Page 55 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

He fixed the end of the torch into a sconce bolted to the brick wall. Leaning over the barrow, careful not to soil his sleeves further, he picked up the bundle and thrust it into the niche. As it slid in, the sheet partly fell away and the corpse’s head flopped to one side, long brown hair spilling. Munck, muttering a curse, wrestled the corpse into the niche, rearranged the shroud around it, and gave it a final shove to wedge it next to its neighbor.

He examined his sleeves and cuffs again with fastidious care, satisfying himself that no additional flesh, fluids, or offal had fouled them. Then he knelt and picked up the burlap bag, measuring out mortar powder into the trough; added water; and began mixing it with the mortar hoe. When it reached the proper consistency, he spread a layer of the fresh mortar along the bottom of the niche and began setting bricks into it, troweling on more mortar to seal the joints and tapping the bricks with the handle to set them in place. Another layer of mortar and bricks went down, then another, and in a short time the alcove was thoroughly bricked up, sealing its contents in permanent darkness.

He rose slowly, plucked the torch from the wall, and turned, wheeling the now-empty barrow—creak, creak, creak—back through the maze of tunnels in the direction of the operating chambers, ready to collect the next bundle, which he knew would not be long in coming.

35

NINE-YEAR-OLD CONSTANCEsat in the window seat of her bedroom, her own bedroom, looking out the tall windows of the second floor. “House,” it was called by the people who lived here, like Mrs. Palegood the cook, and Mr. Moseley the teacher—but to her it was a palace.

Palaces were not for girls like her. She could remember when her mother and father were still alive, when there was food to eat and warmth from the stove, and their apartment—smaller than this room—smelled like boiled cabbage, and her father, grimy from work on the docks, had patiently showed them card tricks, sign language, and taught them ventriloquism. It had been a small, simple place. There were palaces in a book her father had read to them, a book of fairy tales, dirty and coverless but filled with magic. She remembered every page of that book. On page 37 there was a picture of a white castle on a hill, shining like a diamond, with flags and banners rising above its roofs. On page 44 was a picture of a knight on horseback, and on page 72 was the horrible old witch who’d tried to cook and eat Hansel and Gretel.

Then her father died and they had to move. Their new place was crowded, dark, and very cold, and one of the men there took the book away and tore the pages out to start a fire in the stove. She watched them go up in flames, one by one. And then her mother drowned, and that’s when Mary took her and Joe to a dirty place under a staircase, where there were staggering men and loud women and rats. Mary would go out during the day and bring back bits of food at night, while she and Joe hid.

But even that did not last long: Mary was taken, Joe disappeared, and she was left alone. She sorted through garbage for something to eat or wear, always with her heart beating fearfully in her narrow chest, enduring kicks, curses, and names that rained down on her as she did her best to keep from underfoot—“urchin,” “guttersnipe,” “damned little tramp.”Better you should throw yourself in the river like your mama did, one leering woman had told her,and rid the world of an extra mouth.

But her mother had not jumped into the river on purpose. That was an awful fib. Constance did not understand why that toothless woman said that.

They had put Mary in a big brick building and locked her in there. But she’d still been able to see Mary most evenings—to get a bit of food and words of comfort. And on nights when the cramps of hunger would not let her sleep, and the slimy bricks of her secret hiding places simply refused to get warm, she found herself slipping out into the streets and creeping down to the dark pier where she’d seen her mother winched up in a net, dripping, hair covering her face like black seaweed—and trying to understand why God had put her in a place like this and what she needed to do to make it right.

…And then, this had happened. Sitting in the window seat, she looked around her room again in wonder, at the hanging lace encircling the princess bed, the toys lined up on a shelf, the flowers in the window, the music box on the table, the mountain of soft pillows on the bed. Most of all, the food: roasted chicken with apples, sausages piled with potatoes and gravy, thick slabs of boiled ham, soft warm bread smeared with melting butter, ice cream and cake and candied cherries and chocolates.

And best of all, seeing Joe. But Joe wasn’t happy. He wasn’t convinced that the kind woman was really their aunt: it was too good to be true. He feared something bad was going to happen. Hearing this, she wondered if maybe they were being fattened up to be cooked and eaten, like Hansel and Gretel.

But what bad things could happen to them? The woman really did seem like a duchess, which after all wasalmosta princess, and she was so kind. The duchess somehow knew her nickname and started calling her Binky. Binky! It was the name her own father called her, because he said it was the word for something small and cute and complicated. The duchess wanted Constance and Joe to call her Aunt. Joe refused, but Constance was trying. She was doing her best to be good. She was trying to deserve all this, even though she was an ungrateful, dirty, good-for-nothing guttersnipe.

She thought back to when Aunt Livia had grabbed her, bundled her into a carriage, and covered her with a thick beaver rug—a real carriage, with soft seats and lamps and a horse with a driver. For a moment she wondered if she was being taken away to some evil place—if she was experiencing one final instance of warmth before the terrible unknown.

