The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist), Page 2

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I am not going anywhere,” I answered, and launched myself into the breach, getting knocked about like a bit of flotsam in the churning tide, then tapping him on his broad shoulder, and across the hall Warthrop checked his watch again. Her partner turned about, and his thin lips drew back from his crooked yellow teeth.

  “Next song, chum,” he said in a slickly refined English accent. Lilly said nothing, but her startling blue eyes danced more merrily than she.

  Dearest Will, Please forgive me for not writing more often.

  “You’ve hogged her enough, I think,” I said. Then a direct appeal to her: “Hello, Lilly. Spare a single dance for an old friend?”

  “Don’t you see she’d rather with someone who actually can? Why don’t you crack open another oyster and leave the dancing to real gentlemen?”

  “Quite so.” I smiled. And then I smashed my right forearm into his Adam’s apple. He dropped straight down, clutching his throat. I finished the job with a quick downward jab to his temple. Hit a man hard enough in that spot and you can kill him. He crumpled into a ball at my feet. He might have been dead; I did not know or care. I seized Lilly’s wrist as all around us the fists began to fly.

  “This way!” I whispered in her ear. I shoved through the throng, dragging her behind me, toward the buffet tables, where I spied a red-faced Warthrop stamping his foot in frustration. It was not quite a quarter past ten. He had lost again. A chair sailed across the room; a man bellowed, “Dear God, I think you’ve broken it!” over the din; and the music broke apart into a confusion of discordant shrieks, like a vase shattering; and then we were out the side door into the narrow alley, where a trash fire burned in a barrel: gold light, black smoke, and the smell of lavender as she struck me across the cheek.

  “Idiot.”

  “I am your deliverer,” I corrected her, trying out my most rakish grin.

  “From what?”

  “Mediocrity.”

  “Samuel happens to be a very good dancer.”

  “Samuel? Even his name is banal.”

  “Not like the extraordinarily exotic William.”

  Her cheeks were flushed, her breath high in her chest. She tried to push past me; I didn’t let her.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “It’s positively reckless going back in there. If you’re not struck by a serving platter, the police will be here soon to clear the place out. You don’t want to be arrested, do you? Let’s go for a drive.”

  I wrapped my fingers around her elbow; she pulled away easily. My mistake: I should have used my right hand.

  “Why did you hit him?” she demanded.

  “I was defending your honor.”

  “Whose honor?”

  “All right, my honor, but he really should have yielded. It’s bad form.”

  In spite of herself she laughed, and the sound was like coins tossed upon a silver tray, and that at least had not changed.

  I was urging her toward the mouth of the alley. The cobblestones were slick from an early afternoon rain, and the night had turned cold. Her arms were bare, so I shrugged out of my jacket and dropped it over her shoulders.

  “First you’re a brute; then you’re a gentleman,” she said.

  “I am the evolution of man in microcosm.”

  I hailed a cab, gave the driver the address, and slid into the seat beside her. The black jacket went well with her purple gown, I thought. Her face flickered in and out of shadow as we rattled past the streetlamps.

  “Have I been kidnapped?” she wondered aloud.

  “Rescued,” I reminded her. “From the clutches of mediocrity.”

  “That word again.” Nervously smoothing the folds in her gown.

  “It is a lovely word for a terrible thing. Down with mediocrity! Who is Samuel?”

  “You mean you don’t know him?”

  “You failed to introduce us.”

  “He’s Dr. Walker’s apprentice.”

  “Sir Hiram? Imagine that. Well, it isn’t too hard to imagine. Like attracts like, they say.”

  “I thought the saying was quite the opposite.”

  I waved my hand. The gesture came from the monstrumologist; the disdain was wholly my own. “Clichés are mediocrities. I strive to be wholly original, Miss Bates.”

  “Then I shall alert you the moment it happens.”

  I laughed and said, “I have been drinking champagne. And I wouldn’t mind another taste.” We were close to the river. I could smell the brine and the faint tartness of decaying fish common to all waterfronts. The cold wind toyed with the ends of her hair.

  “You’ve taken to alcohol?” she asked. “How do you hide it from your doctor?”

  “For as long as I’ve known you, Lillian, you’ve called him that, and I really wish you’d stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he isn’t my doctor.”

  “He doesn’t mind that you drink?”

  “It’s none of his business. When I return to our rooms tonight, he will ask, ‘Where have you been, Will Henry?’ ” Lowering my voice to the appropriate register. “And I will say, ‘From walking up and down the earth, and to and fro in it.’ Or I may say, ‘It’s none of your damn business, you old mossback.’ He’s become quite the fussbudget lately. But I don’t want to talk about him. You’ve grown out your hair. I like it.”

  Something had been loosed within me. Perhaps the alcohol was to blame, perhaps not; perhaps it was something much harder to define. Upon her face, light warred with shadow, but within me there was no such conflict.

  “And you’ve grown up,” she said, touching the ends of her hair. “A bit. I did not recognize you at first.”

  “I knew you right away,” I replied. “From the moment you walked in. Though I’d no idea you were back in the States. How long have you been home? Why did you come home? I thought you weren’t coming back for another year.”

