Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

The memory palace refused to appear. It remained out of reach, shifting, insubstantial.

Pendergast waited, reducing his heartbeat and respiration still further. Such a failure had never occurred before.

Now, delving into one of the most difficult of the Chongg Ran exercises, he mentally detached his consciousness from his body, then rose above it, floating incorporeal in space. Without opening his eyes, he re-created a virtual construct of the room in which he lay, imagining every object in its place, until the entire room had materialized in his mind, complete to the last detail. He lingered over it for several moments. And then, piece by piece, he proceeded to remove the furnishings, the carpeting, the wallpaper, until at last everything was gone once again.

But he did not stop there. Next, he proceeded to remove all the bustling city that surrounded the room: initially, structure by structure, then block by block, and then neighborhood by neighborhood, the act of intellectual oblivion gaining speed as it raced outward in all directions. Counties next; then states; nations, the world, the universe, all fell away into blackness.

Within minutes, everything was gone. Only Pendergast himself remained, floating in an infinite void. He then willed his own body to disappear, consumed by darkness. The universe was now entirely empty, stripped clean of all thought, all pain and memory, all tangible existence. He had reached the state known as Sunyata: for a moment-or was it an eternity?-time itself ceased to exist.

And then at last, the ancient mansion on Dauphine Street began to materialize in his mind: the Maison de la Rochenoire, the house in which he and Diogenes had grown up. Pendergast stood on the old cobbled street before it, gazing through the high wrought-iron fence to the mansion’s mansard roofs, oriel windows, widow’s walk, battlements, and stone pinnacles. High brick walls on one side hid lush, interior parterre gardens.

In his mind, Pendergast opened the huge iron gates and walked up the front drive, pausing on the portico. The whitewashed double doors lay open before him, giving onto the grand foyer.

After a moment of uncharacteristic indecision, he stepped through the doors and onto the marble floor of the hall. A huge crystal chandelier sparkled brilliantly overhead, hovering beneath the trompe l’oeil ceiling. Ahead, a double curved staircase with elaborately beaded newels swept up toward the second-floor gallery. On the left, closed doors led into the long, low-ceilinged exhibition hall; on the right lay the open doorway into a dim, wood-paneled library.

Although the real family mansion had been burned to the ground by a New Orleans mob many years before, Pendergast had retained this virtual mansion within his memory ever since: an intellectual artifact, perfect down to the last detail; a storehouse in which he kept not only his own experiences and observations, but innumerable family secrets as well. Normally, entering into this palace of memory was a tranquilizing, calming experience: each drawer of each cabinet of each room held some past event, or some personal reflection on history or science, to be perused at leisure. Today, however, Pendergast felt a profound unease, and it was only with the greatest mental effort he was able to keep the mansion cohesive in his mind.

He crossed the foyer and mounted the stairs to the wide second-floor hallway. Hesitating only briefly at the landing, he moved down the tapestried corridor, the broad sweep of the rose-colored walls broken at intervals by marble niches or ancient gilt frames containing portraits in oils. The smell of the mansion now swept over him: a combination of old fabric and leather, furniture polish, his mother’s perfume, his father’s Latakia tobacco.

Near the center of this hallway lay the heavy oak door to his own room. But he did not proceed that far. Instead, he stopped at the door just before it: a door that, strangely, had been sealed in lead and covered with a sheet of hammered brass, its edges nailed into the surrounding door frame.

This was the room of his brother, Diogenes. Pendergast himself had mentally sealed this door years before, locking the room forever inside the memory palace. It was the one room into which he had promised himself never again to enter.

And yet-if Eli Glinn was right-he must enter it. There was no choice.

As Pendergast paused outside the door, hesitating, he became aware that his pulse and respiration were increasing at an alarming rate. The walls of the mansion around him flickered and glowed, growing brighter, then fading, like the filament of a lightbulb failing under too much current. He was losing his elaborate mental construct. He made a supreme effort to concentrate, to calm his mind, and managed to steady the image around him.

He had to move quickly: the memory crossing could shatter at any moment under the force of his own emotions. He could not maintain the necessary concentration indefinitely.

He willed a pry bar, chisel, and mallet to appear in his hands. He wedged the pry bar under the brass sheet, pulling it away from the door frame, moving around the four sides until he had pried it off. Dropping the bar, he took up the chisel and mallet and began hammering loose the soft lead that had been packed in the cracks between the door and the frame, digging and carving it out in chunks. He worked rapidly, trying to lose himself in the task, thinking of nothing but the job at hand.

Within minutes, curls of lead lay over the carpeting. Now the only impediment to what lay on the far side of the door was its heavy lock.

Pendergast stepped forward, tried the handle. Normally, he would have picked it with the set of tools he always carried with him. But there was no time even for this: any pause, however brief, might be fatal. He stepped back, raised his foot, aimed at a point just below the lock, and gave the door a savage kick. It flew back, slamming against the interior wall with a crash. Pendergast stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. The room of Diogenes, his brother, lay beyond.

And yet there was nothing visible. The mellow light of the hallway did not penetrate the infinite gloom. The doorway was a rectangle of blackness.

Pendergast tossed aside the chisel and mallet. A moment’s thought brought a powerful flashlight into his hand. He snapped on the light and pointed the beam into the gloom, which seemed to suck the very light out of the air.

Pendergast tried to take a step forward but found he could not will his limbs to move. He stood there, on the threshold, for what seemed like an eternity. The house began to wobble, the walls evaporating as if made of air, and he realized he was once again losing the memory palace. He knew if he lost it now, he’d never return. Ever.

It was only by a final act of supreme will-the most focused, draining, and difficult moment he had ever faced-that Pendergast forced himself over the threshold.

He stopped again just beyond, prematurely exhausted, playing the flashlight around, forcing the beam to lick ever farther into the darkness. It was not the room he expected to find. Instead, he was at the top of a narrow stairway of undressed stone, winding down into the living rock, twisting deeply into the earth.

At this sight, something dark stirred within Pendergast’s mind: a rough beast that had slumbered, undisturbed, for over thirty years. For a moment, he felt himself falter and his will fail. The walls trembled like a candle flame in the wind.

He recovered. He had no choice now but to go forward. Taking a fresh grip on the flashlight, he began to descend the worn, slippery steps of stone: deeper, ever deeper, into a maw of shame, regret-and infinite horror.

Pendergast descended the staircase, the smell of the sub-basement coming up to him: a cloying odor of damp, mold, iron rust, and death. The staircase ended in a dark tunnel. The mansion had one of the few belowground basements in New Orleans-created at great expense and labor by the monks who originally built the structure, and who had lined the walls with sheets of hammered lead and carefully fitted stone to make cellars for aging their wines and brandies.