The Curse of the Wendigo

SEVENTEEN

“Ich Habe Dich Auch Vermisst ”

In those days the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology—or “the Society,” as it was informally known—was headquartered on the corner of Twenty-second and Broadway, in an imposing structure designed in the neo-Gothic tradition, with narrow arched windows and doorways, soaring turrets, and snarling gargoyles hunkered at the cornices. Originally it had been an opera house, but the company had gone bankrupt in 1842 and had sold the building to the Society, which had refurbished the structure to fit its own peculiar needs.

The main auditorium had been converted to a lecture hall and general assembly, where monstrumologists from around the world gathered for their annual congress. The second and third stories contained meeting rooms and administrative offices. The entire fourth floor had been gutted and remodeled into an extensive library that housed more than sixteen thousand volumes, including original manuscripts rescued from the Royal Library of Alexandria after Julius Caesar accidentally torched it in 48 b.c.

I did not know what to expect at my first congress. All I knew was that my mentor looked forward to the annual event the way a child anticipates Christmas morn. Once each year the crème de la crème of this odd and most esoteric of professions gathered to share their latest discoveries, to expound upon the cutting-edge research and methods, and to gather what comfort they could in a convivial gathering of like-minded souls who, for whatever reason, felt compelled to spend their lives studying creatures the majority of humankind would rather see extinct.

If I shared, by means of that peculiar osmosis of a keeper with his child, any of my master’s enthusiasm, it was soon squelched at the commencement of the congress. I passed the hours of that first day in the main auditorium, with only a thirty-minute respite for lunch, in a stultifying atmosphere of interminable speeches delivered in dry monotones by men who possessed no oratorical gifts whatsoever (some with accents so thick as to render the mother tongue unrecognizable) on topics equally dull and arcane.

The congress formally began with a kind of roll call. The president pro tempore, the same Dr. Giovanni whose clumsiness had started the brawl the night before—he was sporting an impressive shiner and a large patch over his nose—stood at the lectern lugubriously reading aloud names from a long piece of foolscap, to which some in the hall responded with an “Aye!” and to which others made no reply at all.

I watched—or rather endured—the proceedings from a vantage point high above the stage. We were seated upon a dilapidated divan inside the doctor’s private box, bestowed upon the family Warthrop by the Society in recognition of three generations of familial dedication to the cause. By ten o’clock, we had finally reached the F ’s, and the doctor was nearly beside himself with boredom. I suggested this would be an excellent time to catch up on his sleep—he had tossed and turned the night before—but my gentle proposition was met with withering disdain.

The sole bit of excitement came with the announcement that the president of the Society, Dr. Abram von Helrung, would not be in attendance until the following day, with no explanation given for his absence. Rumors had been rife that something earthshaking was on the horizon—that von Helrung intended to drop a scientific bombshell at week’s end, a proposition that would shake the world of natural history to its foundation. To those few colleagues who had the temerity to sound out Warthrop on the matter, the doctor gave a curt response, refusing to validate the other rumor that followed the first on eagle’s wings—that upon the conclusion of von Helrung’s presentation, his former pupil, the renowned Pellinore Warthrop, intended to rise in reply.

We were back in our rooms by six, which gave us more than an hour to dress for our dinner date with Dr. von Helrung. In any other circumstance this would have been more than enough time to change (the doctor, as I have noted elsewhere, was heedless to the point of disdain about his appearance). On this evening, however, Warthrop became as punctilious as the fussiest quaintrelle. I, as his impromptu valet, bore the brunt of his anxiety. His waistcoat was wrinkled. His shoes were scuffed. His cravat was crooked. After my third unsuccessful attempt to tie a proper knot, he pushed my hands away roughly and cried, “Never mind. I’ll do it!”

His lecture on proper etiquette—“Sit up straight, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘may I,’ speak only when spoken to.” “The purpose and function of a finger bowl . . . ,” et cetera, et cetera—was mercifully interrupted by the arrival of Skala promptly at a quarter past. He grunted a good evening to the doctor and swept out through the doors without a backward glance, one hand buried in the bulging pocket of his peacoat—perhaps, I thought, he was caressing the butt end of a truncheon.

