The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist) (9 page)

Hold out your hands. Steady now. Don’t drop it! Carry it over to my worktable and set it there. Careful, it’s slippery.

And the boy, with the tattered hat to keep his head warm in the icy basement, presses the ropy bundle to his chest, shuffling across the floor slick with blood. The slithering and slipping of the cargo in his arms, the offal smearing his shirtfront, and the smell that assaults him. And the antiseptic clink and clatter of sharp instruments, and the man in the white coat with its copper-colored stains leaning over the metal necropsy table, and the boy’s numb fingers wet with effluvia, and the tears of protest that run down his cheeks and the hunger in his belly and the light-headedness of finding himself in this place where no pies cool on racks and no woman sings over a warm fire, just the man and his
gore-encrusted nails and the peculiar crunch of the shears snapping through cartilage and bone and the strangely hypnotic beauty of a corpse flayed wide, its organs like exotic creatures of the lightless deep, the surreal humming of the man as he works, fingers digging deep, black eyes burning, forearms bulging, the taut muscles of his neck and the clenched jaw, and the eyes, the eyes burning.

Nothing human yet. We’ll take a look at those intestines in a moment. What are you doing over there? Set it down on the table; I need you here, Will Henry.

Here:
by his side.
Here:
in this cold place where not a molecule of air moves.
Here:
the boy in the tattered hat smelling of smoke and the blood sticky on his bare hands and the thing opened up before him like a spring flower straining toward the sun.

The monstrumologist’s hands were sure and quick then, like all else about him. He was in his prime. None could match him in dexterity of mind; none shared in the purity of his animus. What heights might he have risen to if he had chosen a different path—if true passion could be chosen, like the ripest apple in the basket? Statecraft or poetry? Another Lincoln, perhaps, or a Longfellow. If a soldier, then a Grant or a Sherman or, to reach further back, an Alexander or a Caesar. It seemed nothing could contain him, in those days. No light shone brighter than his lamp. It was overwhelming for the boy in the tattered hat: He had never been in the presence of genius; he did not know how to behave
or think or speak or any human thing; and so he was forced to look to the man in the stained white coat to guide him, to tell him how to behave and think and speak. He was the bloody corpse beneath the bright lamp splayed open, straining toward the sun.

Why are you staring like that? Are you going to be sick? Do you find it hideous? I find it beautiful—more splendid than a meadow in springtime. Hand me the chisel there. . . . I was younger than you when I assisted my father in the laboratory. I was so small I had to stand on a stepping stool to help him. I held a scalpel before I could hold a spoon. Good! Now the forceps; let’s have a look at this fellow’s incisors. No, the large forceps—oh, never mind, hand me the pliers there; that’s a good boy!

Later, at the worktable, standing on my tiptoes to watch him dissect the intestines of the beast, discovering at last evidence of its human victim, and the joy upon his face in counterpoint to my horror as he pulled it free with a soft squish.

We have found him, Will Henry! Or a bit of him anyway. Step lively; hand me that jar over there. Snap to, quickly! It’s falling apart on me. . . . Hmm. Very difficult to tell the age by this, but it could be him; it could be. They said he was a boy around your age. What do you think?

Rolling the molar around in his palm like a dice player.

A boy around your age, or so I’m told. . . . What do you think?

A boy around my age? And that is all that’s left of him? Where is the rest?

Well, where do you think it is? What isn’t used is discarded—defecated, to be technical about it. Like all living things do, what it didn’t convert to energy it shat out. Waste, Will Henry. Waste.

A human being. He is speaking of a human being, a boy around my age was the report, and all that is left is a tooth—the rest now part of the beast or in a pile of its shit.

Waste, waste.

And the boy in the tattered hat, in the tattered hat, in the tattered hat.

THREE

He must have heard them that night: the howls and shrieks of the boy’s soul tearing in half, the cry of damnation’s desire, the rage against the beast that had refused to consume him. The beast that had left behind the black, smoldering casings of his parents—for what it did not use for fuel, it shat out as dust and ash. He must have heard. Every board and window and shingle and nail must have rattled with the force of his anger and grief.

The man must have heard—and he did nothing. In fact, in those early days, the more I cried—always alone in my little attic room—the harsher, colder, and more merciless he became. Perhaps he told himself it was for my own good, and after all this was at a time when children were not coddled. Perhaps his harshness was meant to make me
harsh, his coldness to make me cold, his mercilessness to make me merciless. It was the best and only answer to the brutal question as he understood it:

What sort of god is this?

But now I don’t think he was being harsh or cold or merciless.
He
was not the harsh, cold, merciless one.

