The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist) (11 page)

FIVE

Nearly seven thousand days after that night, I stepped out the back door into the little alleyway behind 425 Harrington Lane. The monstrumologist was crying for his supper—perhaps my unexpected appearance had reminded him that he, like every other human, needed to eat once in a while. But I refused to cook in the sty he called a kitchen before scrubbing down what could be sanitized and tossing out what couldn’t. I set to work upon returning from the market and hiding the scones, though he cursed me for it. “They are still mine until I give them to you,” I scolded him. He slunk away like a chastened child. There was always, even in his prime, a childishness about the monstrumologist, as if part of him were frozen in that time prior to his mother’s death, the little boy who simply stopped, who could not
free himself from the ice, who lived on in the man, forgotten and alone, but whose cries broke free from time to time, like those of the boy he inherited, the boy he tucked away in the attic room, all three of them—the boy, the man, and the boy inside the man—trapped in the Judeccan ice.

I dumped the first load of garbage into the nearest ash barrel. The one next to it was stuffed to overflowing, not by the monstrumologist, surely, but by the girl I had hired to keep him alive. Beatrice, was that really her name? I couldn’t remember, though I could recall the face very well; I am good with faces. Apple-cheeked, fair-skinned, a little on the heavy side, a quick, pleasant smile. I had chosen her carefully from a list of applicants: an old maid with no family in town, used to caring for the sick and infirm (she had ministered to her parents until both died). A God-fearing woman who disdained gossip and had few close ties and, most importantly, whose patience was deep as the Atlantic and whose hide was thick as a tortoise’s. No wonder he’d sacked her.

I filled up the barrel quickly, but the first stars were appearing and the temperature was dropping rapidly, and I thought a fire would be nice—I would have to burn the refuse before I left anyway—so I trooped into the old shed and fetched the kerosene.

You’ve put me in a tight spot—once again,
I thought.
If I leave you with no caretaker, you will succumb to your demons. But your demons prevent anyone from caring for you!

Such is the nature of demons, I suppose.

I doused both barrels with the kerosene. An errant breeze blew out the first match, and suddenly I was thirteen again, up to my ankles in the freezing snow, warming my bloodstained hands beside this same barrel by the immolation of a corpse I had helped dismember.

You must harden yourself. If you are to stay with me, you must become accustomed to such things.

Must I, Warthrop? Must I become accustomed to “such things”? And if I had failed—if
you
had failed to make me accustomed to them—what then? Would there have been room then for sentimentality, for the absurdities of love and pity and hope and every other human thing? But you didn’t fail; you succeeded beyond your wildest expectations, and I, William James Henry, am your crowning achievement, the most aberrant of aberrant life forms, without love without pity without hope, harsh cold merciless leviathan of the lightless heatless deep.

I lit the second match and dropped it into one barrel. Smoke boiled; fire leapt. Then the third match into the other barrel. And the heat like a barber’s warm rag upon my face, and the smoke a speckled curtain of gray and black, and the stench of organic burning things, rotten food and moldy bread, and underlying it the foul muck of marrow sizzling within bone and the acrid tincture of hair smoldering, and I knew, I knew before I looked, before I kicked the first barrel over, spilling the contents of its gullet onto the damp, hard-packed earth, I knew what I would find, knew to the core of
my harsh, cold, merciless self what he had done and to whom he had done it, apple-cheeked, fair-skinned, ready smile, and
you bastard, you bastard, what have you done? What have you done?

There was her apron, torn and bloody, and a piece of her calico dress and the remnants of the ribbon that held back her hair.

Long tangled strands of it clung stubbornly to the skull, a light brown giving to gray, and she the Medusa:
I am turned to stone.

She grinned up at me, and the empty sockets looked into my face, and both were devoid of expression, her skull, my face, no sorrow, no pity, no horror, no fear, hollow socket and hollow man, hollowed out by his hand.

FOLIO XII

Arcadia

NOT A DRACHM
OF BLOOD REMAINS IN ME, THAT DOES NOT TREMBLE;
I KNOW THE TRACES OF THE ANCIENT FLAME.

—DANTE, PURGATORIO

Canto 1

ONE

I cannot say to you,
This is where it began.

A circle has no starting point.

There are the secrets I have kept.

He encircles me. There is no beginning or end, and time is the lie the mirror tells us.

These are the secrets.

The child in the tattered hat and the boy in the labyrinth and the man beside the ash barrel circle without beginning, without end.

It is hard,
he told me once,
hard to think about those things we do not think about.

