The Isle of Blood

Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

or visit us online to sign up at

eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Also by Rick Yancey

THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST

THE CURSE OF THE WENDIGO

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Rick Yancey

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Book design by Lucy Ruth Cummins

The text for this book is set in Adobe Jenson Pro.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yancey, Richard.

The Isle of Blood / William James Henry; edited by Rick Yancey.

p. cm.—(Monstrumologist; 3)

Summary: When Dr. Warthrop goes hunting for the “Holy Grail of Monstrumology” in 1888, twelve-year-old orphan Will Henry follows him to Socotra, plunging into depths of horror worse than anything he has experienced so far.

ISBN 978-1-4169-8452-8 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4169-8974-5 (eBook)

[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Monsters—Fiction. 3. Apprentices—Fiction. 4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Horror stories.] I. Title.

PZ7.Y19197Isl 2011

[Fic]—dc23

2011019949

For Sandy

Fig. 36

“There was red rain in the Mediterranean region, March 6, 1888. Twelve days later it fell again. Whatever this substance may have been, when burned, the odor of animal matter was strong and persistent.”

—(L’Astronomie, 1888)

“[The object that fell from the sky] was a circular form resembling a sauce or salad dish bottom upward, about eight inches in diameter and one inch in thickness, of a bright buff color, with a fine nap upon it similar to that of milled cloth.… Upon removing the villous coat, a buff-colored pulpy substance of the consistency of good soft soap, an offensive, suffocating smell appeared; and on near approach to it… the smell became almost insupportable, producing nausea and dizziness. A few minutes’ exposure to the atmosphere changed the buff into a livid color resembling venous blood.”

—Professor Rufus Graves,

The American Journal of Science, 1819

“Seek a fallen star,” said the hermit, “and thou shalt only light on some foul jelly, which, in shooting through the horizon, has assumed for a moment an appearance of splendour.”

—Sir Walter Scott, The Talisman, 1825

Contents

Prologue: September 2010: “Contact”

Folio VII: Objet Trouvé

Chapter One: “A Very Dangerous Poison”

Chapter Two: “I Have All That I Need”

Chapter Three: “The Answer to a Prayer Unspoken”

Chapter Four: “It Is Human to Turn Round”

Chapter Five: “The Singular Cure”

Chapter Six: “An Interesting Phenomenon”

Chapter Seven: “Would You Live?”

Chapter Eight: “The One Thing That Keeps Me Human”

Chapter Nine: “The Final Disposition”

Chapter Ten: “I Am the One”

Chapter Eleven: “What Do You Know of My Business?”

Chapter Twelve: “The Most Terrifying Monster of All”

Folio VIII: Exile

Chapter Thirteen: “The Space Between Us”

Chapter Fourteen: “The Thing That Cannot Be Seen”

Chapter Fifteen: “What You See, My God Sees”

Chapter Sixteen: “Be Still and Listen”

Chapter Seventeen: “Too Late”

Chapter Eighteen: “The Best of Us”

Chapter Nineteen: “Little Good Can Come of This”

Chapter Twenty: “I Choose to Serve the Light”

Chapter Twenty-One: “A Pleasure to Meet You”

Chapter Twenty-Two: “I Would Gladly Die”

Folio IX: Das Ungeheuer

Chapter Twenty-Three: “My Name Is Pellinore Xavier Warthrop”

Chapter Twenty-Four: “The Blindest of Faiths”

Chapter Twenty-Five: “Dvipa Sukhadhara”

Chapter Twenty-Six: “It Is Part and Parcel of the Business”

Chapter Twenty-Seven: “An Interesting Dilemma”

Chapter Twenty-Eight: “The Trouble with Venice”

Chapter Twenty-Nine: “Before You Were, I Was”

Chapter Thirty: “I Will Come for You”

Chapter Thirty-One: “Have You Been Abandoned?”

Chapter Thirty-Two: “Give It to Will Henry”

Folio X: Tυφωεύς

Chapter Thirty-Three: “Our Only Hope for Success”

Chapter Thirty-Four: “The Best Stories Are Better Left Untold”

Chapter Thirty-Five: “The Fury of a Merciful God”

Chapter Thirty-Six: “Is It Not Wondrous?”

Chapter Thirty-Seven: “We Are Not Too Late”

Chapter Thirty-Eight: “The Faithful Scrivener of His Handiwork”

Chapter Thirty-Nine: “What Does It Look Like?”

Chapter Forty: “I Stand Upright”

Chapter Forty-One: “The Angel of Death”

Chapter Forty-Two: “Fundamentally Human”

Chapter Forty-Three: “Lessons of the Unintended Kind”

Chapter Forty-Four: “A Fallen Star”

Epilogue

Everyone has someone.

More than three years had gone by since the director of the nursing home had handed over to me the thirteen leather-bound notebooks belonging to the deceased indigent calling himself William James Henry. The director did not know what to make of the journals, and, frankly, after reading the first three volumes, I didn’t either.

Headless humanoid killing machines running amok in late-nineteenth-century New England. The “philosopher of aberrant biology” who studies and (when necessary) hunts down such creatures. Microscopic parasites that somehow give their hosts unnaturally long lives—if they don’t “choose” to kill them instead. Midnight autopsies, madmen, human sacrifice, monsters in underground lairs, and a monster hunter who may or may not have been the most famous serial killer in history.… There was no question that Will Henry’s strange and disturbing “diary” had to be a work of fiction or the carefully executed, highly organized delusions of a man whose reason had clearly come undone.

Monsters are not real.

But the man who wrote about them certainly was real. I had spoken to the people who had known him. The paramedics who had taken him to the hospital after a jogger discovered him unconscious in a drainage ditch. The social workers and policemen who worked his case. The staff and volunteers at the assisted-living facility who had bathed and fed him, who had read to him and eased his passing at the ripe old age (according to Will Henry) of 131. And, of course, I had in my possession the journals themselves, which someone had written. The question was—has always been—one of identity, not veracity. Who was William James Henry? Where did he come from? And what unfortunate circumstance brought him to that drainage ditch, half-starved, those handwritten notebooks—besides the clothes on his back—his sole possession?

Everyone has someone, the director of the facility had told me. Someone knew the answer to those questions, and I took it upon myself to find that person, publishing the first three volumes of the journal under the title The Monstrumologist in the fall of 2009. The second set, called The Curse of the Wendigo, was published the following year. Though the subject matter was just this side of outlandish, I hoped the author had incorporated at least some of the truth about himself and his past. A reader might recognize something in the tale about a relative, a coworker, a long-lost friend, and contact me. I was convinced someone somewhere knew this poor man calling himself Will Henry.

My motivation went beyond mere curiosity. He had died alone, with nothing and no one, and had been laid to rest in a pauper’s grave with the poorest of the poor, forgotten. My heart went out to him, and I wanted, for reasons I still do not entirely understand, to bring him home.

Soon after The Monstrumologist was published, I began receiving e-mails and letters from readers. The vast majority were cranks claiming to know who Will Henry was. More than one offered to tell me—for a price. A few offered well-meaning suggestions for further research. Some, predictably, accused me of being the author. A year went by, then two, and I was no closer to the truth. My own research had resulted in no significant progress. In fact, at the end of two years, I had even more questions than when I’d begun.

Then, in late summer of last year, I received the following e-mail from a reader in upstate New York:

Dear Mr. Yancey,

I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of nut or con artist or something. My daughter was assigned your book to read for her language arts class, and she came to me last night very excited because we happen to have a relative whose name really was Will Henry. He was the husband of my father’s great-aunt. It’s probably just a crazy coincidence, but I think you might be interested, if you really didn’t just make up the stuff about finding the journals.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Reed1

A few e-mails and a phone call later, I was on a flight to New York to meet Elizabeth in her hometown of Auburn. After some pleasant conversation and several cups of coffee at a local diner, she took me to Fort Hill Cemetery. My guide was a vivacious, outgoing middle-aged woman who had come to share my fascination with the mystery of Will Henry. She agreed with me—as would any reasonable person—that his story had to be more fiction than fact, but her very real family connection to a man by that name was no fabrication. It was that connection that brought me to New York and to that cemetery. She had e-mailed me a picture of the tombstone, but I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

It was a beautiful afternoon, the trees decked out in all their autumnal glory, the sky a cloudless, brilliant blue. And, three years and three months after first reading those haunting opening lines (These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed…), I was standing at the foot of a grave, before a granite marker that read:

LILLIAN BATES HENRY

1874–1950

Beloved Wife

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

“I never knew her,” Elizabeth said. “But my father said she was quite a character.”

I could not take my eyes off the name. Until that moment I had had nothing tangible except the diaries and a few old newspaper clippings and other questionable artifacts tucked within the yellowing pages. But here was a name etched in stone. No. More than that. Here was a person, literally right at my feet, whom Will had written about.

“Did you know him?” I asked hoarsely. “Will Henry?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know either of them. He disappeared a couple years after her death, before I was born. There was a fire.…”

“A fire?”

“Their house. Will and Lilly’s. A total loss. The police suspected arson, and so did the family.”

“They thought Will Henry set it, didn’t they?”

“My family didn’t like him very much.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Dad said he was… kind of odd. But that isn’t the main reason.”

She dug into her purse. “I brought a picture of her.”

My heart quickened. “Is Will in it?”

She pulled out a faded Polaroid photograph and tipped it slightly to reduce the glare from the bright sun overhead.

“It’s the only one I could find in Dad’s things. I’m still looking, though; maybe I’ll find some more. It’s from her seventy-fifth birthday.”

I did the math quickly. “That would be in ’49—her next to last.”

“No, it was her last. She died before her next birthday.”

“Is that Will sitting on her left?” He looked to be about the right age.

“Oh, no. That’s her brother, Reggie, my great-grandfather. Will is sitting on her other side.”

The photograph was more than sixty years old and was slightly out of focus, but the man on Lilly’s right struck me as being at least twenty years younger than her. Elizabeth agreed.

“That’s the main reason the family didn’t like him, according to Dad. Lilly told everyone he was ten years younger, but he looks twice that in this picture. Everyone thought he married Aunt Lilly for her money.”

I could not tear my eyes away from the blurry image. A lean face, dark deep-set eyes, and a stiff, somewhat enigmatic smile. These are the secrets I have kept.

“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!”

“Dr. Warthrop, I would do nothing of the kind—”

“Then, I ask you, of all the cases we have investigated, why did you choose the one that casts me in the worst possible light? Ha! See, I have caught you. There is only one reasonable answer to that question. Revenge!”

I could not hide my astonishment at his accusation. “Revenge? Revenge for what?”

“For your perceived mistreatment, of course.”

“Why do you think I have been mistreated?”

“Oh, that is very clever of you, Will Henry—parsing my words to mask your perfidy. I did not confess to mistreating you; I pointed out your perception of mistreatment.”

“Very well,” I said. There were very few arguments anyone could win with him. In fact, I had never won any. “You pick the case.”

“I don’t wish to pick the case! The entire idea was yours to begin with. But you’ve shown your hand in this, and rest assured I will disavow anything you dare to publish under the guise of preserving my legacy. Holmes had his Watson, indeed! And Caesar had his Brutus, didn’t he?”

“I would never do anything to betray you,” I said evenly. “I suggested Socotra because I thought—”

“No!” he cried, taking a step toward me. I flinched as if expecting a blow, though in all our years together he had never struck me. “I forbid it! I have labored too long and too hard to banish the memory of that accursed place from my mind. You are never to speak that name again in my presence, do you understand? Never again!”

“As you wish, Doctor,” I said. “I shall never speak of it again.”

And I didn’t. I dropped the matter and never brought it up again until now. It would be extremely difficult—no, impossible—to immortalize someone who denied the very facts reported. Years passed, and as his powers waned with them, my duties expanded to include the composition of his papers and letters. I took no credit for my efforts and received none from the monstrumologist. He ferociously edited my work, striking out anything that, in his opinion, smacked of poetic indulgence. In science, he told me, there is no room for romantic discourse or ruminations upon the nature of evil. That he himself was a poet in his youth drenched the exercise in irony and pathos.

It has often puzzled me, what pleasure he derived from denying himself those very things that gave him pleasure. But I am not the first to point out that love is a complicated thing. It is true the monstrumologist loved his work—it was, besides me, all he had—but his work was merely an extension of himself, the firstborn fruit of his towering ambition. His work may have brought him to that strange and accursed island, but it was his ambition that nearly undid him.

It began on a freezing February night in 1889 with the arrival of a package to the house on Harrington Lane. The delivery was unexpected but not unusual. Having been an apprentice to the monstrumologist for almost three years, I was accustomed to the midnight knock upon the back door, the furtive exchange of the portage charge, and the doctor acting like a boy on Christmas morn, his cheeks ablaze with feverish anticipation as he bore his present to the basement laboratory, where the box was unwrapped and its foul contents revealed in all their macabre glory. What was unusual about this particular delivery was the man who brought it. In the course of my service to the monstrumologist, I had seen my fair share of unsavory characters, men who, for a dollar and a dram of whiskey, would sell their own mothers—willing mercenaries in service to the natural science of aberrant biology.

But this was not the sort who stood shivering in the alleyway. Though bedraggled from a journey of many miles, he wore an expensive fur-lined coat that hung open to reveal a tailored suit. A diamond ring glittered on the little finger of his left hand. More striking than his regalia was his manner; the poor fellow seemed nearly mad with panic. He abandoned his cargo on the back stoop, pushed his way into the room, seized the doctor by his lapels, and demanded to know if this was number 425 Harrington Lane and if he—the doctor—was Pellinore Warthrop.

“I am Dr. Warthrop,” said my master.

“Oh, thank God! Thank God!” the tormented man cried in a hoarse voice. “Now I’ve done it. It’s right out there. Take it, take it. I’ve brought you the blasted thing. Now give it to me! He said you would—he said you had it. Quickly, before it’s too late!”

“My good man,” replied the doctor calmly. “I would gladly pay the charge, if the price is reasonable.” Though he was a man of substantial means, the monstrumologist’s parsimony soared to near operatic heights.

“The price? The price!” The man laughed hysterically. “It isn’t you who’ll pay, Warthrop! He said you had it. He promised you would give it to me if I brought it. Now keep his promise!”

“Whose promise?”

Our uninvited guest let loose a banshee howl and doubled over, clutching his chest. His eyes rolled back into his head. The doctor caught him before he hit the floor, and eased him into a chair.

“Damn him to hell—too late!” the man whimpered. “I am too late!” He wrung his hands in supplication. “Am I too late, Dr. Warthrop?”

