Blue Labyrinth

56

Aloysius Pendergast lay in bed, keeping as still as possible. Every movement, even the tiniest, was an agony. Just breathing in enough air to oxygenate his blood sent white-hot needles of pain through the muscles and nerves of his chest. He could feel a dark presence waiting at the foot of his bed, a succubus ready to climb on top and suffocate him. But whenever he tried to look at it, it vanished, only to reappear when he looked away.

He tried to will the pain away, to lose himself in the contents of his bedroom, to focus his concentration on a painting on the opposite wall, one in which he had often taken solace: a late work by Turner, Schooner off Beachy Head. He would sometimes lose himself for hours in the painting’s many layers of light and shadow, in the way Turner rendered the sheets of spume and the vessel’s storm-tossed sails. But the pain, and the vile reek of rotting lilies — cloying, sickly-sweet, like the stench of suppurating flesh — made such mental escape impossible.

All his usual mechanisms for coping with emotional or physical trauma had been taken away by the sickness. And now the morphine drip was exhausted and would not be replenished for another hour. There was nothing but a landscape of pain, stretching away endlessly on all sides.

Even in this extremity of his illness, Pendergast knew that the malady afflicting him had its ebbs and swells. If he could survive this current onslaught of pain, it would — in time — subside to afford temporary relief. He would be able to breathe again, to speak, even to rise from his bed and move about. But then the swell of pain would return, as it always did — and each time it was worse and more prolonged than before. And he sensed that at some point soon, the escalation of pain would stop subsiding, and the end would come.

And now, at the periphery of his consciousness, came the crest of the wave of pain: a creeping blackness at the edges of his vision, a vignetting of sorts. It was a signal that, within minutes, he would lose consciousness. Initially, he had welcomed this release. But in a cruel twist, he had soon learned there was, in fact, no release. Because the blackness led, not to a void, but to a hallucinogenic underworld of his subconscious self that had proven in some ways even worse than the pain.

Moments later the blackness caught him in its grip, tugging him from the bed and the dimly lighted room like an undertow catching an exhausted swimmer. There was a brief, sickening sensation of falling. And then the darkness melted away, revealing the scene like a curtain parting from a stage.

He was standing on a scarified ledge of hardened lava, high on the flanks of an active volcano. It was twilight. To his left, the ribbed flanks of the volcano led down to a distant shore, so far away as to seem a different world, where little clutches of whitewashed buildings huddled at the edge of the spume, their evening lights piercing the gloom. Directly ahead and below him was an immense chasm — a monstrous gash ripped into the very heart of the volcano. He could see the living lava roiling like blood within it, glowing a rich angry red in the shadow of the crater that rose just above. Clouds of sulfur steamed up from the chasm, and black flecks of ash, whipped by a hell-wind, skittered through the air.

Pendergast knew precisely where he was: standing on the Bastimento Ridge of the Stromboli volcano, looking down into the infamous Sciara del Fuoco — the Slope of Fire. He had stood on this same ridge once before, just over three years ago, when he had witnessed one of the most shocking dramas of his life.

Except the place now looked different. Brutal at the best of times, it had become — playing out as it was in the theater of his fevered hallucination — something of pure nightmare. The sky encircling him was not the deep purple of twilight, but rather a sickly green, the color of rotten eggs. Livid flashes of orange and blue lightning seared the heavens. Bloated crimson-colored clouds scudded before a guttering, sallow sun. A ghastly Technicolor hue illuminated the entire scene.

As he took in the hellish vision, he was startled to see a person. Not ten feet in front of him, a man sat on a deck chair set upon a fin of old lava that stood out precariously from the ridge above the smoking Sciara del Fuoco. He was wearing dark glasses, a straw hat, a floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts, and was sipping what looked like lemonade out of a tall glass. Pendergast did not need to draw any closer to recognize, in profile, the aquiline nose, neatly trimmed beard, ginger-colored hair. This was his brother, Diogenes. Diogenes — who had disappeared at this very spot, in the horrific scene that had played out between himself and Constance Greene.

As Pendergast watched, Diogenes took a long, slow sip of the lemonade. He gazed out over the boiling fury of the Sciara del Fuoco with the placid expression of a tourist gazing out at the Mediterranean from the balcony of a Nice hotel. “Ave, Frater,” he said without turning toward him.

Pendergast did not reply.

“I would ask after your health, but present circumstances obviate the need for that particular bit of hypocrisy.”

Pendergast merely stared at this bizarre materialization: his dead brother, lounging on a beach chair at the edge of an active volcano.

“Do you know,” Diogenes went on, “I find the irony — the fitting irony — of your present predicament almost overwhelming. After all we’ve been through, after all my schemes, your end will come at the hands, not of myself, but of your own issue. Your very own son. Think on’t, brother! I should have liked to have met him: Alban and I would have had a lot in common. I could have taught him many things.”

Pendergast did not respond. There was no point in reacting to a feverish delusion.

Diogenes took another sip of lemonade. “But what makes the irony so deliciously complete is that Alban was merely the precipitant of your undoing. Your real killer is our own great-great-grandfather Hezekiah. Talk about the sins of the fathers! Not only is it his own ‘elixir’ killing you — but it is because of the elixir that an indirect victim of it, this Barbeaux fellow, is now taking his revenge.” Diogenes paused. “Hezekiah; Alban; myself. It all makes for a nice family circle.”

Pendergast remained silent.

Still offering only his profile, Diogenes stared out over the violent spectacle churning at their feet. “I’d think you would welcome this chance for atonement.”

Pendergast, goaded, finally spoke. “Atonement? What for?”

“You, with your prudery, your hidebound sense of morality, your misguided desire to do right in the world — it’s always been a mystery to me that you weren’t tortured by the fact we’ve lived comfortably off Hezekiah’s fortune all our lives.”

“You’re talking about something that happened a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

“Does the span of years do anything to lessen the agony of his victims? How long does it take to wash the blood from all that money?”

“It is a false syllogism. Hezekiah profited unscrupulously, but we were the innocent inheritors of that wealth. Money is fungible. We are not guilty.”

Diogenes chuckled — barely audible over the roar of the volcano — then shook his head. “How ironic that I, Diogenes, have become your conscience.”

The enervating anguish of Pendergast’s conscious self began to break through the hallucination. He staggered on the ridge of lava; righted himself. “I…” he began. “I… am not… responsible. And I will not argue with a hallucination.”

“Hallucination?” And now, finally, Diogenes turned to face his brother. The right side of his face — the side he had been presenting to Pendergast — looked as normal and as finely cast as it always had. But the left side was horribly burned, scar tissue puckering and veining the skin from chin to hairline like the bark of a tree, cheekbone and the orbit of a missing eye exposed and white.

“Just keep telling yourself that, frater,” he said over the roar of the mountain. And as slowly as he had turned to face Pendergast, Diogenes now turned away once more, hiding the horrible sight, his gaze once again on the Sciara del Fuoco. And as he did so the nightmare scene began to waver, dissolve, and fade away, leaving Pendergast once again in his own bedroom, the lights dim around him, fresh waves of pain surging over him once more.