Reliquary

= 42 =

D’AGOSTA FOLLOWED Margo down a dusty, poorly lit hall on the first floor of the Museum. Once part of an ancient exhibit, the hall had been sealed from public view for years, and was now used primarily as overflow storage space for the mammalian collection. Various stuffed beasts, in postures of attack or defense, lined both sides of the narrow corridor. D’Agosta nearly snagged his jacket on the claw of a rearing grizzly. He found himself keeping his arms close to his sides to avoid brushing against the rest of the moldering specimens.

As they rounded a corner into a cul-de-sac, D’Agosta saw a huge stuffed elephant dead ahead, its much-repaired gray skin tattering and flaking. Beneath its massive belly, hidden in shadow, was the two-story metal door of a freight elevator.

“We gotta make this quick,” he said as Margo pressed the elevator button. “One Police Plaza has been mobilizing all afternoon. Looks like they’re getting ready to storm the Normandy beaches. Besides that, there’s some kind of surprise rally by Take Back Our City forming along Fifth Avenue.” There was a smell in the air that reminded him of certain summer crime scenes he’d visited.

“The preparation lab is just down the hall,” Margo said, watching as D’Agosta’s nose wrinkled. “They must be macerating a specimen.”

“Right,” said D’Agosta. He glanced up at the huge elephant overhead. “Where are the tusks?”

“That’s Jumbo, P. T. Barnum’s old showpiece. He was hit by a freight train in Ontario and his tusks were shattered. Barnum ground them up, made gelatin out of them, and served it at Jumbo’s memorial dinner.”

“Resourceful.” D’Agosta slid a cigar into his mouth. Nobody could complain about a little smoke with a reek like this.

“Sorry,” said Margo, grinning sheepishly. “No smoking. Possibility of methane in the air.”

D’Agosta put the cigar back in his pocket as the elevator door slid open. Methane. Now there was something to think about.

They stepped out into a sweltering basement corridor lined with steam pipes and enormous packing crates. One of the crates was open, exposing, the knobby end of a black bone, big as a tree limb. Must be a dinosaur, D’Agosta thought. He struggled to control a feeling of apprehension as he remembered the last time he’d been in the Museum’s basement.

“We tested the drug on several organisms,” Margo said, walking into a room whose bright neon lights stood in sharp contrast to the dingy corridor outside. In one corner, a lab worker was bending over an oscilloscope. “Lab mice, E. coli bacteria, blue-green algae, and several single-celled animals. The mice are in here.”

D’Agosta peered into the small holding area, then stepped back quickly. “Jesus.” The white walls of the stacked cages were flecked with blood. Torn bodies of dead mice littered the floors of the cage, shrouded in their own entrails.

Margo peered into the cages. “You can see that of the four mice originally placed in each cage, only one remains alive.”

“Why didn’t you put them all in separate cages?” D’Agosta asked.

Margo glanced up at him. “Leaving them together was the whole point. I wanted to examine behavioral as well as physical changes.”

“Looks like things got a little out of hand.”

Margo nodded. “All of these mice were fed the Mbwun lily, and all became massively infected by the reovirus. It’s highly unusual for a virus that affects humans also to affect mice. Normally, they’re very host-specific. Now watch this.”

As Margo approached the topmost cage, the surviving mouse leapt at her, hissing, clinging to the wire, its long yellow incisors knitting the air. Margo stepped back.

“Charming,” said D’Agosta. “They fought to the death, didn’t they?”

Margo nodded. “The most surprising thing is that this mouse was badly wounded in the fight. But look at how thoroughly its cuts have healed. And if you check the other cages, you’ll see the same phenomenon. The drug must have some powerful rejuvenative or healing properties. The light probably makes them irritable, but we already know that the drug makes one sensitive to light. In fact, Jen left one of the lights on and by morning the protozoan colony directly beneath it had died.”

She stared at the cages for a moment. “There’s something else I’d like to show you,” she said at last. “Jen, can you give me a hand here?”

With the lab assistant’s help, Margo slid a divider across the topmost cage, trapping the live mouse on one side. Then she deftly removed the remains of the dead mice with a long pair of forceps and dropped them into a Pyrex basin.

“Let’s take a quick look,” she said, carrying the pieces into the main lab and placing them on the stage of a wide-angle Stereozoom. She peered through the eyepieces, probing the remains with a scapula. As D’Agosta looked on, she sliced open the back of a head, peeled the skin and fur away from the skull, and examined it carefully. Next, she cut open a section of spinal cord and peered closely at the vertebrae.

“As you can see, it looks normal,” she said, straightening up. “Except for the rejuvenative qualities, it seems the primary changes are behavioral, not morphological. At least, that’s the case in this species. It’s too early to be sure, but perhaps Kawakita did succeed in taming the drug in the end.”

