Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

The vehicle was useless; he would have to walk back to New Xade, now 175 miles behind him. He had food and plenty of water. He would walk at night. Quickly, he did the mental calculations. He had fifty-six pounds of water left, give or take. His water requirement would be a gallon a day: eight pounds of water. That equaled a seven-day supply. Twenty-five miles of walking a day to reach New Xade.

He had a sporting chance to survive this; to walk out of the desert alive. No doubt Diogenes knew that, too.

The real question was why Diogenes had set up this elaborate deception in the first place. And it was elaborate indeed: involving multiple chartered jets, feints and double blinds, a long vehicle chase. Along the way, some people he’d met had been duped; others, he felt sure, had provided paid “assistance.” He was not sure what was true and what was false. Who had told him actual lies? The pilot of the Bombardier, the Land Rover salesman — Proctor felt certain of them. The rest had seen what Diogenes wanted them to see. But those two, he believed, were part of his plan. They had told lies to Proctor’s face — even though they both, undoubtedly, realized the extreme danger they’d been in. Was it possible, actually possible, the car salesman had stuck to Diogenes’s script — even after the treatment he’d received at Proctor’s hands?

Then there was the question of Constance herself. Proctor had only once seen her face directly: in the security video of the Namibian airport. If Diogenes was capable of such a thorough deception in every other way, surely he could have misled Proctor there, too. It was unlikely… but it was possible. Was she dead or alive?

Why? Why? The incomprehensibility of it all filled Proctor with useless rage.

Taking a deep breath, he recognized that he was at the extreme edge of exhaustion, almost to the point of sleep psychosis. He had been going flat-out for over sixty hours straight. He could do nothing more without sleep.

As he lay back in the cool of the night, he heard a swelling sound in the distance, a throbbing crescendo that he recognized as the roar of a large male lion. The roar was joined by another, and then another: a call and response. It was a coalition of young, aggressive males not old enough to have their own prides, roaring together to establish a bond in preparation for a hunt.

A cooperative hunt.

He would deal with that later. He closed his eyes and immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Although a setting late-autumn sun gilded the west-facing Manhattan façades overlooking the Hudson River, the library of 891 Riverside was cloaked, as always, in perpetual dusk. The tall, iron-framed windows were locked and barred, and covered by heavy tapestries, richly embroidered. But now no fire crackled in the large fireplace; no lamps of antique Tiffany glass were lit against the gloom.

As afternoon turned to evening, and evening to night, the house remained perfectly silent, in watchful repose. No footsteps rang against the marble floor of the reception room; no fingers touched the keys of the Flemish virginal. No movement of any sort, in fact, could be detected — at least, none above the level of the subterranean.

Behind twin bookcases in the library, a private elevator led down to the basement. Here, a labyrinth of corridors, heavy with efflorescence and redolent of dust, led past a number of stone chambers, including one that gave every indication of being an operating room, apparently unused for some time. The passageways terminated in a small space with a low, vaulted ceiling. Into one wall, the Pendergast family crest had been carved: a lidless eye over two moons, one crescent, the other full, with a lion couchant, along with the Pendergast motto LUCRUM, SANGUINEM: “To gain honor, blood.” Manipulating the crest with the proper motion caused the stone wall to swing away, revealing a circular staircase, cut out of the living bedrock and spiraling down into further darkness. This in turn led to a sub-basement of almost unguessable extent. A central brick pathway led along an earthen floor, below Romanesque arches, past chamber after veiled chamber: burial vaults, storerooms, and collections of every imaginable sort. There were rows of chemicals in ancient glass bottles; rare minerals; insects large and small, with iridescent abdomens and desiccated antennae; Old Master paintings and medieval tapestries; illuminated manuscripts and incunabula; military uniforms and weapons; and a large collection of instruments of torture. This seemingly endless and almost uncatalogable trove was the cabinet of curiosities that had been assembled over many years and at great cost by Antoine Pendergast, Agent Pendergast’s great-grand-uncle — more commonly known by his pseudonym, Enoch Leng.

About halfway down the length of this central corridor, an isolated room, hardly more than an alcove, stood to one side, containing a priceless collection of Japanese Ukiyo-e art: woodblock prints of seascapes; Mount Fuji, wreathed in clouds; courtesans playing the koto. The rear wall of the niche was covered by a large rice-paper depiction of the Okazaki Bridge from Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō . Behind the print was the massive stone wall that formed part of the building’s foundation.

An almost invisible detent in the stone, however, acted much like the crest farther above: when turned to the proper notch, it released a spring that caused a portion of the wall to swing back, in the fashion of a small door. This led to a narrow passage that debouched onto a round chamber, lit faintly by candles, from which three rooms fanned out in the shape of a cloverleaf. One was a small library, containing a writing desk surrounded by old oaken shelves full of leather-bound volumes. Another room was devoted to reflection and meditation, containing only a chair set before a single work of art. And leading off from the far end of the round chamber was the third space: a bedroom-bath suite. The entire composed a small apartment, deep underground, furnished in a spare but nonetheless exquisite style.

The bedroom was similar to the other two rooms: understated, yet somehow elegant in its very asceticism. The large bed had a satin coverlet with matching crimson pillows. One nightstand held a porcelain washbasin from the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King; another held a taper, set into a candlestick of Sheffield pewter.

The set of rooms was as silent and still as the house above, save for the soft, almost inaudible breathing of a person dozing beneath the satin coverlet.

That person was Constance Greene.

Now Constance woke. A light sleeper by long habit, she was fully awake at once. Switching on an electric lantern and blowing out the bedside candle, she consulted her watch: five minutes past eight. Strange, how time felt so different down here, below the beat of the city above: if she was not careful, the days would start blending together so quickly she might lose track of them.

Swinging her legs out of the bed and rising, she reached for a silk robe that hung on a nearby peg and wrapped it tightly around herself. Then she stood for a moment, quite still, reflecting — in the tradition of the monks of the Gsalrig Chongg monastery in Tibet, where she had been tutored — on her state of being and mind upon waking.

She was aware, first and foremost, of an emptiness — an emptiness that, she knew, would never leave her and could never be filled. Aloysius Pendergast was gone. She had finally acknowledged this fact; her decision to retreat to these subterranean chambers — and to quit, at least for a time, the world of the living — was her way of accepting his death. In times of stress, or danger, or great grief, she had always retreated to these quiet, subterranean spaces, known to almost no others. Pendergast had, in his reserved yet gentle way, cured her of this habit; taught her the beauty of the world beyond the Riverside Drive mansion; taught her to tolerate the companionship of her fellow creatures. But now Pendergast was no longer with her. When she realized this, she faced the only two courses of action open to her: retreating belowground, or making use of the vial of cyanide pills that she kept as insurance against the world. She chose the former. Not because she feared death — quite the opposite — but because she knew Aloysius would have been irrevocably disappointed in her if she took her life.