  She laughed. “My, haven’t you become the loquacious one! It is so un–Will Henry–like. What’s gotten into you?”

  She was teasing me, of course, but I did not miss the hint of fear in her voice, the tiny quiver of uncertainty, the delicious thrill of confronting the unknown. We were kindred spirits in that: What repelled attracted; what terrified compelled.

  “The ancient call,” I said with a laugh. “The overarching imperative!”

  The cab jerked to a halt. I paid the driver, tipping him handsomely in a gesture of contempt for the doctor’s parsimony, and helped her to the curb. Sound carries better in colder air, and I could hear the rustle of her skirts as she stepped down and the whisper of lace against bare skin.

  “Why have you brought me here, Will?” Lilly asked, staring at the imposing edifice, the hunkered gargoyles snarling down at us from the cornices.

  “I want to show you something.”

  She gave me a wary look. I laughed. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It won’t be like our last visit to the Monstrumarium.”

  “That wasn’t my fault. You chose to pick the thing up.”

  “As I recall, you asked me to sex it, knowing very well the creature was hermaphroditic.”

  “And as I recall, you decided that handling a Mongolian Death Worm was better than admitting your ignorance.”

  “Well, my point is we’re both perfectly safe tonight, as long as Adolphus doesn’t catch us.”

  We stepped inside the building. She laid a hand on my arm and said, “Adolphus? Surely he’s gone home for the evening.”

  “Sometimes he falls asleep at his desk.”

  I pushed opened the door beneath the sign that read ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE TO NONMEMBERS. The stairs were dimly lit and quite narrow. A musty odor hung in the air: a hint of mold, a touch of decay.

  “People forget he’s down here,” I whispered, leading the way; the stairs were too narrow to walk abreast. “And the cleaning staff never ventures lower than the first floor—not for fear of anything in the catalog; they’re terrif
ied of Adolphus.”

  “Me too,” she confessed. “The last time I saw him, he threatened to bash my head in with his cane.”

  “Oh, Adolphus is all right. He’s just spent too much time alone with monsters. Sorry. Not supposed to call them that. Unscientific. ‘Aberrant biological specimens.’ ”

  We reached the first landing. Stronger now the smell of preserving chemicals flimsily covering the sickly-sweet tincture of death that hung in the Monstrumarium like an ever-present fog. One more flight and we would be steps from the old Welshman’s office.

  “This better not be some kind of trick, William James Henry,” she whispered in my ear.

  “I’m not one for revenge,” I murmured in return. “It isn’t in my nature.”

  “I wonder what Dr. John Kearns would say to that.”

  I turned back to her. She recoiled, startled by my angry expression. “I confessed that to you in confidence,” I said.

  “And I’ve kept it,” she retorted, defiantly jutting out her chin at me, a gesture echoing her childhood.

  “That isn’t the sort of confidence I meant, and you know it. I didn’t kill Kearns to avenge.”

  “No.” Her eyes seemed very large in the dim lighting.

  “No. Now may we proceed?”

  “You’re the one who stopped.”

  I took her hand and drew her down the remaining steps. Peered around the corner into the curator’s office. The door was open, the light on. Adolphus was slumped behind his desk, head thrown back, mouth agape. Behind me Lilly whispered, “I won’t go another step until you tell me—”

  I turned back. “Very well! I wanted it to be a surprise, but I am your faithful servant, Miss Bates—as I am his—as I am everyone’s, something I’ve proven time and again, even in Kearns’s death. Especially in Kearns’s death . . . It is something unique, an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind something, precious beyond pearls, to a monstrumologist at least, and Warthrop’s greatest prize to date. He’s presenting it at a special assembly of this year’s Congress. After that only God knows what he will do with it.”

  “What is it?” Breathless. Scarlet-cheeked. Rising to the balls of her feet. Never more lovely than in that moment.

  She knew, like me—and like you—the terrible longing, the hopeless revulsion, the pull of the faceless, nameless thing, the thing I call das Ungeheuer.

  The thing we desire and deny. The thing that is you and not-you. The thing that was before you were and will be long after you are gone.

  I held out my hand. “Come and see.”

  Canto 2

  ONE

  Come and see.

  The boy with the tattered hat two sizes too small and the tall man in the stained white coat and the cold basement floor and the jars filled with amber liquid stacked to the ceiling. The long metal table and the instruments hanging from hooks or lined up like cutlery in shiny trays.

  “This is where I conduct the majority of my studies, Will Henry. You must never come down here unless I am present or give you my permission. The most important rule for you to remember is that if it moves, don’t touch it. Ask first. Always ask first. . . .

  “Here, I have something for you. It’s your father’s work apron, a bit battle stained, as you can see. . . . Hmm. Careful now or you’ll trip over it. Well. You’ll grow into it.”

  On the worktable something squirms inside one of the larger jars. Bulbous-eyed. Gape-mouthed. Sharp-clawed. And the claws scratch against the thick glass.

  “What is it that you do here?”

  “What do I . . . ?” He is astonished. “What did your father say?”

  I have been so many places, Will. I have seen wonders only poets can imagine.

  In the glass jar, the nameless thing staring back at me, scratching, scratching against the glass.

  And the tall man in the dingy white smock holding forth in a dry, lecturing tone, as one speaking to a vast assemblage of like-minded men in dingy white smocks:

  “I am a scientist. A student in a rather peculiar backwater of the natural philosophies called aberrant biology. ‘Monstrumology’ is the common term. I’m surprised your father never told you.”

  Dr. Warthrop is a great man engaged in great business. And I shall never turn my back upon him, though the fires of hell itself arise to contend against me.

  “You’re a monster hunter,” I said.

  “You’re not listening to me. I am a scientist.”

  “Who hunts monsters.”

  “Who studies certain rare and, yes, dangerous species that are, in general, malevolent toward human beings.”

  “Monsters.”

  Scratch, scratch, the thing in the jar.

  “That is a relative term often misapplied. I am an explorer. I carry a lamp into lightless places. I strive against the dark that others may live in the light.”

  And the thing inside the jar, hopelessly clawing against the thick glass.

  Scratch, scratch

  TWO

  There was no light in that tiny alcove into which he shoved me like a box of useless curios inherited from some distant relation. I had begged my father to take me with him on one of his grand adventures with the great Pellinore Warthrop so I might share in the “great business” and see with my own eyes “wonders only poets can imagine.” What I saw in those first few months was neither great nor wonderful. I did, however, get a taste of those fires of hell itself.

  It always came just as I was finally falling into a fitful slumber. After hours of my wailing in the utter dark, knowing that when I did fall asleep, exhausted from my inexhaustible grief, I would watch once more my parents dance in the flames—always in that moment, as if he knew somehow, and sometimes I was sure he did, the cry would come, high and shrill and filled with terror: Will Henry! Will Henreeeee!

  And down I would climb into the darkened hall and stumble bleary-eyed to his room.

  “There you are!” A match sparked; he lit the lamp beside the bed. “What? Why are you staring at me like that? Didn’t your parents teach you it was impolite?”

  “Is there something you want, sir?”

  “Why, no, I don’t want anything. Why do you ask?” He flicked his finger at the chair by the bed. I sank into it, my head pounding, loose upon my shoulders. “What is the matter with you? You look terrible. Are you sick? James never mentioned that you were a sickly child. Are you sickly?”

  “Not that I know of, sir.”

  “Not that you know of? Wouldn’t that be something even a simpleton would know? How old are you, anyway?”

  “I am almost eleven, sir.”

  He grunted, sizing me up. “Small for your age.”

  “I’m very fast. I’m the fastest player on my team.”

  “Team? What sort of team?”

  “Baseball, sir.”

  “Baseball! Do you like sports?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What else do you like? Do you hunt?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Father keeps promising he will take me . . .” I paused, slamming head-on into another promise that would never be kept. Warthrop’s eyes bored into mine, glittering with that strange, unnerving, backlit glow. He’d wondered if I was sick, but he was the one who looked sick: dark circles beneath his eyes, hollow-cheeked and unshaven.

  “Why do you cry, Will Henry? Do you think your tears will bring them back?”

  They coursed down my cheeks, empty stygian vessels, useless. It took everything in me not to throw my body across his and beg for comfort. Beg for it! The simplest of human gestures.

  I did not understand him then.

  I do not understand him still.

  “You must harden yourself,” he told me sternly. “Monstrumology is not butterfly collecting. If you are to stay with me, you must become accustomed to such things. And worse.”

  “Am I to stay with you, sir?”

  His gaze cut down to my bones. I wanted to look away; I could not look away.
/>   “What is your desire?”

  My bottom lip quivered. “I have nowhere else to go.”

  “Do not pity yourself, Will Henry,” he said, the man whose own self-pity rose to operatic heights. “There is no room in science for pity or grief or any sentimental thing.”

  And the child answered, “I’m not a scientist.”

  To which the man replied, “And I am not a nursemaid. What do you desire?”

  To sit at my mother’s table. To smell the warm pie cooling on the rack. To watch her tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. To hear her say it isn’t time, Willy, you must wait for it to cool; it isn’t time. And the whole world, down to the last inch of it, to smell like apples.

  “I could send you away,” he went on: an offer, a threat. “There is probably not a person in all of North America more poorly constituted to raise a child. Why, I find most people unbearable, and children hardly rise to that level. You may expect the worst kind of cruelty from me, Will Henry: cruelty of the unintended kind. I am not a hateful man—I am merely the opposite, and the opposite of hate is not love, you know.”

  He smiled grimly at my puzzled expression. He knew—knew!—that the heartbroken waif before him had no capacity to understand what he was saying. He, the patient gardener, was planting seeds that would take years to germinate. But the roots would dig deep, and the crop would be impervious to drought or pestilence or flood, and, in the fullness of time, the harvest would be abundant.

  For bitterness does not envy pleasure. Bitterness finds pleasure in the spot from which bitterness springs. Younger than I when he lost his mother, banished by a cold and unforgiving father, the monstrumologist understood what I had lost. He had lost it too.

  In me, himself.

  And in himself, me.

  Time is a line

  But we are circles.

  THREE

  Sept. 19, 1911