As we exited the building, the doctor moaned under his breath. I looked around for the source of his distress and spied the same ragamuffin character from the night before loitering near the Fifty-ninth Street entrance to the park.

The rig bounced as the huge Bohemian took his seat; the whip snapped and cracked; and then we were off at breakneck speed, whipping south onto Fifth Avenue, while our driver yelled curses and epithets at anything that dared get in his way, including pedestrians for whom, but a moment before, the act of crossing the street had not seemed a life-threatening proposition.

Our journey was mercifully short—von Helrung’s four-story brownstone occupied the corner of Fifth and Fifty-first Street. Still, by its end, I was battered and bruised and my pounding heart strained the buttons of my shirt.

We were met at the door by a person of color, a burly man whose girth rivaled that of Augustin Skala. He introduced himself as Bartholomew Gray, placed himself entirely at the doctor’s service, and then, with dignified and deliberate ambulation, escorted us into the well-appointed parlor.

Our host fairly bounded across the room upon our entrance. He was a stocky barrel-chested man with short thick legs and small quick feet. His enormous square-shaped head was topped by an explosion of cottony white hair, and he had sparkling sapphire-colored eyes set deep beneath his bushy brows. His ruddy cheeks glowed with veritable delight at seeing his old friend and former pupil, and I watched dumbfounded as he gathered my aloof and undemonstrative master into a bear hug, pressing his face into the doctor’s stiffly starched waistcoat. My astonishment was compounded when Warthrop returned the gesture, stooping a bit to wrap his leaner, longer arms around the shorter man’s back.

With tears shining in his eyes, von Helrung cried softly, “Pellinore, Pellinore, mein lieber Freund. It has been too long, ich habe dich vermisst!”

“Meister Abram,” murmured the monstrumologist with genuine affection. “Ich habe dich auch vermisst. Du siehst gut aus.”

“Oh, no, no,” remonstrated the thickset Austrian. “Es ist nicht wahr—I am old, dear Pellinore, and near the end of my days, but danke, thank you!”

His flashing eyes fell upon me, and his joyful grin returned.

“And this must be the illustrious William Henry, conqueror of the wilderness, of whom I’ve heard so much!”

I bowed, extended my hand to him, and carefully repeated the greeting the doctor had taught me: “It is a pleasure and honor to meet you, Herr Doctor von Helrung.”

“Oh, no, that will not do!” cried von Helrung. He brushed aside my proffered hand, pulled me into his arms, and proceeded to crush the air from my lungs. “The honor is mine, young Master Henry!”

He released me; I took a long, shuddering breath; and he looked long and deeply into my eyes, his gaiety giving way to gravity. “I knew your father, a brave and loyal man who died too young, but alas such is the fate of many a brave and loyal man! A grievous loss. A tragic end. I wept when I heard the news, for I knew what he meant to mein Freund Pellinore, unsere Herzen sind eins—his tears, mine; his heartbreak, ours! You have his eyes; I see that. And his spirit; I have heard that. Remain faithful to his memory, mein Junge. Serve your master as your father served him, and your father will smile down at you from paradise!”

As if “paradise” were a cue, a rumble and a clatter erupted from the hall behind us; it sounded like an entire regiment was thundering down the stairs. Bursting into our midst in a storm of white lace and verdant velvet, her raven ringlets pulled back from her round face and gathered into a crimson bow, was a young girl, perhaps a year or two older than me, with eyes the same remarkable shade of blue as our host.

She froze when she saw us, an abrupt halt nearly as violent as her charge. She recovered quickly, however, turned upon von Helrung, and, in a ringing, unaccented voice, made clear her indignation.

