The Curse of the Wendigo

TWENTY-ONE

“I Do Not Think We Will Find Him”

Muriel Chanler was waiting for us in the von Helrung parlor. She rushed to Warthrop, threw her arms around him, and pressed her face into his chest. Warthrop murmured her name. He stroked her auburn hair. Von Helrung turned his head and coughed politely, ending the moment. The two withdrew quickly from each other’s arms.

“Have they found him yet?” she asked.

“If not, it will be soon,” the doctor said firmly. “In his condition he could not have gotten far.”

“Muriel, liebchen, perhaps you would like to find little Will something to eat?” suggested von Helrung. “He is looking very pale to me.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. I was, I will admit, deeply concerned about the doctor’s mental state. I’d not witnessed him this close to breaking since those awful days in the wilderness.

“I hope you’re right,” Muriel was saying to him now. “And I hope Meister Abram is wrong. I hope it was someone else who murdered Skala.”

“He is in the wrong about practically everything,” the doctor allowed. “Except that.”

She turned her lovely face away. Warthrop raised his hand as if to console her, then allowed it to fall.

“I’ll see to it he has the best defense possible, Muriel,” he promised. “And of course I will testify on his behalf. I’ll see to it a proper place is found for him.”

“An asylum,” she whispered.

“Please, please, you must be strong, Muriel; you must be strong for John,” said von Helrung, taking her by the elbow and guiding her to a chair. “Here. Sit. You will listen to your uncle Abram now, yes? There is a time to grieve, but that time is not yet! What shall Bartholomew bring you? Would you like some brandy? A glass of sherry, perhaps?”

She looked past him to Warthrop. “I want my husband.”

The doctor demanded a word alone with von Helrung. They retired to the older man’s study and shut the door. After a moment I could hear their row; the doctor was upbraiding him for telling the police they were hunting a mythical beast when their quarry was nothing more than a terribly disturbed man.

I looked over and found Muriel smiling at me through her lingering tears.

“Whatever happened to your neck, Will?” she asked.

I avoided those penetratingly beautiful eyes, casting my own upon the Persian carpet and mumbling, “It was an accident, ma’am.”

“Well, I didn’t think it was something deliberate!” She laughed in spite of herself. “It isn’t easy, is it? Serving a monstrumologist.”

“No, ma’am. It is not.”

“Especially if his name happens to be Pellinore Warthrop.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So why do you?”

“My father served him. And when he died, I had nowhere else to go.”

“And now I shall guess you are indispensable to him.”

She smiled at my startled expression.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I have little doubt he’s told you that. He used to tell me the same thing, but that was a very long time ago. Do you love him, Will?”

The question rendered me speechless. Love—the monstrumologist?

“I shouldn’t ask that,” she went on. “It is none of my business. I know he is all that you have. He was once the same to me. But a house cannot be built upon sand, Will. Does that make any sense to you? Do you know what I mean?”

I shook my head slowly. I did not.

“It used to comfort me to think he was incapable of love—that in no way should I take what happened between us personally. But I think I understand now. It isn’t love he lacks—he loves more fiercely than any other man I have ever known—it is courage.”

“Dr. Warthrop is the bravest man in the world,” I said. “He’s a monstrumologist. He’s not afraid of anything.”

“I understand,” she replied gently. “You’re just a boy and you see him through different eyes.”

I had nothing to say to that. For some reason I heard his voice, echoing in a snowbound clearing, You disgust me. I lowered my head, and felt the memory of his arms pulling me close, his warm breath on my neck.

She sensed my distress, and her heart was moved with pity. “He is quite fond of you, you know,” she said.

I searched out her expression. Was she teasing me?

“Oh, yes,” she continued, smiling. “Worries about you like a mother hen. It’s quite sweet—and quite unlike him. Just last night he was saying—”

She stopped herself. She looked away. I saw that she was blushing.

By the time the two monstrumologists had suspended their debate, she was ready to leave. Though von Helrung pleaded, there was nothing he could say that would change her mind.

“I will not hole up here like a frightened kitten,” she said. “If they don’t catch him first, he’ll find his way home, and I want to be there when he does.”

“I will come with you,” the doctor said.

She avoided his eyes. “No,” she said simply. But Warthrop would not let it go; he followed her to the door, pressing his case urgently while he helped her with her wrap.

“You should not go alone,” he said.

“Don’t be silly, Pellinore. I am not afraid of him. He is my husband.”

“He is not in his right mind.”

“A defect not uncommon among you monstrumologists,” she teased him. She spoke to his reflection. She was adjusting her hat in the hall mirror.

“Can we be serious for a moment?”

“Describe a moment when you were not.”

“You’ll be safe here.”