Now I think he heard my screams and remembered another boy, a boy from long ago, consigned to that same attic space away from the beating heart of the house, the lonely boy whose mother had died and whose father blamed him for it. The terrified boy who watched his father fade from him while remaining all the while in his sight, a majestic ship disappearing over the endless horizon, the boy alone and sick and sick in his loneliness. The kind of loneliness you never completely leave behind, no matter how crowded your life becomes. He was helpless to save that boy; he was helpless to save me. The distance was too great—there were not enough years in a lifetime to climb that eight-foot ladder and say to the boy,
Be still, be still. I know your pain.

These are the secrets I have kept.

This is the trust I never betrayed.

Canto 5

ONE

I knelt beside the dead man in the Monstrumarium, beside the opened door to the Locked Room.

The back of his skull had been blasted open, a single shot at close range. Grimacing with the effort—he was not a small man—I rolled him onto his back. The bullet had passed through; he had no face. I patted his pockets. A pearl-handled switchblade knife. A pouch of tobacco and a weathered pipe. A pair of brass knuckles. His coat was thin, the elbows worn threadbare. His pants were tied with a bit of frayed rope. His hands were heavily calloused, his knuckles scraped raw. In the puddle where his head had been lay his teeth, blown free from his mandible by the impact of the round.

Waste, Will Henry, waste.

I dropped the brass knuckles and knife into my pocket and crouched close to the floor, and the light from the gas jets flung my shadow over the body.

When presented with a problem, look for the simplest solution first; that is always the route nature takes.

He had not expected the blow, obviously. His back had been turned. His killer had crept up unawares or betrayed him—either a competitor or a mutinous cohort, or perhaps more than one. The find was, as Maeterlinck said, a prize for which wealthy men might sacrifice their fortunes and desperate men their very souls.

TWO

Von Helrung understood that too.

“Congratulations are in order, of course,
mein guter Freund
,” he gruffed, clipping off the tip of his Havana cigar. It was the evening before his niece and I would flee the dance. “Any other natural philosopher, who presented a living specimen of
T. cerrejonensis,
even if he was a distinguished member of our Society, would be tossed out of the assembly as a charlatan and profiteer.”

“How fortunate, then, that I am not any other—or either,” Warthrop replied dryly. We were lounging in the well-appointed sitting room of the Zeno Club, where gentlemen of like-minded philosophical outlooks gathered to share a glass of port over quiet conversation or simply to enjoy the languid atmosphere of a vanishing age: the age
of reasoned discourse by serious men. We were but two decades away from a worldwide conflagration that would claim thirty-seven million lives. The fire was warm, the chairs comfortable, the carpet lush, the waiters obsequiously attentive. Warthrop had his tea and scones, von Helrung his sherry and cigar, and I my Coca-Cola and cookies. It was like the old days, except I was no longer a boy and von Helrung no longer old, but tending toward ancient. Hair thinner, face paler, stubby fingers not quite as steady. But his eyes still gleamed bird bright, and he had lost none of his acumen—or his humanity. The same could not be said of me.

He’s going to die soon,
I decided as I sat silently listening to their conversation.
He won’t live out the year.
When he spoke or took the smallest breath, you could hear the death rattle deep in his barrel chest. I could feel it when he wrapped his short arms around my waist and pressed his snowy white mane against me: the life force fading, the heat leaching through his vest like the earth’s heat fading into the desert sunset.

“Dear Will, how you have grown, and in the passing of but a year!” he exclaimed when he saw me. He looked up into my face intently. “Pellinore must have finally decided to feed you!” He chuckled at his own joke, and then grew very serious. “But what is it, Will? I can see that your heart is troubled. . . .”

“There is nothing troubling me,
Meister
Abram.”

“No?” He was frowning. Something in my expression—
or perhaps lack thereof—seemed to bother him.

“No, of course not,” snapped the monstrumologist. “Why should anything be troubling Will Henry?”

“I worry, though,” the old Austrian said now, after rolling the tip of the cigar upon his flattened tongue. “On the matter of security . . .”

“I have placed it in the Locked Room,” Warthrop answered. He sipped his tea. “I suppose we could station an armed guard at the door.”

Von Helrung lit his cigar and waved away the plume of bluish smoke. “I speak of your presentation to the colloquium. The less who know of the find for now, the better. A private gathering of our most trusted colleagues.”

Warthrop stared at him from over his cup. “The general assembly is closed to the public,
Meister
Abram.”

“Pellinore, you know there is none dearer to me than you, unless it is young Will here, such a fine young man, such a tribute to your, may I say, paternal guidance and affection . . .”

I nearly choked on my cola.
Paternal guidance and affection!

“. . . so there is no one who understands better your desire to place your name in the firmament of scientific achievement. . . .”

“I do not labor—nor have I suffered—to advance my reputation above the advancement of human knowledge, von Helrung,” the doctor said with a perfectly straight face. “But I do understand your concern. If news of a living
T. cerrejonensis
reaches certain quarters, we
might
expect a bit of trouble.”