“They’re here! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“They’ve only just arrived, mein kleiner Liebling,” replied von Helrung reasonably. “Dr. Warthrop, may I present my niece, Miss—”

“Bates,” interrupted the girl, thrusting her hand, palm down, toward the monstrumologist, who accepted it graciously, bowed low, and waved his lips in its general vicinity. “Lillian Trumbul Bates, Dr. Pellinore Warthrop. I know who you are.”

“Evidently,” returned the doctor. He nodded toward me. “Miss Bates, may I present—”

“William James Henry,” she finished for him, and turned upon me those eyes saturated in blue. “‘Will’ for short. You are Dr. Warthrop’s apprentice.”

“Hello,” I said shyly. Her stare was all too frank. From the first, it unnerved me.

“Uncle says you are my age, but if you are, you are quite undersized. How old are you? I’m thirteen. In two weeks I shall be fourteen, and Mother says I may go on dates. I like older boys, but Mother says I shan’t be allowed to date them.”

She paused, waiting for my response, but I was completely at a loss.

“Do you go to school, or does Dr. Warthrop instruct you?”

“Neither,” I replied in a kind of squeak that sounded embarrassingly birdlike to my ears.

“Really? Why? Are you thickheaded?”

“Now, Lilly,” remonstrated her uncle. “Will Henry is our guest.” He patted her shoulder gently and said warmly to my master, “Come, Pellinore, sit with me; there are fresh cigars from Havana in the humidor. We will talk about the old days, and the new and exciting ones to come!” Then, turning back to his niece, he said, “Lilly, mein kleiner Liebling, why don’t you take William to your room and show him your birthday present? We’ll ring up when dinner is served.”

Before either the doctor (who did not smoke cigars) or I (who did not wish to see Lillian Trumbul Bates’s bedroom) could protest, I was yanked from the room, hauled up the stairs, and flung into her room. She slammed the door, threw the bolt, and then sailed past me to belly flop upon the canopy bed. Rolling onto her side, she rested her round dollish face upon her palm and studied me frankly from beneath her delicate brows, with an expression not unlike the doctor’s upon ripping out the heart of Pierre Larose.

“So you are studying to be a monstrumologist,” she said.

“I suppose I am.”

“You suppose you are? Don’t you know?”

“I haven’t decided. I—I did not ask to serve the doctor.”

“Your father asked?”

“My father is dead. He served the doctor, and when he died—”

“What about your mother? Is she dead too? Are you an orphan? Oh, you’re Oliver Twist! And that would make Dr. Warthrop Fagi’n!”

“I like to think of him as Mr. Brownlow,” I said.

“I have read everything that Mr. Dickens has written,” Lilly averred. “Have you read Great Expectations? That’s my favorite. I read all the time; it’s practically all I do, except bicycling. Do you like to bicycle, Will? I bicycle practically every Sunday, and do you know I’ve seen Lillian Russell seven times on her gold-plated bicycle riding with her beau, Diamond Jim Brady? Do you know who Diamond Jim Brady is? He’s very famous, you know. He eats everything. Once at breakfast I saw him eat four eggs, six pancakes, three pork chops, five muffins, and a beefsteak, washing it all down with a gallon of orange juice, which he called ‘golden nectar.’

“Uncle Abram knows him. Uncle knows everybody who is anybody. He knows Buffalo Bill Cody. Two summers ago I saw his Wild West show in London when it played before the queen. I know her, too—Victoria. Uncle introduced us. He knows everyone. He knows President Cleveland. I met President Cleveland at the White House. We had tea. He has a love child because he’s married and couldn’t be with his true love; her name is Maria.”

“Whose name?” I asked. I was having some trouble keeping up. “The love child’s?”

“No, his true love’s name. I don’t know his daughter’s name. I think it’s a daughter, anyway. Are you an only child, Will?”

“Yes.”

“So you have no one.”

“I have the doctor.”

“And he has no one. I know that. John Chanler married his true love.”

“I don’t think—He’s never said—I can’t imagine the doctor ever being in love,” I said. I remembered his remark to Sergeant Hawk in the wilderness. “He says women should be classified as a different species.”

