The Book of the Dead (47 page)

Pendergast stood in the shadows of his own memory, filled with the helpless foreboding of nightmare, watching the scene unfold. At first the two boys explored cautiously, their candlelight throwing elongated shadows among the boxes and piles of bizarre devices.

“Do you know what all this is?” whispered Aloysius.

“What?”

“We’ve found all the stuff from Great-Grand-Uncle Comstock’s magic show.”

“Who’s Great-Grand-Uncle Comstock?”

“Only the most famous magician in the history of the world. He trained Houdini himself.”

Aloysius touched a cabinet, ran his hand down to a knob, and cautiously pulled out a drawer: it contained a pair of manacles. He opened another drawer, which seemed to stick, and then it gave with a sudden
pop!
A pair of mice shot out of the drawer and scurried off.

Aloysius moved on to the next item, his younger brother following close behind. It was a coffin-like box standing upright, with a screaming man painted on the lid, numerous bloody holes piercing his body. He opened it with a groan of rusty hinges to reveal an interior studded with wrought-iron spikes.

“That looks more like torture than magic,” said Diogenes.

“There’s dried blood on those spikes.”

Diogenes peered closely, fear temporarily overcome by a strange eagerness. Then he stepped back again. “That’s just paint.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know dried blood when I see it.”

Aloysius moved on. “Look at that.” He pointed to an object in the far corner. It was a huge box, much larger than the others, rising from floor to ceiling, the size of a small room itself. It was garishly painted in red and gold with a grinning demon’s face on the front. Flanking the demon were odd things—a hand, a bloodshot eye, a finger—floating against the crimson background almost like severed body parts loosed in a tide of blood. Arched over a door cut into the side was a legend painted in gold and black:

“If it were my show,” said Aloysius, “I would have given it a much grander name, something more like ‘The Gates of the Inferno.’ ‘The Doorway to Hell’ sounds boring.” He turned to Diogenes. “Your turn to go first.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I went first last time.”

“Then you can go first again.”

“No,” said Aloysius. “I don’t care to.” He put his hand on the door and gave Diogenes a nudge with his elbow.

“Don’t open it. Something might happen.”

Aloysius opened it to reveal a dim, stifling interior, lined with what looked like black velvet. A brass ladder stood just inside, disappearing up through a hatch in a low false ceiling set into the box.

“I could dare you to go in there,” Aloysius went on, “but I’m not going to. I don’t believe in childish games. If you want to go in, go in.”

“Why don’t
you
go in?”

“I freely admit it to you: I’m nervous.”

With a creeping feeling of shame, Pendergast could see his knack for psychological persuasion, already developed as a boy, coming into play. He wanted to see what was in there—but he wanted Diogenes to go in first.

“You’re scared?” Diogenes asked.

“That’s right. So the only way we’re ever going to know what’s in there is if
you
go in first. I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Scared?”

“No.” The quaver in his high-pitched voice said otherwise.

Pendergast reflected bitterly that Diogenes, who was only seven, hadn’t yet learned that truth is the safest lie.

“Then what’s stopping you?”

“I… I don’t feel like it.”

Aloysius snickered dryly. “I admitted I was scared. If you’re scared, say so, and we’ll go back upstairs and forget all about it.”

“I’m not scared. It’s just some stupid fun house.”

Pendergast watched, horrified, as his childish doppelganger reached over and grasped Diogenes by the shoulders. “Go ahead, then.”

“Don’t
touch
me!”

Firmly and gently, Aloysius urged him through the little doorway of the box and crowded in behind him, blocking his retreat. “As you said, it’s just some stupid fun house.”

“I don’t
want
to stay in here.”

They were both inside the first compartment in the box, jammed up against each other. Clearly, the fun house was meant to admit one adult at a time, not two half-grown children.

“Get going, brave Diogenes. I’ll be right behind.”

Wordlessly, Diogenes began to climb the little brass ladder, and Aloysius followed.

Pendergast watched them disappear as the hinged box door closed automatically behind them. His heart was beating so hard in his chest he thought it might explode at any moment. The walls of his memory construct flickered and shook. It was almost unbearable.

