The Isle of Blood (3 page)

“Children?” I asked.

She shook her head. “They never had any. And Dad said they
never
met any of Will’s relatives. He was a total mystery-man. No one was even sure what he did for a living.”

“I guess you know what I’m going to ask next.”

She laughed brightly. It sounded oddly tinny in the setting.

“Did he ever talk about working for a monster hunter when he was younger? He didn’t—at least in none of the stories I’ve heard. The problem is, anyone who might have heard a story like that is dead now.”

We were silent for a moment. I had a thousand questions and couldn’t get a grip on a single one of them.

“So their house burns down and Will disappears, never to be heard from again,” I finally said. “That would be—when? Two years after she died, so 1952?”

She was nodding. “Around that time, yes.”

“And fifty-five years later he turns up again in a drainage ditch a thousand miles away.”

“Well,” she said with a smile. “I never said I had
all
the answers.”

I looked at the gravestone. “She was all he had,” I said. “And maybe when she died he went a little crazy and burned down the house and lived on the streets for the next five decades?”

I laughed ruefully and shook my head. “It’s weird. I’m closer to the truth now than I’ve ever been, and it feels like I’m farther away.”

“At least you know was telling the truth about her,” she tried to comfort me. “There really was a Lilly Bates who was around thirteen years old in 1888. And there really was a man named William James Henry.”

“Right. And everything else he writes about could still be a product of his imagination.”

“You sound disappointed. Do you
want
monsters to be real?”

“I don’t know what I want anymore,” I confessed. “What else can you tell me about Lilly? Besides Reggie, were there any other brothers or sisters?”

“Not that I know of. I know she grew up in New York. The family was pretty well off. Her father—my great-great-grandfather—was a big-time financier, right up there with the Vanderbilts.”

“Don’t tell me. After she died and the house burned down, they found her bank accounts cleaned out.”

“No. They hadn’t been touched.”

“Some gold-digger Will was. You’d think the family might have changed its mind about him.”

“It was too late,” she replied. “Aunt Lilly was dead, and Will Henry was gone.”

That was it
, I thought on the plane ride back to Florida. The thing I wanted. I knew monsters were not real, and was fairly certain there had been no serious scientists called monstrumologists who chased after them. It wasn’t about the journals, though I had to admit they fascinated me; it was the
why
behind the
what
. It was Will Henry himself.

I went back to the journals. Monsters might not be real, but Lilly Bates had been. Buried in the folios were clues that might lead me to Will Henry, to the
why
I was so desperate to understand. Sprinkled in those pages were verifiable facts, a jigsaw puzzle of the real intermingled with the bizarre. His life—and this strange record of it—demanded an explanation, and I was more determined than ever to discover what it was.

We are hunters all. We are, all of us, monstrumologists
, Will Henry writes in the transcript that follows. I can say that he’s absolutely right, at least in my case. And the monster I hunt is not unlike the creature that almost destroyed him and his master. Pellinore Warthrop had his grail—and I have mine.

R. Y.

Gainesville, FL

April 2011

Fig. 37

It is no longer possible to escape men.
Farewell to the monsters,
Farewell to the saints.
Farewell to pride.
All that is left is men.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

After several years of service to the monstrumologist, I approached him with the idea of recording, in the interest of posterity, one or two of his more memorable case studies. I waited, of course, until he was in one of his better moods. Approaching Pellinore Warthrop while he wallowed in one of his frequent bouts of melancholia could be hazardous to one’s physical well-being. Once, when I made that ill-advised approach, he hurled a volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies at my head.

The moment presented itself at the delivery of the day’s mail, which included a letter from President McKinley, thanking Warthrop for his service to the country upon the satisfactory conclusion of “that peculiar incident in the Adirondacks.” The doctor, whose ego was as robust as any of Mr. P. T. Barnum’s sideshow strong men, read it aloud three times before entrusting it to my care. I was his file clerk, among other things—or, I should say, as well as
every
other thing. Nothing outside his work could brighten the monstrumologist’s mood more than a brush with celebrity. It seemed to satisfy some deep yearning in him.

Beyond elevating his moribund spirits and thus ensuring—momentarily, at least—my physical safety, the letter also provided the perfect entrée for my suggestion.

“It
was
quite peculiar, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“Hmmm? Yes, I suppose.” The monstrumologist was absorbed in the latest issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
, which had also arrived that day.

“It would make quite a tale, if someone were to tell it,” I ventured.

“I have been thinking of preparing a small piece for the
Journal
,” replied he. The
Journal of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology
was the official quarterly of the Society.

“I was thinking of something for more widespread consumption. A story for the
Post
, for example.”

“An interesting idea, Will Henry,” he said. “But wholly impractical. I made a promise to the president that the matter would remain strictly confidential, and I’ve no doubt that, if I should break my vow, I might find myself locked up in Fort Leavenworth, not exactly the ideal place to pursue my studies.”

“But if you published something in the
Journal
…”

“Oh, who reads
that
?” he snorted, waving his hand dismissively. “It is the nature of my profession, Will Henry, to labor in obscurity. I avoid the press for a very good reason, to protect the public
and
to protect my work. Imagine what the publication of that affair would do—the firestorm of panic and recriminations. Why, half the state of New York would empty out, and the rest would appear on my doorstep to hang me from nearest tree.”

“Some might say your actions were nothing short of heroic,” I countered. If I could not appeal to his reason, I would plead to his ego.

“Some
have
,” he replied, referring to the president’s letter. “And that must be enough.”

But not
quite
enough; I knew what he meant. More than once he had seized my hand at his bedside, staring beseechingly at me with those dark backlit eyes nearly mad with desperation and sorrow, begging me to never forget, to bear his memory past the grave.
You are all I have, Will Henry. Who else will remember me when I am gone? I will sink into oblivion, and the earth shall not note or care at my passing!

“Very well. Another case, then. That matter in Campeche, at Calakmul…”

“What is this, Will Henry?” He glared at me over the magazine. “Can’t you see I am trying to relax?”

“Holmes has his Watson.”

“Holmes is a fictional character,” he pointed out.

“But he is based on someone real.”

“Ah.” He was smiling slyly at me. “William James Henry, do you have literary ambitions? I am astounded.”

“That I might have literary ambitions?”

“That you have any ambition at all.”

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I do.”

“And all this time I had allowed myself to hope you might follow in my footsteps as a student of aberrant biology.”

“Why couldn’t I be both?” I asked. “Doyle is a physician.”

“Was,”
he corrected me. “And not a very successful one at that.” He laid down the magazine. I had at last gotten his full attention. “I will confess the idea intrigues me, and I would have no objection to your trying your hand at it, but I retain the right to review anything you set to paper. Beyond my own reputation, I have the legacy of my profession to protect.”

“Of course,” I said eagerly. “I wouldn’t dream of publishing anything without obtaining your approval first.”

“But nothing of our difficulties in the Adirondacks.”

“I was actually thinking of that case from a few years ago—the incident in Socotra.”

His face darkened. His eyes burned. He leveled a finger at my face and said, “Absolutely not. Do you understand? Under no circumstances are you
ever
to do such a thing. The temerity, Will Henry, to even suggest it!”

“But why, Dr. Warthrop?” I asked, taken aback by the ferocity of his reaction.

“You know very well the answer to that question. Oh, I should have guessed it. I should have known!” He rose from his chair, shaking with the force of his passion. “I see it now, the true fount of your ambition, Mr. Henry! You would not immortalize but humiliate and degrade!”