The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist) (12 page)

“But how did it get
inside
him?” Lilly blurted out. She was visibly shaken by this, her first real exposure to aberrant biology. You may study it in a thousand books and hear about it in a thousand lectures and discuss it with a thousand learned philosophers, but you can never
know
it until you have seen it—and what she had seen was but a glimpse.

Warthrop seemed perplexed by her question. “Well, the number of available orifices is quite small. I think it is safe to assume it entered through the largest one.”

“But
why
did it crawl inside him?”

The monstrumologist blinked several times. The answer was obvious—to him and, to his mind, anyone who had one. But his tone was patient with her, more so than it ever had been with me. “To eat, Miss Bates. And to hide from anything that might eat
him
.”

He clapped his hands softly. “Well! I must have a look at Adolphus now, I suppose. Hang on to that revolver, Mr. Henry; I shall help myself to this fellow’s Colt and meet you back here. Stay in this room and do not venture out until I return or unless your life depends upon it. Miss Bates, after you.”

Lilly slipped her arm through mine. “I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.”

“It may be a little much to ask of him,” Warthrop replied. He nodded to the bag in my hand. “I wouldn’t want for him to find himself in the unfortunate position of having to choose between you.”

I laughed. Lilly failed to see the humor, though. She said, “I can manage myself.”

The doctor started to say something, shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and then without a word darted out the door. We were alone, Lilly and the monster and me.

I sank to the floor and rested my back against a shipping crate emblazoned with the Society’s coat of arms.
Nil timendum est.
With the squirming sack between my legs, I looked up at Lilly, who seemed very tall and nearly goddesslike from my inferior position, haughtily regal in her purple dress, though it suffered now from a smudge or two.

“May I say how striking you look right now?” I asked. “I can’t decide if it’s the angle or the lighting. Perhaps both. I am very tired. I think the alcohol has worn off.”

“You used to be so serious,” she observed after a studied
silence. “Even when you were trying to joke, you were serious.”

“The work gives one perspective.”

“What kind of perspective would that be?”

I pursed my lips, thinking about it. “The loftiest humanly possible. Or just possible, period.”

She shook her head. “Where is the gun?”

“In my pocket. Why?”

She squatted beside me and fished into my pocket. “Don’t take my firearm, Miss Bates,” I cautioned her.

“Your hands are full.”

“If you take my firearm, I shall be forced to shoot you.”

“The more you try to be funny, the less funny you become.”

She held the gun with both hands against her stomach. She with the gun, I with the bag.

“It isn’t my fault you don’t have a sense of humor,” I said. “Please don’t worry it; you’re making me nervous.”

She sat down beside me, her eyes upon the lump beneath the burlap.

“I thought they grew to five times that size.”

“More like ten. It’s just a baby, Lilly.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking about taking it out for a cuddle. . . .”

She let go of the gun with one hand long enough to punch me in the arm. “I mean after this is done.”

“He’s going to present it to a group of like-minded men, who will nod with admiration and approval and pat him
on the back and vote him a medal or perhaps commission a statue in his honor. . . .”

“Some boys grow
up
,” she observed. “And some grow
backward
.”

“I shall have to ponder that awhile before I can offer an opinion on it.”

“What will he do with it
after
the congress has adjourned? That’s what I meant.”

“Ah, I see. The cat, as it were, is out of the bag now, so it can’t stay here. I assume that was his original plan. Perhaps he’ll bring it back to New Jerusalem, build a special pit for it, and feed it goats. I don’t think he has any plans to release it back into the wild.”

“Wouldn’t that be the best thing to do?”

“Not for the wild. And not for Warthrop. One is much more important than the other, you know.”

“I would set it free.”

“It’s the last of its kind, Lilly. Doomed either way you go.”

“Then why not just kill it?” Looking at the undulating burlap. “He could stuff it like a trophy.”

“Well, that’s an idea,” I said curtly. The topic had become tiresome. “Tell me something: Have you kissed him?”

“Kissed . . . Dr. Warthrop?”

I smiled, picturing that. “Warthrop hasn’t kissed anyone since 1876. I was referring to the mediocrity.”

“Samuel?” She lowered her eyes; she would not look at me. “Is that any business of yours?”

“I suppose not.”

“I know not.”

“Really? Then he must be mediocre, for you not to know!”

She laughed in spite of herself. “You aren’t half as clever as you think you are, you know.”

I nodded. “More like a third. Did you meet him in England? Aren’t you lonely there, Lilly? Don’t you miss New York? What sort of person would
want
to apprentice for Sir Hiram Walker? No one who’s a third as clever as he thinks he is, so he must be a mediocrity.”

“He’s a friend,” she said.

“A friend?”

“A very good friend.”

“Oh. Hmm. Very good is certainly not mediocre.”

She smiled. “Not by a third.”

“I should very much like to kiss you now.”

“That is a lie.” Still smiling.

And I, now frowning: “Why would someone lie about that?”

“If you really wanted to kiss me, you would have kissed me, not—”

I kissed her.

Dear Will, I pray this finds you well.

Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. “Will,” she whispered. “I should very much like for you to kiss me again.”

And I did, and the thing turned upon itself inside the
burlap, and scratch, scratch against the heavy glass and
you must harden yourself to such things
and there was no room for love or pity or any other silly human thing and
never fall in love, never.

In the snarl of winding passageways and dusty rooms and shelves overflowing with dead nightmarish things and

I find it beautiful—more splendid than a meadow in springtime.

There is one last thing I must say before I go.

In the twisting, scratching, dusty, overflowing, dead, nightmarish chambers of the lightless heatless deep.

