Felder blinked. Her words were slow to settle in.
She went on. “I fear this story must remain between us. Are you interested?”
“Interested?” Felder repeated. “My God. Of course.”
“Good. Then please consider this my gift to you.” Constance paused. “After all—it is Christmas Eve.”
86
THEY SAT, QUITE STILL, IN THE PROFUSION OF DAPPLED light. Constance looked over Felder’s shoulder, out into the main body of the chapel. The two envelopes, one old, one new, lay on the pew between them.
Constance began. “I was born at Sixteen Water Street, New York City, in the 1870s. Most likely it was in the summer of 1873. By the time I was five, both my parents were dead of tuberculosis. In 1878, my older sister, Mary, was confined to a workhouse—the Five Points Mission—and ultimately vanished. My brother, Joseph, died in 1880. This much you know.
“What you may not know is that my sister, Mary, was the victim of a doctor attached to the Five Points Mission, a surgeon of great skill who called himself Enoch Leng. Dr. Leng was a man with a singular ambition—to extend his own life span far beyond that of a normal human being. Before you judge him, however, I should explain that Dr. Leng was not trying to extend his life for selfish reasons. He was working on a scientific project—one that would take longer than a normal life span to complete.”
“What scientific project?” Felder asked.
“The details of the project aren’t necessary for my own story.” Constance paused. “Now, here we come to the first of several grotesqueries. Dr. Leng’s theories were unorthodox, as was his sense of medical ethics. His research led him to believe it would be possible to create a medical treatment—a formula or arcanum—for greatly prolonging life. The ingredients could be procured only from living human tissue, taken from a healthy young person.”
“Good Lord,” Felder murmured.
“As a specialist at a children’s workhouse in the Five Points section of Manhattan, then New York’s most notorious slum, Dr. Leng had no paucity of raw material. My own sister fell victim to his experiments—her mutilated corpse, along with dozens of others, was discovered in a mass grave about three years ago in Lower Manhattan.”
Felder recalled coming across an article describing this discovery on one of his visits to the public library. It had been in the New York Times, written by that reporter—Smithback—the one who was later murdered. So Mary Greene was Constance’s sister, he thought.
“I’m afraid a great many people fell victim to Dr. Leng while he was refining his technique. Suffice it to say that—in 1885—he succeeded in perfecting his arcanum.”
“He found a way to prolong his life?”
“His technique centered on the bundle of nerves known as the cauda equina—I have no need of further anatomical explanation, you being a doctor. But yes: by increasingly subtle refinements, he did in fact succeed in creating an arcanum that would dramatically slow the aging process of the human body. By that time, I was a ward, living in his house.”
“You—?” Felder began.
“After my sister vanished, I became—in the parlance of the day—a ‘guttersnipe.’ I had no family and lived in the streets, doing whatever it took to stay alive. I begged, I did cartwheels or swept the sidewalks free of filth for pedestrians, hoping for a penny. More than once I very nearly froze or starved to death. Many nights I slept within the shadow of the Five Points Mission, where Dr. Leng donated his services. One day the doctor stopped and asked my name. When I told him, I think he realized he was responsible for my situation—and for some unknown reason he took pity on me. Or perhaps not. At any rate, he took me into his mansion on Riverside Drive and used me as a guinea pig, administering the perfected arcanum, probably to test for side effects. And over time, strangely enough, he became fond of me. Why, I shall never know. He fed me, clothed me, educated me, and… continued to administer to me that same elixir that he gave himself.”
Constance had been slow to utter these last words. For some minutes, the chapel fell into silence. The story was incredible, but Felder knew it was the truth.
At last, Constance resumed. “For many, many years, we lived a solitary, reclusive life in that mansion. I continued my courses of study in literature, philosophy, art, music, history, and languages, partly with the doctor’s help and partly on my own, making free use of his library and scientific collections. Meanwhile, Dr. Leng continued his work. Around 1935, he achieved his second success. Using various chemicals and compounds that had been previously unavailable, he managed to synthesize an arcanum that no longer required… human factors.”
“In other words, he stopped killing,” Felder said.
Constance nodded. “As long as it prolonged his life, he felt no special compunction against taking lives. However, as a scientist, it offended his sense of purity and aesthetic. Yes—he stopped killing. He no longer needed to. The arcanum we both continued to take was now purely synthetic. But his greater task remained incomplete. And so his scientific research continued until it finally stopped, rather suddenly, in the spring of 1954.”
“Why 1954?” Felder asked.
A thin smile appeared on Constance’s face. “Once again, that isn’t germane to my story. But I will tell you one thing. Dr. Leng once explained to me that there are two ways to ‘cure’ a patient. The common way is by restoring him to health.”
“What’s the other?”
“Putting him out of his misery.” The thin smile vanished. “In any case, with his work finally complete—or, more precisely, no longer necessary—Dr. Leng ceased to take the elixir. He lost interest in life, became even more reclusive, and began to age at a normal rate. But he gave me a choice. And I… chose to continue treatment.
“And so things remained for another fifty-odd years—until we were the victims of an unexpected and violent home invasion. Dr. Leng was killed, and I went into hiding in the deepest recesses of the house. Ultimately, order was restored, and the mansion passed into the hands of Leng’s great-grandnephew: Aloysius Pendergast.”
“Pendergast?” Felder repeated, hugely surprised.
Constance nodded.
Felder shook his head. It was too much to take in—too much.
“I watched Pendergast for many months before I finally revealed myself to him. He very kindly took me in as… as his ward.” She shifted on the bench. “And there you have it, Dr. Felder—the story of my past.”
Felder took a deep breath. “And—your child?” He couldn’t help but wonder who the father was.
“I gave birth to my son in Gsalrig Chongg, a remote monastery in Tibet. Through a complicated process, the monks of the monastery recognized that my son was the nineteenth incarnation of one of Tibet’s holiest rinpoches. This proved a great danger. The occupying Chinese authorities have been ruthlessly suppressing Tibetan Buddhism, especially the idea of the reincarnation of holy men. Back in 1995, when the Dalai Lama proclaimed a six-year-old boy as the eleventh incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the Chinese seized the boy, and he hasn’t been seen since—perhaps murdered. The Chinese learned that my child had been proclaimed the nineteenth reincarnation of the rinpoche—and so they came to get him.”
“So it was necessary to convince them that he was dead,” Felder said.
“Precisely. I pretended to flee with the child and then throw him overboard, all as a diversion. My arrest was highly public, and it seemed to satisfy the Chinese. Meanwhile, my real child was being smuggled out of Tibet to India.”