The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist) (8 page)

I reviewed for him a brief history of the toxin, how it had been discovered by the ancient Phoenicians and brought to Egypt, why it was preferred by assassins and certain governments’ secret police (extremely slow-acting in the proper dosages, giving the perpetrators days to effect their getaway), what he might expect in the coming hours—headaches, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea, insomnia—the lecture delivered in a dry monotone, like that of a white-coated man to a hall filled with other white-coated men. And Maeterlinck quivering beneath my grip, nodding with wide-eyed enthusiasm. It was, after all, the
most important lecture he would ever hear.

“You have about a week,” I told him. “One week until your heart muscle blows apart and your lungs shred to pieces. Your only hope for survival is receiving the antidote before that happens. Here.” I stuffed a piece of paper into his shirt pocket. “His name and address.”

Dr. John Kearns, Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel.

“If you leave tonight, you might have just enough time,” I went on. “He is a close friend of the doctor’s, a doctor himself as a matter of fact, Warthrop’s spiritual twin and polar opposite, a man who has seen to the bottom of the well, if you follow my meaning. He will give you the antidote if you give him the name: tipota. Do not forget.”

I stepped back, scooping up the derringer from the nightstand.

And his mouth came open, and he said, “You’re mad.”

“To the contrary,” I answered. “I am the sanest person alive.”

I gestured toward the door with the gun. “I suggest you hurry, Maeterlinck. Every second is precious now.”

He eyed me for a moment, his wet lips twisting into a grimace of fear and rage. He scooted to the edge of the bed, swung his legs over the side, pushed himself off, and then crumpled into a heap with a startled cry. It was the remnant of the sleeping draft that dropped him, of course, not the tinted saline I had shot into his veins. He reached for me without thinking, the natural instinct, the human affliction.
I stared down at him from the upper atmosphere, Maeterlinck a miniscule speck writhing at my feet, so far beneath me that no feature was distinct, so close I could see down to the marrow of his bones.

I could have killed him. It was within my power. But I stayed my hand, and so am I not merciful?

SIX

I found the monstrumologist in the library where I had left him, slouched in a chair, a volume of Blake open upon his lap, but he was not reading it; he was staring off into space with a melancholy expression. He did not react when I entered the room, did not rise to greet me or demand to know where I had been or why I had been gone so long. He closed his eyes and laced his fingers together over the book, leaned back his head, and said, “I have been thinking I acted rashly in dismissing this Maeterlinck fellow without demanding proof of his claim. It would be an extraordinary find and would seal my place as the foremost practitioner of my craft in the world.”

“You’ve already secured that place, many times over,” I assured him.

“Ah.” Rolling his head back and forth. “Fame is fleeting, Will. It is not fame I crave; it is immortality.”

“Perhaps you should seek out a priest.”

He chuckled. His right eye came open to consider me, closed again.

“Too easy,” he murmured.

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “I’ve always thought, if heaven is such a wonderful place, why is entering it so absurdly easy? Confess your sins, ask forgiveness—and that is all? No matter what your crimes?”

“I haven’t been to church since my parents died,” I answered. “But if memory serves, there are one or two crimes for which there is no forgiveness.”

“Again, then what sort of god is this? His love is either infinite or it is not. If it is, there can be no crime beyond forgiveness. If not, we should pick a more honest god!”

He placed the book on the table beside him and stood up. He stretched his long arms over his head.

“But I have little patience for mysteries of the unsolvable variety. Tell me, where have you put it?”

I did not play dumb. What would be the point? “In the basement.”

He nodded. “I must have a look at it.”

“It’s alive,” I said.

“Well, of course it is. You wouldn’t have come looking for me if it weren’t.”

He stopped before me, placing his hands upon my shoulders and drilling into my bones with his dark, backlit eyes. “I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.”

“Maeterlinck received what was coming to him,” I said.

“You are now resisting the urge to brag.”

“No.” An honest answer.

“Or chide me for losing my temper.”

“You? You are the most even-tempered man I have ever met. It’s as you’ve always told me, sir: A man must control his passions lest they control him.”

Or, in the alternative, he might choose to have none at all and thereby escape the struggle entirely.

He laughed out loud and clapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s snap to it, then! It might be alive, as you say, but still could be a case of mistaken identity.”

He did not ask me for any particulars of the transaction, that night or ever. Did not ask the price or how it was arrived at or why I decided to seek out Maeterlinck myself without telling him. For all his flaws, Warthrop was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. The path to immortality did not lie in that direction. He was proud of me, in his way, for taking initiative in the battle, as a good foot soldier in service to the cause.

