The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist) (13 page)

He cleared his throat. His voice sounded like a shoe
scraping over broken glass. “Dead, according to Maeterlinck. Killed by the same coal miner who discovered the nest.”

“But wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume . . . ?”

“Her mate had been killed the week before. Reasonable to assume it was her mate—a big male, nearly forty-five feet from tail to snout.”

“That is my point. Where there is one, but especially where there are
two
 . . .”

“Oh, I suppose anything is
possible
. It is
possible
that a tribe of Neanderthals survives in the inaccessible regions of the Himalayas. It is
possible
that leprechauns emerge from the Irish woods and dance in the highlands when the moon is full. It is equally
possible
that you were born of two monkeys mating and switched upon your birth. It is also
possible
that this entire conversation—no, your entire existence—is but a dream, and you will wake up to find that you’re an old man in your farmhouse next to your stout but practical wife and marvel at the power of dreams while you sleepily milk the family cow!”

I pondered his argument for a moment and then said, “Must I be a farmer?”

On one or two occasions he gave in to the human imperative and allowed me to help him upstairs and into his bed. “Well, why are you hovering about like some ghoulish angel of death?” Snapping his fingers at me. “Back to the basement, Will Henry, and snap to!”

Oh, if I hear that loathsome phrase attached to my name one more time . . . !

I set the gun beside the nest and contemplated the gestating
T. cerrejonensis
. It glowed in the orange light of the heat lamp. The basement was cold; the place in which it rested was warm. Three days before, it had begun to quiver, ever so slightly, nearly unperceptively. When you listened through the stethoscope, you could hear it, a wet squishy sound, as the organism writhed and twisted within the amniotic sac. Hearing it gave you a certain thrill: This was life, fragile and elemental, tender and implacable. Entropy and chaos reigns o’er all of creation, destruction defines the universe, but life endures. And isn’t that the essence of beauty? It occurred to me, while I watched the thing shiver with the ancient force, that aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution’s highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is
us
and then there is
everything else but us
.

But we do not stand apart from or above or in the middle of anything. There is nothing apart, nothing above, and the middle is everywhere—and nowhere. We are no more beautiful or essential or magnificent than an earthworm.

In fact—and dare we go there, you and I?—you could say the worm is
more
beautiful, because it is innocent and we are not. The worm has no motive but to survive long enough to make baby worms. There is no betrayal, no cruelty, no envy, no lust, and no hatred in the worm’s heart, and so who
are the monsters and which species shall we call aberrant?

Sitting in the cold basement before the warm egg, my eyes filled with tears. For true beauty—beauty, as it were, with a capital
B
—is terrifying; it puts us in our place; it reflects back to us our own ugliness. It is the prize beyond price.

I reached out my hand and laid it gently upon the pulsing skin.

Forgive, forgive, for you are greater than I.

Canto 2

ONE

Forgive.

The empty eye and the tangled strands of hair still clinging to the skull beside the ash barrel.

And what might Dr. Pellinore Warthrop be needing, Mr. Henry?

Oh, the usual things. He isn’t an invalid, but he is a careless housekeeper and never cooks for himself. He needs someone for the laundry and the shopping, cooking, cleaning, someone to answer the door, but I don’t anticipate much of that—the doctor receives hardly any callers these days.

Yes, sir. Bit of a recluse, is he?

Somewhere between that and a hermit.

So he doesn’t practice medicine anymore?

He never did. He isn’t that kind of doctor.

Oh, no?

Oh, no. No, he is a doctor of philosophy, and I wouldn’t recommend you broach that topic with him—or any other topic, for that matter. If he wants to talk, he will. If he doesn’t, he won’t. You can expect to be ignored for a great deal of the time. Well, nearly all the time.

And the rest of the time, Mr. Henry? What might I expect then?

Well, yes. He has quite the temp— Well, let’s just say he’s a bit hotheaded for a philosopher.

A hotheaded philosopher? Oh, Mr. Henry, that’s funny!

More humorous in the abstract, I’m afraid. The best strategy is to agree with everything he says. For example, if he either implies or explicitly states that a worm’s intelligence exceeds your own, a good answer would be, “I have often thought so myself, Dr. Warthrop.” At other times, he may say something that makes no sense—it doesn’t mean he’s off his rocker; he’s just being Warthrop. He speaks out of context. I mean, the context is hidden.

Hidden, Mr. Henry? Hidden where?

Inside his own mind.

He hides things . . . in his mind?

Well, don’t we all, Beatrice?

I tapped the skull on its face with the edge of my shoe.

I knew I should fetch the constable. Have him arrested. It would be a fitting end for a doctor of monstrumology, whose business irrevocably leads to murder. We were both
up to our elbows in blood, Warthrop and I.