One last thing I must say

lips slightly parted

These are the secrets these are the secrets these are the secrets

FOUR

The light of the monstrumologist’s lamp kissed the rough surface of the egg; he leaned over it, bringing the lens of the loupe close, and his breath was but a whisper of wind through that beautiful meadow at springtime. He’d taken measurements—mass, circumference, temperature—and listened to it through his stethoscope. He worked quickly. He did not want to expose the egg too long to the basement air. As Maeterlinck had observed, New England was anything but tropical.

“Well, it certainly matches the descriptions in the literature,” he told me, “scant and imprecise as those may be. It
could
be the ovum of a
T. cerrejonensis
. Certainly not a crocodile or turtle egg—
much
too big for one of those. Definitely reptilian. Perhaps a distant cousin, the giant anaconda
or boa, but, again, the size rules them out. Well! In this instance we must rely upon the old adage that time will tell.” He straightened and pushed the loupe onto the top of his head. His cheeks were flushed. He did not know for certain what he had, but at the same time he
knew
. “We shall nurture it, keep it warm and well insulated, and see what emerges in a few weeks’ time.”

“Just in time for the annual congress,” I pointed out. “It obliges you, Doctor.”

He stiffened slightly. “I am not sure what you mean by that.”

“The last of its kind,” I said. “As if your cap didn’t already have enough feathers!”

“Do you know, Will Henry, for about a year now, whenever you make a remark like that, I cannot decide if you are praising me or mocking me or both.”

“I am acknowledging the obvious, sir,” I said.

“Usually the purview of politicians and novelists. I would suggest you avoid it.”

He returned the egg to its bower of straw and for the next thirty minutes fussed with the small heat lamp, using a thermometer to measure the ambient temperature near the surface of the egg.

“We must keep close watch,” Warthrop said. “Check it upon the hour until it’s ready to hatch, and then we cannot leave it unattended. For our protection as well as its own. At least two others know of its existence and location, perhaps
more. Should intelligence of our find fall upon the wrong ears . . . it could pose a greater danger than the thing itself.”

He was speaking to me but looking at “the thing itself.”

“Its venom is the most toxic on record, five times as potent as that of
Hydrophis belcheri
. A drop that would fit upon the head of a pin is enough to kill a grown man.”

I whistled. “No wonder it is so valuable. You could wipe out an entire army with a cupful. . . .”

He shook his head and chuckled ruefully. “And thus our own natures determine our conclusions.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is valuable not for what it takes away, Will Henry. It is valuable for what it gives.”

“That was my point, Doctor.”

“Death as something one gives?”

“And receives. It is both.”

Still smiling: “I really have failed, haven’t I?” He looked back at the egg. “Take that same pinhead-size drop. Dilute it in a ten percent solution. It may be injected directly into the vein, or some prefer to soak tobacco in it and ingest it through a pipe. The effect, I hear, is indescribably euphoric—orgasmic, for lack of a better word. One dose—one puff—is sufficient to leave the user more hopelessly ensnared than the most hopeless opium addict. It is irrevocable, like the fruit from Eden’s tree: Once it’s tasted, there is no going back. More begets the desire for more—and more, and more—until the brain has rewired itself.
The body needs it as the lungs need air or the cells glucose.”

I saw it immediately. A supplier of this überopium would become very rich, very quickly. Richer than all the richest robber barons combined, Warthrop had said. Maeterlinck had not been lying: His client’s asking price was ridiculously low—
suspiciously
so, to my mind.

“There is something foul here,” I said. “If this client of Maeterlinck’s was willing to practically give it away . . .”

“Very astute of you, Will Henry. Perhaps I am premature in my assessment. Yes, the price was much too low if he understood what he had—and much too high if he didn’t!”

“Unless Maeterlinck never intended to let you have it. You were to be used to verify its authenticity.”

“And what purpose would that serve? All he had to do was wait for it to hatch, harvest the venom, and—if you’ll pardon the expression—give it a shot.”

“Whoever hired him knows you, or knows of you. . . .”

He crossed his arms and threw back his head, considering me down the length of his patrician nose. “And? What does that tell you?”

“There is a motive here beyond profit.”

“Excellent, Mr. Henry! It is true: I must reevaluate to the last premise my conclusions about your acumen. But what could that motive be?” He held up his hand as my mouth came open. “I have a few thoughts along those lines, which I will hold in abeyance for now. Far too many serve the cakes before they’re fully baked.”

I frowned. “Is that a quote from somewhere?”

He laughed. “It is now.”

The vigil lasted nearly a month. As the “big day” approached, his anxiety grew—along with his beard and hair—and his appetite withered. He hovered over the egg for hours, fiddling with the lamp, rearranging the straw, listening to the developing life inside its leathery cocoon through the stethoscope. My major duties, excluding the usual ones of cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping, answering letters, and the like, included keeping watch by the basement door, the doctor’s loaded revolver always by my side. He started at every little noise, slept no more than thirty minutes at a stretch, and generally devolved from philosopher of aberrant biology into a surrogate mother. More than once, when I dragged myself down the stairs to check on him, I would find Warthrop perched upon his stool in a semistupor, resting his chin on his palm, half-shut eyes fixed upon the thing in the straw.

“Go to bed,” I said to him once. “I’ll watch it.”

“And if you fall asleep?”

He said nothing. I let it go. “May I ask you something?”

His eyebrow rose; the eye beneath remained lidded.

“It didn’t drop out of the sky, and it wasn’t preserved in a frozen tundra for a hundred years or, I am guessing, laid a century before it will hatch. How can it be the last of its kind? Where is its mother?”