“I cannot answer that question,” replied the doctor. “For I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“He told me you would give me the antidote if I brought it, but I was delayed in New York. I missed the train and had to wait for the next one—more than two hours I had to wait. Oh, God! To come all this way only to die at the end of it!”

“The antidote? The antidote to what?”

“To the poison! ‘Bring my little gift to Warthrop in America if you wish to live,’ he told me, the devil, the fiend! So I have, and so you must. Ah, but it is hopeless. I feel it now—my heart—my heart—”

The doctor shook his head sharply and with a snap of his fingers directed me to fetch his instrument case.

“I will do all within my power,” I heard him say to the poor man as I scampered off. “But you must get a grip on yourself and tell me simply and plainly…”

Our tormented courier had fallen into a swoon by the time I returned, eyes rolling in his head, hands twitching in his lap. His face had drained of all color. The doctor removed the stethoscope from the case and listened to the man’s heart, bending low over the quivering form, his legs spread wide for balance.

“Galloping like a runaway horse, Will Henry,” the monstrumologist murmured. “But no abnormalities or irregularities that I can detect. Quickly, a glass of water.”

I expected him to offer the distressed man a drink; instead Warthrop dumped the entire contents of the glass over his head. The man’s eyes snapped open. The mouth formed a startled O.

“What sort of poison did he give you?” demanded my master in a stern voice. “Did he say? Answer!”

“Tip… tipota… from the pyrite tree.”

“Tipota?” The doctor frowned. “From what kind of tree?”

“Pyrite! Tipota, from the pyrite tree of the Isle of Demons!”

“The Isle of Demons! But that is… extraordinary. Are you quite certain?”

“Bloody hell. I think I would remember what he poisoned me with!” the man sputtered vehemently. “And he said you had the antidote! Oh! Oh! This is it!” His hands clawed at his chest. “My heart is exploding!”

“I don’t think so,” said the doctor slowly. He stepped back, studying the man carefully, dark eyes dancing with that eerie backlit fire. “We still have a few moments… but only a few! Will Henry, stay with our guest while I mix up the antidote.”

“Then, I am not too late?” the man inquired incredulously, as if he could not dare to allow himself to hope.

“When was the poison administered?”

“On the evening of the second.”

“Of this month?”

“Yes, yes—of course this month! I would be as dead as a doornail if it had been last month, now, wouldn’t I!”

“Yes, forgive me. Tipota is slow-acting, but not quite that slow-acting! I shall be back momentarily. Will Henry, call me at once should our friend’s condition change.”

The doctor flew down the stairs to the basement, leaving the door slightly ajar. We could hear jars knocking against each other, the clink and clang of metal, the hiss of a Bunsen burner.

“What if he’s wrong?” the man moaned. “What if it is too late? My eyesight is failing—that’s what goes just before the end! You go blind and youheart blows apart—blows completely apart inside your chest. Your face, child. I cannot see your face! It is lost to the darkness. The darkness comes! Oh, may he burn for all eternity in the lowest circle of the pit—the devil—the fiend!”

The doctor bounded back into the room, carrying a syringe loaded with an olive-green-colored liquid. The dying man jerked in the chair upon the doctor’s entrance and cried out, “Who is that?”

“It is I, Warthrop,” answered the doctor. “Let’s get that coat off. Will Henry, help him, please.”

“You have the antidote?” the man asked.

The doctor nodded curtly, pulled up the man’s sleeve, and jabbed the needle home.

“There now!” Warthrop said. “The stethoscope, Will Henry. Thank you.” He listened to the man’s heart for a few seconds, and I thought it must be a trick of the light, for I spied what appeared to be a smile playing on the doctor’s lips. “Yes. Slowing considerably. How do you feel?”

A bit of color had returned to the man’s cheeks, and his breathing had slowed. Whatever the doctor had given him was having a salutary effect. He spoke hesitantly, as if he could hardly believe his good fortune. “Better, I think. My eyesight is clearing a bit.”

“Good! You may be relieved to know that…,” the monstrumologist began, and then stopped himself. It had occurred to him, perhaps, that the man had already suffered enough distress. “It is a very dangerous poison. Always fatal, slow-acting, and symptom-free until the end, but its effects are entirely reversible if the antidote is administered in time.”

“He said you would know what to do.”

“I’m quite certain he did. Tell me, how did you come by the acquaintance of Dr. John Kearns?”

Our guest’s eyes widened in astonishment. “However did you know his name?”

“There is only one man I know—and who knows me—who would play such a fiendish prank.”

“Prank? Poisoning a man, hurling him to the threshold of death’s doorway, for the purpose of delivering a package— that’s a prank to you?”

“Yes!” the doctor cried, forgetting himself—and what this suffering soul had been through—for a moment. “The package! Will Henry, carry it down to the basement and put on a pot for tea. I’m sure Mr.—”

“Kendall. Wymond Kendall.”

“Mr. Kendall could do with a cup, I think. Snap to now, Will Henry. I suspect we’re in for a long night.”

The package, a wooden box wrapped in plain brown paper, was not particularly heavy or cumbersome. I toted it quickly to the laboratory, placed it on the doctor’s worktable, and returned upstairs to find the kitchen empty. I could hear the rise and fall of their voices coming from the parlor down the hall while I made the tea, my thoughts a confusion of dreadful anticipation and disquieted memory. It hadn̵t been quite a year since my first encounter with the man named Jack Kearns—if that was his name. He seemed to have more than one. Cory he had called himself, and Schmidt. There was one other name, the one he’d given himself in the fall of the previous year, the one by which history would remember him, the one that best described his true nature. He was not a monstrumologist like my master. It was not clear to me then what he was, except an expert in the darker regions of the natural world—and of the human heart.

“He was renting a flat from me on Dorset Street in Whitechapel,” I heard Kendall say. “He was not the usual kind of tenant one finds in the East End, and clearly he could afford better, but he told me he liked to be close to his work at the Royal London Hospital. He seemed very dedicated to his work. He told me he lived for nothing else. Do you know, the funny thing is, I liked him; I liked Dr. Kearns very much. He was quite the conversationalist… a marvelous, if slightly skewed, sense of humor… very well-read, and he’d always been on time with his rent. So when he came up two months late, I thought something must have happened to him. This is Whitechapel, after all. Dr. Kearns kept very late hours, and I was afraid he might have been waylaid by ruffians—or worse. So more out of concern for his welfare than the arrears, I decided to check up on him.”

“I take it you found him well,” offered the doctor.

“Oh, he was the picture of soundness and good cheer! The same old Kearns. Invited me in for a spot of tea as if nothing were amiss, told me he had been distracted lately by a particularly troublesome case, a yeoman with the British Navy who was suffering from some mysterious tropical fever. Kearns seemed completely taken aback—though touched—by my concern for his welfare. When I brought up the matter of the rent, he expressed his mortification, blaming it on this case of his and assuring me I would have it, plus interest, by the end of the week. So soothed was I by his silver-tongued rationale, and also a bit embarrassed to intrude upon his important work, I actually apologized for coming to collect what was rightfully mine. Oh, he is the devil’s own progeny, this Dr. John Kearns!”

“He has a way with words,” the doctor allowed. “Among other things. Ah, but here is Will Henry with the tea.”

The monstrumologist was standing by the mantel when I entered, running a finger contemplatively up and down the nose of the bust of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno. Our guest reclined on the divan, his lean face still flushed from his ordeal. He reached for his cup with a quivering hand.

“The tea,” he murmured. “It must have been the tea.”

“The medium for the poison?” asked the doctor.

“No! He injected that once I had come to my senses.”

“Ah, you mean he slipped you some sort of sleeping draft.”

“That must have been the case. There can be no other explanation. I thanked him for the tea—oh, how he must have relished my appreciation!—and was no more than two steps from the door when the room began to spin and all went black. When I awoke, many hours had passed—night had fully come on—and there he was beside me, smiling ghoulishly.

“‘’ve had a bit of a spell,’ he said.

“‘I fear so,’ said I. I felt utterly drained and entirely helpless, emptied of all vitality. Just turning my head to look at him required every ounce of strength in my body.

“‘Lucky for you it struck in the presence of a doctor!’ he observed with a perfectly straight face. ‘I thought something was the matter when I first saw you, Kendall. A bit green around the gills. Of course, you’ve probably been working too hard exploiting the poor and downtrodden, collecting rents on hovels a rat would be ashamed to call home—a case of slumlord exhaustion is my guess. I would suggest you consider a holiday in the countryside. Get some fresh air. The atmosphere of these neighborhoods is absolutely putrid, infused as it is with the funk of human suffering and despair. Take a trip. A change of scenery would work wonders.’

“I protested vehemently these offensive remarks. I am no slumlord, Dr. Warthrop. I provide a necessary service, and only once or twice have I put someone out for not paying the rent. So complete was my outrage, I would have struck him for these repugnant jibes upon my character, but I could not raise my hand even an inch from the bed.

“‘I am exceedingly glad you dropped by,’ he went on in that maddeningly chipper tone of his. ‘God himself must have sent you—God, or something very much like him. You see, I can’t trust it to the mails, and I can’t go myself—I must take my leave of this blessed isle tomorrow—and finding a reliable courier in this milieu has proved more difficult than I anticipated. You simply cannot rely upon anyone from the ghetto—but I don’t have to tell you that. And now here you are, Kendall! Delivered unto me like the best of presents—wholly satisfactory and completely unexpected. The answer to a prayer of a man who never prays! It is serendipitous to say the least, don’t you think?’”

Kendall paused, sipped his tea, and stared silently for a moment into space. He possessed the haunted look of a man who had barely escaped a brush with death’s angel, which, literally, he had.

“Well, I will confess I didn’t know what to think, Dr. Warthrop. What was I to think? In an instant and without warning, all my faculties had been stripped from me, and now I lay dizzy, my thoughts a blur, paralyzed upon his bed, with him leering down at me. What was a man to think?

“‘It is a small matter,’ he went on. ‘A trifle, really. But it should be delivered sooner rather than later. If it is what I suspect it is and represents what I think it represents, he’ll want it quickly. Delay might cost him the entire game and he would never forgive me.’

“‘Who?’ I asked. Understand, I was quite beside myself at this point, for it had at last dawned on me that he was the cause of my sudden and mysterious affliction. ‘Who would never forgive you?’

“‘Warthrop! Warthrop, of course. The monstrumolo-gist. Now, don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him. He’s a very dear friend of mine. You might call us brothers, in a spiritual sense of course, though we couldn’t be more different from each other. He’s entirely too serious, for one, and he possesses a curious romantic streak for someone who fancies himself a scientist. Has a savior complex, if you want my opinion. Wants to save the whole bloody world from itself, while my motto has always been “live and let live.” Why, the other day I killed a large spider, quite without thinking it through—and afterward I was consumed with remorse, for what had that spider ever done to me? What makes me, by virtue of my superior intellect and size, any better than my eight-legged flatmate? I did not choose to be a man any more than he chose to be a spider. Are we both not equal players in the grand design, each fulfilling the role given to us—until I violated the sacred covenant between us and the one who made us? It’s enough to tear a man’s soul in twain.’

“‘You’re mad,’ I told him; I could not help myself.

“‘To the contrary, my dear Kendall,’ the monster replied. ‘It is your great good fortune to be in the company of the sanest man alive. It has taken me years to rid myself of all delusion and pretense, the cloak of self-righteous superiority with which we humans drape ourselves. In this sense the spider is our superior. He does not question his nature. He is not burdened by the sense of self. The mirror is nothing to him but a pane of glass. He is pure, as sinless as Adam before the fall. Even Warthrop, that incorrigible moralist, would agree with me. I’ve no more right to kill the spider than you’ve to judge me. You, sir, are the hare at this tea party; I am Alice.’

“He withdrew for a moment while I lay as if a two-ton boulder pressed down upon me, barely able to draw the next breath. When he returned, he was holding the syringe in his hand. I will confess, Dr. Warthrop, I’d never known fear like that. The room began to spin again, but not from any sleeping draft—from sheer terror. Helplessly I watched as he tapped the glass and pressed upon the plunger. A single drop clung to the needle’s tip, glistening like the finest crystal in the lamplight.

“‘Do you know what this is, Kendall?’ he asked softly, and then he chuckled long and low. ‘Of course you don’t! I wax rhetorical. It’s a very rare toxin distilled from the sap of the pyrite tree, an interesting example of one of the Creator’s more maleficent flora, indigenous to a single island forty nautical miles from the Galápagos Archipelago, called the Isle of Demons. I love that name, don’t you? It’s so… evocative. But now I wax poetical.’

“He drew close—so close I could see my own reflection in the dark, blank pools that were his eyes. Oh, those eyes! If I ever should see them again in a thousand years, it would be too soon! Blacker than the blackest pit, empty—so empty of… of everything, Dr. Warthrop. Not human. Not animal. Not anything.

“‘It’s called tipota,’ he whispered. ‘Remember that, Kendall! When Warthrop asks you what I’ve stuck you with, tell him that. Tell him, “It is tipota. He poisoned me with tipota!” ’”

My master was nodding gravely, but did I detect a hint of amusement in his eyes? I wondered what in this horrible tale the monstrumologist could find the least bit comical.

“He slipped a piece of paper into my pocket—yes! Here it is; I still have it.”

He held it up for the doctor to see.

“Your address—and the name of the poison, lest I forget it. Forget it! As if I will ever forget that accursed name! He told me I had ten days. ‘More or less, my dear Kendall.’ More or less! He proceeded to lecture me—hovering there with that horrid needle glistening an inch from my nose—on how prized this poison was; how the czar of Russia kept a stash of it in the royal safe; how it was valued by the ancients (‘They say it was what really killed Cleopatra’); how it was the method of choice of assassins, preferred because it was so slow-acting, allowing the perpetrator to be miles away by the time the victim’s heart exploded in his chest. That ghastly speech was followed by an extended description of the poison’s effects: loss of appetite, insomnia, restlessness, racing thoughts, palpitations, paranoid delusions, excessive perspiration, constipated bowel in some cases or diarrhea in others—”

The doctor nodded curtly. He had grown impatient. I knew what it was. The box. The package was pulling on him, beckoning him. Whatever Kearns had entrusted to this loquacious Englishman, it was valuable enough (at least in the monstrumological sense) to risk killing a man over its successful delivery.