“I’m not surprised he said that,” Lilly said, and sniffed. “After what happened.”

“What?”

“Oh, you must know. He must have told you. Aren’t you his apprentice?”

“I know they were engaged, and he somehow fell off a bridge and got sick, and that’s how she met Dr. Chanler—”

She threw back her head and laughed with abandon.

“I’m just repeating what he said,” I protested, ashamed and angry at myself for the indiscretion. It was not a story the doctor was particularly proud of, and I knew he would be mortified if he knew I had shared it.

“I thought you were going to show me your birthday present,” I continued, hoping to change the subject.

“Oh! My present! I forgot.” She hopped from the mattress and scurried halfway under the bed to retrieve it, a weighty tome that she plunked down on the floor between us. Its leather cover was stamped with the title, in ornate script, Compendia ex Horrenda Maleficii.

“You know what this is?” she demanded. It sounded like a challenge.

With a sigh and a sinking heart, I answered, “I think so.”

“Mother would kill Uncle if she knew he gave it to me. She hates monstrumology.”

She flipped rapidly through the book’s flimsy pages. I glimpsed gruesome depictions of human bodies flayed open; dismembered torsos and decapitated heads; the ironic leering grin of a skull whose frontal and parietal bones had been smashed to pieces; a tangle of rotting entrails in which squirmed what appeared to be gigantic larvae or maggots; anterior and posterior views of a woman’s corpse, her flesh ripped free from the underlying muscles and tendons and hanging like strips of peeling paint from the abandoned cathedral of her mortal temple. Page after page of macabre lifelike illustrations of human havoc wreaked, over which Lilly bent low with nostrils wide and cheeks flushed, eyes aflame with voyeuristic delight. Her hair smelled like jasmine, and it was a dizzying juxtaposition, the sweet odor of her hair against the backdrop of those disgusting drawings.

“Here it is,” she breathed. “Here’s my favorite.”

She tapped her finger on the page, where the nude corpse of a young man was displayed in an obscene parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, arms and legs outstretched, head throw back in a silent howl, with what appeared to be a tentacle or perhaps a snake (though it may have been some of his intestines) issuing from his abdomen. Mercifully, Lilly did not elaborate on why she liked this drawing so much. She stared at it for a few seconds in silence, her eyes shining with macabre wonder, before looking up. A sound from downstairs had captured her attention.

“They’re fighting,” she said. “Hear it?”

I could—the doctor’s strident voice, von Helrung’s insistent response.

“Let’s go listen.” She slapped the book closed. Without thinking I grabbed her arm.

“No!” I protested. “We shouldn’t spy.”

“Do you hate him?”

“Who?”

“Dr. Warthrop! Is he your enemy?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, then, you can’t spy on him. It’s only spying when they’re your enemies.”

“I don’t need to spy on him,” I said, trying to think quickly. “I know what they’re fighting about.”

She stared intently at me for a moment with narrowed eyes. “What?”

I could not meet her gaze. I dropped my eyes and said softly, “The Old One.”

There was literally no holding her back after that unfortunate admission. She ignored my frantic protests and crept down the hall, stopping at the top of the stairs to lean over the banister, her curls falling to one side as she cocked an ear to eavesdrop. It was a dramatic gesture. The two monstrumologists were arguing loud enough to be heard in Queens.

“. . . ashamed of yourself, Meister Abram,” the doctor was saying. “To indulge that . . . that . . . theater person.”

“You judge before you know all the facts, mein Freund.”

“Facts? Facts, you say! And what facts might those be? Creatures neither alive nor dead who live off the blood of the living, who transform themselves into mist and bats and wolves. Chickens and pigs, too, I suppose—why not? Who sleep in coffins and rise each night with the moon? Are those the ‘facts’ to which you refer, Meister Abram?”