TWO

Deep in the bowels of the Beastie Bin, the man stiffened in my arms. His back arched, his head fell back. Bright red arterial blood boiled from his mouth, blended with stringy globs of black, dead tissue—the remnants of his esophagus, I think—and then he died.

I lowered his body to the floor. Dropped the blade into my pocket. Ran a bloody hand through my hair, still gelled, though no longer so stylishly.

Bring me to it!

I already have.

I knew what he meant, knew where the creature lay hidden: I’d transcribed Warthrop’s notes on the creature. Disaster had been averted—all was not lost—but I would need something to put it in. I returned to the Locked Room
and grabbed the burlap sack. The monster wasn’t going anywhere soon. There might be more thieves scurrying about the Beastie Bin, well-armed, desperate thieves at that, but I felt no anxiety, no sense of urgency. I didn’t even bother to pick up the revolver before I went to fetch the sack.

I strolled back to the corridor where I’d left him, turned the corner, and pulled up short: A man was kneeling beside the body. A few feet beyond, an indistinct figure hovered in the shadows. Now, what was the reason I hadn’t picked up that damned revolver?

The man rose. The gun I had abandoned came up. I raised my hands and said, “It’s me, Warthrop.”

The figure standing behind him rushed out of the shadows. Lilly. She drew up suddenly, seeing my blood-spattered face. “Will! Are you hurt?”

Warthrop brushed her aside and yanked the empty sack from my hand.

“Where is it?” he growled.

“Right here,” I answered. I pulled the switchblade from my pocket and offered it to him. “I’ll trade you,” I said.

He understood at once. With a curt nod he took
the knife, handed me the bag, and returned to the body. I squatted down beside him. Lilly watched us, puzzled, arms folded over her chest.

“Adolphus is dead,” I told the monstrumologist as he ripped open the man’s shirt to expose his torso.

“So I understand,” Warthrop grunted. He flicked open the knife. Pressed the tip just beneath the sternum. Squared his shoulders. “Are you ready?”

I edged closer, pulling wide the mouth of the sack. “Ready.”

Lilly gasped—couldn’t help herself, I guessed; though she had always bragged she would be the first female monstrumologist, she’d never been this close to actual practice of the craft. The doctor rammed the knife in and drew the blade down, the muscles in his neck bulging from the effort. When he reached the navel, he tossed the knife to the floor and slid his hands, palms pressed together, into the body. “Careful,” I murmured, and he nodded sharply, muttering, “Slippery . . .” He was sweating in the cool air, brows knotted in concentration, eyes closed, because he didn’t need them for this: just quick, sure hands and the iron-hard will to guide them. “Hold steady now,” he murmured to me, to the thing curled up inside the man’s chest cavity. “Now, Will Henry!”

He opened his eyes and rose up on his knees, and his hands came out of the man’s middle with a soft
plop!
, and the thing in his grip twisted and coiled sensuously around his arms, dripping with gore and oddly beautiful in the smoky yellow light, shimmering like the midnight surface of a river. With one smooth motion the monstrumologist swung the prize into the sack. “Now the truly tricky part,” he muttered. He did not rush. He forced himself to go slowly. First one hand, then the hand that held the base of its head. The critical moment in which he was at the greatest danger of being
bitten. Then he was free and I twisted the mouth of the bag closed. We were a bit out of breath.

“Well, Will Henry,” he panted. “I suppose we should have posted a watch after all.”

THREE

After examining the two victims and inspecting the scene of the crime—or crimes, since both murder and burglary were involved—the monstrumologist concurred with my assessment of the sequence of events.

“They were not rivals or enemies,” he said. “They were companions. Too much risk for one man to take on alone—one was to act as lookout while the other transferred the treasure from crate to sack. But one carried the seed of perfidy in his heart—the lookout, I think, since he also carried the gun, which he used once the Locked Room was open.” We had found the weapon in the eviscerated thief’s coat pocket. Warthrop sniffed the barrel; it had been recently fired. “He goes into the room. It fools him, the apparent lassitude of his quarry. Perhaps he even assumes that it sleeps. Bag in one hand, he pops open the cage
door, and it
strikes
.” Warthrop smacked a fist into his open palm. “The fangs sink deep. In his panic, he flings aside the bag to use that hand to pull off the mouth, though the jaws are locked in a grip too tight for three strong men to break. He stumbles backward out of the room, stepping into his victim’s blood as he goes, hits the far wall, upending the crates. By this point it is too late—well, it was too late the moment he was struck. His instinct is to run, and so he does, but he doesn’t get far—the poison has already reached his brain. He is disoriented, dizzy; the world spins; the center will not hold. He careens into this storage room, where he collapses, and his pounding heart speeds the toxin into every muscle and organ.”