“Yes, yes,” Warthrop said. “I am familiar with the effects of tipota. As acquainted, if not as intimately, as—”

Now it was Kendall who interrupted, for he was more there than here, and ever would be, lying helpless upon Kearns’s bed while the lunatic leaned over him, leering in the lamplight. I doubt the poor man ever fully escaped that dingy flat in London’s East End, not in the truest sense. To his death he remained a prisoner of that memory, a thrall in service to Dr. John Kearns.

“‘Please,’ I begged him,” Kendall continued. “‘Please, for the love of God!’

“Ill-chosen words, Dr. Warthrop! At the mention of the deity’s name, his entire manner was transformed, as if I had profaned the Virgin herself. His ghoulish grin disappeared, the mouth drew down, the eyes narrowed.

“‘For what, did you say?’ he asked in a dangerous whisper. ‘For God? Do you believe in God, Kendall? Are you praying to him now? How odd. Shouldn’t you rather pray to me, since I now hold death literally an inch from your nose? Who has more power now—me or God? Before you answer “God,” think carefully, Kendall. If you are right and I stab you with my needle, does that prove you right or wrong—and which answer would be worse? If right, then God surely favors me over you. In fact, he must despise you for your sin and I am merely his instrument. If wrong, then you pray to nothing.’ He shook the needle in my face. ‘Nothing!’ And then he laughed.”

As if in counterpoint he paused in his narration and cried bitter tears.

“And then he said, the foul beast, ‘Why do men pray to God, Kendall? I’ve never understood it. God loves us. We are his cron, like my spider; we are his beloved.… Yet when faced with mortal danger, we pray to him to spare us! Shouldn’t we pray instead to the one who would destroy us, who has sought our destruction from the very beginning? What I mean to say is… aren’t we praying to the wrong person? We should beseech the devil, not God. Don’t mistake me; I’m not telling you where to direct your supplications. I’m merely pointing out the fallacy of them—and perhaps hinting at the reason behind prayer’s curious inefficaciousness.’”

Kendall paused to angrily wipe clean his face, and said, “Well, I suppose you can guess what he did next.”

“He injected you with tipota,” tried my master. “And within a matter of seconds, you lost consciousness. When you awoke, Kearns was gone.”

Our tormented guest was nodding. “And in his stead, the package.”

“And you made straightaway to book your passage to America.”

“I considered going to the police, of course…”

“But doubted they would believe such an extravagant tale.”

“Or admitting myself into hospital…”

“Risking that they would not know the antidote for so rare a toxin.”

“I had no choice but to do his bidding and hope he was telling the truth, which it seems he was, for I am feeling myself again. Oh, I cannot tell you what agony these last eight days have been, Dr. Warthrop! What if you were away? What if those two hours’ delay in New York had been two hours too much? What if he’d been wrong and you knew not the antidote?”

“Well, I was not; they weren’t; and I did. And here you are, safe and sound and only slightly worse for wear!” The doctor turned quickly to me and said, “Will Henry, stay with our guest while I have a look at this ‘trifle’ of Dr. Kearns.’ Mr. Kendall might be hungry after his ordeal. See to it, Will Henry. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Kendall, but Jack did say delay might cost the entire game.”

With that the monstrumologist fled from the room. I heard his hurried footfalls down the hall, the creak of the basement door, and then the thunder of his descent into the laboratory. An awkward silence ensued between my companion and me. I felt slightly embarrassed over the doctor’s abrupt and disrespectful departure. Warthrop was never one to observe the strict protocols of proper Victorian society.

“Would you care for something to eat, sir?” I asked.

Kendall drew a heavy breath, the color high in his cheeks, and said, “I just vomited and shat my way across the entire Atlantic Ocean. No, I would not like something to eat.”

“Another cup of tea?”

“Tea! Oh, dear God!”

So we sat for a few moments with but the ticking of the mantel clock for company, until at last he dozed off, for who knew how long it had been since he last had slept? I tried—and failed—to imagine the unimaginable terror he must have felt, knowing that with each tick of the clock he’d drawn closer to the final doorway, that one-way ingress into oblivion, every delay dangerous, each moment lost perilous. Did he consider himself lucky—or did he think it more than luck?

And then it occurred to me that he’d never given an answer to Kearns’s question: To whom should we pray? With a shudder I wondered to whom he had prayed—and who, precisely, had answered.

I crept from the parlor to the basement door, reasoning that, though unbidden, I would be slightly less useless by the doctor’s side. The laboratory below was ablaze in light, and I could hear the soft, unintelligible exclamations of the monstrumologist. I will confess even I, who thought daily of running away from the house on Harrington Lane as fast as his thirteen-year-old legs could carry him, who more than once wished he could be anywhere in the world other than at the side of a monstrumologist before the necropsy table, who nearly every night prayed to the same holy being—about whose efficacy and existence the unholy Kearns had scoffed—that he might be delivered, somehow, some way, into a life more like the one that had been snatched from him nearly three years before, even I felt the pull of the box, felt the by now familiar morbid regard for all loathsome things… the citizens of our nightmares… the denizens of our darkest dreams. What is in that package? What has been delivered this night?

I will not say my descent was eager, but it was swift and not entirely owing to my sense of duty. I did want to see what was in that box. Dreaded it and desired it. More than anything else, dread and desire were my chief inheritance from the monstrumologist.

I caught the word “Magnificent!” as I came down. The doctor was bent over his worktable with his back toward me, hiding the open box from view. The twine and brown paper wrapping, hastily ripped away, lay in a wad on the floor. The bottom step whispered the smallest of groans beneath my foot, and he whirled around, pressing the small of his back against the tabletop and spreading his arms wide to obscure what was on the table.

“Will Henry!” he cried hoarsely. “What the devil are you doing? I told you to stay with Kendall.”

“Mr. Kendall is asleep, sir.”

“I’ve no doubt that he is! He’s been injected with a ten percent solution of morphine.”

“Morphine, Dr. Warthrop?”

“And a bit of food coloring for effect. Perfectly harmless.”

I struggled to grasp his meaning. “It wasn’t the antidote?”

“There is no antidote for tipota, Will Henry.”

I gasped. Warthrop had lied, and I had never known him to tell a deliberate falsehood. In fact, he reserved his most vehement contempt for that very practice, calling it the worst sort of buffoonery and foolishness—and the monstrumologist was not the sort of man who suffered fools gladly.

What could be the explanation? To placate a doomed man? To give him a measure of peace upon his final moments on rth? Had his lie been indeed an act of mercy?

The doctor glanced over his shoulder at the table. He turned back to me with an icy glare. “What?” he demanded. “What are you staring at?”

“Nothing, sir. I only thought you might need—”

“I have all that I need at the present, thank you. Return at once to Mr. Kendall, Will Henry. He should not be left alone.”

“How… how long does he have?”

“That is very difficult to say—there are so many variables—thirty, perhaps forty, years.”

“Years! But you said there was no anti—”

“Yes, I did, and no, there isn’t, because there is no such thing, Will Henry. ‘Tipota’ is the Greek word for ‘nothing.’”

“It is?”

“No, I am lying to you. It is actually the Greek word for ‘stupid child.’ Yes, it means ‘nothing’ in Greek, and there is no such thing as a pyrite tree. Pyrite’s other name is ‘fool’s gold.’ And there is no Isle of Demons near the Galápagos. When Kearns instructed Kendall, ‘Tell him it is tipota,’ he meant it literally.”

“You mean it was… it was all a joke?”

“More of a trick. He needed Kendall to believe he was poisoned in order to ensure the package’s delivery. Now, if you’re quite finished standing there with your jaw hanging open like the most disagreeable of mouth-breathers, please do as I requested and attend to our guest.”

I did not obey immediately. My astonishment outweighed my loyalty.

“But his symptoms…”

“Are all attributable to the psychological distress produced by his belief that he had been poisoned.”

“So you knew the whole time? But why didn’t you—”

“Tell him the truth? Do you think the poor fool would have believed me if I had? He doesn’t know me from Adam. Might not he think I was part of Jack’s fiendish plan and keel over from a heart attack brought on by the enormity of his fear and the finality of all hope? There was a good possibility of that, and it was something Kearns probably anticipated, making his game all the more wickedly delicious. Imagine it, Will Henry! The lie sends him all the way here… and then the truth kills him! No, I saw through it at once and took the only moral path available to me—and so, even saints may sin that God’s will be done!”

He pointed up the stairs. “Snap to, Will Henry.”

So I did, though there wasn’t much snap in my to. He called after me, “Shut the door behind you and do not come down again.”

“Yes, sir. I will, Dr. Warthrop—and I won’t.”

I kept the first promise, at least.

I sat in the parlor with our unconscious guest, restless and bored. I was not accustomed to being dispensed with, after being told ad nauseam by my master how indispensable I was. I was suffering also from the dreadful notion that Warthrop might be wrong, that there was such a poison as tipota and at any moment Kendall would keel over; I did not wish to watch a man’s heart explode in our parlor.

But as the minutes ticked by, he continued to breathe—and I to stew. Why had the monstrumologist so abruptly dismissed me? What was in that box that he did not want me to see? He had never seemed particularly concerned about exposing me to the most disgusting and frightening of biologic phenomena—or to their handiwork. I was, like it or not, his apprentice, and had not he himself often said, “You must become accustomed to such things”?

Ten minutes. Fifteen. Then the crash and rattle of the basement door flying open, the thunder of his footsteps down the hall, and Warthrop barreled into the room. He went straight to the divan and hauled Kendall upright.

“Kendall!” he shouted into the man’s face. “Wake up!”

Kendall’s eyes fluttered open, closed again. I noticed the doctor had donned a pair of gloves.

“Did you open it, Kendall? Kendall! Did you touch what was inside?”

He grabbed the unconscious man by the wrists, turned Kendall’s hands this way and that, and then bent low to sniff his fingers. He pulled up Kendall’s eyelids and squinted deep into the unseeing orbs.

“What is it?” I asked.

“At least three have touched it. Was one you, Kendall? Was it you?”

The man answered with a soft moan, deep in his drug-induced dream. Warthrop snorted with frustration, turned on his heel, and marched from the room, pausing at the door to bark at me to remain where I was.

“Watch him, Will Henry, and call me at once if he wakes. And, do not touch him under any circumstances!”

I thought he would race back to the basement, but he fled in the opposite direction, and presently I heard him in the library, yanking old weathered tomes from the shelves and depositing them on the large table with thunderous wallops. I could hear him muttering to himself in agitation, but could not make out the words.

I crept down the hall to the library door. He was standing with his back to me, hunched over a leather-bound book. He stiffened suddenly, sensing my presence, and whirled around.

“What?” he cried. “What do you want now?”

“Did you—Could I—”

“Did I what? Could you what?”

“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”

“I told you already what you could do,Will Henry. Yet here you are. Why are you here, Will Henry?”

“I thought you might want me to—”

“Interrupt my work? Hector me with your incessant sycophantic sniveling? It is not as if I asked you to construct a perpetual motion machine or juggle teacups while you stood on your pointy little head. My distinct memory is that I asked you to watch Mr. Kendall—that is all and nothing else—but you seem incapable of following even that simple injunction!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, fighting back the dueling desires to flee and to throw myself upon the floor in a childish fit. I backed out of the doorway and returned to the parlor. Kendall had not moved a muscle, but mine were moving quite freely, particularly the ones around my mouth.

“I hate him,” I whispered to my incognizant witness. “Oh, how I hate him! ‘Snap to, Will Henry, snap to.’ Why don’t you snap to, Warthrop—straight to hell!”

It was so unfair! I had not asked for this. My father had gladly served the monstrumologist, but my own servitude was more of the involuntary kind, the result of tragic circumstances with which I, at thirteen, had yet fully to come to terms. If not for the man who had just unfairly and savagely upbraided me, my father and mother would still be alive and I would not know a scintilla of the dark and dusty interior of 425 Harrington Lane. Perhaps the monstrumologist was not directly responsible for their deaths, but monstrumology certainly was. Oh, that accursed “philosophy”! That noisome “science” that had doomed my parents—and now me.

The acrid stench of rotting flesh… the sightless orbs of some foul creature staring up at me from the necropsy table… the unutterable horror of Pellinore Warthrop cleaning human flesh from bloody fangs as he whistled with the happiness of a man lost in the thing he loves…

While the boy he’d inherited, the boy who had watched his parents perish in a fire for which he, Warthrop, had supplied the metaphorical match, stood in half-swoon close by, ever the faithful, indispensable companion, feet like ice in blood-flecked shoes on a cold stone floor…

And little by little that boy’s soul, his human animus, growing cold, going numb, atrophying…

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.

Do you know what this means?

I do.

Year after year, month after month, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, second after second, in the company of the monstrumologist, something chews at the soul, like the churning surf shapes the shoreline, eroding the edifice, exposing the bones, revealing the skeletal structure beneath our sense of human exceptionalism.

When I first came to live with him, it was part of our dissection protocol to have a bucket by the table so I might unload the contents of my stomach—it was inevitable. After a year at his side, the pail was no longer necessary. I could reach my hands into the putrid remains of an organism’s corruption as casually as a young girl plucksichsies in the meadow.

I could feel it as I held vigil in that parlor, the loosening of something bound tight inside me, an unraveling that both thrilled and terrified. I had no name for it, not then, not at thirteen, this thing unwinding inside me. It was part of me—the most fundamental part, perhaps—and it was apart from me, and the tension between them, the me and not-me, could break the world in half.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft…

I don’t mean to speak in riddles. I am an old man now. The old speak plainly; it is our prerogative.

If I would speak plainly, I would call it das Ungeheuer, but that is only my name for the me/not-me, the unwinding thing that compelled and repulsed me, the thing in me—and the thing in you— that whispers like thunder, I AM.

You may have a different name for it.

But you’ve seen it. You cannot be human and not see it, feel its pull, hear it whisper like thunder. You would flee from it, but it is you, and so where might you run? You would embrace it, but it is not-you, and so how might you hold it?

You see, more than a starving man wants bread, I wanted to see what was in that box, whatever it might be. That desire made me more my master’s progeny than my own father’s; I was Pellinore Warthrop reincarnate, but unalloyed by any poetic compunctions. In me it was pure hunger, a desire untainted by platitudes or petty human morals.

But within that thing inside unwinding, das Ungeheuer, also dwelled the loathing—the counterbalancing force of revulsion that screamed for me to remain in the parlor with Kendall.

My charge had moved not a muscle in nearly an hour and did not look as if he would for several more. If I remained a moment more, my heart might explode. By that point I did not merely want to look at Kearns’s special gift. I had to look.

I crept down the hall and peeked into the library, where I spied the monstrumologist seated at the table, his head resting on his folded arms. Softly I called his name. He did not move.