“My place is at home, Pellinore. Our home.”

He was taken aback by this; he did not attempt to hide it. He said, “Then I am coming with you.”

“To what purpose?” she demanded. She turned from the mirror, the color high in her cheeks. “To protect me from my own husband? If he is as sick as you say, why should you feel the need?”

He had no ready answer. She smiled, and lightly touched his wrist with her gloved hand.

“I am not afraid,” she repeated. “Besides, it would not do, a married lady in my position entertaining a gentlemen without my husband present. What would people think?”

“I don’t care what they think. I care about . . .”

He would not—or could not—finish the thought. He raised his hand as if to touch her cheek, quickly dropping it again when he saw me out of the corner of his eye.

“Will Henry,” he snapped. “Why are you constantly hovering about me like Banquo’s ghost?” He turned back to her. “Very well. Your blasted stubbornness has worn me down, madam. But surely you can’t protest to Bartholomew staying with you.”

Von Helrung thought it was a capital idea, and Muriel relented to mollify them. She seemed amused by their concern.

“And you will ring me when you’ve arrived. Don’t make me worry, liebchen!” von Helrung called to her from the doorway. He waited until the hansom had melted into the traffic, before closing the door. With a heavy sigh he ran a pudgy hand through his hair.

“My heart is troubled for her, Pellinore. Dear Muriel is in shock. The truth has not yet sunk in that John is lost to us forever.”

“I do wish you’d stop with that melodramatic drivel,” my master said. “It grates on my nerves. He may be lost, as you say, but it will be for considerably shorter than forever. I expect Inspector Byrnes will be calling within the hour to notify us of his death or capture.”

The call did not come that hour or the next or the next. Shadows crept across Fifth Avenue. Von Helrung smoked cigar after cigar, filling the room with the noxious fumes, while the doctor paced, obsessively flipping open his pocket watch. Warthrop would occasionally pause before the window to scan the street for the chief inspector’s brougham. At a quarter past four, with the sun slipping toward the Hudson, the maid poked her head into the room to inquire if the doctor and his ward would be staying for supper.

Warthrop shuddered at the question; it seemed to break inertia’s hold upon him.

“I think Will Henry and I will head over to Mulberry Street,” he said. “We can wait for word at police headquarters as well as here. Ring for us there if you hear anything, Meister Abram.”

The cigar fell from the old man’s mouth and rolled across the expensive carpet. “What?” he cried, leaping out of his chair. “Lieber Gott, what is the matter with me? How could I be so stupid?”

He rushed to the front door, calling for the maid to have Timmy—the livery boy—bring around the calash. He patted his pockets frantically, finally withdrawing from some inner recess of his jacket a pearl-handled derringer.

“What is it?” Warthrop demanded.

“It may be nothing—or it may be everything, Pellinore. In my distracted state I completely forgot, and now I pray it means nothing—I do pray so! Here.” He pulled a long-bladed knife sheathed in leather from another pocket and pressed it into the doctor’s hands. “Remember, aim for the heart! And never—never!—look into its eyes!”

He flung open the door and raced to the curb, where a boy not much older than me sat holding the reigns to a low-slung calash. We hurried after him. “Tell me what you forgot, von Helrung!” Warthrop demanded.

“Muriel, mein Freund. Muriel! She never called.”

Situated a few blocks north of the Plaza Hotel at Central Park, the Chanler residence sat squarely in the middle of Millionaires’ Row, palatial abodes lining Fifth Avenue above Fiftieth Street, mansions of such staggering size and architectural extravagance that they perfectly reflected the ethos of their owners. Here lived the titans of American capitalism and avatars of the Gilded Age—families with names such as Gould and Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Astor, to whom Muriel was now, by marriage, distantly related.

The Chanler House was not the largest of these estates by any means; still, compared to the housing in which “the other half” of the city lived—the crowded and filthy tenement buildings—it was a castle in the style of a fifteenth-century French château.

With surprising agility for a man of his years, von Helrung jumped from the calash, and he dashed through the front gates, attacking the steps two at a time.

He pounded his pudgy fist against the door for several seconds, shouting, “Muriel! Bartholomew! Open up! It is I, von Helrung!”

He turned to the doctor. “Quickly, Pellinore! We must break it down.”

The doctor responded reasonably, “Perhaps they are upstairs and simply don’t—”

“Ack!” the old monstrumologist groaned. He shoved Warthrop roughly to one side, stepped back to give himself a running start, and threw himself against the door. It bowed, but did not give way. “Dear God in heaven!” he shouted, gathering himself for the next blow. “Give.” Slam! “Me.” Slam! “Strength!”

The door gave way with a final desperate wallop of his shoulder, the splintered remains crashing into the wall inside with the force of a thunderclap. Von Helrung’s momentum carried him into the entryway, but he maintained his balance, lunging several steps into the cavernous space, where the crystal chandelier splintered the light of the setting sun into a thousand glittering pieces.

I smelled it the moment I stepped inside—the sickly sweet odor of death, the unmistakable perfume of decay. The doctor reacted to it immediately. He pushed past his winded companion and strode to the grand staircase. Von Helrung, now holding the derringer, grabbed Warthrop’s cloak with his free hand and pulled him back.

“We stay together,” he whispered harshly. “Where is the knife?”

Warthrop clucked impatiently, but took out the knife and handed it to me. “I have my revolver,” he said.

“Good, but you will need these.” Von Helrung held out several shining silver bullets. They clinked softly in the eerie silence. Warthrop pushed the offering away.

“I think my ordinary ones will do, thank you.”

We followed Warthrop up the grand staircase, past portraits of the Chanler clan’s progenitors, the occasional marble statue of a Greek god, and the bust of some anonymous personage glaring down from its perch upon the pedestal.

Upon the first turning of the stair, we found the body of a young girl in a chambermaid’s uniform, lying faceup—but she was upon her stomach. Someone had twisted her head completely around. Her eyes and face were gone. Her skirt was pushed up around her waist, exposing her naked backside. There was nothing but a gaping wound where her buttocks should have been, and the air was saturated with the smell of excrement.

Von Helrung recoiled in shock, but Warthrop hardly took note of the gruesome find. He hopped over the pitiful creature and continued up the stairs, shouting Muriel’s name at the top of his lungs, his eyes wide with panic. Von Helrung and I took more care in our ascent, carefully squeezing around her before continuing after him. I told myself not to look down, but I did, and I nearly swooned with disgust, for what I saw exceeded everything I’d ever witnessed in my tenure as a foot soldier in the service of Warthrop’s exacting mistress.

Someone—or something—had carefully arranged her facial mask, including her bright brown eyes, inside her evacuated bowels, so she appeared to stare up at me from the violated depths.

“Stay back, Will!” whispered von Helrung.

I nearly ran into the doctor upon the second turning of the stairs. Another body lay in our path, lying on its back with legs together and arms spread wide, the same position in which we’d discovered Sergeant Hawk. He had been eviscerated. His organs, still shimmering with bodily fluid, lay in disarray, as if they had been rummaged through to find a special prize—which might have been the heart (I could see its half-eaten remains), or perhaps the intestines, which had been cleaved from his abdomen and wound about his faceless head like a crown.

It was Bartholomew Gray.

The monstrumologist barely paused. He barreled onto the second floor, bellowing her name, kicking open doors with such force that their hinges splintered. Von Helrung caught up with him, touched his shoulder, and cried out when Warthrop swung around and jammed the end of his revolver against his forehead. The older scientist pointed to a door at the end of the hall, over which someone had scrawled this, perhaps with blood, perhaps with the contents of the poor girl’s bowels:

Von Helrung called softly, “No, Pellinore!” but the doctor was already at the door, which stood slightly ajar, his revolver held at the level of his ear.

He pushed open the door, and something fell from its hiding place above—a chamber pot brimming over with a sludgy mass. The pot had been balanced between the top of the door and the wall, a trap my master had fallen for years before, only this time the joke wasn’t a pail filled with a Tanzanian Ngoloko’s blood. It was a chamber pot filled with human feces.

Warthrop stumbled backward, gagging and spitting (his mouth had been slightly open), his cloak and hair saturated in stinking excrement. He recovered himself quickly, however, and rushed into the room. Von Helrung and I followed close behind.

Reposed upon the bed was a third body, wearing the same green dress she had worn when I’d danced with her, legs obscenely spread, arms folded over her head. On the headboard had been scrawled the words “Good Job!”

Warthrop rushed toward the bed with a strangled cry of despair, and abruptly stopped, a look of nearly comical bewilderment upon his haggard features.

“Oh, no,” he murmured.

I peered over his shoulder—and into the face of Bartholomew Gray.

The beast had stripped it off and laid it over her face.

Beside me von Helrung gave a small, horrified sob. The doctor took a deep breath, set his jaw, and pulled the makeshift mask away.

The beast had left the face beneath intact.

“Regina,” whispered von Helrung. “It is Regina, the cook.”

Warthrop turned, and his eyes were flint-hard. He pushed past us and strode to the opposite side of the room to the remains of a window; the frame still held a few wickedly gleaming broken shards. He gazed past them, down to the small courtyard below.

“We’ll search the rest of the house,” he said, “but I do not think we will find him.”

He turned around to face us. I looked away. The expression in his eyes was unendurable.

“His business here, I think, is done.”