And as for Maeterlinck: I never heard from him again. I can only assume he fled to London seeking a dead man who’d been left for carrion on an island six thousand miles away. Finding neither the man nor the antidote, since neither
existed, he must have thought himself doomed, until the dire moment he thought must be coming never materialized. From time to time, I wonder if his heart was filled with rage or joy—rage for having been tricked in so cruel a manner, joy for having survived when death was all but certain. Perhaps neither, perhaps both; what did it matter? It certainly didn’t matter to me. He received the priceless gift, and I the prize beyond price.

Canto 4

ONE

“T. cerrejonensis!”
Lilly whispered after hearing some—but not all—of the tale. “It can’t be, Will!”

“It is,” I said.

“They’ve been extinct for nearly a hundred years. . . .”

In a lavender gown, holding my wrist, looking into my face with depthless blue eyes.

“Or so everyone assumed,” I said.

In my morning suit, with carefully gelled hair fashionably long, smiling down into those eyes.

“Are you satisfied?” I whispered. “Shall we go on? Or do you wish to turn back? The dance is over, but I know this little club on the East Side . . .”

She pursed her lips impatiently and shook her curls and her luminous eyes glittered with a fire too bright for such
dingy surroundings and I might have kissed her then, before that final turn, that last juncture, in her lavender dress with lace that whispered against her bare skin. But a man must control his passions lest they control him—if he has them. And that is the rub, the central question, the paramount
if
.

“Of
course
,” she scolded me. “Don’t be a fool.”

“I am no fool,” I assured her, and, clasping her hand firmly in mine, drew her around the last corner, the final turn, the terminus of the labyrinth, where the Locked Room waited for us.

I held up immediately, pushing her behind me with one hand while fumbling in my pocket for the doctor’s revolver with the other.

The door hung open.

The Locked Room was not.

And outside it a man lay facedown in a pool of blood that shimmered black in the amber light.

Behind me Lilly gasped. I eased forward, stepped carefully over the body, and stuck my head inside the room.

“Will!” she called softly, edging closer.

“Stay back!” I took in the scene within the room quickly, and then stepped back into the hall.

“Is it . . . ?”

I nodded. “Gone.”

I knelt by the man in the hall. Body warm, blood cool but tacky; he had not been dead long. The fatal wound was
not hard to discern: a high-caliber bullet administered to the back of the head at close range.

I looked up at her; she looked down at us, at me and the dead man beside me.

“The key is still in the lock,” I said.

And she replied, “Adolphus.”

I sprang forward, seizing her hand as I went, and together we raced back to the office of the old man, the one who had told me, not so very long ago, that he would never join the monstrumological ranks because, in his words,
They die! They die like turkeys on Thanksgiving Day!

His body was not quite as warm as the one lying in the hall. I flung him to the floor and pounded upon his chest and breathed into his open mouth—after flinging aside the upper dentures—and cried his name into his sightless eyes. I pulled open his jacket. His entire shirtfront was soaked in blood. I looked up at Lilly and shook my head. She covered her mouth and turned away, stumbled through the dusty detritus toward the door. I was upon her in two strides.

“Lilly!” I grabbed her arm and whirled her round. “Listen to me! Warthrop—you must find him. He’ll be back at our rooms at the Plaza—”

“The police . . . ?”

I shook my head. “This is no matter for the police.”

Pushing her toward the stairway.

“You aren’t coming?”

“I’ll wait for him here. We did not miss it by much, Lilly. He may still be down here—
it,
too.”

We had reached the foot of the stairs.

“
Who
may still be down here?”

“Whoever shot that man by the Locked Room.” But it wasn’t his killer I was most concerned about—it was Warthrop’s prize. Should it somehow escape . . .

“Then you cannot stay!” Pulling on my arm.

“I can handle myself.” On impulse I grabbed her bare shoulders and kissed her hard on the mouth. “For how long I cannot say—so hurry. Hurry!”

She clattered up the stairs, and the darkness swallowed her quickly. Then the resounding clang of the door slamming closed. Then silence.

I was alone.

Or was I?

Warthrop’s prize was down here in the pit with me, if someone hadn’t carted it off or, more terrible still, slain it.

Its sense of smell is exquisite,
he had told me,
making it a marvelous nocturnal hunter; it can sniff out its prey for miles.

I could huddle at the top of the stairs with my back to the door and wait for the doctor to arrive. That would give the creature but one way to reach me and myself a fair chance of killing it before it could kill me. It would be the prudent thing to do.

But it was the last of its kind. If cornered, I would have
no choice but to defend myself, and Warthrop would never forgive me.

I took a deep breath and plunged back into the labyrinth.

The way is dark, the path is not straight. Easy to get lost, if you don’t know the way, easy to go in circles, easy to find yourself at the place from which you began.

TWO