Well, thought I, he’s either sleeping or he’s dead. If the former, I dare not wake him. If the latter, I cannot!

I shuffled quickly and quietly to the basement door, hesitating but half a breath before making the descent.

And within me, the unwinding.

Just one little look, I promised myself. I reasoned it must be a very curious prize indeed for my master to be so secretive about it. And, to be honest, my pride was wounded. I interpreted his caginess as ak of trust—after all we had been through together! If he could not trust me, the one person in the world who endured him, whom could he trust?

A black cloth covered the worktable. Beneath it lay the prize of Dr. John Kearns; I could see the outline of the box in which it had arrived. Now, why had the monstrumolo-gist covered it? To hide it from prying eyes, obviously—and there was only one pair of eyes in the house that would pry.

My anger and shame doubled. How dare he! Had I not proved myself time and again? Had I not always been the model of unquestioning loyalty and steadfast devotion? And this was my recompense? The gall of the man!

I did not gingerly lift one corner and furtively glance at what lay beneath. I flung back the black cloth; it snapped angrily in the cold atmosphere as it fell away.

I gasped; I could not help it. I might have perversely prided myself on my transformation from naïve boy to world-weary apprentice to a monstrumologist, morbidly happy with the carapace that had grown around my tender sensibilities, but this laid me bare, exposing the aboriginal protohuman that still dwells within us all, the one who regards in terror the vast depths of the evening sky and the unblinking eye of the soulless moon. The doctor’s word for it had been “magnificent.” That was not the word I would have chosen.

From a greater distance and in weaker light, it might have resembled a bit of ancient earthenware—a large clay serving bowl, perhaps—though one fashioned by a blind man or a potter still learning the craft. It was, for lack of a better word, lumpy. The sides bulged; the rim was uneven; and the bottom was slightly convex, causing it to lean precariously toward one side.

But the distance was not great and the light not weak; I saw close up and clearly the material with which this odd container was constructed. I’d learned enough anatomy from Warthrop to identify some of the things that constituted this confusing morass of remains, woven together with mind-boggling intricacy—there a proximal phalanx, here a mandible snapped in half, but others were as mysterious—and nearly meaningless—as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered to the four corners of a room. Rip a human being apart, shred him into pieces no larger than the length of your thumb, and see how much of him you can recognize. Is that a tuft of hair—or a muscle’s stringy sinew turned black? And that blob of purplish substance there—a piece of his heart, or perhaps a chunk of his liver? The difficulty was compounded by the interweaving of the various parts. Imagine an enormous robin’s nest fashioned not from twigs and leaves but from human remains.

Yes, I thought, not a bowl. A nest. That’s what it reminds me of.

It puzzled me at first, how the monstrous artisan, whoever—or whatever— he was, had managed to achieve it. Lifeless tissue rots quickly when exposed to the elements, and without some bonding agent the entire gruesome sack would no doubt have collapsed into a chaotic mass. The thing did glisten like fired clay in the harsh electrified lighting of the laboratory. Perhaps that’s how my first impression of it was formed, for it was coated in a slightly opaque, gelatinous substance resembling mucus.

In his mad rush to confront Kendall—Did you open it, Kendall? Did you touch what was inside?—the doctor had abandoned his notes. At the top of the page was this notation:

London, 2 Feb ’89, Whitechapel. John Kearns. Magnificum???

Below this line was a word I did not recognize, for my studies in the classical languages had languished under the doctor’s care. He had written it in large block letters that dominated the page:

Tυφωεύς

The rest of the page was blank. It was as if, once he had committed that one word to paper, he could think of nothing else to write.

Or, I thought, there was nothing else he dared to write.

This was deeply troubling, more so than what he had hidden beneath the black cloth. Though still a boy, I could, as I’ve confessed, endure with stoic fortitude the grotesque manifestations of nature’s villainous side. This was far worse; it shook the foundations of my devotion to him.

The man with whom—for whom—I lived, the one for whom I had risked my life and would again without hesitation at the slightest provocation, the man whom in my mind I called not “the monstrumologist” but “the monstrumolo-gist,” was acting less like a scientist and more like a conspirator to a crime.

There remained but one thing to do before I made good my escape from the basement.

I did not want to, and nothing required that I do it. In fact, every good impulse in me urged an expeditious retreat. But there are thoughts we think in the forward part of our brains, and then there are those whose origins are much deeper, in the animal part, the part that remembers the terrors of the open savanna at night, the oldest part that was there before the primordial voice that spoke the words “I AM.”

I did not want to look into that glistening sack of dismembered remains; I had to look.

Leaning on the edge of the table for balance, I went onto my tiptoes to peer inside. If function followed form, there could be but one purpose for this strange—and strangely beautiful—objet trouvé.

“Will Henry!” a sharp voice cried behind me. In two strides he was upon me, pulling me back as if from a precipice, whipping me round to face him. His eyes shone with fury and—something I rarely witnessed—fear.

“What the devil are you doing, Will Henry?” he shouted into my upturned face. ̴Did you touch it? Answer me! Did you touch it?”

He grabbed my wrists as he’d done Kendall’s and brought my fingertips close to his nose, sniffing noisily, anxiously.

“N-no,” I stammered. “No, Dr. Warthrop; I didn’t touch it.”

“Do not lie to me!”

“I’m not lying. I swear I didn’t; I didn’t touch it, sir. I was just—I just—I’m sorry, sir; I fell asleep, and then I woke up, and I thought I heard you down here…”

His dark eyes searched mine intently for several agonized moments. Gradually some of the fear I saw reflected there faded. His hands dropped to his sides. His shoulders relaxed.

He stepped around me to the table and said briskly, sounding more like his old self, “Well, what’s done is done. You’ve seen it; you might as well lend a hand. And to answer your question—”

“My question, sir?”

“The one you did not ask. It is empty, Will Henry.”

He set to work methodically, his excitement betrayed only in his eyes. Oh, how those dark eyes danced with delight! He was wholly in his unholy element now. This was his raison d’être, the world of blood and umbrage that is monstrumology.

“Hand me the loupe, and I’ll need you to hold the light for me, Will Henry. Close now, but not too close! Here, put on these gloves. Always wear gloves. Don’t forget.”

He slipped on the loupe and cinched the headband tight. The thick lens made his eye appear absurdly large in proportion to his face. He leaned over the “gift” from John Kearns while I directed the light upon its glistening irregular surface.

He did not move the object; we rotated around it. He stopped several times in our circuit around the table, bringing his nose dangerously close to the surface of the thing, transfixed by minutiae invisible to my naked eye.

“Beautiful,” he murmured. “So beautiful!”

“What is?” I wondered aloud. I couldn’t help myself. “What is this thing, Dr. Warthrop?”

He straightened, pressing his hands against the small of his back, wincing, for he had been stooping for nearly an hour.

“This?” he asked, his voice quavering with exhilaration. “This, William Henry, is the answer to a prayer unspoken.”

Though I hardly understood what he meant, I did not press him to elaborate. Monstrumologists, I had learned, do not pray to the same gods we do.

“Come along,” he cried, turning abruptly on his heel and racing up the stairs. “And bring the lamp. The morphine should be wearing off soon, and it’s imperative that we eliminate Mr. Kendall as a suspect.”

A suspect? I wondered. A suspect of what?

In the parlor the doctor candhed before the supine man, who was now groaning, arms crossed over his chest, eyes rolling beneath the fluttering lids. Warthrop pressed his gloved fingers against the man’s neck, listened to Kendall’s heart, and then pried open both of the man’s eyelids to stare into his jittery, unseeing eyes.

“Beside me, here, Will Henry.”

I went to my knees beside him and shone the light into Kendall’s jerking orbs. The doctor bent very low, so close, their noses almost touched, creating the absurd tableau of a kiss suspended. He murmured something; it sounded like Latin. “Oculus Dei!”

“What are you looking for?” I whispered. “You said he wasn’t poisoned.”

“I said he wasn’t poisoned by Kearns. There are three distinct sets of fingerprints infixed in the sputum coagulate. Someone has handled it—three ‘someones,’ apparently—and I doubt John was one of them. He knows better.”

“It’s poisonous?”

“To put it mildly,” the doctor answered. “If the stories have an ounce of truth.”

“What stories?”

He did not turn from his task, but he sighed heavily. The doctor was like most men in this at least. He was not adept in performing two things at once.

“The stories of the nidus, Will Henry, and of the pwdre ser. Now you are going to ask, ‘What is a nidus?’ and ‘What is pwdre ser?’ But I beg you to hold your questions for now; I’m trying to think.”

After a moment he stood up. He regarded his accidental patient for another moment or two. Then he turned and stared silently at me for another two or three.

“Yes, sir?” I said with a tremulous little gulp. The heavy silence and his unreadable expression unnerved me.

“I don’t see that we have a choice, Will Henry,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know for certain he’s touched it, and the stories may be nothing more than superstition and tall tales, but it’s better to err on the side of caution. Run upstairs and strip the bed in the guest room, and we’re going to need some sturdy rope. I should give him another dose of morphine, I suppose.”

“Rope, sir?”

“Yes, rope. Twenty-four or -five feet should be enough; we can cut it to fit. Well, what are you waiting for? Snap to, Will Henry. Oh, and one more thing,” he called after me. I paused at the door. “Just as a precaution… get my revolver.”

In another half hour it was done. Wymond Kendall lay spread-eagled upon a bare mattress, stripped to his undergarments, bound by wrists and ankles to the four posters, and beside him was the monstrumologist, who had decided to postpond his uher dose of morphine, though he kept the syringe close—in case, he confessed, his faith in the probity of our species was misplaced.

Kendall moaned deep in his throat. Then his eyes fluttered open. Warthrop rose from his chair, his hand dropping casually into his coat pocket, where I’d seen him slip the gun. He offered the disoriented soul what I call the Warthropian smile—thin-lipped, awkward; more of a grimace than a grin.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Kendall?”

“I am cold.”

He tried to sit up. That he could not came home to him slowly, the realization exposed in his expression, which was nearly comical in its glacial shift from shock to unalloyed terror. He jerked hard on the ropes. The bedposts creaked. The frame shook.

“What is the meaning of this, Warthrop? Release me! Release me at once!”

It was too much for the poor man to bear. In less than a fortnight he’d found himself in the same position he’d been in at the beginning of this strange and unexpected nightmare. It must have seemed to him that he had escaped one madman only to be captured by another.

“I have no intention of harming you,” my master tried to reassure him. “What I’ve done is for your own protection—as well as my own. I will gladly release you when I am satisfied that neither of us is in danger.”

“Danger?” the panicked victim squeaked. “But you gave me the antidote!”

“Mr. Kendall, there is no antidote for the danger of which I speak. You must tell me the truth now. Though all men lie, and most men more than they should or even must… the truth in this instance could literally set you free.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve told you the truth; I’ve told you everything exactly as I remember it. Dear God, how could I invent such a tale?”

Spittle flew from his lips. Warthrop took a step back and calmly held up his hand, waiting for the man to calm himself before the doctor continued.

“I’m not accusing you of admission, Kendall; I am accusing you of omission. Tell me the truth. Did you touch it?”

“‘Touch it? Touch what? What did I touch? I didn’t touch anything.”

“He told you not to touch it. I’m sure he did. He couldn’t suffer his courier to touch it and risk it being lost or destroyed. He must have warned you not to touch it.”

“Are you talking about the package? You think I opened it? Why would I open it?”

“You couldn’t bear it. The not knowing. Why would Kearns go to such bizarre lengths to send me this package? What was in it that was so valuable he was willing to commit murder rather than see it go undelivered? You were terrified; you didn’t want to open it, but you had to open it. Your desire is understandable, Mr. Kendall. It is human to turn round, to stare into Medusa’s face, to tie ourselves to the mainmast to hear the sirens’ song, to turn back as Lo7;s wife turned back. I am not angry at you for looking. But you did look. You did touch it.”

Kendall had begun to cry. His head rocked back and forth on the bare mattress. He twisted his arms, his legs, and I heard the rope scratching against his flesh.

The monstrumologist snatched the lamp from my hand and brought it close to the tormented man’s face. Kendall recoiled; his right arm jerked as he instinctively attempted to cover his eyes.

“You are sensitive to light, aren’t you, Mr. Kendall?”

Warthrop handed the lamp back to me. The doctor grasped Kendall’s right index finger with his gloved hand, and the man winced in pain, teeth clamping down hard on his bottom lip to stifle the sob of pain.

“This was the hand, wasn’t it? The hand that touched the thing inside the box. The hand that touched what no hand should touch.”

The doctor rolled the man’s fingers within his loosely closed hand.

“Your joints ache terribly, don’t they? All over, but particularly in this hand. You’ve been telling yourself it’s the cold or the tipota, perhaps, or both. It is neither.”

He closed his fist around the base of Kendall’s fingers and said, “They’re growing numb, aren’t they? The numbness began at the tips of the ones with which you touched it, but the numbness is spreading. You are telling yourself the rope is cutting off the circulation or the room is very cold. It is neither.”

Warthrop released his hand. “I cannot say with any reasonable certainty how badly you will suffer, Mr. Kendall. As far as I know, yours is the first verifiable exposure known to science.”

“Exposure, you say? Exposure to what?”

“The Welsh call it pwdre ser. The rot of stars.”

“Star rot? What the bloody hell is that?”

“A rather poetic description of a substance that is neither rot nor from the stars,” the doctor said. His voice had assumed that maddening dry, lecturing tone I’d heard a thousand times before. “It is actually part of the digestive system, like our own saliva, but unlike our saliva, it is highly toxic.”

“All right! All right, damn you, yes, yes, I touched it—I did touch it! I reached into that blasted box and gave it a pinch, but that was all! I didn’t take it out and cuddle with it—just a little touch, a tiny poke to see what it was! That’s all. That’s all!”

The doctor was nodding gravely. His expression was one of profound pity.

“That was probably enough,” he said.

“Why am I bound to this bed?”

“I have told you.”

“Why have you taken my clothes?”

“So I may examine you.”

“What is the thing in the box?”

“It is called a nidus ex magnificum.”

“What is it for?”

“Its name explains its function.”

“Where does it come from?”

“Well, that is the riddle, isn’t it, Mr. Kendall? What did John Kearns say?”

“He didn’t.”

“He’s a viper, I would agree, but as far as I know his sputum is not venomous or even particularly sticky; he did not make the nidus. Did he happen to mention by any chance where the maker might be?”

“No. No, he did not. I told you… everything he said.… Ah, God, the light. The light burns my eyes.”

