The Isle of Blood (54 page)

He rose and walked the few steps to the water’s edge, and the man in the glassy surface gazed upward into the monstrumologist’s eyes.

“It nearly undid me,” he said pensively. It struck me as an exceedingly odd thing to say to the one recuperating from its terrible bite. I did not realize he was referring to an entirely different monster.

“My ambition bore me up like the wings of Icarus,” he said. “And when the truth of the
magnificum
burned those wings away, I fell. I fell very far. And I did not fall alone.”

He turned to me. “When you were attacked and I lost you in the melee, it… broke something in me. As if I’d been rudely shaken from a deep sleep. In short…” He noisily cleared his throat and looked away. “It reminded me of why I became a monstrumologist in the first place.”

“Why did you?” I asked.

“Why do you think?” he returned testily. “To save the world, of course. And then, at some point, as with most self-appointed saviors, it became about saving myself. Neither goal is entirely realistic. I cannot save the world, and I don’t care much anymore about saving me… but I do care very much about…”

He returned to sit beside me. I saw something in his hand. It was Lilly’s photograph.

“And now I must ask you about this,” he said. His tone was grave.

“It’s nothing,” I said, reaching for it. He held it just beyond my grasp.

“Nullité?”
he asked. “Nothing?”

“Yes. It’s… She gave it to me…”

“Who gave it to you? When?”

“Lilly. Lilly Bates, Dr. von Helrung’s great-niece. Before I left for London.”

“And why did she give it to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“She said it would bring me luck.”

“Ah. Luck. Then, you
did
know why she gave it to you.”

“I don’t like her very much.”

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Can I have it back now?” I asked.

“You mean ‘
May
I have it back now.’”

“May I?”

“Have you fallen in love, Will Henry?”

̶That’s stupid.”

“What is? Love or my question?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’ve tried that trick once. Why do you suppose it will work better the second time?”

“I don’t love her. She bothers me.”

“You have just defined the very thing you denied.”

He stared at her face in the photograph with a curious expression, the naturalist stumbling upon a strange new species.

“Well, she is pretty, I suppose,” he said. “And you are getting older, and there are some contagions for which we will never find a cure.”

He handed the photograph back to me. “I told you once never to fall in love. Do you think that was wise advice or self-serving manipulation?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “I don’t either.”

Kearns returned at dusk with a fresh catch of camel spiders and a chip on his shoulder. For Kearns, he was downright sullen.

“Bagged only three today,” he said. “This isn’t a hunt; it’s a turkey shoot.”

“Except they are not turkeys and we are not hunting them,” replied the doctor. “We are ending their agony and preventing the spread of a deadly disease.”

“Oh, you’re always desperate to be so bloody
noble
.” Kearns glanced at me. “Are you cured?”

“It appears so,” Warthrop answered for me. He preferred to limit Kearns’s interaction with me, as if he feared an altogether different sort of contagion.

“Then, shouldn’t we be using what you have to cure them and not be slaughtering them like cows?”

“Human beings are not cows,” retorted the doctor, echoing his old master. “I’ve only two vials of sera. These vials must be preserved in order to replicate the antidote.”

“You realize you are talking out of both sides of your mouth, Pellinore. You didn’t worry about preserving the antidote when it came to your assistant here.”

“And you really should avoid mimicking the voice of conscience, Kearns. It rings hollow, like someone attempting to speak in a language he does not understand.”

Smiling mischievously, Kearns stuffed a whole spider into his mouth. The monstrumologist turned his head away in disgust.

The doctor had designed a brutally efficient protocol to finish the grisly work of eradicating the
magnificum
from the island. We set up camp at a spot that provided good cover and some shelter from the elements, a few hundred feet below the clouds that enveloped the nesting grounds. We kept our quarry’s hours, sleeping by day and luring them into the killing zone by night.

Fire was our bait. It drew them in, and Warthrop and Kearns would hide behind an outcropping or a boulder and pick them off as they crept into the circle of light. The bodies from the night before were used for fuel for the next night’s fire.

It was grim, grisly work. There was no thrill of the chase, no near brushes with death. There was just death.

This was the somber side of monstrumology, heroism of the grittiest kind, the labor in darkness that the rest might live in the light. It began to take its toll on my master. He stopped eating. He slept only a few minutes at a stretch, and then would be up again, staring into the distance with eyes that had taken on a desperate, haunted look, like a man caught between two unthinkable alternatives.

Kearns was not faring much better. He complained constantly that he still had not found his Minotaur and this was far from the epic quest he had envisioned.

“Come now, Pellinore. Surely we could make this more fun,” he said late one night. Not a single victim had wandered into our trap. “We could split up—make a game of it. Whoever bags the most wins the prize.”

