The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist) (10 page)

Von Helrung nodded. He seemed relieved that my master understood the central dilemma. The most astounding discovery in a generation, one that held theory-altering implications not just for aberrant biology but for all the natural sciences, including key tenets of evolution—and it must be kept secret!

“
Ach,
if only this broker who brought it to you had revealed the name of his client!” cried von Helrung. “For this mysterious personage knows you, knows as well as Maeterlinck that the prize now rests in the possession of a certain Pellinore Warthrop of 425 Harrington Lane! I do not exaggerate,
mein Freund
. You have been in no greater peril in all your dangerous career. This, your greatest prize, may also be your undoing.”

Warthrop stiffened. “My ‘undoing,’ as you call it, must come sometime, von Helrung. Better that it comes at the height of my career than in the last bitter dregs of it.”

Von Helrung puffed on his cigar and watched his former pupil down the final drops of his tea.

“It may yet,” he murmured. “It may yet.”

THREE

The last bitter dregs of it.

Nineteen years after uttering those words, he was sitting at the foot of his bed wrapped in a towel. I could count every rib in his bony chest, and with his wet hair and haggard features he reminded me, for some reason, of one of
Macbeth
’s witches.
Fair is foul and foul is fair!

“Did you make tea?” he asked.

“No.”

I stepped around to his dresser in search of some clean underwear.

“Really? I thought surely you must be, by all the banging and clattering down there. ‘Dear Will is making me a nice pot of tea,’ I thought.”

“Well, I wasn’t. I was looking to see if you had a crumb
of food in the place. Which you don’t. What are you living on, Warthrop? Old carcasses from your collection?”

I tossed a clean pair of underwear—the drawer was full of them; he probably hadn’t changed his shorts in a month—at him. They landed on his head and he giggled like a child.

“You know I have no appetite when I’m working,” he said. “Now, a good, strong cup of some Darjeeling, that is something altogether different! I never could replicate your cup, Will, try as I might. Never tasted the same after you left.”

I went to the closet. Tossed a pair of trousers, a shirt, and the cleanest vest I could find onto the bed.

“I’ll make you a pot when I get back.”

“Get back? But you only just got here!”

“From the market, Warthrop. It will be closing soon.”

He nodded. He was absently turning the underwear in his hands. “I don’t suppose you’d mind picking up a scone or two. . . .”

“I will get you some scones.”

I sat in the chair. For some reason I was out of breath.

“They never tasted the same either,” he said. “One wonders how that could be.”

“Stop that,” I said sharply. “Don’t be childish.”

I looked away. The sight of him wrapped in the towel, thin hair dripping wet, the hunched shoulders, the hollow chest, the rail-thin arms and spidery hands—it sickened me. It made me want to hit him.

“Are you going to tell me?” I asked.

“Tell you what?”

“This thing you’re working on, this thing that’s slowly killing you, this thing that
will
kill you, I suppose, if I let it.”

His dark eyes glittered with that familiar infernal glow. “I believe I am in charge of my own death.”

“It doesn’t appear that way. In fact, it appears that
it
is in total charge of
you
.”

The fire went out. He dropped his head. “I must die sometime,” he whispered.

It was too much. I leapt from the chair with a guttural roar and bore down upon him. He shrank at my advance, flinched as if expecting a blow.

“God damn you anyway, Pellinore Warthrop! The days of your puerile attempts to manipulate and control me are over. So save the melodramatic sniveling for someone else.”

His shoulders heaved. “There is no one else.”

“That is
your
choice, not mine.”

“
You
chose to leave
me
!” he shouted up into my face.

“You gave me no choice!” I turned away. “You disgust me. ‘Always tell the truth, Will Henry, all the truth in all things at all times.’ From you, the most intellectually dishonest man I have ever known!”

I spun on my heel, turned round again. We are circles; our lives are not straight.

“You’ve been nothing but a burden to me, an albatross around my neck!” I shouted. “Everything about you is
repulsive—you’re living like some feral creature, wallowing in your own filth, and for what? For
what
?”

“I cannot . . . I cannot . . .” Shaking uncontrollably, hugging his nakedness, dank hair falling over his face in a stringy curtain.

“Cannot
what
?”

“Say what I cannot—do what I cannot—
think
what I cannot.”

I shook my head. “You’ve gone mad.” With wonder in my voice. The unconquerable Pellinore Warthrop, the singular man, had crossed that razor-thin fissure unto the other side.

“No, Will. No.” He lifted his head to look at me, and I thought,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Nothing has changed since the beginning. It is not I who has gone blind. It is you whose eyes have been opened.”

FOUR

With my eyes wide open and three inches from the floor, I crawled in an ever-widening circle around the corpse in the Monstrumarium.

Every second was precious, but I forced myself to go slowly, gathering in what the eye could harvest in the meager light.

