Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

With an effort, he pushed this voice — a voice of the old Diogenes, which now and then came bubbling up unexpectedly, like methane in a tar pit — back down from whence it came. That was then; this was now. He was a changed man, a reformed man — and yet the Old Voice still returned in moments of extreme agitation, as now… or when, for whatever reason, his blood was roused…

He tried to focus on the tweed.

He had prided himself on his sophistication and worldliness for too long, despising the opinion of others. The only time he ever considered how others might view him was when he was engaged in social engineering. Or when, out of boredom or irritation, he deceived, punked, or trolled others for his private amusement. He was finding it difficult to show Constance the sense of vulnerability and affection that he genuinely felt for her. He was like a man who, having taken a vow of silence for half his life, suddenly tried to lift up his voice in song.

He adjusted his position in the chair. He’d had to drag it out of storage from one of the basement vaults, and its ancient silk-and-velvet cushions had been heavy with dust. As the creak of the chair subsided, he listened once again, his senses ready to capture the faintest sound, the least variation in air pressure, that would indicate her approach up the staircase that corkscrewed down into the sub-basement.

He glanced at his watch: quarter past ten in the morning. He had said good-bye to Constance a few minutes before midnight. He had been sitting here, waiting, for her — and for her response — ever since.

The degree of planning and money and time necessary to bring last evening’s meeting to fruition — a meeting in which he could bare his soul, without fear of interruption — had been tremendous. But it would all be worthwhile — if only she said yes.

At another time, in another life, he could have found amusement in how well he’d pulled it all off. The handling of Proctor, for example, had been perfect: right down to Gander airfield, where he’d arranged things so that the devoted bodyguard would land just in time to see him force “Constance”—actually a disguised Flavia — into a waiting jet. Proctor had, of course, raced off to Ireland in pursuit… while he himself had immediately exited the Bombardier, boarded a different plane, and returned to New York. He’d been back in the city before seven o’clock, barely six hours after leaving it in the Navigator. Sending that alert, clever man on a wild goose chase to the ends of the earth had been a brilliant piece of work.

The refrigerated coffin had also, he felt, been an inspired touch. Proctor would not know what it meant — not that, in reality, it meant anything — but it would surely have put his imagination to work… and inspired him to the most extreme of measures.

He reminded himself that it was unseemly to take pride in what, for Proctor, must be the most mortifying experience of a lifetime. But the man was out of the way — inconvenienced but alive. Constance would never have forgiven him had he employed a more drastic solution.

Across the corridor from where he sat was the chamber that, in prior years, had served as Enoch Leng’s operating room. From his vantage point, he could just make out the end of the operating table, fashioned out of an early martensitic-stainless-steel alloy. It was still polished to a brilliant sheen, and his own features looked back at him. They were splendid features, the scar adding a certain frisson to his chiseled face and heterochromic eyes. At least, he hoped that’s what Constance would think.

You mention the feelings I had for your brother. Why, then, should I have any interest in his inferior sibling — especially after the way you abused my innocence?

… Why should these lines of hers, flung at him in anger just the night before, come back now to torment him? But he had always been an expert at tormenting himself, even more than at tormenting others. Self-torture was a skill Aloysius had taught him. Aloysius, who — while not smarter — was sufficiently older to have been always one math problem ahead of him, one novel better read, one inch taller, one blow stronger. With his disapproving sanctimoniousness and condescension, it was Aloysius who had driven his interests and pastimes underground, into more private and perverse avenues. And it was Aloysius who had triggered the Event, which ended all his hopes of a normal—

Diogenes clamped down hard on the inner torrent of words, realizing that his breathing had quickened and his heart was pounding in his chest. He calmed himself. His hatred for his brother was a just and good hatred. It could never be extinguished and now — with Aloysius’s death — it could never be redressed. But a strange thing had happened: with his brother’s demise, Diogenes’s mind had cleared. He had become more certain than ever there was one person in the world who could in fact bring meaning, fulfillment, and joy into his life.

And that person was Constance Greene.

Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You’re an improbable person, and so am I. And that was how, in his first days after barely escaping the fury of the Stromboli volcano and its vomitus of lava… that was how he had looked upon his own budding passion for Constance.

Even now, the moment came back to him with the vividness of yesterday: that struggle on the terrible, forty-five-degree slope of the Sciara del Fuoco. It had not been a lava flow in the liquefied-stone sense of Hawaii, but rather a lava slope, a hellish rent in the earth half a mile across down which house-sized rocks, red-brown with heat, tumbled incessantly. The heat thrown off by the Slope of Fire created a rising hurricane of brimstone and ash: and it was this demonic wind that had saved his life. After Constance had hurled him from the edge of the slope, he had tumbled, not falling but ultimately rising in the heat-generated gusts, until he had been dashed against one side of the scorching chasm, wedged into a crevice, one side of his face sizzling where it touched the wall of superheated rock. In shock, he had managed to extricate himself, scramble over the lip, and — on all fours — make his way farther along the trail Constance had chased him up, skirting the actual cone of the volcano and eventually making his way down the far side to Ginostra. Ginostra, a village of some forty residents, accessible only by boat: a tiny nugget of the Sicilian past. And it was here where, fainting with the pain, he was taken in by a childless widow who lived in a cottage outside of town. She did not ask him how he came about his injuries; she did not seem to mind his request for utter secrecy; she appeared to be content to tend his wounds with what ancient liniments and tinctures were at her disposal. It was not until the day before he left that he found the true reason for her ministrations — she was mortally afraid of his maloccio , the evil bicolored eyes that, local legend held, would bring ruin upon her if she did not do everything in her power to help him.

He was laid up for weeks, his burns — the hardest of all pain to mitigate, even with modern medicines — causing him unendurable agony. And yet, while he was lying there enveloped in a universe of pain, all he could think about was, not hatred for Constance, but the equally unimaginable pleasure he had shared with her… for just one night.

At the time, he could hardly believe it. It seemed inexplicable, as though he was in thrall to the passions of a stranger. But his need for her, he now realized, was not improbable. In fact, it was inevitable — for all the reasons he had explained the night before. Her distaste for the base and servile world. Her unique depth of knowledge. Her remarkable beauty. Her appreciation for the manners, civilities, and courtliness of an earlier time — coupled most agreeably with a temperament purified, like the best steel, by heat and violence. She was a tigress, dressed tastefully in silk.