“Here, I shall lay this cloth over them. Is that better?”

“Yes. Please untie me.”

“I wish I could. Would you like something to eat?”

“Oh, God, no. No. My stomach. Hurts.”

“Mr. Kendall, I’m going to extract a small sample of your blood. Slight pinch.… Good. Will Henry, another vial please. Where’s the other one? Did you lose it? Ah, there it is.… Slow, deep breaths, Mr. Kendall. Would you like another shot of morphine for your nerves?”

“I want you to untie me from this bloody bed.”

“Will Henry, will you turn off the light please? And close the door.” The doctor removed the cloth. “Mr. Kendall, I want you to open your eyes. Do you see me clearly?”

“Yes. Yes, I can see you.”

“Really? I can’t see you. The room is pitch dark. Tell me, how many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three. Why?”

“It is called Oculus Dei, Mr. Kendall. I do not know who gave it that colorful sobriquet.”

“What does it mean?”

“The eyes of God.”

“I know that. I did manage to pick up a bit of Latin in school, Dr. Warthrop. I am asking what it means.”

The monstrumologist did not know the answer, or if he did, he kept it to himself.

He drew me into the hall and shut the door.

“An extraordinary development, Will Henry, and not without its fair share of irony. He is poisoned—not by Kearns’s hand but by his own… literally!”

“Is he going to die?”

Warthrop confessed he didt know“We are in uncharted waters, Will Henry. No victim of pwdre ser ex magnificum has ever been recovered, much less studied.” Though his expression was grave, his voice betrayed his excitement. “He may die; he may fully recover. I have some hope. After all, his exposure was minuscule, and there are some anecdotal reports that suggest pwdre ser loses some of its potency over time. It could depend upon the age of the nidus.”

“Shouldn’t we… Would you like me to fetch a doctor, sir?”

“To what purpose? Mr. Kendall is not suffering from a head cold, Will Henry. The unfortunate fool has managed to find his greatest fortune by coming to the one person who best understands his misfortune. Ha! Now I must have a look at this sample. Stay with him until I return, Will Henry. Do not leave. Under no circumstances is Mr. Kendall to be left alone. And do not doze off or allow your mind to wander! I expect to know everything he does or says while I am away. Do not touch him; do not allow him to touch you. And pay attention, Will Henry. You are a witness to history!”

“Yes, sir,” I responded dutifully.

“I shan’t be long. Here, just in case, you had better have this.”

He pressed the revolver into my hand.

“Who is there?” Kendall cried upon my stepping back into the room. The doctor had covered his eyes again before leaving and turned back on the light.

“It’s me. Will Henry,” I answered.

“Where is the doctor? Where is Warthrop?”

“He’s downstairs in his laboratory, sir.”

“Trying to find a cure?”

“I… I don’t know, Mr. Kendall.”

“What do you mean?” he cried. “Is he a doctor or isn’t he?”

“He is but he isn’t.”

“What? What did you say? He is but he isn’t?”

“He is not a medical doctor.”

“Not a medical doctor? What sort of doctor is he, then?”

“He is a monstrumologist, sir.”

“A monster…”

“Mon strum…”

“Monstrum…”

“—ologist.”

“Ologist?”

“Monstrumologist,” I said.

“Monstrumologist! That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard of. What sort of nonsense is that?”

“It’s a scientist,” I said. “A doctor of natural philosophy.”

“Oh, good Christ!” he moaned loudly. “I have been kidnapped by a philosopher!” His chest heaved. “Why am I tied to this bed? Why aren’t you taking me to hospital?”

I made no reply. I did not think it would serve any purpose to tell him the truth. I caressed the barrel of the doctor’s gun nervously. Why was Kendall tied to the bed? Why had the monstrumologist given me the gun?

“Hello?” he called.

“I’m here.”

“I can’t feel my hands or feet. Be a good lad and help me.”

“I—I can’t untie you, Mr. Kendall.”

“Did I ask you to untie me? Just loosen the knots a bit. The rope’s cutting into my skin.”

“I will ask the doctor when he comes back.”

“Comes back? Where did he go?”

“He’s in the laboratory,” I reminded him.

“I am a British citizen!” he cried shrilly. “My uncle is a member of Parliament! I will prosecute your ‘doctor’ for assault and battery, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and torture of a foreign national! They’ll hang him for certain, and you with him!”

“He is only trying to help, Mr. Kendall.”

“Help? By stripping me bare and tying me up? By refusing to take me to a proper doctor?”

The revolver’s skin was cold beneath my fingers. Where was the dawn? The sun would rise soon; it had to.

“I’m cold,” he whimpered. “Can’t you at least put some covers on me?”

I gnawed on my bottom lip. The man was shivering uncontrollably, teeth literally chattering in his head. What should I do? The doctor hadn’t forbid covering him, but I was sure if he’d wanted him covered he would have done it himself. It would clearly ease his suffering, if only by a little—and wasn’t that my duty, my simple human obligation?

I laid down the gun and pulled the coverlet from the closet. As I bent to spread it over his quivering form, I caught a whiff of a familiar odor, one that I had smelled many times before—the cloyingly sweet smell of putrefying flesh.

I raised my head, bringing my eyes to the level of his right hand, and saw that the skin had gone from a rosy red to a light gray. It seemed almost translucent. I imagined I could see right down to his bones.

The hand that had touched it, the thing that Warthrop had called beautiful, was beginning to decompose.

“I am dying.”

I swallowed hard and said nothing.

“Squeezed, that’s how I feel. Like a giant fist squeezing me, every inch, down to my vry bones.”

“The doctor will do everything he can,” I promised him.

“I don’t want to die. Please. Please don’t let me die.”

His rotting fingers clawed uselessly at the empty air.

He slipped into semiconsciousness—not awake, not quite asleep.

Dawn came. The doctor did not come with it. He didn’t appear until an hour later. I jumped in my chair when the door opened; I was exhausted, my nerves shot.

“Why did you cover him?” he demanded.

“I didn’t touch him. He was cold,” I added defensively.

Warthrop peeled off the coverlet and let it drop to the floor.

“It was my mother’s. Now I shall have to burn it.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

He waved my apology away. “As a precaution—the precise toxicity of pwdre ser is unknown. How long has he been out?”

“About an hour and a half.”

“‘About’? Haven’t you been keeping notes?”

“I—I didn’t have anything to write with, sir.”

“Will Henry, I thought I had impressed upon you the urgency of this case, one of the most—if not the most—important discoveries in the history of biology—aberrant or otherwise. We must be meticulous. We must not allow our personal failures or biases to compromise our observations.… When did this grayish discoloration begin to manifest itself?”

“Shortly after you went downstairs,” I answered, my face hot with shame. I had not noted the hour. “It started with his hand—”

“Which hand?”

“His right hand, sir.”

“Hmmm. Stands to reason. It’s spreading rapidly, then.”

It had, I told him. A slaty tide swamping hands, then arms, then torso, groin, legs, feet. Kendall’s face was a paper-thin gray mask stretched drum-skin tight over protruding bone.

“What has he reported?”

“He said he’s going to have you arrested and hanged.”

Warthrop sighed loudly. “About his symptoms, Will Henry. His symptoms.”

He was bending over the bed, listening to Kendall’s heart through his stethoscope.

“He said he was cold and that it felt like a giant fist was squeezing him.”

The doctor told me to bring over the lamp. With great care he slowly removed the cloth covering Kendalleyes and peeled up one eyelid. The orb jittered in its socket as if maddened by the onslaught of light.

“The pupil is grossly dilated. The iris has completely disappeared,” he observed.

He dropped his gloved fingers to Kendall’s cheek and pressed gently. The skin ripped apart at his touch, exposing the dark gray bone beneath. A viscous mixture of pus and blood dribbled from the fissure. The noxious stench of decay wafted around our heads.

“Both dermal and epidermal layers are in active decay, the tissue having begun to liquefy.… Early stages of imperfect osteogenesis noted in the zygomatic bone,” Warthrop breathed. “Forming non-arthric osteophytic structures…”

He ran his hands over the rest of the face, over the arms, the chest and abdomen, down the legs. He had learned his lesson; he did not press hard. His touch was whisper-soft.

“Additional osteophytic growths noted in the elbows, wrists, knuckles, knees, hips.… We’ll need to take some measurements of these, Will Henry.… Acute myositis throughout.…” He glanced down at my notes. “M-y-o, Will Henry, not m-i-o.… Myositis is the inflammation you see here in the skeletal, or voluntary, muscles. At this rate, in a few hours our Mr. Kendall will begin to resemble a circus strong man—a skinless one, I should say.”

He peered at Kendall’s right hand, then the left.

“Note the abnormal thickness and dark yellow color of the nails,” he said. He tapped one with his own gloved fingernail. “As hard as steel! The condition is called onychauxis.” Taking pity on me, he spelled it out.

He looked over at me, eyes shining with that unnerving backlit glow.

“A precise parallel to the stories in the literature, Will Henry,” he whispered. “He is… becoming. And it’s happening faster than I first assumed.”

“And you don’t think a hospital…”

“Even if I did think it, the nearest hospital is in Boston. It would be over before we got there.”

“He’s dying?”

Warthrop shook his head. What did that mean? Did it mean Kendall was dying? Or did it mean the monstrumolo-gist did not know for certain?

“Is there a cure for it?” I asked.

“Not according to my sources, which are not very reliable. There is, of course, the singular cure that ends all ailments.”

Only a monstrumologist, I thought, would characterize death as a cure for anything. I watched him pick up the syringe loaded with morphine and roll it back and forth in his open palm. It would ease the poor soul’s suffering; it might give him the smallest measure of peace. But the drug also might interfere with the progress of Kendall’s becoming and thus compromise Warthrop’s scientific inquiry.

It would, in short, desecrate the temple.

Without comment the monstrumologist laid down the syringe. He seemed to tower ten feet above the writhing form in the bed, and his shadow fell hard upon that pile of bones wrapped loosely in its sack of gossamer skin.

He told me to rest; he would hold vigil for a while.

“You look terrible,” he observed dispassionately. “You need to sleep. Probably should find yourself something to eat, too.”

I glanced toward the bed. “I’m not very hungry, sir.”

He nodded. It made sense to him. “Where is my revolver? You haven’t lost it, have you? Thank you, Will Henry. Now off to bed, but first I’ll need you to take care of this.”

He handed me a slip of paper, a note jotted down in his nearly illegible scrawl.

“A letter for Dr. von Helrung,” he explained. “You may want to recast it in your own hand first, Will Henry. Send it by express mail marked ‘personal’ and ‘confidential.’”

“Yes, sir.”

I started out. He called after me, “Straight there and back, and be quick if you want any sleep this day.”

He motioned toward the bed.

“It appears to be accelerating.”

The letter to the head of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology was brief and to the point:

‘PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL’

Von Helrung—

I have, under the most unusual of circumstances, come into possession of an authentic nidus ex magnificum, by way of Dr. Jack Kearns, whom I believe you’ve met. Expect me in New York within the week. In the interim direct our friends in London to make discrete inquiries into Kearns’s whereabouts. He is working—or did work—at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, and resided in the same district, in a flat on Dorset Street owned by a Mr. Wymond Kendall, Esq.

—Warthrop

I went straight to the post office, resisting all temptations along the way, Mr. Tanner’s shop in particular, where the fragrance of fresh scones hung warm in the bitter air. The wind was sharp upon my cheek, the day bright and bracingly cold, the snow faultlessly white—dazzlingly white, unblemished, pure. My heart ached for the snow.

I paused but once and then only for a moment. There, white upon white in the beneficent snow, my former schoolhouse, and children playing in the drifts. A battle raged for the highest ground, the defenders screeching, hurling down their hastily packed cannonade upon the heads of their attackers. A little ways off, a squadron of fallen angels had left its impression, and nearby a passable likeness of the headmaster, complete with cap and cape and walking stick.

And their cries were thin, their laughter high and hysterical in the biting wind.

There was a boy I recognized. He was shouting something from the top of the little hill, crouched behind the ramparts of the fort, taunting the assault force below, and I remembered him. The slightly pug nose. The shaggy blond hair. The splash of freckles across cheeks. I remembered everything about him, his high-pitched voice, the gap between his teeth, the color of his eyes, the way he smiled first with those eyes. You could see the smile coming a year before it arrived. I remembered where he lived, what his parents looked like. He had been a friend, but I could not remember his name. What was his name? He had been my friend, my best friend, and I could not remember his name.

The doctor was standing in the kitchen when I came in, eating an apple.

“You’re late,” he said. He did not sound angry, not his usual self at all. He said it casually, a knee-jerk response to my entering the room. “Did you stop somewhere?”

“No, sir. Straight to the post office and back.”

It struck me then, and with a heart in which fear and hope intertwined in an obscene embrace, I asked, “Is he dead?”

“No, but I had to eat something. Here, you should too.”

He tossed an apple at me and bade me follow him upstairs. I slipped the apple into my coat pocket; I had no appetite.

“The sclerosing bone dysplasia has exacerbated,” he called over his shoulder as he took the steps two at a time. “But his heart is as strong as a horse’s, his lungs are clear, his blood super-oxygenated. The edema of the muscular tissue continues unabated, and—” He stopped suddenly and whirled about, causing me to almost smack face-first into his chest. “This is the most remarkable thing, Will Henry. Although his dermis continues to deteriorate and slough off, he hasn’t lost more than a teacup’s worth of blood, mostly around the wrists and ankles, so I took the precaution of loosening the bindings a bit.”

I followed him into the room. Immediately my hand flew up to cover my nose; the smell was truly overwhelming. It dropped scorching into my lungs. Why hadn’t he opened the window? The monstrumologist seemed oblivious to the reek. He continued to chomp on his apple, even as tears of protest coursed down his cheeks.

“What?” he demanded. “Why are you staring at me like that? Don’t look at me; look at Mr. Kendall!”

He didn’t nudge me toward the bed. I took that step myself.

He did not grab my chin and force me to look.

I looked because I wanted to look. I looked because of the tight thing unwinding, das Ungeheuer, the me/not-me, Tantalus’s grapes, the thing you cannot name. The thing I knew but did not understand. The thing you may understand but do not know.

I flung myself from the room and managed a dozen shuffling steps down the hall before I collapsed. Everything inside gave way. I felt empty. I was nothing more than a shadow, a shell, a hollow carapace that had once dreamed it was a boy.

A shadow fell over me. I did not look up. I knew I would find no comfort from the bearer of that shadow.

“He’s dying,” I said. “We have to do something.”