But that had been two days ago. She’d arrived at this mansion and been reunited with Joe. No bad things came. What came were toys, and books, and hot baths, and huge breakfasts and lunches and suppers. Everything the lady—Aunt Livia—had promised on the snowy street outside the workhouse had come true. She was warm and dry, and Joe was here—he had his own room on the far side of a bathroom they shared; they were called “Jack and Jill” rooms by their tutor, Mr. Moseley. Joe wouldn’t tell her what had happened to him at Blackwell’s, but she knew it must have been awful, because he seemed changed. Every now and then, though, the old laughing, teasing Joe surfaced, with his card tricks and pick-a-pocket japes.

Binky didn’t know if she’d ever feel at home in her room. It was so grand and warm, and the bedcovers were so soft that she was afraid to go to sleep because she might sink down to the street and wake up back on the cold, wet stones to find it had all been a dream. She spent a lot of her time being careful to move very quietly, not break things, and speak only when spoken to—in short, to be the best little girl a guttersnipe could be—so that she’d never, ever, get put back in that bad place.

Careful not to disturb the child sitting in the window seat, “Aunt” Livia, Duchess of Ironclaw, stood motionless in the carpeted hallway, observing her through the crack of the bedroom door. She found herself fascinated, even obsessed, by the child. Her feelings on seeing her younger self—on calling her by her long-abandoned nickname, Binky, which had once been her own—were too peculiar and inexplicable to be analyzed. And how could there be analysis, without analogue or precedent? She recalled a phrase of H. P. Lovecraft’s, when he described the sensations of a truly unique encounter as being “poignant and complex.” Those adjectives had always seemed lacking to her. Yet now—in an encounter of her own that could certainly be called unique—she could think of none better. Looking at her tiny self as she went about her day—sitting in a window seat lost in thought, playing with her new toys, whispering with her brother Joe, wolfing down food, her little prayers at bedtime—it was an experience beyond the reach of words.

What came to her mind instead was something most unwelcome: a sudden effluence of her own dark memories, once brutally locked away, now risen again and impossible to resist—three torturing moments in particular, the awful dates of each engraved into her remembrance forever:

Dr. Enoch Leng, June 19, 1881—Come, child; this Mission is no spot for a young waif such as yourself. I’m a physician, let me get you to a place where you’ll be cared for, where your ills will be cured. I know you are afraid. But please, do not discompose yourself: resistance is truly unnecessary…

Leng, October 13, 1935—My child, ofcourseit is different! And yes, a certain languorousness is to be expected upon the initial injection; my refinement contains trace amounts of synthetic opiates among other things, but you’ll find that even though the formula is different—and rather easier to procure—the benefit is the same…

Leng, January 7, 1951—Foolish, frivolous, thankless girl! After the kindnesses I’ve shown you: taken you into my care, treated you like my own blood, given you access to books and instruments and paintings so numberless even your mind cannot absorb them all…to now accuse me of using you as a guinea pig those long years ago! Just because you’ve stumbled over a few papers in those endless basement perambulations of yours doesn’t mean you would, or could, understand what I did for you or why. But I shall say this: if you now refuse to take the elixir, if you willfully throw away the bloom of youth in favor of creeping enfeeblement and, finally, worms and dust, you’ll not only be sacrificing a priceless intellect, honed by decades of education and my edifying attentions—but in doing so will cause your own sister’s death to have been in vain. That’s right: in your ignorance you label yourself a guinea pig, but it was Mary who died so thatyoumight live. Your sister, Mary Greene, who died in my laboratory on this very night, exactly seventy years ago, in the vivisection that at last unlocked the final secret of the Arcanum—and allowed you to enjoy a life of the mind not for decades, but centuries. There! I see you are shocked. Well, you have only yourself to blame; I certainly never planned to tell you such details. But when you get over this snit, consider: if you stop taking the arcanum, you’ll besacrificing everything your sister Mary died for. Mary Greene, who died not just for your sins, but for your very life…

Constance stepped back from the doorway, her hand rising to stifle the gasp triggered by these unbidden memories. She’d been so busy with her plans, so pleased by her progress, that she’d let down her guard. She must steel herself mentally, using thestong pa nyidmeditation technique Pendergast had taught her, to keep such crushing recollections in abeyance.

Pendergast…The thought of him, the memories of him…his eyes, his honeyed voice, his breath caressing her ear…they comprised another mental burden that required ruthless and disciplined suppression. She trembled with the effort necessary to banish these thoughts, telling herself they belonged to another universe, another time, nothing more now than tiny electrical sparks moving among her brain cells, signifying nothing.

As she took a final look at her younger self before moving down the passage, it hit home to Constance that, when she’d seized her younger shade and spirited her off to this house, she had triggered an irreversible fork in time. Up until that point, the two people—the Constance of 1880 and the Constance of the twenty-first century—shared every memory and were effectively one. But now, the girl sitting in the window seat and gazing onto the courtyard below had, through no action of her own, embarked on her own timeline…one to which Constance had no access, one she had no memory of and no way of predicting. Those awful memories of Leng that had assaulted her just now were hers, and hers alone.

She thanked the God of the Universe they would never be memories of little Constance.

36

December 9, 1880

Sunday

YOUR CARRIAGE IS WAITING, ma’am.”

“And high time that it is.” Carlotta Victoria Cabot-Flint heaved herself out of the drawing room chair where she’d been waiting, walked with dignified step into the front hall, and suffered the parlormaid to drape the heavy beaver coat around her commodious person.

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