“Yeah,” D’Agosta added. “After it was too late.”

“That’s what’s been puzzling me. Kawakita must have taken the drug before it reached this stage of development. Why would he take such a risk, trying the drug on himself? Even after testing it on other people, he couldn’t have been sure. It wasn’t like him to act so rashly.”

“Arrogance,” said D’Agosta.

“Arrogance doesn’t explain turning yourself into a guinea pig. Kawakita was a careful scientist, almost to a fault. It just doesn’t seem in character.”

“Some of the most unlikely people become addicts,” D’Agosta said. “I see it all the time. Doctors. Nurses. Even police officers.”

“Maybe.” Margo sounded unconvinced. “Anyway, over here are the bacteria and the protozoans we inoculated with the reovirus. Strangely enough, they all tested negative: the amoebas, paramecia, rotifers, everything. Except for this one.” She had open an incubator, exposing rows of Petrie dishes covered with purple agar. Glossy, dime-sized welts in each dish of agar indicated growing colonies of protozoans.

She removed a dish. “This is B. meresgerii, a single-celled animal that lives in the ocean, growing in shallow water on the surface of kelp and seaweed. It usually feeds on plankton. I like to use them because they’re relatively docile, and they’re exceptionally sensitive to chemicals.”

She carefully dragged a wire loup through the colony of single-celled animals. Smearing the loup on a glass slide, she seated the slide on the microscope tray, adjusted the focus, then stepped away so D’Agosta could take a look.

Peering into the eyepiece, D’Agosta couldn’t see anything at first. Then he made out a number of round, clear blobs, waving their cilia frantically against a gridded background.

“I thought you said they were docile,” he said, still staring.

“They usually are.”

Suddenly, D’Agosta realized that the frenzied maneuvering was not random at all: The creatures were attacking each other, ripping at each other’s external membranes and thrusting themselves into the breaches they created.

“And I thought you said they ate plankton.”

“Again, they normally do,” Margo replied. She looked at him. “Creepy, isn’t it?”

“You got that right.” D’Agosta backed away, inwardly surprised at how the ferocity of these tiny creatures somehow made him feel squeamish.

“I thought you’d want to see this.” Margo stepped up to the microscope and took another look herself. “Because if they plan on—”

She paused, stiffening, as if glued to the eyepiece.

“What is it?” D’Agosta asked.

For a long minute, Margo didn’t respond. “That’s odd,” she murmured at last. She turned to her lab assistant. “Jen, will you stain some of these with eosinophil? And I want a radioactive tracer done to find out which are the original members of the colony.”

Motioning D’Agosta to wait, Margo helped the lab assistant prepare the tracer, finally placing the entire treated colony under the Stereozoom. She peered into the microscope for what seemed to D’Agosta like an eternity. At last she straightened up, scratched some equations into her notebook, then peered into the Stereozoom once again. D’Agosta could hear her counting something to herself.

“These protozoa,” she said at last, “have a normal life span of about sixteen hours. They’ve been in here thirty-six. B. meresgerii, when incubated at thirty-seven degrees Celsius, divides once every eight hours. So”—she pointed to a differential equation in her notebook—“after thirty-six hours, you should see a ratio of about seven to nine dead to live protozoa.”

“And—?” D’Agosta asked.

“I just did a rough count and found the ratio is only half that.”

“Which means?”

“Which means the B. meresgerii are either dividing at a lower rate, or…”

She put her eye back to the microscope and D’Agosta could hear the whispered counting again. She straightened up again, this time more slowly.

“The dividing rate is normal,” she said, in a low voice.

D’Agosta fingered the cigar in his breast pocket. “Which means?”

“They’re living fifty percent longer,” she said flatly.

D’Agosta looked at her a moment. “There’s Kawakita’s motive,” he said quietly.

There was a soft knock at the door. Before Margo could answer, Pendergast glided in, nodding to them both. He was once again attired in a crisp black suit, and his face, though a little drawn and tired, betrayed no sign of his recent journeys beyond a small scrape above the left eyebrow.

“Pendergast!” D’Agosta said. “About time.”

“Indeed,” said the FBI agent. “I had a feeling you’d be here, too, Vincent. Sorry to have been out of touch so long. It was a somewhat more arduous journey than I had imagined. I would have been here to report my encounter half an hour earlier, but I felt a shower and change of clothes to be rather essential.”

“Encounter?” Margo asked incredulously. “You saw them?”

Pendergast nodded. “I did, and much else besides. But first, please bring me up to date on events aboveground. I heard about the subway tragedy, of course, and I saw the troops in blue, massing as if for Runnymede. But there’s obviously much that I’ve missed.”

He listened intently as Margo and D’Agosta explained about the true nature of glaze, about Whittlesey and Kawakita, and about the plan to flush out the Astor Tunnels. He did not interrupt except to ask a few questions while Margo was sketching out the results of her experiments.