“Pellinore, tales of the vampire stretch back hundreds of years—”

“So do tales of leprechauns, and we do not study those—or are they next? Are we to include magical sprites in the canon? We might as well! Henceforth let us devote ourselves to determining how many fairies can dance upon the head of a pin—or perhaps in the vacuum that exists between your ears!”

“You wound me grievously, mein Freund.”

“And you insult me, mein Meister. If I had proposed such a thing when I was your pupil, you would have boxed my ears! What is it? Have you gone daft? Are you drunk? What in the name of God would compel you to pursue this madness?”

“You credit me too much power, Pellinore. I can only suggest—it is up to the Society to decide.”

“I credit you with the death of two innocent men—and the attempted homicide of another. I do not count Will Henry and myself; we took that risk with no compunction from you.”

“I did not tell John to go. He offered.”

“You didn’t have to tell him, you wicked old fool. You knew he would go if he thought it would please you.”

“He said the case had never fully been explored. He insisted—”

The doctor cursed loudly, and I heard the hard thud of something being slammed to the thick carpet. Instinctively I started down the stairs, and Lilly pulled me back.

“Wait,” she whispered.

“It is nothing,” I heard von Helrung say. “It can be replaced.”

“I hold you fully responsible for what happens to him,” returned the doctor, refusing to be mollified.

“And I freely accept that responsibility. I shall do all within my power, though I fear it is too late.”

“‘Too late’? What do you mean?”

“He is in the state of becoming.”

“Oh, for the love of—Has the whole world gone mad? Am I the sole sane person left in the cosmos? The state of becoming . . . what? No! Don’t you dare say it. If you say it, I shall break the other one. Over your thick Austrian head.”

“You are understandably distressed.”

“So, what is your plan? Keep him alive long enough to present him as a Lepto lurconis specimen, then shove a silver dagger through his heart? Burn his body upon a bloody pyre? I shall turn you over to the police. I shall see you prosecuted for cold-blooded murder and watch you hang.”

“You must come to terms with certain facts—”

“Facts! Oh, wonderful. We are back to the facts.” Warthrop laughed harshly.

“The first of which is—regardless what you think of my proposal—that John will die, probably well before I can present my paper.”

“And why do you say that?”

“Because he is starving to death.”

For a moment there was no reply. I could well imagine, though, the expression on the doctor’s face.

“He cannot eat?”

“He will not eat. Because what is offered is not what satisfies.”

Lilly hissed between her teeth and yanked me backward, for the doctor had appeared below, practically running toward the front door.

“Will Henreeeeeeeee!” he bellowed.

“Pellinore! Pellinore, mein lieber Freund, where are you going? Please, I beg you. . . .” The stocky Austrian scurried after him on his thickset legs.

“Where I’m going is none of your damn business, von Helrung—but I’ll tell you anyway: to John. I’m going to see John.” He sidestepped his old master, and stopped short when he saw me standing above.

“Snap to, Will Henry,” he snarled. “Visiting hours for the asylum are over.”

“You should not go, Pellinore,” von Helrung said.

“And why not?”

Von Helrung sighed. “Because he is here.”

The doctor stiffened. He stepped toward von Helrung and said in a tone he had used often with me—stern, uncompromising, and intolerant of dispute—“Take me to him.”

He was being kept in a bedroom at the far end of the second floor, four doors from Lilly’s room. Von Helrung, noting the lateness of the hour and expressing concern for our appetites, instructed Lilly to escort me to the dining room so we might begin without them. Warthrop would have none of it. “Will Henry stays with me,” he told our host. Lilly protested too, saying if I stayed, she should stay; it was entirely unfair. Von Helrung would have none of that; he had no say-so over me, but he did over her, and he ordered her downstairs. She shot me a hateful look as if it were all my fault, and traipsed down the stairs, her arms flopping loosely at her sides, lifting her knees high to slam her feet upon each step.

