D’Agosta watched as Hayward turned on her heel and walked quickly out of his office. He noticed she hadn’t bothered to say good-bye. He also noticed that, suddenly, the cigar didn’t taste as good anymore.
= 8 =
HE SAT IN THE listening darkness, unmoving.
Although the chamber was devoid of light, his eyes flicked from surface to surface, lingering with a loving glance on each object they encountered. It was still a novelty; he could sit motionless for hours, enjoying the marvelous acuteness of his own senses.
Now he closed his eyes and allowed himself to listen to the distant sounds of the city. Slowly, from the background murmur, he sorted out the various strands of conversation, filtering the nearest and loudest from those more distant, many rooms or even floors away. Then those, too, faded into the haze of his concentration, and he could hear the faint scamperings and squeals of the mice as they carried out their own secret cycles of life within the walls. At times he thought he could hear the sound of the earth itself, rolling and churning, swathed in its atmosphere.
Later—he was not sure how much later—the hunger started again. Not a hunger exactly, but the feeling of something missing:a deep craving, unlocalized, subtle for the time being. He never allowed the craving time to grow.
Standing quickly, he stepped across the laboratory, surefooted in the blackness. Turning on one of the gas spigots along the far wall, he lit the attached nozzle with a sparker, then positioned a retort of distilled water over the burner. As the water heated, he reached into a secret pocket sewn into the lining of his coat and withdrew a slender metal capsule. Unscrewing its end, he poured a trace of powder onto the surface of the water. Had there been light, the powder would have shone the color of light jade. As the temperature rose, a thin cloud began to spread downward from the surface until the entire retort became a miniature storm of roiling liquid.
He turned off the heat, then emptied the distillate into a Pyrex beaker. This was the point at which the decoction should be placed between the hands, the mind emptied, the ritual movements performed, the caressing vapor allowed to rise and fill the nostrils. But he could never wait; once again, he felt his palate burn as he swallowed the liquid greedily. He laughed to himself, amused at his own inability to follow the precepts he had set so sternly for others.
Even before he was seated again, the hollow feeling was gone, and the long slow rush had started: a flush that began in his extremities, then spread inward until it seemed that the very core of his being was on fire. An indescribable feeling of power and well-being surged through him. His senses, already hyperacute, seemed to expand until he could see infinitesimal dust motes hanging in the pitch black; until he could hear all of Manhattan in conversation with itself, from cocktail chat in the Rainbow Room seventy stories above Rockefeller Center, to the hungry wailing of his own children, far below-ground in secret forgotten spaces.
They were growing hungrier. Soon, not even the Ceremony would control them all.
But by then it would no longer be necessary.
The darkness seemed almost painfully bright, and he closed his eyes, listening to the vigorous rush of blood through the natural gates and alleys of his inner ears. He would keep his eyelids closed until the peak of sensation—and the odd, silvery sheen that temporarily covered his eyes—had gone. Whoever named it glaze,he thought with amusement, named it well.
Soon—all too soon—the fierce bloom faded. But the power remained, a constant reminder in his joints and sinews of what he had become. If only his former colleagues could see him now. Then they’d understand.
Almost regretfully, he stood again, unwilling to leave the site of so much pleasure. But there was much that needed doing.
It would be a busy night.
= 9 =
MARGO APPROACHED the door, noting with distaste that it was as dirty as ever. Even in a museum known for its high dust tolerance, the door to the Physical Anthropology lab—or Skeleton Room, as the staff universally referred to it—was almost unbelievably grimy. This can’t have been washed since the turn of the century,she thought. A patina of hand oils coated the knob and the surrounding area like a shiny varnish. She considered getting a tissue out of her carryall, then dismissed the thought, grabbed the knob tightly, and turned.
As usual, the room was dimly lit, and she had to squint to make out the tiers of metal drawers that rose to the ceiling like the stacks of some vast library. Each of the twelve thousand drawers contained, either whole or in part, the remains of a human skeleton. Although most belonged to native peoples of Africa and the Americas, Margo was interested in the subset of skeletons that had been collected for medical, rather than anthropological, purposes. Dr. Frock had suggested that, as a first step, they examine the remains of people with acute bone disorders. Perhaps, he’d hypothesized, the victims of such ailments as acromegaly or Proteus syndrome could help shed some light on the bizarre skeleton that waited for them under the blue plastic sheet in Forensic Anthropology.
As she threaded her way between the giant stacks, Margo sighed. She knew the impending encounter would be unpleasant. Sy Hagedorn, administrator of the Physical Anthropology lab, was almost as old and desiccated as the skeletons he watched over. Along with Curley manning the staff entrance, Emmaline Spragg of Invertebrate Biology, and a few others, Sy Hagedorn was the last remnant of the Museum old guard. Despite the Museum’s computerized collection database, and despite the high-tech laboratory that lay just beyond the Skeleton Room, he steadfastly refused to bring his cataloguing methods into the twentieth century. When her erstwhile colleague Greg Kawakita had made his office in the lab, he’d had to endure Hagedorn’s withering scorn every time he opened up his laptop. Behind Hagedorn’s back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator “Stumpy.” Only Margo and a few of Frock’s other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn’s diminutive size, but to Stumpiniceps troglodytes,a particularly mundane kind of bottom-feeder that populated the oceans of the Carboniferous period.
At the thought of Kawakita, Margo frowned guiltily. He’d left a message on her answering machine maybe six months before, apologizing for dropping out of touch, saying he needed to speak to her, that he’d try again the same time the following evening. When her phone had rung again at the appointed time twenty-four hours later, Margo had reached for it automatically, then frozen, her hand inches from the handset. Nobody left a message when the machine picked up, and she had drawn her hand back slowly, wondering exactly what instinct had prevented her from answering Kawakita’s call. But even as she’d done so, she’d known the answer. Kawakita had been a part of it all… along with Pendergast, Smithback, Lieutenant D’Agosta, even Dr. Frock. His extrapolation program had been the key that helped them understand Mbwun: the creature that had terrorized the Museum and that still roamed her uneasy dreams. Selfish as it was, the last thing she’d wanted was to talk to someone who would unnecessarily remind her of those awful days. Silly, in retrospect, now that she was chin-deep in an investigation that—
The sudden fussy clearing of a throat brought Margo back to the present. She looked up to see a short man standing before her, wearing a worn tweed suit, his leathery face lined with innumerable wrinkles.
“I thought I heard somebody wandering around my skeletons,” Hagedorn said, frowning, tiny arms crossed in front of his chest. “Well?”
Despite herself, Margo felt annoyance begin to take the place of her daydreams. His skeletons, indeed. Stifling her irritation, she pulled a sheet of paper from her carryall. “Dr. Frock wants these specimens sent up to the Forensic Anthropology lab,” she replied, handing the sheet to Hagedorn.
He scanned it, the frown deepening. “ Threeskeletons?” he said. “That’s somewhat irregular.”