The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(96)

“Good evening, Agent Pendergast,” the guard said. “How are you this evening?”

“Quite well, Frances, thank you,”Pendergast replied. He nodded toward the book. “How are you enjoying Ariosto?”

“Very much. Thanks for the suggestion.”

“I believe I recommended the Bacon translation.”

“Nesmith in the microfiche department has one. The others are on loan.”

“Remind me to send you down a copy.”

“I’ll do that, sir. Thanks.”

Pendergast nodded again and passed on, through the entrance hall and up the marble stairs, hearing nothing but the sound of his own footsteps. At the entrance to Room 315—the Main Reading Room—he paused again. Inside, ranks of long wooden tables lay beneath yellow pools of light. Pendergast entered, gliding toward a vast construction of dark wood that divided the Reading Room into halves. By day, this was the station from which library workers accepted book requests from patrons and sent them down to the subterranean stacks by pneumatic tube. But now, with the fall of night, the receiving station was silent and empty.

Pendergast opened a door at one end of the receiving station, stepped inside, and made his way to a small door, set into a frame beside a long series of dumbwaiters. He opened it and descended the staircase beyond.

Beneath the Main Reading Room were seven levels of stacks. The first six levels were vast cities of shelving, laid out in precise grids that went on, row after row, stack after stack. The ceilings of the stacks were low, and the tall shelves of books claustrophobic. And yet, as he walked in the faint light of the first level—taking in the smell of dust, and mildew, and decomposing paper—Pendergast felt a rare sense of peace. The pain of his stab wound, the heavy burden of the case at hand, seemed to ease. At every turn, every intersection, his mind filled with the memory of some prior perambulation: journeys of discovery, literary expeditions that had frequently ended in investigative epiphanies, abruptly solved cases.

But there was no time now for reminiscing, and Pendergast moved on. Reaching a narrow, even steeper staircase, he descended deeper into the stacks.

At last, Pendergast emerged from the closet-like stairwell onto the seventh level. Unlike the flawlessly catalogued levels above it, this was an endless rat’s nest of mysterious pathways and cul-de-sacs, rarely visited despite some astonishing collections known to be buried here. The air was close and stuffy, as if it had—like the volumes it surrounded—not circulated for decades. Several corridors ran away from the stairwell, framed by bookcases, crossing and recrossing at strange angles.

Pendergast paused momentarily. In the silence, his hyperacute sense of hearing picked up a very faint scratching: colonies of silverfish, gorging their way through an endless supply of pulp.

And there was another sound, too: louder and sharper. Snip.

Pendergast turned toward the sound, tracking it through the stacks of books, angling first one way, then another. The sound grew nearer.

Snip. Snip.

Up ahead, Pendergast made out a halo of light. Turning a final corner, he saw a large wooden table, brilliantly lit by a dentist’s O-ring lamp. Several objects were arrayed along one edge of the table: needle, a spool of heavy filament, a pair of white cotton gloves, a bookbinder’s knife, a glue pen. Next to them was a stack of reference works: Blades’s The Enemies of Books; Ebeling’s Urban Entomology; Clapp’s Curatorial Care of Works of Art on Paper. On a book truck beside the table sat a tall pile of old volumes in various states of decomposition, covers frayed, hinges broken, spines torn.

A figure sat at the table, back to Pendergast. A confusion of long hair, white and very thick, streamed down from the skull onto the hunched shoulders. Snip.

Pendergast leaned against the nearest stack and—keeping a polite distance—rapped his knuckles lightly against the metal.

“I hear a knocking,” the figure quoted, in a high yet clearly masculine tone. He did not turn his head. Snip.

Pendergast knocked again.

“Anon, anon!” the man responded.

Snip.

Pendergast knocked a third time, more sharply.

The man straightened his shoulders with an irritable sigh. “Wake Duncan with thy knocking!” he cried. “I would thou couldst.”

Then he laid aside a pair of library scissors and the old book he had been rebinding, and turned around.

He had thin white eyebrows to match the mane of hair, and the irises of his eyes were yellow, giving him a gaze that seemed leonine, almost feral. He saw Pendergast, and his old withered face broke into a smile. Then he caught sight of the package beneath Pendergast’s arm, and the smile broadened.

“If it isn’t Special Agent Pendergast!” he cried. “The extra-special, Special Agent Pendergast.”

Pendergast inclined his head. “How are you,Wren?”

“I humbly thank thee, well, well.”The man gestured a bony hand toward the book truck, the pile of books waiting to be repaired. “But there is so little time, and so many damaged children.”

The New York Public Library harbored many strange souls, but none was stranger than the specter known as Wren. Nobody seemed to know anything about him: whether Wren was his first name, or his last, or even his real name at all. Nobody seemed to know where he’d come from, or whether he was officially employed by the library. Nobody knew where or what he ate—some speculated that he dined on library paste. The only things known about the man was that he had never been seen to leave the library, and that he had a pathfinder’s instinct for the lost treasures of the seventh level.