Blue Labyrinth

Her hand stole to an i

But Pendergast would not die. There must be an answer to his sickness. It would be found somewhere in the abandoned laboratories and dusty files in the rambling sub-basements of the Riverside Drive mansion. Her long study of Pendergast’s family history — Hezekiah Pendergast, in particular — convinced her of it.

If my ancestor Hezekiah, Pendergast had told her, whose own wife was dying as a result of his elixir, could not find a cure, could not undo the damage his nostrum had caused… then how can I?

How, indeed.

She slid a heavy tome from the bookshelf. As she did, a muffled click could be heard, and two adjoining bookcases swung out noiselessly on oiled hinges, revealing the brass grille of an old-fashioned elevator. She stepped inside, shut the gate, and turned a brass lever. With a rattle of ancient machinery, the elevator descended. After a moment it jerked to a halt, and Constance stepped out into a dark anteroom. A faint smell of ammonia, dust, and fungus assaulted her nostrils. It was a familiar smell. She knew this basement well — so well that she almost did not need a light to move around. It was, quite literally, a second home to her.

Nevertheless, she removed an electric lantern from its rack on a nearby wall and switched it on. She moved through a maze of corridors, ultimately reaching an old door, heavy with verdigris, which she pushed open to reveal an abandoned operating room. An empty gurney gleamed in the beam of her flashlight, next to an IV rack draped in cobwebs, a bulbous EKG machine, and a stainless-steel tray spread with operating instruments. She crossed the room to the limestone wall at the far end. A quick gesture — the depressing of a stone panel — caused a section of the wall to swivel inward. She stepped into the opening, her light probing down a spiral staircase cut out of the living bedrock of Upper Manhattan.

She descended the staircase, heading for the mansion’s sub-basement. At the bottom, the staircase debouched into a long, vaulted space with an earthen floor, a brick pathway ru

Chemistry ran in the family.

Hezekiah’s wife, also named Constance (strange coincidence, she mused — or then again, perhaps not) had died of her own husband’s elixir. In those last, desperate weeks of her life, according to family lore, Hezekiah had finally faced the truth about his patent medicine. After his wife’s grisly death, he had taken his own life and been buried in the lead-lined family mausoleum in New Orleans, beneath the old family manse known as Rochenoire. That mausoleum had been permanently sealed after the burning of Rochenoire by a mob, and it now lay under the asphalt of a parking lot.

What, then, had happened to Hezekiah’s laboratory, his collection of chemical compounds, and his notebooks? Had they perished in the fire? Or had his son, Antoine, inherited things related to his father’s chemical researches and carried them here, to New York City? If he had, they would be somewhere in these decrepit labs in the sub-basement. The other three sons of Hezekiah had no interest in chemistry. Comstock had become a magician of some renown. Boethius, Pendergast’s great-grandfather, went off to become an explorer and archaeologist. She could never find out what Maurice, the fourth brother, had accomplished, beyond the fact that he sank to an early death from dipsomania.

If Hezekiah had left notes, laboratory equipment, or chemicals behind, Antoine — or as Constance preferred to think of him, Dr. Enoch—was the only one who would have taken an interest. And if that was the case, perhaps some remnant of Hezekiah’s formula for his deadly elixir might be found in this sub-basement.

Formula first, antidote second. And all this had to happen before Pendergast died.

After passing through several chambers, Constance walked beneath a Romanesque arch, decorated with a faded tapestry, into a room that lay in considerable disarray. Shelves were toppled; the bottles and their contents shattered on the floor — the results of a conflict that had taken place here eighteen months before. She and Proctor had been trying to restore order from the shambles. This was one of the last rooms awaiting restoration; scattered about the floor lay Antoine’s entomological collections, with broken bottles full of dried hornet abdomens, dragonfly wings, iridescent beetle thoraxes, and desiccated spiders.

She glided beneath another archway, into a room filled with stuffed Passeriformes, and from there into the most unusual region of the sub-basement: Antoine’s collection of miscellanea. Here were cases full of such odd things as wigs, doorknobs, corsets, busks, shoes, umbrellas and walking sticks, along with bizarre weapons — harquebuses, pikes, shestopyors, bardiches, poleaxes, glaives, bombards, and war hammers. Next, a room full of ancient medical equipment, apparently for both human and veterinary purposes, some of it evidently much used. This was followed, bizarrely, by a collection of military weapons, uniforms, and various kinds of equipment, dating up to approximately the First World War. Constance paused to examine both the medical and the military collections with some interest.

And then came the devices of torture: brazen bulls, racks, thumbscrews, iron maidens, and, ugliest of all, the Pear of Anguish. In the center of the room an executioner’s block had been placed, with an ax lying nearby, near a piece of curled human skin and a shock of hair: relics of a certain horrific event that had taken place here five years earlier, around the time that Agent Pendergast had become her guardian. Constance looked on all these devices with detachment. She was not particularly disturbed by this grotesque evidence of human cruelty. On the contrary, it only confirmed that her view of humanity was correct and needed no revision.

Finally, she came to the room she had been seeking: Antoine’s chemical laboratory. Pushing open the door, a forest of glassware, columnar distillation equipment, titration arrays, and other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century apparatus greeted her eye. Years ago she had spent some time in this particular room, assisting her first guardian. She had never seen anything suggestive. Nevertheless, she was certain that — if Antoine had inherited anything from his father — it would be found here.

She set down the electric lantern on a soapstone table and looked about. She would begin her search, she decided, at the far end.

The chemical apparatus was set up on long tables, coated for the most part in a thick mantle of dust. She quickly went through the drawers, finding many notes and old papers, but nothing that predated Antoine, and all of it focused on Antoine’s own unique researches, mostly dealing with acids and neurotoxins. Having gone through the drawers, finding nothing, Constance started with the old oaken cabinets that lined the walls, still full of working chemicals behind the fronts of rippled glass. She went carefully through the bottles and vials and ampoules and carboys, but they were all labeled in Antoine’s neat copperplate hand — nothing in the handwriting of Hezekiah, which, she knew from her research, was spiky and erratic.