The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(30)

A heavy brocade curtain had been hung over the doorway leading into the rear rooms. I lifted it aside with the end of my walking stick. I thought I had been prepared for almost anything, but what I found was, perhaps, what I least expected.

The rooms were almost entirely empty. There were at least half a dozen large tables, here and there, whose scarred surfaces bore mute testimony to hours of experimental labor. But they were devoid of furnishing. There was a strong ammoniac smell in the air of these rooms that almost choked me. In one drawer I found several blunt scalpels. All the other drawers I examined were empty, save for dust mites and spiders.

After much searching, I located the spot in the floorboards through which the blood had seeped a few nights before. It seemed to have been etched clean with acid; aqua regia, judging by the odor. I glanced around at the walls then, and noticed other patches, some large, others small, that also seemed to indicate recent cleaning.

I must confess to feeling rather a fool at that moment. There was nothing here to excite alarm; nothing that would rouse the faintest trace of suspicion in even the most perspicacious policeman. And yet the sense of dread refused to wholly leave me. There was something about the oddly decorated parlor, the smell of chemicals, the meticulously cleaned walls and floor, that troubled one. Why were these hidden back rooms clean, while the parlor had been allowed to gather dust?

It was at that moment I remembered the basement.

Years before, Leng had asked, in an offhand way, if he could use the old coal tunnel in the basement for storing excess laboratory equipment. The tunnel had fallen into disuse a few years earlier, with the installation of a new boiler, and I had no need of it myself. I had given him the key and promptly forgotten the matter.

My feelings on descending the cellar stairway behind the Cabinet can scarcely be described. On one occasion I halted, wondering if I should summon an escort. But once again, sane reasoning prevailed. There was no sign of foul play. No—the only thing for it was to proceed myself.

Leng had affixed a padlock to the coal cellar door. Seeing this, I was momentarily overcome by a sense of relief. I had done my utmost; there was nothing else but mount the stairs. I even went so far as to turn around and take the first step. Then I stopped. The same impulse that had brought me this far would not let me leave until I had seen this bad business through.

I raised my foot to kick in the door. Then I hesitated. If I could contrive to remove the lock with a pair of bolt cutters, I reasoned, Leng would think it the work of a sneak-thief.

It was the work of five minutes to retrieve the necessary implement and cut through the hasp of the lock. I dropped it to the ground, then pushed the door wide, allowing the afternoon light to stream down the stairway behind me.

Immediately upon entering, I was overwhelmed with far different sensations than those that had gripped me on the third floor. Whatever work had ceased in Leng’s chambers was, clearly, still active here.

Once again, it was the odor I noticed first. As before, there was a smell of caustic reagents, perhaps mixed with formaldehyde or ether. But these were masked by something much richer and more powerful. It was a scent I recognized from passing the hog butcheries on Pearl and Water Streets: it was the smell of a slaughterhouse.

The light filtering down the rear stairs made it unnecessary for me to ignite the gas lamps. Here, too, were numerous tables: but these tables were covered with a complicated sprawl of medical instruments, surgical apparatus, beakers, and retorts. One table contained perhaps three score small vials of light amber liquid, carefully numbered and tagged. A vast array of chemicals were arranged in cabinets against the walls. Sawdust had been scattered across the floor. It was damp in places; scuffing it with the toe of my boot, I discovered that it had been thrown down to absorb a rather large quantity of blood.

I knew now that my apprehensions were not entirely without merit. And yet, I told myself, there was still nothing to raise alarm here: dissections were, after all, a cornerstone of science.

On the closest table was a thick sheaf of carefully jotted notes, gathered into a leather-bound journal. They were penned in Leng’s distinctive hand. I turned to these with relief. At last, I would learn what it was Leng had been working towards. Surely some noble scientific purpose would emerge from these pages, to give the lie to my fears.

The journal did no such thing.

You know, old friend, that I am a man of science. I have never been what you might call a God-fearing fellow. But I feared God that day—or rather, I feared his wrath, that such unholy deeds—deeds worthy of Moloch himself—had been committed beneath my roof.

Leng’s journal spelt it out in unwavering, diabolical detail. It was perhaps the clearest, most methodical set of scientific notes it has been my eternal misfortune to come across. There is no kind of explanatory gloss I can place upon his experiments; nothing, in fact, I can do but spell it all out as plainly and succinctly as I can.

For the last eight years, Leng has been working to perfect a method of prolonging human life. His own life, by evidence of the notations and recordings in the journal. But—before God,Tinbury—he was using other human beings as material. His victims seemed made up almost entirely of young adults. Again and again, his journal mentioned dissections of human craniums and spinal columns, the latter on which he seems to have focused his depraved attentions. The most recent entries centered particularly on the cauda equina, the ganglion of nerves at the base of the spine.

I read for ten, then twenty minutes, frozen with fascination and horror. Then I dropped the abhorrent document back onto the table and stepped away. Perhaps I was a little mad at that point, after all; because I still contrived to find logic in all of this. Body-snatching the recent dead from graveyards is an unfortunate but necessary practice in the medical climate of our day, I told myself. Cadavers for medical research remain in critically short supply, and there is no way to supply the need without resorting to grave-robbing. Even the most respectable surgeons need resort to it, I told myself. And even though Leng’s attempts at artificially prolonging life were clearly beyond the pale, it was still possible he might unintentionally achieve other breakthroughs that would have beneficial effects…