Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [13]
“I wish you’d let me hire a live-in housekeeper, Maurice. And a cook. It would greatly relieve your burden.”
“Nonsense! I can take care of the house myself.”
“I don’t think it’s safe for you to be here alone.”
“Not safe? Of course it’s safe. I keep the house well locked at night.”
“Naturally.” Pendergast sipped the sherry, which was an excellent dry oloroso. He wondered, a little idly, how many bottles were left in the extensive cellars. Many more, probably, than he could drink in a lifetime, not to mention the wine, port, and fine old cognac. As the collateral branches of his family had died out, all the various wine cellars—like the wealth—had concentrated around him, the last surviving member of sound mind.
He took another sip and put down the glass. “Maurice, I think I’ll take a turn through the house. For old times’ sake.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be here if you need me.”
Pendergast rose and, opening the pocket doors, stepped into the entry hall. For fifteen minutes, he wandered through the rooms of the first floor: the empty kitchen and sitting rooms, the drawing room, the pantry and saloon. The house smelled faintly of his childhood—of furniture polish, aged oak, and, infinitely distant, his mother’s perfume—all overlaid with a much more recent odor of damp and mildew. Every object, every knickknack and painting and paperweight and silver ashtray, was in its place, and every little thing carried a thousand memories of people long since under earth, of weddings and christenings and wakes, of cocktail parties and masked balls and children stampeding the halls to the warning exclamations of aunts.
Gone, all gone.
He mounted the stairs to the upper landing. Here, two hallways led to bedrooms in the opposite wings of the house, with the upstairs parlor straight ahead, through an arched doorway protected by a brace of elephant tusks.
He entered the parlor. A zebra rug lay on the floor, and the head of a Cape buffalo graced the mantel above the massive fireplace, looking down at him with furious glass eyes. On the walls were numerous other heads: kudu, bushbuck, stag, deer, hind, wild boar, elk.
He clasped his hands behind his back and slowly paced the room. Seeing this array of heads, these silent sentinels to memory and events long past, his thoughts drifted irresistibly to Helen. He’d had the old nightmare the previous night—as vivid and terrible as ever—and the malevolent effects still lingered like a canker in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps this room might exorcise that particular demon, at least for a while. It would never disappear, of course.
On the far side, against the wall, stood the locked gun case that displayed his collection of hunting rifles. It was a savage, bloody sport—driving a five-hundred-grain slug of metal at two thousand feet per second into a wild animal—and he wondered why it attracted him. But it was Helen who had truly loved hunting, a peculiar interest for a woman—but then Helen had been an unusual woman. A most unusual woman.
He gazed through the rippled, dusty glass at Helen’s Krieghoff double-barreled rifle, the side plates exquisitely engraved and inlaid with silver and gold, the walnut stock polished with use. It had been his wedding present to her, just before they went on their honeymoon safari, after Cape buffalo in Tanzania. A beautiful thing, this rifle: six figures’ worth of the finest woods and precious metals—designed for a most cruel purpose.
As he looked, he noted a small edge of rust creeping around the muzzle rim.
He strode to the door of the parlor and called down the stairs. “Maurice? Would you kindly bring me the key to the gun cabinet?”
After a long moment, Maurice appeared in the hall. “Yes, sir.” He turned, disappearing once again. Moments later, he slowly mounted the groaning stairs, an iron key gripped in his veined hand. He creaked past Pendergast and stopped before the gun case, inserted the key, and turned it.
“There you are, sir.” His face remained impassive, but Pendergast was glad to sense in Maurice a feeling of pride: