The Obsidian Chamber

26

Diogenes Pendergast waited in a small, straight-backed chair in the little room at the top of the steps spiraling down to the sub-basement of 891 Riverside Drive. The door to the staircase stood open. He had set a taper into a wall sconce, and it threw a flickering, friendly light over the old stonework. At least, he hoped it was friendly; he knew very little about such things.

He had been careful not to place his chair directly before the doorway. He did not want to appear Cerberus-like: a threatening figure guarding the downward portal. He had worked hard to make sure everything about himself had been as friendly and unthreatening as possible. He was dressed simply in black wool pants and a black-and-gray tweed jacket… or so they appeared to him. He did not like tweed — it was itchy and unrefined — but it radiated sincerity, hominess, and affability.

Or at least — once again — he hoped it did.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins…

With an effort, he pushed this voice — a voice of the old Diogenes, which now and then came bubbling up unexpectedly, like methane in a tar pit — back down from whence it came. That was then; this was now. He was a changed man, a reformed man — and yet the Old Voice still returned in moments of extreme agitation, as now… or when, for whatever reason, his blood was roused…

He tried to focus on the tweed.

He had prided himself on his sophistication and worldliness for too long, despising the opinion of others. The only time he ever considered how others might view him was when he was engaged in social engineering. Or when, out of boredom or irritation, he deceived, punked, or trolled others for his private amusement. He was finding it difficult to show Constance the sense of vulnerability and affection that he genuinely felt for her. He was like a man who, having taken a vow of silence for half his life, suddenly tried to lift up his voice in song.

He adjusted his position in the chair. He’d had to drag it out of storage from one of the basement vaults, and its ancient silk-and-velvet cushions had been heavy with dust. As the creak of the chair subsided, he listened once again, his senses ready to capture the faintest sound, the least variation in air pressure, that would indicate her approach up the staircase that corkscrewed down into the sub-basement.

He glanced at his watch: quarter past ten in the morning. He had said good-bye to Constance a few minutes before midnight. He had been sitting here, waiting, for her — and for her response — ever since.

The degree of planning and money and time necessary to bring last evening’s meeting to fruition — a meeting in which he could bare his soul, without fear of interruption — had been tremendous. But it would all be worthwhile — if only she said yes.

At another time, in another life, he could have found amusement in how well he’d pulled it all off. The handling of Proctor, for example, had been perfect: right down to Gander airfield, where he’d arranged things so that the devoted bodyguard would land just in time to see him force “Constance”—actually a disguised Flavia — into a waiting jet. Proctor had, of course, raced off to Ireland in pursuit… while he himself had immediately exited the Bombardier, boarded a different plane, and returned to New York. He’d been back in the city before seven o’clock, barely six hours after leaving it in the Navigator. Sending that alert, clever man on a wild goose chase to the ends of the earth had been a brilliant piece of work.

The refrigerated coffin had also, he felt, been an inspired touch. Proctor would not know what it meant — not that, in reality, it meant anything — but it would surely have put his imagination to work… and inspired him to the most extreme of measures.

He reminded himself that it was unseemly to take pride in what, for Proctor, must be the most mortifying experience of a lifetime. But the man was out of the way — inconvenienced but alive. Constance would never have forgiven him had he employed a more drastic solution.

Across the corridor from where he sat was the chamber that, in prior years, had served as Enoch Leng’s operating room. From his vantage point, he could just make out the end of the operating table, fashioned out of an early martensitic-stainless-steel alloy. It was still polished to a brilliant sheen, and his own features looked back at him. They were splendid features, the scar adding a certain frisson to his chiseled face and heterochromic eyes. At least, he hoped that’s what Constance would think.

You mention the feelings I had for your brother. Why, then, should I have any interest in his inferior sibling — especially after the way you abused my innocence?

… Why should these lines of hers, flung at him in anger just the night before, come back now to torment him? But he had always been an expert at tormenting himself, even more than at tormenting others. Self-torture was a skill Aloysius had taught him. Aloysius, who — while not smarter — was sufficiently older to have been always one math problem ahead of him, one novel better read, one inch taller, one blow stronger. With his disapproving sanctimoniousness and condescension, it was Aloysius who had driven his interests and pastimes underground, into more private and perverse avenues. And it was Aloysius who had triggered the Event, which ended all his hopes of a normal—

Diogenes clamped down hard on the inner torrent of words, realizing that his breathing had quickened and his heart was pounding in his chest. He calmed himself. His hatred for his brother was a just and good hatred. It could never be extinguished and now — with Aloysius’s death — it could never be redressed. But a strange thing had happened: with his brother’s demise, Diogenes’s mind had cleared. He had become more certain than ever there was one person in the world who could in fact bring meaning, fulfillment, and joy into his life.

And that person was Constance Greene.

Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You’re an improbable person, and so am I. And that was how, in his first days after barely escaping the fury of the Stromboli volcano and its vomitus of lava… that was how he had looked upon his own budding passion for Constance.