“I am doing all within my power, Will Henry,” he responded gently.

“You aren’t doing anything! You’re not trying to cure him.”

“I have told you there is no—”

“Then, find one!” I screamed at him. “You said it yourself, there is no one else. You’re the one. You’re the one! If you can’t help him, then nobody can, and you won’t. You won’t because you want him to die! You want to see what the poison does to him!”

“May I remind you that I am not the one who exposed him? He did that to himself,” he said. He squatted beside me and placed his hand upon my shoulder. I heaved myself away from him.

“What he is, that’s what you are inside,” I told him.

“There is but one way to end his suffering,” he said, the gentle tone abandoned; his voice, like his shadow upon me, was hard.

He pulled the revolver from his pocket and thrust it toward me. “Here. Would you like to do it? For I cannot. Simply because there is no hope for him, Will Henry, that doesn’t mean I have to give up all hope for me.”

“There is no hope—for either of you.”

He dropped the revolver to the floor. It lay between us. His shadow and the gun lay between us.

“You’re tired,” he said. “Go to bed.”

“No.”

“Very well. Sleep on the floor. It makes no difference to me!”

He scooped up the revolver and left me alone with my misery. I don’t know how long I lay there in that hall. It mattered no more to me than it did to the monstrumologist where I slept. I do not remember climbing the stairs into the loft, but I do remember throwing myself upon the bed fully clothed and watching the snow-laden clouds through the window over my head. The clouds were the color of Mr. Kendall’s rotting skin.

I closed my eyes. There in the darkness inside my own head, I saw him, gray-skinned, black-eyed, hollow-cheeked, sharp tusks of bone tearing through papery flesh, a corpse whose galloping heart refused to stop.

My stomach rumbled loudly. When was the last time I’d eaten? I could not remember. I pulled from my pocket the apple that the monstrumologist had given me. Its skin was the color of Mr. Kendall’s bloody teeth.

When I see gray now, I think of rotting flesh.

And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in summertime.

Sometime later—though it was not much later—his hand fell upon my shoulder. Above me was the window and, above the window, the clouds with their bellies full of snow.

“Will Henry,” the monstrumologist said. His voice was cracked and raw, as if he’d been screaming at the top of his lungs. “Will Henry.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“A quarter past three. I did not wish to wake you…”

“But you woke me anyway.”

“I wanted to show you something.”

I rolled onto my side, away from him.

“I don’t want to look at him again.”

“It isn’t Mr. Kendall. It’s this.” I heard the crinkle and crunch of papers in his hand. “A treatise by a French scientist named Albert Calmette, of the Pasteur Institute. It’s concerned with the theoretical possibility of developing antivenin, based on the vaccine principles of Pasteur. The theory applies to certain poisonous snakes and arachnids, but it could have applications in our case—Mr. Kendall’s case, I mean. It may be worth a try.”

“Then, try it.”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “The chief obstacle is time, in that Mr. Kendall doesn’t have much of it left.”

I rolled onto my back, and the form of the monstrumologist swung into view. He looked exhausted. He swayed like a man trying to keep his balance on the yawing deck of a ship.

“Then, you had better get to work.”

“It means you will have to sit with Mr. Kendall.”

I sat up, swung my feet over the side of the bed, and tugged on my shoes.

“I will sit with him.”

Before he allowed me into the room, the doctor uncapped a small vial filled with a thick, clear liquid and shook several drops of the substance onto his handkerchief.

“Here. Tie this round your face,” he instructed me, and then proceeded to tie the knot himself. My senses were assaulted by a sweet, musky fragrance that reminded me of rubbing alcohol, though without the biting astringency.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Ambra grisea, or ambergris, the aged regurgitation of the sperm whale,” the monstrumologist answered. “A common ingredient in perfume. I often wonder, though, how common it would be if ladies in particular knew where it came from. You see, ambergris is normally expelled through the whale’s anus with fecal matter, but—”

“Fecal matter?” My stomach rolled.

“Shit. But sometimes the mass is too large to pass, and the material is regurgitated through the mouth.”

“Whale vomit?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. The ancient Chinese called it ‘dragon’s spittle.’ In the Middle Ages people carried balls of it around, believing it could ward off the plague. It’s quite pleasant, though, isn’t it?”

I agreed that it was. The doctor smiled with satisfaction, as if he had just imparted an important lesson.

“All right. Quietly now, Will Henry.”

We stepped into the bedroom. Despite the gift of regurgitated whale shit, I could smell Kendall’s decay. It stung my eyes. The taste of it tingled upon my tongue. I had expected it, though that had done little to prepare me for it. All other expectations, to my surprise, were not met.

First, Warthrop had taken his mother’s coverlet and put it back where he had found it. Mr. Kendall was covered from feet to neck.

That was not all. Mr. Kendall himself had changed. I had expected more of the agonized writhing, the grunts and throaty moans of someone in extreme mental and physical distress. Instead he was so still, so quiet, that for the briefest of moments I thought he might have finally succumbed. But no, he lived. The covers rose and fell, and upon closer examination I saw that his eyes roamed beneath their half-closed lids. Most astonishing of all (given the astonishing circumstances) was the smile. Wymond Kendall was smiling! As if lost in a pleasant dream, he smiled.

“Mr. Kendall… is he—”

“Smiling? Yes, I would call that a smile. The stories say that in the final stages the victim experiences moments of intense euphoria, an overwhelming feeling of bliss. It’s an interesting phenomenon; perhaps once in the bloodstream pwdre ser releases a compound structurally similar to an opiate.” He stopped, laughed softly—at himself?—and said, “I should get to work on the antivenin. Call me at once should his condition change.”

And with that the monstrumologist left me alone with Kendall. He would not have done so, I have told myself many times over the course of my long life, if he had known what Kendall had become—if he had known that Kendall was not Kendall anymore—that he was no more human, or more sentient, than a dime-store mannequin.

I have told myself that.

The room is cold. The light is gray. The even exhalations of the once-human thing on the bed are the only things the boy can hear—metronomic, the ticking of the human clock, lulling him to sleep.

He is so tired. His head lolls. He tells himself he won’t fall asleep. Just rest his eyes for a moment or two…

In the gray light in the cold room, to the rhythmic breath of the thing becoming—sleep.

Sleep now, Will Henry, sleep.

Do you see her? In the white behind the gray, in the warm beyond the cold, in the silence past the ticking of the clock—she is baking a pie, an apple pie, your favorite. And you at the table with your tall glass of milk, swinging your legs, not long enough yet for your feet to touch the floor.

It must coolfirst, Willy. It must cool.

A strand of hair loosed from her bun falling down her graceful neck, and her new apron, and a dab of flour upon her cheek, and how long her arms seem reaching into the oven, and the whole world smelling like apples.

Where is Father?

Away again.

With the doctor?

Of course with the doctor.

I want to go.

You do not know what you’re wishing for.

When will he be home?

Soon, I hope.

He says one day I shall go with him.

Does he?

One day I will.

But if you go, who will keep me company?

You can come too.

Where your father goes, I have no desire to follow.

The fire that engulfs her has no heat. Her scream makes no sound. The boy sits in his chair with his short legs swinging and his tall glass of milk, and he watches the flames consume her, and he is laughing while his mother burns, and the world still smells like apples.

And then his father’s voice, calling him:

Will Henry! Will Henreeeeeeee!

I bolted from the chair, stumbled toward the bed, turned, lunged through the doorway into the hall, and started down the stairs. It was not my father’s voice—not the dream voice—but the doctor’s calling me, as he had a hundred times before, in desperate need of my indispensible services.

“Coming, sir!” I called, pounding down the stairs to the main floor. “I’m coming!”

We met in the front hall, for as I raced down, he ran up, and both of us were winded and slightly wild-eyed, regarding each other with identical expressions of comic confusion.

“What is it?” he asked breathlessly.

And I, with him: “What is it?”

“Why are you asking me ‘What is it?’ What is it?”

“What, Dr. Warthrop?”

“I asked you that, Will Henry.”

“Asked me what;

“What is it!” he roared. “What do you want?”

“You—you called for me, sir.”

“I did no such thing. Are you quite all right?”

“Yes, sir. I must have… I think I fell asleep.”

“I would not advise that, Will Henry. Back upstairs, please. We mustn’t leave Mr. Kendall unattended.”

The room was still very cold. And the light gray. And there was the whisper of snow now against the windowpane.

And the bed, empty.

The chair and the Louis Philippe armoire and the dead embers and the little rocking chair and the littler doll in that chair and her littler still black, unblinking china eyes and the boy frozen on the threshold, staring stupidly at the empty bed.

I backed slowly into the hall. The hall was warmer than the room, and I was much warmer than the hall; my cheeks were on fire, though my hands were numb.

“Dr. Warthrop,” I whispered, no louder than the snow against the pane. “Dr. Warthrop!”

He must have fallen, I thought. Got loose of the ropes somehow and fell out of bed. He’s lying on the other side, that’s all. The doctor will have to pick him up. I am not touching him!

I turned back. My turning took a thousand years. The stairs stretched out below me for a thousand miles.

To the landing, another millennia. There was the beating of my heart and my hot breath puffing my makeshift mask, and the smell of ambergris and, above and behind me, the gentle protest of the top step, creaking.

I stopped, listening. The passing of the third millennia.

I was patting my empty pockets for the gun.

Where is the gun?

He had forgotten to give it back to me, or, as he would undoubtedly say, I had forgotten to ask him for it.

I knew I should keep going. Instinctively I understood where salvation lay. But it is human to tie ourselves to the mainmast, to be Lot’s wife, turning back.

I turned back.

It launched itself from the top step, a reeking sepulcher of jutting bone and flayed skin and crimson muscle dripping purulence, a yawning mouth festooned with a riot of jagged teeth, and the black eyes of the abyss.

The once-Kendall slammed into me, its shoulder driving into my chest, and the black eyes rolled in their sockets, like a shark’s eyes when it attacks, in the ecstasy of the kill. I punched blindly at its face; my knuckles knocked against the sharp, bony growths that had erupted from the rubbish of its flesh, bone meeting bone, and my entire arm sang with pain.

The creature seized my wrist and flung me down the last flight of stairs as easily as a boy tosses a stick. I landed face-first with a loud wallop at the bottom, making no more noise than that, for the fall knocked all the breath out of me. In the space of a heartbeat, I rolled onto my back, and it was upon me, so close I saw my own face reflected in its soulless eyes. Its face was not that of a human being. I have looked at that face a thousand times; I keep the memory of it in a special cabinet of curiosities, and I take it out from time to time, when the day is bright and the sun warm and the evening very far away. I take it out and hold it. The more I hold it, you see, the less I’m afraid of it. Most of the skin is gone, torn or sloughed off, exposing the underlying musculature, the marvelously complex—and marvelously beautiful—underpinning. Pointed horns of calcified tissue protrude from the skull, scores of them, like the thrust-up roots of cypress trees, from the cheekbones, the forehead, the jaws and chin. It has no lips. Its tongue has putrefied and broken apart; just the base remains. I saw the brown stringy mass spasm as the open mouth came down at me. The rest of the tongue he swallowed; the lips, too. The only thing in Mr. Kendall’s stomach was Mr. Kendall.

At the last instant before he landed on top of me, I brought up my hands. They broke easily through him; my fingers tangled with his ribs. If I’d had my wits about me, I would have thought to push just a bit more, find his heart and squeeze until it burst. Perhaps, though, it was a matter of timing, not acumen. There was no time to think.

In the time it took for me to realize that this inhuman face would be the last face I would see, the bullet punched through the back of his head, blowing out an apple-size hole as it came out the other side before burying itself in the carpet not quite a quarter inch from my ear. The body jerked in my hands. I felt—or thought I felt—the protest of his heart, an angry push against my fingers wrapped tight around his ribs, the way a desperate prisoner grasps the bars of his cell, before it stopped beating. The light did not go out of his eyes. There hadn’t been any light in them to begin with. I was still trapped in those eyes—sometimes I think I am trapped still—in their unseeing sight.

Warthrop heaved the body away—once he had freed it from my maddened grip—tossed the gun aside, and knelt beside me.

I reached for him.

“No! No, Will Henry, no!”

He lunged out of my reach; my bloody fingertips brushed his coattails.

“Do… not… touch—anything!” He held up his hand as if to demonstrate. “Are you injured?”

I shook my head. I still had not found my voice.

“Do not move. Keep your hands away from your body. I will be right back. Do you understand, Will Henry?”

He scrambled to his feet and raced toward the kitchen. It is human, the compulsion to do the very thing you’ve been cautioned not to do. The handkerchief was still tied around my face. I felt as if I were slowly being suffocated, and all I desired was to yank it down.

A moment later he was back, wearing a fresh pair of gloves, and he tugged the mask down as if he knew without my telling him the immediate cause of my distress. I took a long, shuddering breath.

“Don’t me, don’t move, not yet, not yet,” the monstrumologist whispered. “Careful, careful. Did he hurt you, Will Henry? Did he bite or scratch you?”

I shook my head.

Warthrop studied my face carefully, and then, as abruptly as he returned, he abandoned me again. The hall began to fade into a gray mist. My body was going into shock; suddenly I was terribly cold.

In the distance I hear the plaintive cry of a train’s whistle. The mist parts, and on the platform stands my mother and me, holding hands, and I am very excited.

Is that it, Mother? Is that the train?

I think it is, Willy.

Do you think Father has brought me a present?

If he has not, then he is no longer Father.

I wonder what it could be.

I worry what it could be.

Father has been gone very long this time.

Yes.

How long has it been, Mother?

Very long.

Last time he brought me a hat. A stupid hat.

Now, Willy. It was a very nice hat.

I want him to bring me something special this time.

Special, Willy?

Yes! Something wonderful and special, like the places he goes.

I do not think you would find them so wonderful and special.

I would, and I will! Father says he will take me with him one day, when I’m old enough.

Gripping my hand tightly. And, in the distance, the growl and huff of the locomotive.

You will never be old enough for that, William James Henry.

One day he will take me. He promised he would. One day I will see places other people only dream about.

The train is a living thing; it screeches angrily, complaining of the rails. Black smoke blows grumpily from its stack. The train glares contemptuously at the crowd, the self-important conductor, the porters in their neat white jackets. And it is huge, throbbing with power and restrained rage. It is a huffing, growling, enraged monster, and the boy is thrilled. What boy wouldn’t be?

Look now, Willy. Look for your father. Let’s see who will be the first to spot him.

I see him! I see him! There he is!

No, that isn’t him.

Yes, it—Oh, no, it isn’t.