“This is fascinating,” he said at last. “Fascinating, and extremely unsettling.” He took a seat at a nearby lab table, crossing one thin leg over the other. “There are disturbing parallels here to my own investigations. You see, there is a gathering point, deep in the Astor Tunnels. It’s located in the remains of what was once the Crystal Pavilion, the private train station beneath the defunct Knickerbocker Hotel. In the center of the Pavilion I found a curious hut, built entirely of human skulls. Countless footprints converged on this hut. Nearby was what appeared to be an offering table, along with a variety of artifacts. While I was examining it, one of the creatures approached out of the darkness.”

“What did it look like?” Margo asked almost reluctantly.

Pendergast frowned. “Difficult to tell. I never came that close, and the NVD I was wearing does not resolve well at distance. It looked human, or close to it. But its gait was… well, it was off somehow.” The FBI agent seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “It squatted forward in an unnatural way as it ran, cradling something that I believe was meant as another addition to the hut. I blinded it with a flash and fired, but the sudden brilliance overloaded the goggles, and by the time I could see again the thing was gone.”

“Was it hit?” D’Agosta asked.

“I believe so. Some blood spoor was evident. But by that point, I was somewhat anxious to return to the surface.” He looked at Margo, one eyebrow raised. “I would imagine that some of the creatures are more deformed than others. In any case, there are three things we can be sure of. They are fast. They can see in the dark. And they are completely malevolent.”

“And they live in the Astor Tunnels.” Margo shivered. “All under the influence of glaze. With Kawakita dead and the plants gone, they’re probably mad with need.”

“It would seem so,” Pendergast said.

“And this hut you describe was probably the site where Kawakita dispensed the drug,” Margo continued. “At least toward the end, when things were getting out of hand. But it all sounds almost ceremonial.”

Pendergast nodded. “Precisely. Over the entrance to the hut I noticed Japanese ideographs translating roughly to ‘Abode of the Unsymmetrical.’ That is one of the names used to describe a Japanese tea room.”

D’Agosta frowned. “Tea room? I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I, at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what Kawakita must have done. The roji, or series of steps placed at irregular intervals in front of the hut. The lack of ornamentation. The simple, unfinished sanctuary. These are all elements of the Tea Ceremony.”

“He must have distributed the plant by steeping it in water, like tea,” Margo said. “But why go to all that trouble, unless…” She paused. “Unless the ritual itself—”

“My own thought exactly,” Pendergast said. “As time went on, Kawakita must have had increasing difficulty controlling the creatures. At some point, he abandoned selling the drug and realized he simply had to provide it. Kawakita was also trained as an anthropologist, correct? He must have understood the settling, the taming, influence of ritual and ceremony.”

“So he created a distribution ritual,” Margo said. “Shamans in primitive cultures often use such ceremonies to institute order, preserve their power.”

“And he chose the Tea Ceremony as the basis,” Pendergast said. “Whether reverently or irreverently, we’ll never know. Though I would guess it was a cynical addition on his part, considering his other borrowings. Remember the burned notes you found in Kawakita’s lab?”

“I have them right here,” D’Agosta said, pulling out his notebook, flipping pages, then handing it to Pendergast.

“Ah, yes. Green cloud, gunpowder, lotus heart. These are green teas of varying rarity.” Pendergast pointed to D’Agosta’s notebook. “And this: ‘dung-loving blue foot.’ Strike a chord, Dr. Green?”

“It should, but it doesn’t.”

Pendergast’s lips twitched in a slight smile. “It is not one substance, but two. What members of the Route 666 community would no doubt label ’shrooms’.”

“Of course!” Margo snapped her fingers. “Caerulipes and coprophilia.”

“You lost me,” D’Agosta said.

“The blue-foot Psilocybe and the dung-loving Psilocybe,” Margo said, turning to the Lieutenant. “Two of the most potent hallucinogenic mushrooms there are.”

“And this other item, wysoccan,” Pendergast murmured. “If memory serves, that was a ritual drink used by the Algonquin Indians during coming-of-age ceremonies. It contained significant amounts of scopolamine. Jimsonweed. A very nasty hallucinogen, causing deep narcosis.”

“So you think this is a laundry list?” D’Agosta asked.

“Perhaps. Perhaps Kawakita wanted to modify his brew in some way, making the drug users more docile.”

“If you’re right, and Kawakita wanted to keep the glaze users under control, then why this hut of skulls?” Margo asked. “It seems to me building something like that would have the opposite, inciting effect.”

“True enough,” Pendergast said. “There is still a large piece missing from this puzzle.”

“A hut, built entirely of human skulls,” Margo mused. “You know, I’ve heard of that before. I think there was a mention of something like that in Whittlesey’s journal.”