Von Helrung knocked on the door twice, paused, and then twice again. I heard the heavy tread of a large man crossing the floorboards, and then the sound of several bolts being drawn back. The door creaked open. Standing on the other side was Augustin Skala, a massive paw stuffed into the pocket of the old peacoat. He nodded silently to his employer and stepped to one side so we could slip past his mountainous bulk.

The room was small—a bed, a dresser and washstand, a single window, and a fireplace, in which a few damp sticks smoldered. A lamp sat on the mantel, begetting spastic shadows that jerked upon the dark carpeting and jittered across the muted wallpaper; I felt as if I had stepped into a cave.

Chanler reclined in the bed beneath a heavy quilted coverlet, eyes hidden under quivering lids, the lashes fluttering at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. His swollen blood-red lips were slightly parted, and I could hear his deep, wheezing breath from my spot on the other side of the room.

“Why have you moved him here?” asked the doctor softly.

“We thought it best,” answered von Helrung.

“‘We’?”

“The family and I.”

“And what did his physician think?”

“I am his physician.”

“When did you become a medical doctor, von Helrung?”

“In the sense that he’s been entrusted to me, Pellinore.”

“And Muriel agreed to this?”

The old Austrian nodded, and added somberly, “There is nothing more she can do for him.”

“I can hear you, you know.”

The subject of their discussion seemed to have not moved a muscle, but his eyes were now open, blood-red like his lips, shining with an overabundance of tears.

“Is that you, Pellinore?” he asked, with a swipe of his tongue over his suppurating lower lip.

“It is I,” said my master, approaching the bed.

“And who is that with you? Not little Philly.”

“Will. Will Henry,” the doctor corrected him, motioning for me to come closer.

“Bittle filly,” Chanler said, with a flick of his glowing eyes in my direction. “Congratulations, Willy Billy; he caught you but hasn’t killed you yet. You know that’s the plan, don’t you? Same as your father, he’ll see you die. Then donate your remains to the Society—put you on display in the Beastie Bin, where he puts all the nasty creatures he catches.” He coughed. “It’s where all you nasty things belong.”

“I am disappointed in you, John,” Warthrop said, ignoring the delirious tirade. “I expected you to be on your feet by now. You missed an excellent scrimmage last night.”

“Who won the pool?”

“Gravois.”

“That squirrelly frog. Don’t tell me—he played bookie, too.”

“I won’t tell you, then.”

“Do you remember the time he hid behind the band, and the tuba player vomited on him?”

“Which in turn made him sick.”

“And he threw up all over his date—that dancer . . .”

“Ballerina,” Warthrop said.

“Yes, that’s the one. With the skinny legs.”

“You called her ‘the stork.’”

“No, that was you.”

“No. I called her Katarina.”

“Why did you call her that?”

“It was her name.”

With some effort Chanler managed to laugh. “Damned literalist! ‘Stork’ is better.”

The doctor nodded absently. “I fully expected to see you there, John. But it seems you’ve taken a turn for the worse . . .”

“I can’t shake it, Pellinore,” his friend admitted. “I felt a little better for a while, and then I fall back again—like Sisyphus and the rock.”

“How do you expect to get better, though, if you refuse to eat?”

A look of anger flashed across Chanler’s face. “Who told you that?”

Warthrop glanced at von Helrung, who was studying his patient with an expression of intense concern.

“Why can’t you eat, John?” persisted the doctor.

“I would eat; I’m hungry enough, so hungry I can hardly stand it, but they won’t give me anything!”

“Now, John,” von Helrung scolded him. “You know that isn’t true.”

“Tell you me true!” shouted Chanler. “Tell me you true!” He closed his eyes and grunted in frustration. He spoke with great deliberateness, plucking each word clean from the tangled undergrowth of his thoughts before allowing it past his lips: “Don’t . . . tell . . . me . . . what’s . . . true.”

“Anything you’d like—anything. Only name it, and I will see that you get it within the hour,” said Warthrop.

Chanler was trembling. Fluid dripped from the corners of his eyes. The doctor reached down to wipe away the tear, and his friend jerked violently beneath the covers. “Don’t! . . . touch me . . . Pellinore.”

