Blue Labyrinth

The briefest flicker of his eyes, and then he locked them back on her. “What an offensive question! I’ve wasted quite enough time with you already. Good day, Dr. Green.”

Margo rose and left. In that brief moment, his eyes had involuntarily flickered to a spot above and behind her head. As she turned to leave, she observed that the space was occupied by a small, framed botanical print.

She felt hopeful that behind that print would be a safe containing the combination. But how to get Jörgensen out of his bloody office? And even if she found a safe, where would she find its combination? And, assuming she managed to learn the combination, the Herbarium Vault was located deep within the Museum’s basement…

Nevertheless, she had to try.

In the middle of the hallway, she paused. Should she pull a fire alarm? But that would cause the wing to be evacuated and probably get her into trouble.

She continued walking down the hallway, offices and labs on either side. It was still lunch hour, and the place was relatively empty. In one empty lab she spied a Museum phone. She ducked inside, staring at the phone. Could she call him, pretend to be someone’s secretary, ask him to come to a meeting? But he didn’t look like someone who went to meetings… nor someone who would respond favorably to an unexpected summons. And wouldn’t he know most of the secretaries’ voices?

There must be a way to get him out of the office. And that way would be to get him mad, send him off in a fury to dress down a colleague.

She picked up the phone. Instead of calling Jörgensen, she called Frisby’s office. Disguising her voice, she said: “This is the Botany Department office. May I speak with Dr. Frisby? We have a problem.”

Frisby came on a moment later, out of breath. “Yes, what is it?”

“We received your memo about that woman, Dr. Green,” Margo said, keeping her voice muffled and low.

“What about it? She hasn’t been bothering you down there, has she?”

“You know old Dr. Jörgensen? He’s a good friend of Dr. Green. I’m afraid he’s pla

Frisby slammed down the phone. Margo waited in the empty lab, its door partly open. In a few minutes she heard a huffing sound and an enraged Jörgensen came striding past, face red, looking remarkably robust for his age — no doubt heading for Frisby’s office to set him straight.

Margo quickly hustled down the hall and, to her relief, found that his office door had been left wide open in his hurried exit. She ducked in, eased the door shut, and lifted the botanical print from the wall.

Nothing. No safe — just a blank wall.

She felt crushed. Why had he looked in that direction? There was nothing else on the wall. Maybe it was just a random glance, or maybe she hadn’t gotten a good fix on it. She was about to put the picture back when she noticed a piece of paper taped to the rear of the frame, with a list of numbers on it. All the numbers had been crossed out but the last.

56

Aloysius Pendergast lay in bed, keeping as still as possible. Every movement, even the tiniest, was an agony. Just breathing in enough air to oxygenate his blood sent white-hot needles of pain through the muscles and nerves of his chest. He could feel a dark presence waiting at the foot of his bed, a succubus ready to climb on top and suffocate him. But whenever he tried to look at it, it vanished, only to reappear when he looked away.

He tried to will the pain away, to lose himself in the contents of his bedroom, to focus his concentration on a painting on the opposite wall, one in which he had often taken solace: a late work by Turner, Schooner off Beachy Head. He would sometimes lose himself for hours in the painting’s many layers of light and shadow, in the way Turner rendered the sheets of spume and the vessel’s storm-tossed sails. But the pain, and the vile reek of rotting lilies — cloying, sickly-sweet, like the stench of suppurating flesh — made such mental escape impossible.

All his usual mechanisms for coping with emotional or physical trauma had been taken away by the sickness. And now the morphine drip was exhausted and would not be replenished for another hour. There was nothing but a landscape of pain, stretching away endlessly on all sides.

Even in this extremity of his illness, Pendergast knew that the malady afflicting him had its ebbs and swells. If he could survive this current onslaught of pain, it would — in time — subside to afford temporary relief. He would be able to breathe again, to speak, even to rise from his bed and move about. But then the swell of pain would return, as it always did — and each time it was worse and more prolonged than before. And he sensed that at some point soon, the escalation of pain would stop subsiding, and the end would come.

And now, at the periphery of his consciousness, came the crest of the wave of pain: a creeping blackness at the edges of his vision, a vignetting of sorts. It was a signal that, within minutes, he would lose consciousness. Initially, he had welcomed this release. But in a cruel twist, he had soon learned there was, in fact, no release. Because the blackness led, not to a void, but to a hallucinogenic underworld of his subconscious self that had proven in some ways even worse than the pain.

Moments later the blackness caught him in its grip, tugging him from the bed and the dimly lighted room like an undertow catching an exhausted swimmer. There was a brief, sickening sensation of falling. And then the darkness melted away, revealing the scene like a curtain parting from a stage.

He was standing on a scarified ledge of hardened lava, high on the flanks of an active volcano. It was twilight. To his left, the ribbed flanks of the volcano led down to a distant shore, so far away as to seem a different world, where little clutches of whitewashed buildings huddled at the edge of the spume, their evening lights piercing the gloom. Directly ahead and below him was an immense chasm — a monstrous gash ripped into the very heart of the volcano. He could see the living lava roiling like blood within it, glowing a rich angry red in the shadow of the crater that rose just above. Clouds of sulfur steamed up from the chasm, and black flecks of ash, whipped by a hell-wind, skittered through the air.

Pendergast knew precisely where he was: standing on the Bastimento Ridge of the Stromboli volcano, looking down into the infamous Sciara del Fuoco — the Slope of Fire. He had stood on this same ridge once before, just over three years ago, when he had witnessed one of the most shocking dramas of his life.

Except the place now looked different. Brutal at the best of times, it had become — playing out as it was in the theater of his fevered hallucination — something of pure nightmare. The sky encircling him was not the deep purple of twilight, but rather a sickly green, the color of rotten eggs. Livid flashes of orange and blue lightning seared the heavens. Bloated crimson-colored clouds scudded before a guttering, sallow sun. A ghastly Technicolor hue illuminated the entire scene.

As he took in the hellish vision, he was startled to see a person. Not ten feet in front of him, a man sat on a deck chair set upon a fin of old lava that stood out precariously from the ridge above the smoking Sciara del Fuoco. He was wearing dark glasses, a straw hat, a floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts, and was sipping what looked like lemonade out of a tall glass. Pendergast did not need to draw any closer to recognize, in profile, the aquiline nose, neatly trimmed beard, ginger-colored hair. This was his brother, Diogenes. Diogenes — who had disappeared at this very spot, in the horrific scene that had played out between himself and Constance Greene.