Here the outline of a bloody shoe print, six inches from where he fell. Another as the second man stumbled backward toward the wall. Here, against the wall, a stack of empty crates toppled over and broken apart. A terrific struggle had happened here. With a third man? Or with Warthrop’s prize? Had the victim’s betrayer or competitor been overcome inside the Locked Room as he attempted to transfer the prize to another container more suitable for
transport? Finding nothing else useful against the wall, I crossed into the room. In my brief inspection earlier I hadn’t seen it: Someone—or some
thing—
had flung a large burlap sack into the far corner. I tapped on it with my foot. Empty.

That was it, then: He tried to lift it out of the cage, and it struck, drove him out, and as he stumbled backward he stepped into the puddle of blood, leaving the imprint of his shoe on the floor. Or he could have lost his grip—not been in
its
grip—panicked, and backed out in terror, slamming against the far wall and knocking over the crates before fleeing the Monstrumarium, the motive for his crime abandoned. The second scenario did not seem satisfactory to me. If he had dropped the prize, it would have pursued him and left some evidence of itself through the same puddle into which the shoe had dipped. Back in the corridor, I ran my fingertips over the damp wall above the pile of shattered wood and bent nails, squinting in the flickering light of the jets, kicking myself for not having fetched a torch from Adolphus’s office. My fingers brushed something sticky. I sniffed. Blood. The wall was speckled with dime-size drops of it around the level of my eyes. Had he smacked his head against the hard stone? Or had he already been punctured several times over? The drops extended for three feet in either direction from the center of the broken crates. From whipping his head back and forth? Or from something whipping
him
?

“Where are you?” I whispered. “It isn’t big enough—not yet—to take you anywhere, so wherever you are, you went
there of your own accord. Did you run
from
it or
with
it, embracing you? Did you make it back to the surface or are you still here?”

Silence answered.

The Monstrumarium spanned the length and breadth of the building above it, which occupied an entire city block. A sprawl of ill-lit, interlocking tunnels and hundreds of storage rooms of various sizes, some stuffed so full that only the hardiest dared navigate them without Adolphus there to guide him. More than once I’d gotten lost down here, wandering for a quarter hour or more, until, unnerved and disoriented, I gave in to my panic and called for him to find me and lead me out:
Adolphus! Adolphus, I’m lost again!

The would-be thief could have escaped the encounter with the beast only to find himself wandering down here like I had done, desperate and lost—and hunted. He could have made it back to the street, his pursuer safely sealed below like the Minotaur of the story. Or he could have been overcome—not here, but somewhere else within the labyrinth—and, even now as I considered the possibilities, he was being consumed.

I went over the scene one last time. How long since Lilly had left to fetch the doctor? My sense of time was skewed. It seemed more than a month since I’d pushed her up the stairs with that farewell kiss. I trotted back toward the curator’s office, holding the gun in my right hand while keeping the left before me, the knife and brass knuckles within my trouser pocket knocking against my leg, pausing at each turn
and scanning the next tunnel before proceeding on. I had the sense of time slithering down a black hole, carrying me with it. Though the floor rose as I neared the entrance, I felt as if I were skittering down a steep slope, at the bottom of which opened the mouth of a lightless abyss, the entryway to the lowermost circle, Judecca, the frozen heart of hell.

In the last tunnel before the final turn, midway down, a shadow leapt from the murky recesses of a storage room and slammed into me, forcing me sideways into the wall. The impact knocked the gun from my hand. I smelled whiskey and blood as he clamped his fingers around my throat, pinning my back against the wall with his body, and his breath was hot in my ear. I brought up my fists and boxed him hard against the ears, which loosened his grip a bit, but he was maddened by fear and pain and did not let go. His face shone with fresh blood, and was crisscrossed with deep crimson fissures where the fangs must have ripped. His teeth were bared, his eyes red-rimmed and wild with terror.

I brought my knee up and into his crotch; his hold slipped as he doubled over, and I shoved him away. No time for the gun: I pulled the knife from my pocket and flicked it open. The blade sprang free, glinted coldly in the gaslight. He stumbled backward, bending over, clutching at his privates, and then he vomited up a stew of bile and blood and black, curdled blobs of his own gut—the monster’s poison had already necrotized a part of his stomach. His other organs, I knew, were dying as well. That is how the poison kills you:
You die from the inside out. Depending on the amount of toxin, the process can take anywhere from minutes to several days.

My turn.

I grabbed him by the throat, pulled him up, pressed the tip of the knife under his jaw. His rancid breath, stinking of his inner rot, washed over my face, and I gagged.

“Where is it?” I choked out.
“Where is it?”

“Inside . . .”

“Inside? Here? In the Monstrumarium? Bring me to it!”

He laughed. Then he belched, and a viscous mixture of blood and mucus bubbled over his bluish lips. I saw it then. I had seen the same thing many times before in my service to the monstrumologist:

The light was fading from his eyes.

“I already have.”