“Name it, John,” the doctor insisted.

Chanler’s head rocked from side to side. His eyes continued to leak tears; the pillowcase was stained with them. “I can’t.”

The monstrumologist and von Helrung withdrew to the fireplace to confer out of earshot.

“This is unconscionable,” Warthrop told von Helrung. “The man needs a doctor. The only question is, shall you summon one, or shall I?”

“I heard that!” Chanler called.

“His condition is beyond the scope of—,” began von Helrung, but his former pupil would have none of it.

“He should be in Bellevue right now, not wasting away here with this baboon in a peacoat!”

“Shit!”

The two men started at the expletive.

“Worse than the hunger, Pellinore!” John Chanler called. “The shit! Every hour on the hour, buckets and buckets of shit!”

Warthrop glanced at von Helrung.

“He has been incontinent,” explained the Austrian apologetically.

“So dysentery, too—and you still don’t think he needs a doctor? It will kill him in a week.”

“Do you know what that’s like, Pellinore?” shouted Chanler. “To lie wallowing in your own shit?”

“We change the sheets immediately,” protested von Helrung. “And you could use the pan, John. It’s right there beside you.” He turned to Warthrop and said beseechingly, “I try to make him as comfortable as possible. Understand, mein Freund, there are things that—”

The doctor brushed him aside and returned to the bed.

“The wrong metaphor,” gasped Chanler. “The wrong hell. Not Sisyphus. Not Greek. Christian. Dante’s rivers of shit. That’s what it is.”

“I’m taking you to the hospital, John,” Warthrop told him.

“If you try, I’ll shit on you.”

“No doubt you will, but I’m taking you anyway.”

“That’s all is it—it is—Pell, but we forget.”

“I don’t understand, John. What do we forget?”

Chanler lowered his voice, pronouncing the word with great solemnity, as if he were sharing a profound truth: “Shit.” He giggled. “It’s all shit. I am shit. You are shit.” His eye fell upon the simian features of Augustin Skala. “He is definitely shit. . . . Life is shit. Love . . . love is shit.”

Warthrop started to speak, and von Helrung cut him off.

“Don’t, Pellinore. It is not John who speaks now. It is the beast.”

“You don’t believe me,” said Chanler. “You haven’t bathed in it yet, that’s all. The minute it sullies your unadulterated ass, you jump into a river, don’t you?”

He coughed, and thick green bile broiled in his mouth and bubbled over his lips. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed it back down.

“You disgust me,” Chanler said. “Everything about you is repulsive—nauseating—you sickening mealy-mouthed piece of snot.”

The doctor said nothing. If he remembered that he himself had spoken these words before, he did not show it. But I remembered.

“Pellinore, Pellinore, being perfect is such a chore! Do you remember that one?” Chanler asked.

“Yes,” answered the doctor. “One of the kinder ones, as I recall.”

“I should have let you drown.”

Warthrop smiled. “Why didn’t you?”

“Who would I have played my jokes on, then? It was all for show anyway. You didn’t really mean to drown yourself.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was with you, you stupid bugger. If you’d really meant it, you would have waited till you were alone.”

“An error owing to inexperience.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Pell. You’ll get there. One of these days . . . all of us . . . suffocating in shit . . .”

His eyes rolled toward the ceiling. The lids fluttered. The doctor looked at me and nodded. He’d heard enough. He pointed toward the door. We’ d crossed halfway to the exit when Chanler called out in a loud voice, “It won’t do any good, Pellinore! He’ll finish me before the ambulance leaves the gates!”

The doctor turned. He looked at von Helrung, and then swung his eyes in Skala’s direction.

“What do you think he’s got in his pocket, hmm?” Chanler said. “He’ll have it in my heart the minute you close that door. He pulls it out when nobody’s around and cleans his nails with it—picks his teeth—scrapes the crud off his crusty bunghole.” Chanler was grinning ghoulishly. “Amateur!” he sneered at the stoic Bohemian. “Don’t you know anything? That’s a job for the ogimaa. Are you ogimaa, you stinking immigrant monkey?”