Keep looking.

There! There he is! Father! Father!

He has lost weight; his dusty clothes, rumpled from travel, hang loosely on his lean frame. He hasn’t shaven in weeks and his eyes are weary, but he is my father. I would know him anywhere.

And here he is! Here is my Will. Come here to me, boy!

I soar a thousand feet into the air; the arms that lift me are thin but strong, and his face turns beneath me, and then my face is pressing into his neck, and it is his smell beneath the grime of the rails.

Father! What did you bring me, Father?

Bring you! Why do you suppose I brought you anything?

Laughing, and his teeth are very bright in his stubbly face. He starts to set me down so he may embrace his wife.

No! Carry me, Father.

Willy, your father is tired.

Carry me, Father!

It’s all right, Mary. I shall carry him.

And the shrill, startling shriek of the monster, the last angry blast of its breath, and I am home at last, in my father’s arms.

Warthrop lifted me from the floor, grimacing from the effort of holding me as far from his body as possible.

“Hold your hands up, Will Henry. And hold them still!”

He carried me into the kitchen. The washtub sat on the floor by the stove, half-filled with steaming hot water. I saw the teakettle on the stove, and I realized, with an odd pang of sadness, that it was the kettle I’d heard whistling, not a train. My mother and father were gone again, swallowed by the gray mist.

The monstrumologist placed me on the floor before the tub and then sat behind me, pressing his body close. He reached around and grasped my arms firmly, just below the elbows.

“This is going to burn, Will Henry.”

He leaned forward, forcing me toward the steaming surface, and then plunged my bloody hands into the solution, a mixture of hot water and carbolic acid.

I found my voice then.

I screamed; I kicked; I thrashed; I pushed back hard against him, but the monstrumologist did not yield. Through my tears I saw the crimson fog of Kendall’s blood violate the clear solution, spreading out in serpentine tendrils, until I could no longer see my hands.

The doctor pressed his lips against my ear and whispered fiercely, “Would you live? Then hold! Hold!”

Black stars bloomed in my vision, went supernovae, flickered, and died. When I could bear it no longer, at the precise moment when I teetered upon the edge of unconsciousness, the monstrumologist pulled out my hands. The skin had turned a bright, sunburned red. He held them up, turning them this way and that, and then his body stiffened against mine. He gasped.

“Will Henry, what is this?”

He pointed at a small abrasion on the middle knuckle of my left index finger. Fresh blood welled in its center. When I didn’t answer immediately, he gave me a little shake.

“What is this? Did he bite you? Is it a scratch? Will Henry!”

“I—I don’t know! I fell down the stairs.… I don’t think he did.”

“Think, Will Henry! Think!”

“I don’t know, Dr. Warthrop!”

He stood up, and I fell backward, too weak to rise, too frightened to say any more. I looked into his face and saw a man squeezed tight in the crushing embrace of indecision, caught between two unacceptable courses.

“I don’t know enough. God forgive me, I don’t know enough!”

He seemed so large standing over me, a colossus, one of the Nephilim, the race of giants who bestrode the world when the world was young. His eyes darted about the room, as if he were looking for an answer to his impossible dilemma, as if somewhere in the kitchen would be the sign that would show him the way.

Then the monstrumologist became very still. His restless eyes came to rest upon my upturned face.

“No,” he said softly. “Not God.”

He stepped away quickly, and before I could crane my neck around to see where he had gone, he returned, carrying the butcher knife.

He leaned over, reached out, grabbed my left wrist, yanked me from the floor, dragged me to the kitchen table, slapped my hand upon it, shouted, “Spread your fingers!” pressed his left hand hard over the top of mine, brought high the knife, and slammed it down.

Would you live?

The smell of lilacs. The sound of water dripping in a basin. The touch of a warm, wet cloth.

And a shadow. A presence. A shade beyond my shaded eyes.

Would you live?

I float against the ceiling. Below me is my body. I see it clearly, and sitting next to the bed, the monstrumolost, wringing out the washcloth.

Then he covers me. I cannot see his face. He is looking at my other face, my mortal face, the one belonging to the boy in the bed.

He sits back down. I can see his face now. I want to say something to him. I want to answer his question.

He rubs his eyes. He runs his long fingers through his hair. He bends forward, rests his elbows on his knees, and covers his face with his hands. He remains like this but for a moment, and then he is on his feet, pacing to the end of the bed and back again. The lamp flings his shadow upon the floor, and the shadow crawls up the wall as he approaches and then trails behind him as he turns.

He collapses into the chair, and I watch him reach out and lay his hand upon my forehead. The gesture seems absentminded, as if touching me might help him to think.

Above, I watch him touch me. Below, I feel it.

The light burrows deep into my eyes, brighter than a thousand galaxies. Behind the light his eyes, darker than the deepest pit.

His fingers wrapped around my wrist. The press of the cold stethoscope against my chest. My blood flowing into chambers of glass.

And the light digging into my eyes.

What did you bring me, Father?

I brought you a seed.

A seed?

Yes, a golden seed from the Isle of Bliss, and if you plant it and give it water, it will grow into a golden tree that bears lollipops.

Lollipops!

Yes! Golden lollipops! And peppermints and horehound drops and lemon drops. Why are you laughing? Plant it; you’ll see.

I see him standing in the doorway. He has something in his hand.

Ropes.

He drops the ropes into the chair. Reaches into his pocket.

Revolver.

He sets the gun on the table by the chair. Do I see his hand shaking?

Gently he fishes out my arm from beneath the covers, picks up a length of rope—there are three—and ties a knot around my wrist.

I float above him. I cannot see his face. He is looking down at the face of the boy.

He whirls away from the bed; the free end of the rope tumbles over the edge.

Then he turns back, sweeps the ropes lying in the chair onto the floor, and sits down. For a long moment he does not move.

And then the monstrumologist takes the other end of the rope, ties it to his wrist, leans back in the chair, and closes his eyes to sleep.

Where did you go this time, Father?

I’ve told you, Willy. The Isle of Bliss.

Where is the Isle of Bliss?

Well, first you must find a boat. And not just any boat will do. You must find the fastest boat in the world; that is, a boat with a thousand sails, and when you’ve sailed for a thousand days, you will see something that the world hasn’t seen in a thousand years. You’ll swear the sun has fallen into the sea, for every tree on that island is a golden tree, and every leaf a golden leaf, and the leaves shine with a radiance all their own, so even in the darkest night the island seems to burn like a lighthouse beacon.

“I have been thinking about your father for some reason,” the monstrumologist said to the boy. “He saved my life once. I don’t think I ever told you.”

The room seemed so empty; I had gone to a place he could not go. It didn’t matter really whether I could hear him. His words were not meant entirely for me.

“Arabia, the winter of ’73—or it may have been ’74; I can’t recall now. Late one night our camp was ambushed by a hostile and extremely violent pack of predators—by that I mean Homo sapiens. Bandits. Lost three of our porters—and our guide, a very pleasant bedouin by the name of Hilal. I felt badly about Hilal. He thought the world of me. Even tried to give me one of his daughters—either in marriage or as a slave, I was never quite sure because I was never completely comfortable in the language. At any rate, one moment he was talking to me, smiling, laughing—he was very jolly. Few nomads are glum, Will Henry; if you think about it, you will understand why. And the next moment his head was hacked clean off his shoulders.…

“Afterward I told his widow, ‘Your husband is dead, but at least he died laughing.’ I think she took some comfort in that. It is the second-best way to die, Will Henry.” He did not say what the best way was.

“At any rate, your father pulled me from harm’s way. I would have stood my ground, if only to avenge Hilal’s death, but I’d been badly wounded in the thigh and was losing a great deal of blood. James threw me over the saddle of his pony and rode all night to the nearest village. Rode that horse until it collapsed, and then carried me the rest of the way.”

I want to go, Father. Will you take me there, to the Isle of Bliss?

It’s a very, very long way from here, Will.

I don’t care. We’ll find a ship of a thousand sails to carry us there.

Oh, now, those ships are very difficult to come by.

You found one.

Yes, I did. I did find that ship.

“I was laid up for two weeks—the wound had become infected—slipping in and out of delirium, and all the while your father was by my side. At one point, though, I saw Hilal sitting besidee, dimly, as if through a veil or mist, and I knew to the marrow of my bones that I had come to the lip of the stage, as it were. I was not surprised to see him sitting there, and I was not in the least afraid. I was actually happy to see him. He asked me what I wanted. ‘What do you want, Sheikh Pellinore Warthrop? Ask and it will be done.’

“And of all the things I might have asked, I asked him to tell me a joke. And he did, and the devil of it is, I can’t recall it now. It still bothers me. It was a very funny joke. My difficulty is that I have no memory for jokes. My mind does not tend in that direction.”

He was playing with the knot around his wrist. His wan smile faded, and suddenly he was angry—intensely angry.

“It is… unacceptable. Intolerable. I will not tolerate it, do you understand? You are forbidden to die. You did not will your parents’ death; you did not ask to come here—it is not your debt; you should not have to pay.”

Here, here, now. Do not cry. You’re still very young. You’ll have years and years to find it. Until then I shall be the ship of a thousand sails. Climb aboard me back, me matey, and I shall bear thee to that fabled isle!

“I will not suffer you to die,” he said fiercely. “Your father died because of me, and I cannot afford your death too. The debt will crush me. If you go down, Will Henry, you will drag me down with you.” Tugging on the rope.

I see it, Father! The Isle of Bliss. It burns like the sun in the black water.

“Enough!” he cried. “I forbid you to leave me. Now snap to, get up, stop this foolishness. I have saved you. So snap to, you stupid, stupid boy.”

He brought back the hand connected to mine and slapped me hard across the cheek.

“Snap to, Will Henry!” Smack!“Snap to, Will Henry!” Smack!“Snap to, Will Henry!” Smack, smack, smack!

“Would you live?” he shouted. “Then, choose to live. Choose to live!”

Gasping, he fell back toward the chair; the rope connecting us yanked on his arm. Roaring his frustration, he pulled his wrist free of the knot and flung the rope onto my body.

He was spent. All fear, all anger, all guilt, all shame, all pride—gone. He felt nothing; he was empty. Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.

I say this, because next the monstrumologist said this:

“Please, do not leave me, Will Henry. I would not survive it. You were nearly right. What Mr. Kendall was, I am always on the brink of becoming. And you—I do not pretend to understand how or even why— but you pull me back from the precipice. You are the one.… You are the one thing that keeps me human.”

You are the one thing that keeps me human.

In the months that followed—well, years to be completely accurate—the monstrumologist never wavered in his disavowal of saying those words. I must have been delirious; he never said anything like it; or, my favorite, he said something entirely different and I misheard him. This was more like the Pellinore Warthrop I had come to know, and somehow I preferred the familiar version. It was predictable and therefore comforting. My mother, as devout as any New England woman of Puritan stock, loved to speak of the days “when the lion lies down with the lamb.” Though I understand the theology behind it, the image does not bring me peace; it makes me feel sorry for the lion. It strips him of his essence, the fundamental part of his being. A lion that doesn’t behave as a lion is not a lion. It isn’t even the lion’s opposite. It’s a mockery of a lion.

And Pellinore Warthrop, like that lion—or its Creator!—is not mocked.

“I do not deny affirming what I have often said, Will Henry, and that is that, in general, your services have proven more indispensable than not. I have never pretended otherwise. I believe in acknowledging debts where debts are owed. One must take care, however, not to extrapolate anything… well, excessive from it, for lack of a better word.”

And then he would brusquely change the subject.

I forbid you to leave me.

It seemed quite sudden to me, my acquiescence to his demand. One moment I could see myself and see him and see the room—and more, much more. I saw… everything. I saw our house on Harrington Lane; I saw our town of New Jerusalem; I saw New England. I saw oceans and continents and the earth spinning round the sun. I saw the moons of Jupiter and the Milky Way and the unfathomable depths of space. I saw the entire universe. I held it in the palm of my hand.

And the next moment I was in the bed, my head splitting, my left hand throbbing. And Warthrop was sound asleep in the chair beside me. I cleared my throat; my mouth was desert-dry.

He came awake at once, a wild look in his eyes, as if he were seeing a ghost.

“Will Henry?” he croaked.

“I’m thirsty,” I said.

He said nothing at first. He continued to stare until his stare unnerved me.

“Well, then, Will Henry, I shall fetch you a drink of water.”

After I drank some water and sipped some lukewarm broth, he placed the tray on the bedside table (the gun was gone, as were the ropes) and said he needed to change the dressing on my injury.

“You don’t have to look—unless you’d like to. It’s a clean cut, a really extraordinary amputation considering the circumstances.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Dr. Warthrop…#8221;

“Of course. You’ll be happy to know there’s no sign of infection. The operation was not performed under the most sanitary of conditions, as you know. I expect a full recovery.”

“It doesn’t feel like it’s gone.”

“That’s common.”

“What’s common?”

“Hmmm.” Examining his handiwork. “Yes, it’s healing up quite nicely. We are extremely fortunate it is your left index finger, Will Henry.”

“We are?”

“You’re right-handed, are you not?”

“Yes, sir. I suppose that is fortunate.”

“Well, I’m not saying you should feel grateful.”

“But I do feel grateful, Dr. Warthrop. You saved my life.”

He finished putting on the fresh bandage in silence. He seemed troubled by the remark. Then he said, “I would like to think so. The plain truth is that it may have been for nothing. You don’t know if Mr. Kendall was the author of your injury, and I do not know what, if anything, might have happened if he were. When faced with the unknown, it’s best to take the most conservative approach. That’s all well and good as theories go, but the end result is that I took a butcher knife and chopped off your finger.”

He gave my knee an awkward pat and stood up, wincing, pressing his hands into the small of his back.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must have a bath and a change of clothes. Don’t try to get up yet. Use the bedpan if you need to void your bladder or relieve your bowels. What are you smiling about?” he asked crossly. “Did you think I would allow you to wallow in your own excrement?”

“No, sir.”

“I fail to see what is humorous about a bedpan.”

“Nothing, sir. It’s the idea of you emptying one.”

He stiffened and said with great dignity, “I am a natural scientist. We are accustomed to dealing with shit.”

He returned at the setting of the sun, asked how I was faring, and informed me it would not be a bad thing if I tried to get out of bed.

“You will be dizzy and sore, but the sooner you become ambulatory the better. We’ve much to do before we leave for New York.”

“What is there to do, Dr. Warthrop?” I assumed he meant the packing, a chore that always fell to me.