Even now, the moment came back to him with the vividness of yesterday: that struggle on the terrible, forty-five-degree slope of the Sciara del Fuoco. It had not been a lava flow in the liquefied-stone sense of Hawaii, but rather a lava slope, a hellish rent in the earth half a mile across down which house-sized rocks, red-brown with heat, tumbled incessantly. The heat thrown off by the Slope of Fire created a rising hurricane of brimstone and ash: and it was this demonic wind that had saved his life. After Constance had hurled him from the edge of the slope, he had tumbled, not falling but ultimately rising in the heat-generated gusts, until he had been dashed against one side of the scorching chasm, wedged into a crevice, one side of his face sizzling where it touched the wall of superheated rock. In shock, he had managed to extricate himself, scramble over the lip, and — on all fours — make his way farther along the trail Constance had chased him up, skirting the actual cone of the volcano and eventually making his way down the far side to Ginostra. Ginostra, a village of some forty residents, accessible only by boat: a tiny nugget of the Sicilian past. And it was here where, fainting with the pain, he was taken in by a childless widow who lived in a cottage outside of town. She did not ask him how he came about his injuries; she did not seem to mind his request for utter secrecy; she appeared to be content to tend his wounds with what ancient liniments and tinctures were at her disposal. It was not until the day before he left that he found the true reason for her ministrations — she was mortally afraid of his maloccio, the evil bicolored eyes that, local legend held, would bring ruin upon her if she did not do everything in her power to help him.

He was laid up for weeks, his burns — the hardest of all pain to mitigate, even with modern medicines — causing him unendurable agony. And yet, while he was lying there enveloped in a universe of pain, all he could think about was, not hatred for Constance, but the equally unimaginable pleasure he had shared with her… for just one night.

At the time, he could hardly believe it. It seemed inexplicable, as though he was in thrall to the passions of a stranger. But his need for her, he now realized, was not improbable. In fact, it was inevitable — for all the reasons he had explained the night before. Her distaste for the base and servile world. Her unique depth of knowledge. Her remarkable beauty. Her appreciation for the manners, civilities, and courtliness of an earlier time — coupled most agreeably with a temperament purified, like the best steel, by heat and violence. She was a tigress, dressed tastefully in silk.

And she was a tigress in other ways, as well… It tormented him that he was so blinded by hatred of his brother that he’d viewed his successful seduction of her as a triumph over Aloysius. Only later, on his bed of pain, had he realized the night they spent together had been the most remarkable, exciting, raw, sublime, and pleasurable of his life. He sought hedonism like a penitent seeks a cilice — and yet nothing in his life came close to what he’d experienced upon igniting the passions of that woman, pent up for over a hundred years, inflaming that supple and hungry body… What a fool he had been to throw that away.

The rude, ancient medicines of the woman who had tended him had done little to help with the pain, but had done wonders to minimize the scarring. And two months later, he’d left Ginostra — with a new goal in his life…

He realized with a start that Constance stood before him. He had been so distracted that he had not heard her approach.

He rose quickly from the chair before recollecting it had been his intention to remain seated. “Constance,” he breathed.

She was dressed in a simple, yet elegant, ivory dress. A half-moon of lace embroidery below the throat chastely covered, but could not conceal, a most admirable décolletage. The lines of the dress, shimmering like gossamer in the flickering candlelight, ran all the way to the floor, where they hid her feet in a gauzy gathering of fabric. She was looking back at him, regarding his evident discomfiture with an expression he could not quite read: a complex mixture of interest, circumspection, and — he thought and hoped — guarded tenderness.

“Yes,” she said, in a quiet voice.

Diogenes raised one hand to the knot of his tie, fiddling with it unconsciously, uselessly. His mind was so disordered he couldn’t respond.

“Yes,” she repeated. “I’ll retreat from the world with you. And… I’ll take the arcanum.”

She paused, awaiting a response. The shock of relief and delight that broke over Diogenes was so strong that it was not until this very moment he realized just how terrified he’d been that she would say no.

“Constance,” he said again. It was the one word he could manage.

“But you must assure me of one thing,” she said in her low, silky voice.

He waited.

“I need to know this arcanum truly works, and that its creation didn’t involve harming any human being.”

“It works, and no one has been harmed, I promise,” he said, his voice hoarse.

She looked searchingly into his eyes for a long minute.

Almost without knowing what he was doing, he took her hand in both of his. “Thank you, Constance,” he said. “Thank you. You can have no idea how happy this makes me.” He was shocked to find himself blinking away tears of joy. “And you will soon learn just how happy I can make you, too. Halcyon is everything I’ve promised, and more.”

Constance said nothing. She merely looked at him in that strange way of hers — appraising, expectant, inscrutable. Diogenes felt unmanned by this look that, paradoxically, was both titillating and intoxicating.

He kissed her hand. “There is one thing I should explain to you. As you might imagine, I have been forced to create, and maintain, a variety of identities. The identity under which I purchased Halcyon is named Petru Lupei. He is a Romanian count from the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania, where his family fled during the Soviet era. Most were caught and killed, but his father managed to bring out the family wealth, which Petru — he prefers to be called Peter — inherited as the sole son and last survivor of the House of Lupei. Their crumbling family castle is said to be adjacent to the estate of Count Dracula.” He smiled. “I enjoyed that touch. I made him a man of impeccable manners and taste, a beautiful dresser, witty and charming.”

“Fascinating. But why are you telling me this?”

“Because on the way to the airport, I will have to take on the identity and appearance of Petru Lupei — and keep that identity until we reach Halcyon. Please don’t be surprised at my temporary change of looks. On Halcyon, of course, I can be myself. But during the journey there, I would ask you to think of me as Petru Lupei, and to address me as Peter — to preserve my identity and ensure my safe passage.”

“I understand.”

“I knew that you would. And now, please excuse me. I have so much to do before we leave — which, if you like, could be as early as tonight.”

“Tomorrow, if you don’t mind,” Constance said. “I’ll need some time to pack and… say good-bye to this life.”

“Packing,” Diogenes said, as if the thought was new to him. “Of course.” He turned away; hesitated; turned back. “Ah, Constance you are so very beautiful — and I am so very happy!”

He vanished into the gloom of the basement corridor.