on that talent immeasurably.

“I waited — ten minutes, then fifteen. To be honest, I was rather nervous about going up those steps. And I worried that Diogenes, who was a naturally suspicious creature, might have circled back and would be hiding nearby, watching to see if I was around. But all was silent as the grave, and eventually I screwed up my courage, rose from my hiding place, and crept through the palmettos toward the porch stairs. I well remember their dry rustle, and that smell of decay and rot, as I drew closer. I practically slithered up the steps. There was the wooden stand, once elaborately carved but now fearfully decayed, the paint mostly gone, the wood weathered and split. At the top was a dark, round hole, above which the lip of the copper vessel protruded. Holding my breath, I reached my hand down the throat of the pot and felt about the bottom, looking for the tooth, grasped it, and pulled it out. I was surprised to encounter no other teeth in the vessel but that one. As I stared at it in the dim light — one small central incisor, white, with a faint streak of crimson on the root, nestled in my palm — I could tell that it was indeed Diogenes’s. It gave me a start to think that Dufour might actually be aware of his ‘status’ and had been collecting the teeth deposited there on a regular basis. But then I dismissed that as fantasy. Clearly the maid or someone else in residence had recently cleaned the pot; that was the obvious explanation. For a moment I looked up at the old mansion. All was quiet, all was calm. There was no sign of life beyond the lambent glow in the upper window.