“Leave us if you like, Kearns,” Warthrop said wearily. “In fact, I wish you would.”

“You’re being very unfair, Pellinore. It isn’t my fault, you know. I didn’t invent the myth of the
magnificum
.”

“No, you just used it to turn a profit.”

“And you would have used it to profit your reputation and take revenge upon your rivals. ‘All hail the great scientist, the self-righteous knight who brought home the grail to Christendom, Pellinore the Pure, Pellinore the Proud, Pellinore the Magnificent!’” He laughed merrily. “As motives go, mine was by far the most pure.”

“Leave him alone!” I snapped at him. I wanted to take Awaale’s knife and slice off that insufferable smirk. “It’s
your
fault—all of it! He almost died because of you!”

“What are you talking about, boy? The Russians? I didn’t tell the Russians to kill Pellinore. That was their idea.”

“You sent him the
nidus
.”

“For safekeeping, and you should thank me that I did it.”

“I should kill you, is what I should do!”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Well! Aren’t we the bloodthirsty little savage? What have you been teaching this child, Pellinore?”

The monstrumologist shook his head ruefully. “Lessons of the unintended kind.”

For a week we labored in the vineyards of the dead. After two nights without a sighting, Kearns began to talk of returning to Gishub, where we would await the arrival of the
Dagmar
.

“I suppose I must give up on my Minotaur.” He pouted. “But all things—even the best of things—must eventually come to an end.”

A troubled look passed over the doctor’s face. He pulled me out of Kearns’s earshot and whispered, “I have made a terrible mistake, Will Henry.”

“No, you didn’t,” I whispered back. “Everyone thought the
magnificum
was real—”

“Shhh! I’m not talking about the
magnificum
.” He glanced toward the ledge upon which Kearns lay hidden. “I don’t know what he’s waiting for. Perhaps his mind is divided; perhaps he still retains some vestige of his humanity, though I’m hard-pressed to see much evidence of that. Most likely the opportune moment simply has yet to present itself.”

He smiled grimly at my startled expression. “He has to kill me. Well, you too, of course—both of us. What choice does he have? He’s trapped here until the end of the monsoon, and even then he will find it difficult to escape. To whom can he turn for help? The only port on the island is controlled by the British, but he’s wanted by them for murder and treason. The Russians? They will hold him accountable for the expedition’s debacle and will seek retribution. Stay and be hunted—or risk escape and be arrested.”

“But that’s why he won’t kill us,” I argued. “He needs us to escape.”

“Does he? He knows when and where we will be rendezvousing with the
Dagmar
. That was my terrible mistake, telling him that. All he has to do is inform Captain Russell that you and I were lost or killed on the hunt. And then John Kearns is free to go anywhere he wants, become anyone he wants. He will melt back into the human family with his human mask—and life—intact.”

I was quiet for a moment, thinking it through, worrying with it, trying to poke holes in his argument. I decided it was useless and focused instead on finding a solution.

“We could hit him over the head, knock him out, tie him up.… Or wait till he falls asleep…”

The doctor was nodding. “Yes, of course. It’s the only way. He has to sleep sometime.…” His voice trailed off. The haunted look of the past few days flitted across his countenance. “Well, we can’t tie him up. That would be a death sentence, and a particularly cruel one at that.”

“Then, we hit him over the head and take his rifle.”

“Why do you insist on hitting him over the head? We merely have to wait for him to fall asleep to take his rifle.”

“Then, that’s what we do. Wait till he falls asleep and take his rifle.”

“And then… what? Take him prisoner?” he asked.

“We can turn him over to the British.”

“Who will then question him about Arkwright, and
you
will be arrested omplicity in his murder—von Helrung, too.”

“He said he didn’t know Arkwright.”

Warthrop gave me a withering look. “Why is it, Will Henry, that at the precise moment when I begin to think you might actually have a head on your shoulders, you say something like that?”

“Then, we don’t turn him over to anyone. We hold him until we board the
Dagmar
, and then we leave him here.”

The monstrumologist was nodding, but he still seemed troubled. “Yes. It’s the only acceptable alternative. When our work is finished, we’ll spring the trap.”

I did not ask,
The only acceptable alternative to what?
I did not need to.

It was close to dawn on the last night of our bitter harvest, and so far only one of the stricken had stumbled into our trap. Kearns shot him, and then pushed the body onto its back and stared down with disappointment at its face.

“Where
is
he?” he wondered aloud. “Where is my Minotaur?”

“Dead, I’d guess,” answered Warthrop.

“Oh, don’t say that! Should I fail to take him, I would feel the entire enterprise was for naught.”

“What, not enough death for you, Kearns?”

“That’s the wonderful thing about life,” retorted Kearns heartily. “It’s just chock-full of all the death you can handle!”