Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(142)

It had pleased him to pay her frequent sympathetic visits in her comatose state—which he had been at pains to extend, keeping her on the brink of expiration, teasing out her widowed mother’s pain to the greatest possible extent. It was a brew of suffering from which he drank deep, and whose astringent taste renewed his own thirst for the living death that was his life.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” Diogenes said.

The porter entered rolling a portable bar, which he set up on an adjoining table. “Anything else, sir?”

“Not at the moment. You may make up my bed in an hour.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll get your breakfast order then.” The man retreated with another deferential bow.

Diogenes sat for a moment, once again glancing out at the platform. Then, slowly, he drew a silver flask from his breast pocket. Opening it, he poured several ounces of a brilliant green liquid—which to him looked pale gray—into the glass on the portable bar. Then he retrieved a spoon from his leather valise: a silver spoon with the Pendergast family crest stamped on its handle, somewhat melted at one corner. He handled it as one might handle one’s newborn child. Carefully, lovingly, he laid the spoon across the top of the glass and placed a sugar cube inside it. Then, taking the chilled water, he poured it onto the cube, drop by drop. Spilling over the edges of the spoon like a sugary fountain, the sweetened water fell into the liqueur below, turning it first a milky green, then a beautiful opalescent jade—if his eyes could only see in color.

All of this was done without the slightest trace of hurry.

Diogenes put the spoon carefully aside and lifted the glass to his lips, savoring the faintly bitter taste. He screwed the cap back on the flask and returned it to his pocket. It was the only modern absinthe he had found that had the same high proportion of essences of wormwood as the old nineteenth-century brands. As such, it deserved to be drunk in the traditional manner.

He took another sip, settling back comfortably into the chair. What was it Oscar Wilde had said of drinking absinthe? “The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage, where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.”

Strange how, no matter how much he drank, Diogenes never seemed to get past the second stage—nor did he particularly care to.

A small speaker set high up in the wall came to life.





Ladies and gentlemen, this is the conductor speaking. Welcome aboard the Lake Champlain, making stops at Yonkers, Cold Spring, Poughkeepsie, Albany, Saratoga Springs, Plattsburg, St.-Lambert, and Montreal. This is your final boarding call. All visitors, please exit the train at this time…





Listening, Diogenes smiled faintly. The Lake Champlain was one of only two luxury passenger trains still operated by Amtrak. By taking two adjoining first-class bedrooms and having the partition between them unlocked, Diogenes had secured himself a passably comfortable suite. It was a criminal disgrace the way politicians had allowed America’s passenger train system, once the envy of the world, to fall into insolvency and disrepair. But this, too, was but a passing inconvenience: he would soon be back in Europe, where people understood how to travel in dignity and comfort.

Outside the window, a heavyset woman wobbled quickly by, a porter burdened down with suitcases trotting in her wake. Diogenes held up his glass, stirring the pearly liquid gently. The train would depart within moments. And now for the first time—cautiously, like a man approaching a dangerous animal—he allowed himself a brief moment of reflection.

It was almost too dreadful to contemplate. Fifteen years of planning, careful disguise, artful intrigue, ingenious contrivance… all for naught. The thought of all the work and time he had put into Menzies alone—fashioning his backstory, learning his trade, obtaining employment, working for years and years, attending vapid meetings and listening to the asinine mutterings of desiccated curators—was almost enough to send him spiraling into a pit of madness. And then there was the final extravaganza, in all its intricate and fearsome glory: the meticulous medical research into how one could contrive to transform ordinary people into murderous sociopaths using nothing more than sound and light—the ablation of the inhibitory cerebral pathway by laser light, traumatizing the entorhinal cortex and amygdala and allowing for disinhibition of rudimentary function… And then, there had been the painstaking implementation of his own special sound-and-light show hidden within the multimedia presentation everybody else had slaved over—and the testing of it on the technician and that ass, Wicherly…