But he could not stop now. Something terrible was about to happen, but what exactly he still hadn’t the slightest idea. He had not yet excavated that deeply into old, repressed memories. He had to keep going.

In his mind, he opened the box door and climbed the brass ladder himself, passing into a crawl space above, which turned horizontally and gave onto a low chamber above the false ceiling but below the top of the box. The two boys were there ahead of him, Diogenes in the lead. He was crawling toward a circular porthole in the far wall of the crawl space. Diogenes hesitated at the entrance to the porthole.

“Go on!” Aloysius urged.

The little boy glanced back once at his brother, a strange expression in his eyes. Then he crawled through the porthole and disappeared.

Moving toward the porthole himself, Aloysius paused, peering round with the candle, apparently noticing for the first time that the walls seemed to be covered with photographs shellacked to the wood.

“Aren’t you coming?” came a small, scared, angry voice from the darkness beyond. “You
promised
you would stay right behind me.”

Pendergast, watching, felt himself begin to shake uncontrollably.

“Yes, yes. I’m coming.”

The young Aloysius crept up to the round, dark portal, looked inside—but went no farther.

“Hey! Where are you?” came the muffled cry from the darkness beyond. Then suddenly: “What’s happening? What’s
this?”
A shrill boyish scream cut through the little chamber like a scalpel. Ahead, through the porthole, Pendergast saw a light appear; saw the floor tip; saw Diogenes slide to the far end of a small room and tumble into a lighted pit below. There was a sudden low sound, like the rumble of an animal—and dreadful, unspeakable images appeared within the pit—and then with a swift
thunk!
the porthole snapped shut, blocking his view.

“No!” screamed Diogenes from deep within.
“Nooooooo!”

And then quite suddenly, Pendergast remembered all. It came rushing back in perfect, exquisite detail, every hideous second, every moment of the most terrifying experience in his life.

He remembered the Event.

As the memory crashed over him like a tidal wave, he felt his brain overload, his neurons shut down—and he lost control of the memory crossing. The mansion trembled, shivered, and exploded in his mind, the walls igniting and flying apart, a huge roar filling his head, the great palace of memory blazing off into the darkness of infinite space, dissolving into glittering shards of light like meteors streaking into the void. For a brief moment, the anguished cries of Diogenes continued from out of the limitless gulf—then they, too, fell away and all was quiet once again.

W
arden Gordon Imhof glanced around the table of the spartan conference room deep within Herkmoor’s Command Block, microphone clipped to his lapel. All things considered, he felt good. The response to the breakout had been immediate and overwhelming. Everything had worked like clockwork, by the book: as soon as the Code Red was given, the entire complex had been electronically locked down, all ingress and egress halted. The escapees had run around for a time like headless chickens—theirs had been a totally senseless escape plan—and within forty minutes they had all been rounded up and put back either in their cells or in the infirmary. The obligatory anklet sensor check, which ran automatically every time a Code Red was suspended, confirmed that all prisoners in the complex were accounted for.

In the corrections business, Imhof mused, the way to get noticed was through a crisis. A crisis created visibility. Depending on how the crisis was handled, it created an advancement opportunity or a ruined career. This particular one had been handled flawlessly: a single guard hurt (and not badly at that), no hostages taken, nobody killed or seriously injured. Under his leadership, Herkmoor had retained its flawless no-escape record.

Imhof glanced at the clock, waited for the second hand to sweep around to exactly 7:30. Coffey hadn’t shown up, but he wasn’t going to wait. The truth was, the smug FBI agent and his lackey had really begun to get on his nerves.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “let me start this meeting by saying to all of you: well done.”

A murmuring and a vague shifting greeted this opening.

“Today, Herkmoor faced an extraordinary challenge—a mass escape attempt. At two-eleven P.M., nine inmates cut the fence in one of the building C exercise yards and fanned out through the inner perimeter fields. One got as far as the security station at the south end of building B. The cause of the breakout is still under investigation. Suffice to say, it appears that the prisoners in yard 4 were not under direct guard supervision at the time of the escape, for reasons that remain unclear.”