At the use of the Iyiniwok word, Warthrop stiffened. “How do you know that word, John?”

Chanler’s head lolled upon the pillow. The eyes rolled back in their sockets. “Heard it from the man old, the old man in the woods.”

“Jack Fiddler?” asked the doctor.

“Old Jack Fiddler pulled on his pipe, stuck it up his arse, and gave it a light!”

“Pellinore.” Von Helrung touched the doctor’s arm and whispered urgently, “No more. Call the ambulance if you like, but do not push—”

Warthrop shrugged off the hand and strode back to John Chanler’s side.

“You remember Fiddler,” he said to him.

Grinning, Chanler answered, “His eyes see very far—much farther than yours.”

“And Larose? Do you remember Pierre Larose?”

I heard a snatch of the same nonsense he’d spouted in the wilderness, “Gudsnuth nesht! Gebgung grojpech chrishunct.” In a loud voice Warthrop repeated the question, adding, “John, what happened to Pierre Larose?”

Chanler’s demeanor abruptly changed. A look of profound dismay—eyes welling with tears, the fat lower lip quivering like a child’s when confronted by inexpressible loss—transformed his vaguely bestial appearance into one of heart-wrenching pathos.

“‘You don’t go doin’ it, Mr. John,’ he told me. ‘You don’t go peekin’ up the Grand Lady’s skirts. You don’t look in them woods for the things that’re lookin’ for you.’”

“And he was right, wasn’t he, John?” asked von Helrung, for Warthrop’s benefit more than his own. My master shot him a withering look.

“He left me!” Chanler wailed. “He knew—and he left me!” Blood-flecked tears trailed down his hollow cheeks. “Why did he leave me? Pellinore, you’ve seen them—the eyes that do not look away. The mouth that cries on the high wind. My feet are on fire! Oh, good Christ, I am on fire.”

“It called your name,” murmured von Helrung encouragingly. “Larose abandoned you to the desolation—and the desolation called to you.”

Chanler did not reply. His mouth, its sores ripped open by the contortions of his despair, glistened with fresh blood. He stared vacantly at the ceiling, and I remembered Muriel’s remark, He is there . . . and he is not there.

“Gudsnuth nesht. It’s cold. Gebgung grojpech. It burns. Slow down . . . For the love of Christ, slow down. The light is gold. The light is black. What have we given?”

His hand emerged from beneath the covers. His fingers seemed grotesquely long, the nails ragged and encrusted with his own filth. He reached desperately for the doctor, who gathered the withered claw into both his hands—and it was with utter astonishment that I saw tears shining in my master’s eyes.

“What have we given?” Chanler demanded. “The wind says it is nothing to say nothing. In the center, in the beating heart—the pit. The yellow eye unblinking. The golden light black.”

The doctor rubbed his hand, murmured his name. Shaken by the melancholic scene, von Helrung turned away. He crossed his arms over his thick chest and bowed his head as if praying.

“You must take me back,” the broken man pleaded. “Mesnawetheno—he knows. Mesnawetheno—he will pull me out of the shit.” He glared at the doctor with unalloyed animosity. “You stopped him. You stole me from Mesnawetheno. Why did you? What have you given?”

With that question lingering in the air, John Chanler fell back to the fevered dream of the desolation—that gray land where none can save us from the crush of the soundless depths.

Warthrop did not take him back to Mesnawetheno; he took him by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, leaving me in the care of von Helrung, with instructions—as if he were boarding his horse—that I should be fed and given a proper bath before being put to bed.

“I will come by for him later tonight—or in the morning, if not.”

“I want to stay with you, sir,” I protested.

“I won’t hear of it.”

“Then, I’ll wait for you at the hotel.”

“I’d rather you not be alone,” he said with a perfectly straight face, the man who left me alone for hours—sometimes days—at a stretch.