[From Shottom's 1881 letter to McFadden]
It was, I knew now, not gas escaping from a corpse. And this was not the work of a man who trafficked with body snatchers, with corpses stolen from graveyards. This poor creature on the table was still alive. Leng practiced his abominable work on those who still lived. (Section 2, chapter 5)

[Pendergast is visiting via memory crossing]
What the old monks had used this subterranean vault for, Pendergast never learned. But almost two hundred years before, this place had become the Pendergast family necropolis. Here, over a dozen generations on both sides of the family -- the fallen line of French aristocrats, the mysterious denizens of the deep bayou -- had been buried or, more frequently, reburied. Pendergast walked on, hands behind his back, staring at the carved names. Here was Henri Prendregast de Mousqueton, a seventeenth-century mountebank who pulled teeth, performed magic and comedy, and practiced quack medicine. And here, encased in a mausoleum bedecked with quartz minarets, was Eduard, a well-known Harley Street doctor in eighteenth-century London. And here, Comstock Pendergast, famed mesmerist, magician, and mentor of Harry Houdini.

Pendergast strolled farther, passing artists and murderers, vaudeville performers and violin prodigies. At last he stopped beside a mausoleum grander than those around it: a ponderous conflation of white marble, carved into an exact replica of the Pendergast mansion itself. This was the tomb of Hezekiah Pendergast, his own great-great grandfather. (section 9, chapter 1)