Blue Labyrinth

As Pendergast watched, Diogenes took a long, slow sip of the lemonade. He gazed out over the boiling fury of the Sciara del Fuoco with the placid expression of a tourist gazing out at the Mediterranean from the balcony of a Nice hotel. “Ave, Frater,” he said without turning toward him.

Pendergast did not reply.

“I would ask after your health, but present circumstances obviate the need for that particular bit of hypocrisy.”

Pendergast merely stared at this bizarre materialization: his dead brother, lounging on a beach chair at the edge of an active volcano.

“Do you know,” Diogenes went on, “I find the irony — the fitting irony — of your present predicament almost overwhelming. After all we’ve been through, after all my schemes, your end will come at the hands, not of myself, but of your own issue. Your very own son. Think on’t, brother! I should have liked to have met him: Alban and I would have had a lot in common. I could have taught him many things.”

Pendergast did not respond. There was no point in reacting to a feverish delusion.

Diogenes took another sip of lemonade. “But what makes the irony so deliciously complete is that Alban was merely the precipitant of your undoing. Your real killer is our own great-great-grandfather Hezekiah. Talk about the sins of the fathers! Not only is it his own ‘elixir’ killing you — but it is because of the elixir that an indirect victim of it, this Barbeaux fellow, is now taking his revenge.” Diogenes paused. “Hezekiah; Alban; myself. It all makes for a nice family circle.”

Pendergast remained silent.

Still offering only his profile, Diogenes stared out over the violent spectacle churning at their feet. “I’d think you would welcome this chance for atonement.”

Pendergast, goaded, finally spoke. “Atonement? What for?”

“You, with your prudery, your hidebound sense of morality, your misguided desire to do right in the world — it’s always been a mystery to me that you weren’t tortured by the fact we’ve lived comfortably off Hezekiah’s fortune all our lives.”

“You’re talking about something that happened a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

“Does the span of years do anything to lessen the agony of his victims? How long does it take to wash the blood from all that money?”

“It is a false syllogism. Hezekiah profited unscrupulously, but we were the i

Diogenes chuckled — barely audible over the roar of the volcano — then shook his head. “How ironic that I, Diogenes, have become your conscience.”

The enervating anguish of Pendergast’s conscious self began to break through the hallucination. He staggered on the ridge of lava; righted himself. “I…” he began. “I… am not… responsible. And I will not argue with a hallucination.”

“Hallucination?” And now, finally, Diogenes turned to face his brother. The right side of his face — the side he had been presenting to Pendergast — looked as normal and as finely cast as it always had. But the left side was horribly burned, scar tissue puckering and veining the skin from chin to hairline like the bark of a tree, cheekbone and the orbit of a missing eye exposed and white.

“Just keep telling yourself that, frater,” he said over the roar of the mountain. And as slowly as he had turned to face Pendergast, Diogenes now turned away once more, hiding the horrible sight, his gaze once again on the Sciara del Fuoco. And as he did so the nightmare scene began to waver, dissolve, and fade away, leaving Pendergast once again in his own bedroom, the lights dim around him, fresh waves of pain surging over him once more.

57

Far below Pendergast’s bedroom, Constance stood at one of the last of the long sub-basement rooms, breathing hard. A black nylon bag was slung over her shoulder. Traceries of cobwebs hung from her dress.

She had reached the end of Dr. Enoch’s cabinet. It was two thirty PM, and she’d spent hours trying to assemble the necessary compounds for the antidote. Putting the nylon bag down, she consulted her list again, although she knew perfectly well what was still missing. Chloroform and oil of chenopodium.

She had found a large carboy of chloroform, but it hadn’t been well sealed and, over the years, had evaporated. She had found no trace of chenopodium. Chloroform was available by prescription, but that would take too long and Constance did not expect that it would be easy to persuade Dr. Stone, upstairs, to write a scrip. But oil of chenopodium was the bigger problem, as it was no longer used in herbal preparations because of its toxic nature. If she couldn’t find it down here, she would be out of luck. There had to be some in the collections somewhere, as it had been a common ingredient in patent medicines.

But she had seen none.

She started back through the rooms, sweeping beneath the archways. She had skipped the few remaining ruined storage rooms on her outward exploration. Now she would inspect those, too. Over the months, she and Proctor had undertaken the painstaking cleaning process — tossing away the piles of broken glass, gingerly clearing away the crushed artifacts or spilled chemicals.

What if the bottles of oil of chenopodium had been among those broken and disposed of…?

She paused in the one room they had not yet restored. Toppled shelves lay strewn about, and millions of fragments of broken glass winked and glittered on the floor, which was stained with various colored substances and sticky, dried pools. A vile, moldy smell hung in the air here like a toxic miasma. But not everything was broken: many bottles lay on the floor intact, and some shelves still were upright or leaning, crowded with jars of numerous colors, each with a label written in Enoch Leng’s elegant hand.

She started going through the unbroken bottles on some shelves that had escaped the general destruction. The bottles rattled under her fingers as she sorted through them, one Latin name after another, an endless procession of compounds.

It was maddening. The cataloging system Dr. Enoch had used had all been in his own head — and after his death she had never been able to decipher it. She suspected it was random — and that the doctor had simply recorded the entire library of chemicals in his photographic memory.

Completing one shelf, she started on the next, and then the next. A bottle fell and shattered; she kicked the pieces aside. A stench rose up. She kept going, sorting faster and faster, more bottles dropping in her haste. She looked at her watch. Three o’clock.

With a hiss of irritation, she moved to the intact bottles lying about the floor — the ones that hadn’t broken. Stooping, her feet crunching over broken glass, she continued searching, plucking up a bottle, reading the label, tossing it aside. Here were many oils: calendula, borage seed, primrose, mullein, poke root… but no chenopodium. With sudden frustration she lashed out at one of the shelves she had already ransacked, sweeping all the bottles to the floor. They landed with a crashing and popping sound, and now a truly horrific stench rose up.

She stepped aside. Her loss of control was regrettable. Taking a series of deep breaths, she regained her presence of mind and began searching the last of the shelves. Still nothing.

And suddenly there it was: a big bottle labeled OIL OF CHENOPODIUM. Right in front of her.

Scooping up the bottle, she put it in her bag and continued searching for chloroform. Almost the next bottle she picked up turned out to be a small, well-sealed vial of that, too. She stuffed it into the bag, rose, and swept toward the stairs leading to the elevator.

She took this sudden reversal of luck to be a sign. But even as she reached the library, the bookshelves sliding back into place, Mrs. Trask was there, proffering her a phone.