Pendergast looked at her speculatively. “Really? Interesting.”

“Let’s check the archive. We can use the terminal in my office.”

The rays of the late afternoon sun shone through the lone window of Margo’s cramped office, cloaking papers and books in a mantle of gold. As Pendergast and D’Agosta looked on, Margo sat down at her desk, pulled the keyboard toward her, and began to type.

“The Museum got a grant last year to scan all its field notebooks and similar documents into a database,” she said. “With any luck, we’ll find the journal here.”

She initiated a search on three words: Whittlesey, hut, and skulls. The name of a single document appeared on the screen. Margo quickly called it up, then scrolled ahead to the penultimate entry. As she read the words, coldly impersonal on the computer screen, she was irresistibly reminded of the events of eighteen months before: sitting in a darkened Museum office with Bill Smithback, looking over the journalist’s shoulder as he paged eagerly through the moldy notebook.

…Crocker, Carlos, and I press on. Almost immediately, stopped to repack crate. Specimen jar had broken inside. While I repacked, Crocker wandered off trail, came upon ruined hut in the center of a small clearing. It appeared to be made entirely from human skulls, pegged with human longbones set jacal-fashion into the ground. Ragged holes cut through back of each skull. Small offering table in the center of the hut, made from longbones lashed with sinew. We found the figurine, along with some oddly carved pieces of wood, on table.

But I get ahead of myself. We brought gear down to investigate, reopened crate, retrieved toolbag—before we could investigate hut, old native woman wandered out from brush, staggering—sick or drunk, impossible to tell—pointed to crate, wailing loudly…

“That’s enough,” Margo said more abruptly than she meant to, clearing the screen. The last thing she needed now was another reminder of the contents of that nightmare crate.

“Very curious,” Pendergast said. “Perhaps we need to sum up what we know so far.” He paused a moment, poised to tick off the items on his slender fingers. “Kawakita refined the drug known as glaze, tested it on others, then used an improved version on himself. The unfortunate users, deformed by the drug and increasingly shy of light, went underground. Growing feral, they began preying on the subterranean homeless. Now, in the wake of Kawakita’s death and loss of the glaze supply, their prédations have become bolder.”

“And we know Kawakita’s own motive for taking the drug,” Margo said. “The drug seems to have a rejuvenating ability, even the ability to extend one’s lifespan. The underground creatures were given an earlier version of the drug he gave himself. And it seems he continued to perfect the drug even after he began taking it. The creatures in my lab show no physical abnormalities at all. But even his most refined drug has negative effects: look how aggressive and homicidal it made the mice and even the protozoa.”

“But that still leaves three questions,” D’Agosta said suddenly.

They turned to look at him.

“First, why did these things kill him? Because it sure seems obvious to me that’s what happened.”

“Perhaps they were growing ungovernable,” Pendergast said.

“Or they became hostile to him, seeing him as the cause of their troubles,” Margo added. “Or perhaps there was a power play between him and one of the creatures. Remember what he wrote in his notebook: ‘The other one grows more eager by the day.’ ”

“Second, what about that other mention in his notebook: the herbicide, thyoxin? That doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. Or the vitamin D you said he was synthesizing?”

“And don’t forget Kawakita also wrote the word irreversible in his notebook,” Pendergast said. “Perhaps he ultimately realized that he could not undo what he had done.”

“And that might account for the remorse he seemed to show in his notebook,” Margo said. “Apparently, he concentrated on ridding the drug of its physical changes. But in the process, he ignored what his new strain might do to the mind.”

“Third, and last,” D’Agosta continued, “what the hell was the point of rebuilding this hut of skulls mentioned in Whittlesey’s journal?”

At this, everyone was silent.

At last, Pendergast sighed. “You’re right, Vincent. I find the purpose of that hut incomprehensible. As incomprehensible as the odd pieces of metal I found on its offering table.” Pendergast removed the small items from his jacket pocket and spread them on Margo’s worktable. D’Agosta picked them up immediately, examining them closely. “Could they just be pieces of garbage?” he asked. Pendergast shook his head. “They were carefully, even lovingly arranged,” he said. “Like relics in a reliquary.”

“A what?”

“A reliquary. Something used to display revered objects.”

“Well, they don’t look reverential to me. They look like the pieces to a dashboard. Or some appliance, maybe.” D’Agosta turned to Margo. “Any ideas?”

Margo stood up from the computer terminal and walked over to the worktable. She picked up a piece, studied it a moment, then put it down. “This could be anything,” she said, picking up another, a tube of metal with one end encased in gray rubber.

“Anything,” Pendergast agreed. “But I sense, Dr. Green, that when we know what they are—and why they were lying enshrined on a stone platform, thirty stories below New York City—we’ll have the key to this puzzle.”