They were Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Slowly, in his mind, Pendergast approached the table, listening intently, as the conversation — or, more frequently, monologue — became audible.
“Indeed?” Wilde was saying, in a remarkably deep and sonorous voice. “Did you think that — as one who would happily sacrifice himself on the pyre of aestheticism — I do not recognize the face of horror when I stare into it?”
There was no empty seat. Pendergast turned, motioned to a waiter, indicated the table. Immediately, the man brought up a fifth chair, placing it between Conan Doyle and the man Pendergast realized must be Joseph Stoddart.
“I was once told a story so dreadful, so distressing in its particulars and in the extent of its evil, that now I truly believe nothing I hear could ever frighten me again.”
“How interesting.”
“Would you care to hear it? It is not for the faint of heart.”
As he listened to the conversation taking place beside him, Pendergast reached forward, poured himself a glass of wine, found it excellent.
“It was told to me during my lecture tour of America a few years back. On my way to San Francisco, I stopped at a rather squalid yet picturesque mining camp known as Roaring Fork.” Wilde pressed his hand to Doyle’s knee for emphasis. “After my lecture, one of the miners approached me, an elderly chap somewhat the worse — or, perhaps, the better — for drink. He took me aside, said he’d enjoyed my story so much that he had one of his own to share with me.” He paused for a sip of burgundy. “Here, lean in a little closer, that’s a good fellow, and I’ll tell it you exactly as it was told to me.”
Doyle leaned in, as requested. Pendergast leaned in, as well.
“I tried to escape him, but he would have none of it, presuming to approach me in a most familiar way, breathing fumes of the local ubriacant. My first impulse was to push past, but there was something about the look in his eye that stopped me. I confess I was also intrigued — in an anthropological fashion, Doyle, don’t you know — by this leathern specimen, this uncouth bard, this bibulous miner, and I found myself curious as to what he considered a ‘good story.’ And so I listened, and rather attentively, as his American drawl was nigh indecipherable. He spoke of events that had occurred some years earlier, not long after the silver strikes that established Roaring Fork. Over the course of one summer, a grizzled bear — or so it was believed — had taken to roaming the mountains above the town, attacking, killing…and eating…lone miners working their claims.”
Doyle nodded vigorously, his face concentrated with the utmost interest.
“Naturally, the town fell into a state of perfect terror. But the killings went on, as there were many lone men upon the mountain. The bear was merciless, ambuscading the miners outside their cabins, killing and savagely dismembering them — and then feasting upon their flesh.” Wilde paused. “I should have liked to have known whether the, ah, consumption commenced while consciousness was still present. Can you imagine what it would be like to be devoured alive by a savage beast? To watch it tear your flesh off, then chew and swallow, with evident satisfaction? That is a contemplation never even considered by Huysmans in his À Rebours. How sadly lacking the aesthete was, in hindsight!”
Wilde glanced over to see what effect his words were having on the country doctor. Doyle had grasped his glass of claret and taken a deep draught. Listening, Pendergast took a sip of his own glass, then signaled a waiter to bring him a menu.
“Many a fellow tried to track the grizzled bear,” Wilde continued, “but none was successful — save for one miner, a man who had learned the fine art of tracking while living among Indians. He conceived a notion that the killings were not the work of a bear.”
“Not the work of a bear, sir?”
“Not the work of a bear, sir. And so, waiting until the next killing, this chap — his name was Cropsey — went a-tracking, and soon discovered that the perpetrators of this outrage were a group of men.”
At this, Doyle leaned back rather abruptly. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Wilde. Do you mean to say that these men were…cannibals?”
“Indeed I do. American cannibals.”
Doyle shook his head. “Monstrous. Monstrous.”
“Quite so,” Wilde said. “They have none of the good manners of your English cannibals.”
Doyle stared at his fellow guest in shock. “This is no matter for levity, Wilde.”
“Perhaps not. We shall see. In any case, our Cropsey tracked these cannibals to their lair, an abandoned mine shaft somewhere on the mountain, at a place called Smuggler’s Wall. There was no constabulary in the town, of course, and so this fellow organized a small group of local vigilantes. They cognominated themselves the Committee of Seven. They would scale the mountain in the dark of night, surprise the cannibals, and administer the rough justice of the American West.” Wilde toyed with his boutonnière. “The very next night, at midnight, this group gathered at the local saloon to discuss strategy and no doubt fortify themselves for the coming ordeal. They then departed by a back door, heavily armed, and equipped with lanterns, rope, and a torch. This, my dear Doyle, is where the story turns…well, not to put too fine a point on it, rather ghastly. Do steady yourself, there’s a good chap.”
The waiter brought over a menu, and Pendergast turned his attention to it. Three or four minutes later, he was jarred from his perusal by Doyle’s sudden violent rise from the table — knocking his chair over in his agitation — and subsequent flight from the dining room, his face a mixture of shock and disgust.
“Why, whatever’s the matter?” Stoddart said, frowning, as Doyle disappeared in the direction of the gentlemen’s lounge.
“I suspect it must be the prawns,” Wilde replied, and he dabbed primly at his mouth with a napkin…
…As slowly as it had come, the voice began to fade from Pendergast’s mind. The sumptuous interior of the Langham Hotel began to waver, as if dissolving into mist and darkness. Slowly, slowly, a new scene materialized — a very different scene. It was the smoke-filled, whisky-redolent back room of a busy saloon, the sounds of gambling, drinking, and argument penetrating the thin wooden walls. A back room, in fact, remarkably similar to the one in which Pendergast was — in the Roaring Fork of the present — currently situated. After a brief exchange of determined voices, a group of seven men rose from a large table: men carrying lanterns and guns. Following their leader, one Shadrach Cropsey, they made their way out the back door of the little room and into the night.
Pendergast followed them, his incorporeal presence hovering in the cool night air like a ghost.
53
The group of miners walked down the dirt main street of town, casually and without hurry, until they reached the far end, where settlement ceased and the forests mounted upward into the mountains. It was a moonless night. The scent of wood fires was in the air, and in the nearby corrals, horses were moving restlessly about. Silently, the group lit their lanterns and proceeded along a rough mining road, which made its way by switchbacks up, and then farther up, passing beneath the dark fir trees.
The night was cool and the sky was pricked with stars. A lone wolf howled somewhere in the great bowl of mountains, quickly answered by another. As the men gained altitude, the fir trees grew smaller, shorter, twisted into grotesque shapes by incessant winds and deep snows. Gradually the trees thinned out into matted thickets of krummholz, and then the cart path broached the tree line.