The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(149)

The narrow stone panel, swung to one side, had been perfectly disguised to look part of the wall. Beyond was a pool of blackness. Shining the beam ahead of her, she began descending, slowly and silently.

Reaching the last turn at the bottom, she turned off the light and waited, heart beating rapidly, wondering what to do. If she shone her light around, it might betray her presence, give the Surgeon—if he was waiting out there in the darkness—a perfect target. But with the light off, she simply could not proceed.

The light was a risk she’d have to take. She snapped it back on, stepped out of the stairwell, then gasped involuntarily.

She was in a long, narrow room, crowded floor to ceiling with bottles. Her powerful beam, lancing through the endless rows, cast myriad glittering colors about the room, making her feel as if she was somehow inside a window of stained glass.

More collections. What could all this mean?

But there was no time to pause, no time to wonder. Two sets of footprints led on into the darkness ahead. And there was blood on the dusty floor.

She moved through the room as quickly as she could, beneath an archway and into another room filled with more bottles. The trail of footsteps continued on. At the end of this room was another archway, covered by a fringed tapestry.

She turned off her light and advanced toward it. There she waited, in the pitch black, listening. There was no sound. With infinite care, she drew back the tapestry and peered into the darkness. She could see nothing. The room beyond seemed empty, but there was no way to be sure: she would simply have to take a chance. She took a deep breath, switched on her light.

The beam illuminated a larger room, filled with wooden display cases. She hurried ahead, sidestepping from case to case, to an archway in the far wall that led on into a series of smaller vaults. She ducked into the nearest and turned off her light again, listening for any sound that might indicate that her presence had been noticed. Nothing. Turning on the light again, she moved forward, into a room whose cases were filled with frogs and lizards, snakes and roaches, spiders of infinite shapes and colors. Was there no end to Leng’s cabinet?

At the far end of the room, before another low archway that led into further darkness, she again crouched, turning off her light to listen for any noises that might be coming from the room beyond.

It was then she heard the sound.

It came to her faintly, echoing and distorted by its passage through intervening stone. Remote as it was, it instantly chilled her blood: a low, gibbering moan, rising and falling in a fiendish cadence.

She waited a moment, flesh crawling. For a moment, her muscles tensed for an involuntary retreat. But then, with a supreme effort, she steeled herself. Whatever lay beyond, she would have to confront it sooner or later. Pendergast might need her help.

She gathered up her courage, switched on her light, and sprinted forward. She ran past more rooms full of glass-fronted cases; through a chamber that seemed to contain old clothing; and then into an ancient laboratory, full of tubes and coils, dust-heavy machines festooned with dials and rusted switches. Here, between the lab tables, she pulled up abruptly, pausing to listen again.

There was another sound, much closer now, perhaps as close as the next room. It was the sound of something walking—shambling—toward her.

Almost without thinking, she threw herself beneath the nearest table, switching off her light.

Another sound came, hideously alien and yet unmistakably human. It started as a low chatter, a tattoo of rattling teeth, punctuated with a few gasps as if for breath. Then came a high keening, at the highest edge of audibility. Abruptly, the noise stopped. And then Nora heard, in the silence, the footsteps approach once again.

She remained hidden behind the table, immobilized by fear, as the shuffling drew closer in the pitch black. All of a sudden, the darkness was ripped apart by a terrible shriek. This was immediately followed by a coughing, retching sound and the splatter of fluid on stone. The echoes of the shriek died out slowly, ringing on through the stone chambers behind her.

Nora struggled to calm her pounding heart. Despite the unearthly sound, the thing that was approaching her was human. It had to be, she had to remember that. And if it was human, who could it be but Pendergast or the Surgeon? Nora felt it had to be the Surgeon. Perhaps he had been wounded by Pendergast. Or perhaps he was utterly insane.

She had one advantage: he didn’t seem to know she was there. She could ambush him, kill him with the scalpel. If she could summon the courage.

She crouched behind the lab table, scalpel in one trembling hand and light in the other, waiting in the enfolding dark. The shambling seemed to have stopped. A minute, an eternity, of silence ticked by. Then she heard the unsteady footsteps resume. He was now in the room with her.

The footsteps were irregular, punctuated by frequent pauses. Another minute went by in which there was no movement; then, half a dozen jerky footsteps. And now she could hear breathing. Except it wasn’t normal breathing, but a gasping, sucking sound, as if air were being drawn down through a wet hole.

There was a sudden explosion of noise as the person stumbled into a huge apparatus, bringing it to the ground with a massive crash of glass. The sound echoed and reechoed through the stone vaults.

Maintain, Nora said to herself. Maintain. If it’s the Surgeon, Pendergast must have wounded him badly. But then, where was Pendergast? Why wasn’t he pursuing?

The noises seemed to be less than twenty feet away now. She heard a scrabbling, a muttering and panting, and the tinkling of something shedding broken glass: he was getting up from his fall. There was a shuffling thump, and another. Still he was coming, moving with excruciating slowness. And all the time came that breathing: stertorous, with a wet gurgle like air drawn through a leaky snorkel. Nothing Nora had ever heard in her life was quite so unnerving as the sound of that breathing.