But I did not fetch the constable. We are creatures of habit, and I had been his indispensable companion for too long.

I righted the overturned barrel and returned its macabre contents, her skull last, and I let the moment pass; I did not pause to contemplate the empty eye like some wavering Dane to whom human life held a measure of value. I tossed the skull into the barrel with the rest of the garbage; it clanged against the metal side, loud in the cold air.

More kerosene. Another match. And a blast of delicious heat against my face. There is no one on earth who doesn’t enjoy a good fire. The memory is embedded in our genes: Fire has been our friend for millennia. It made us who we are. No wonder the gods punished Prometheus. Master fire and in a few thousand years you will walk on the moon.

I crossed the yard to the old livery stable. I needed a shovel. Some bones would survive the fire and would have to be buried. All but one stall had been removed in 1909 to make room for the Lozier touring car, the most expensive on the market in those days, a gift from the company president to Warthrop for his help in the initial design. As I stepped into the dusky interior, I heard a soft bleating coming from the remaining stall at the far end. I peeked over the door. Three lambs were crowded together in the straw. They started when they saw me and rushed as one into the far corner. Black eyes against white faces. Startled mewling
from dark lips. Stamping anxiously the straw that crackled in the dry air.

It won’t bother me, Mr. Henry. A bad temper shows a strong heart; that’s what my ma always said.

And black eyes in white faces and mewling lips and straw that crackles like dry bones in an ossuary.

TWO

Scratch, scratch.

The thing behind the thick glass. The thing in the burlap sap.

Scratch, scratch.

Form casts shadow and all shadows are the same: There is no difference between the thing behind the glass and the thing in the sack. Their essence—
to ti esti
—is the same. All life is beautiful; all is monstrous. And Lilly with eyes like a mountain lake, pure all the way down, lips slightly parted.

“You are the first and only girl I’ve ever kissed,” I told her that night.

“You’re lying, William Henry,” she said. “You kiss much too well for that to be true.”

“Lying is the worst kind of buffoonery,” I said, quoting
Warthrop. “You don’t meet many girls in a monstrumologist’s laboratory.”

“Not living ones, anyway.”

I laughed. “Am I better than Samuel?”

“I refuse to answer that.” Her breath warm on my face.

“For his sake or your own?”

She stood up so suddenly I flinched. Warthrop was standing in the doorway.

“Will Henry,” he said quietly. “Where is the revolver?”

“I have it,” Lilly answered, clutching it in both hands.

“Place it on the floor in front of you, very slowly now, and step away from it.”

I rose, keeping a grip on the bag with one hand while dropping the other into my pocket. Warthrop shook his head. He stepped into the room, followed closely by a man wearing a bowler hat pulled low over a face ravaged by smallpox, deeply scarred and cratered. He gestured toward me with the empty hand, the hand that wasn’t holding a gun against the doctor’s head.

“Let’s have it, boy,” he said in a thick Irish brogue.

“Do as he says, Will Henry!” Warthrop ordered in a sharp voice. “Let the man have it.”

I held out the bag. He reached around the doctor and snatched it from my hand. Behind me Lilly hissed between her teeth. Warthrop’s eyes burned with fury.

“Thank you very much!” the man called, backing away into the corridor. “And here’s for your trouble!”

He fired once, striking the doctor in the leg, before racing away. I whirled toward Lilly, who’d already picked up the revolver; she tossed it at me, and I leapt over Warthrop writhing on the floor, paying no attention to his cry for me to stop. I fired as the bowler-hatted man turned the corner toward the curator’s office. The bullet chewed off a chunk of Monstrumarium wall. I reached the foot of the stairs; a bullet whistled past my ear, embedded itself in a crate. Then the loud clang of the upper door slamming shut, and I raced up the winding stairs to the first floor, down the hall to the exit, and that door was swinging shut and I caught a glimpse of the brown burlap, and then I was through the door and on the street and he’s swinging onto a horse behind another man also wearing a bowler hat and I fired again as the horse bolts, hooves clattering on the granite, beneath the smoky arc lights and the naked branches of the trees etched against the winter sky.

THREE

I hurried back to the Monstrumarium. In retrospect, I should have taken my time.

He was sitting against the same crate I had sat against, while Lilly tied a tourniquet above the wound in his calf. It was the purple bow from her hair. Warthrop’s face, shining with sweat, darkened as I stepped through the doorway.

“Well?” he barked. “Where is it?”

“He got away,” I gasped.

I feared for an irrational moment that he was going to level the revolver at my forehead and pull the trigger. You could see the thought flicker through his mind like a swift-moving thunderhead. Instead he heaved himself to his feet.