“I would have done it already, but I didn’t want to leave… I thought it best, when you regained consciousness… Well, I could not be two places at once,” he finished impatiently.

I was, I nearly told him. I bit back the words. He would scoff at the notion of my disembodied spirit observing him from the ceiling.

“You would have done what already?”

“Mr. Kendall, Will Henry. We must…” He paused as if searching for the right word. “Resolve this issue of Mr. Kendall.”

We must resolve this issue of Mr. Kendall.

By this the monstrumologist did not mean notifying the family of his demise or making arrangements for returning the body to its native England for burial.

I don’t know why I would think for an instant that it did. How would one go about explaining to his loved ones—or to the British authorities, for that matter—a badly decomposed corpse with a fresh gunshot wound to the head? There was also the sticky matter of the potential virulence of the contagion. As Warthrop put it, “It could be the spark that lights a conflagration that would make the plague seem like a campfire in comparison.”

No, we spent the entirety of that first evening of my recovery in the basement laboratory, dismembering Wymond Kendall.

The monstrumologist wanted samples of every major organ, including the brain (he was very excited to have a look at Mr. Kendall’s brain), which he removed in toto after sawing off the top of his head. I was forced to hold it—an awkward proposition given the thick bandages on my left hand—while the doctor severed the medulla. I had never held a human brain before. Its delicacy surprised me; I thought it would be much heavier.

“The average human brain weighs approximately three pounds, Will Henry,” the doctor said in response to my startled expression. “Compare that to the total weight of our skin, around six pounds, and you have a fact that is as compelling as it is unnerving.”

He took the three-pound seat of Kendall’s consciousness from me and said, “Observe the frontal lobe, Will Henry. The sulci—these deep crevices you see covering the rest of the brain—have all disappeared. The thinking part of his brain is as smooth as a billiard ball.”

I asked him what that meant.

“Well, we may assume it is not a congenital defect, though he did not strike me as all that bright—more gyri than sulci—Sorry, a bit of anatomical tomfoolery there. We may assume it is a manifestation of the toxin. This aligns perfectly with the literature, which claims the victim, in the final stages, becomes little more than a beast, incapable of reason but fully capable of a murderous, cannibalistic rage. Certain indigenous tribes of the Lakshadweep Islands report whole villages wiped out by a single exposure to the pwdre ser, until the last man standing literally eats himself to death.”

The doctor laughed dryly, absently caressing the smooth tissue of Kendall’s brain, and added, “I mean he eats himself to death. When everyone else is dead or has run off, he turns upon himself and feeds from his own body, until he has either bled to death or contracted an infection. Well, you’ve seen the contents of Mr. Kendall’s stomach; I don’t believe he swallowed his tongue by accident.”

He directed me to fill a large specimen jar with formaldehyde, into which he then carefully lowered the brain. As I was heaving the jar onto the shf, my eye was drawn to a nearby container, one I had not seen before. It took a moment for me to recognize what floated inside the amber fluid.

“Is that…”

“It is,” he answered.

“You kept it?”

“Well, I didn’t want to just throw it out with the trash.”

“But why did you—What are you going to do with it?”

“I thought I’d rip a page from Mrs. Shelley’s book and construct another boy, one who won’t pester me with questions, who refrains from getting seriously injured at the most inopportune time, and who does not see it as his mission in life to judge my every decision as if appointed by God to be my conscience.” His attendant smile was quick and humorless. “It’s an important piece of evidence. Forgive me. I thought that would go without saying. When I have the time—which at the moment I most certainly do not—I’ll perform a thorough analysis to determine whether you were actually infected.”

I stared at my finger floating in the fluid for a long moment. It is exceedingly odd to see a piece of yourself apart from yourself.

“If I wasn’t, I don’t want to know,” I said.

He started to say something, and then stopped himself. He nodded curtly. “I understand.”

The monstrumologist next opened up Mr. Kendall’s torso to remove the major organs. He found numerous sacklike growths—“omental cystic lesions,” he called them—lining the interior of the stomach. He gently pressed into one with the tip of his scalpel, and it popped open with a barely audible pompf!, spilling a clear, thick fluid with the consistency of mucus.

After the organs had been preserved and properly labeled, it was time to address, in Warthrop’s words, “the final disposition.”

“The bone saw, please, Will Henry. No, the large one there.”

He began by removing Mr. Kendall’s hollowed-out head. “The ground is much too hard for us to bury the body,” he said as he sawed through the neck. “And I can’t afford to wait until the spring thaw. We’ll have to burn it, Will Henry.”

“What if someone comes looking for him?”

“Who? He fled quickly, in a state of extreme fear. Perhaps he told no one. But let’s assume that he did. What do they know? They know he was coming; he did not have the opportunity or the means to inform them what happened once he arrived. Should the authorities ask questions, I can always say I never met the man, that he may have set out to find me but in the end failed in his quest.”

He dropped the severed head unceremoniously into the empty washtub beside the necropsy table, the same wash-tub into which he had plunged my bloody hands. The head landed with a frightening clang and rolled to one side, the right eye open (the left had been removed by the monstrumologist for study) and seeming to stare directly at me.

“There one bright spot in this distasteful turn of events,” the doctor opined as he separated Mr. Kendall’s right leg from his torso. “We have removed all doubt as to the authenticity of Dr. Kearns’s ‘present.’ We have in our possession the second greatest prize in monstrumology, Will Henry.”

“What is the first greatest?” I asked.

“The ‘first greatest’? Really, Will Henry.”

“The thing that made it?” I guessed. “The… magnificum?”

“Very good! Typhoeus magnificum, named for the father of all monsters—also called the Unseen One.”

“Why is it called that?”

He looked up from his work and stared at me as if all my sulci had given way to gyri.

“It is called the Unseen One, Will Henry,” he said slowly and carefully, “because it has never been seen.

“Practically everything about it is a mystery,” he told me. He was cutting through the glenohumeral joint that connected Mr. Kendall’s humerus to his scapula. My job for this portion of the “disposition” was literally to hold the corpse’s hand, to keep the arm perpendicular to the legless torso. “From class to species, from mating habits to habitat, from life cycle to precise form. We aren’t even sure if it’s a predator. The stories—and they are nothing more than that, folktales passed on from generation to generation—say it is unequivocally predacious, but they are just that—stories and folktales, not credible observation. The only real physical evidence we have of the magnificum are the nidi, its nests, and pwdre ser, which first were thought to be its droppings and are now considered, as I told Mr. Kendall here”—he nodded to the washtub by his feet—“to be part of the digestive system, its saliva or venom, produced in its mouth or some other glandular organ.” He pulled the blade free and said, “There, Will Henry. Give his arm a tug and see if it comes free. Oh, good! Give Master Henry a hand!”

He laughed. I did not. His macabre attempts at humor were getting on my nerves.

“Well, don’t just stand there with it. Put it in the tub with the rest. We are running out of time. I think I should cut the torso in half, at the seventh thoracic vertebra. What do you think?”

I confessed I did not have an opinion; I was only thirteen, and this was my very first dismemberment.

The monstrumologist nodded. “That is true.”

We divided Mr. Kendall’s remains, separating the longer pieces (like his thighs) from the smaller (his hands), the former to be burned in the alley, the latter in the library fireplace.

“What about the bones?” I asked. “What will we do with them?”

“Keep them, of course. I’d like to reconstruct the skeleton, once I have a little time. Ideally we should use acid, but I haven’t enough for the jobit’s not as quick as fire. Time is of the essence now, Will Henry, if we have any hope of tracking down the magnificum.”

We were standing in the alley by the ash barrel, our feet buried in four inches of freshly fallen snow. The brunt of the storm had passed, but a few fat flakes spun down lazily, glowing in the amber light of the streetlamp, like the golden leaves of my father’s island, the one that he had promised to show me, the one he never did.

Warthrop doused the remains in kerosene. He struck the match and held it until the flame scorched his fingers, then dropped it to the ground.

“Well, I suppose something should be said. A few appropriate words. I know some might say that Wymond Kendall reaped what he sowed, that curiosity killed the cat, that he should have minded his own business and kept his nose out of monstrumology’s business. And there would be an equal number who could justly say he is an innocent victim of a vicious madman, the tragic consequence of man’s inhumanity. What do you say, Will Henry?”

“No one deserves that,” I answered.

“Ah. I think you’ve touched on the heart of the matter, Will Henry. Half the world prays they will be given what they deserve, and the other half that they will not!” He looked down at the tangled jumble of parts, a nidus not yet made.… That would be one way to look at it.

“I did not know you, Wymond Kendall,” said the monstrumologist to the dismantled man stuffed into the ash barrel. “I do not know if your life was happy or sad, if you ever loved anyone more than yourself, if you enjoyed the theater or books or were interested in politics. I do not know if you were querulous or kind, vindictive or forgiving, pious or profane. I know next to nothing about you, and I am the one who has held your brain in the palm of his hand. I hope, before your light went out, you made peace with your past, that you forgave those who trespassed against you, and that, more important by far, you forgave yourself.”

He struck a second match and tossed it into the barrel. The flames leapt upward, smoky and dark-edged, and there was intense heat and the acrid smell of burning hair and the sizzle of water boiling out of flesh and the spinning of golden snow. Without thinking, the monstrumologist and I shuffled closer to the barrel, for the night was very cold, and the fire was very warm.

We departed the next morning for New York. I fell asleep on the train, waking upon our arrival at Grand Central Depot with my head in the crook of the doctor’s arm, dizzy and disoriented and feeling sick to my stomach. I’d had a horrible dream in which the monstrumologist had been demonstrating to a group of school children the proper method of removing a brain from a human body—my body.

We dropped our luggage at the Plaza Hotel (save for the doctor’s black valise, into which Warthrop had packed, with exquisite care, the nidus ex magnificum) and left immediately for the Society’s headquarters. As our hansom rattled south along Broadway, the monstrumologist cradled the valise in his lap like a anxious mother with her newborn child. He chided our driver over the slightest delay and eyed every passerby, cart, and carriage suspiciously, as if they were bandits intent on separating him from his precious cargo.

“I am loath to part with it, Will Henry,” he confessed to me. “There is only one other of its kind in the world—the Lakshadweep nidus, named after the place of its discovery in 1851, the Lakshadweep Islands off the Indian coast. If something should happen to it…” He shuddered. “Tragic. It must be safeguarded at all costs, and if I cannot trust him, then no one can be trusted.”

“Dr. von Helrung?” I guessed.

He shook his head. “Professor Ainesworth.”

He was very old, the curator of the Monstrumarium, very cross most of the time, and very hard of hearing. He was also quite vain, a fault that prohibited him from admitting to his near-deafness, which in turn produced his foul temper. Constant disagreement over what was said rendered the old man altogether disagreeable. He had a habit of shaking the head of his cane (fashioned from the bleached skull of a long-extinct creature, a noisome little beast called an Ocelli carpendi that he had nicknamed Oedipus) in the face of any who dared raise their voice to him. Since raising one’s voice was the only way to talk to him, there was not a single monstrumologist—Warthrop included—who had not been the recipient of what one wit had dubbed “the full Adolphus.” The heavy chin thrusts forward; the bushy white eyebrows meet over the bridge of the bulbous, slightly pink, pockmarked nose; the muttonchops bristle and contort in cottony confusion, as a cornered cat’s fur; and then up comes the gnarled fist clutching the walnut cane, at the end of which, waving an inch from your nose, the carpendi’s two-inch fangs and the sightless glare of its oversize ocular cavities.

We found Professor Ainesworth in his musty basement office, perched upon a tall stool behind the massive desk upon which Everests of paper rose halfway to the ceiling. This after we negotiated the serpentine path through books, boxes, and crates—shipments waiting to be catalogued and stocked in the Society’s house of curiosities on the corner of Twenty-second Street and Broadway. On the wall behind the irascible old man hung the Society’s coat of arms, inscribed with the motto Nil timendum est—“fear nothing.”

“There are no children allowed within the Monstrumarium!” he shouted at my master without preamble.

“But this is Will Henry, Adolphus,” replied Warthrop in a loud but respectful tone. “You remember Will Henry.”

“Impossible!” shouted Adolphus. “You can’t be a member until you’re eighteen. I know that much, Pellinore Warthrop!”

“He is my assistant,” protested the monstrumologist.

“You watch your language with me, Doctor! He’ll have to leave immediately.” He shook the head of his cane at me. “Immediately!”

Warthrop placed a hand on my shoulder and said in a voice only slightly softer than a shout, “Iehind the Will Henry, Adolphus! You remember—last November. You saved his life!”

“Oh, I remember very well!” cried the old Welshman. “He’s the reason we have the rule!” He wagged a gnarled finger at my face. “Poking around in places where children shouldn’t poke, weren’t you, little man?”

The doctor’s fingers squeezed the back of my neck, and I, as if his puppet, nodded quickly in response.

“I will keep him under the strictest supervision,” promised the doctor. “He shan’t stray an inch from my sight.”

Before Professor Ainesworth could protest further, Warthrop placed the black valise on the desk. Adolphus grunted, popped the clasps, pried open the top, and peered inside.

“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well, well!”

“Yes, Adolphus” returned the doctor. “Nidus ex—”

“Oh-ho, do you really think so, Dr. Warthrop?” interrupted the curator, clicking his teeth. He shoved his gnarled hands into a pair of gloves and reached inside the bag. The doctor stiffened reflexively, perhaps apprehensive that the arthritic hands might damage his precious cargo.

Adolphus pushed the empty bag aside with his forearm and gingerly lowered the gruesome nest onto the desktop. He produced a large magnifying glass from his coat pocket and proceeded to inspect the thing up close.

“I have already thoroughly examined the specimen for—,” began the doctor, before Ainesworth cut him off.

“Have you now! Hmmmm. Yes. Have you? Hmmmmmmmm.”

His eye, magnified comically large by the glass, roamed over the specimen. His false teeth clicked—a nervous habit. Adolphus was quite proud of his dentures and somewhat emotionally—as well as biologically—attached to them. They’d been fashioned from the teeth of his son, Alfred Ainesworth, who had been a colonel in the Union army. He’d fallen in the battle of Antietam, and his teeth had been rescued after his death and sent to Adolphus, who thenceforward proudly—and literally—sported a hero’s smile.

“Of course, I would not have brought it to you for safekeeping were I not unequivocally certain of its authenticity,” said the monstrumologist. “There is no one else in whom I place more trust or hold in higher admir—”

“Please, please, Dr. Warthrop. Your incessant chattering is giving me a headache.”

I cringed, waiting for the explosion. But none came. Beside me Warthrop was smiling as benignly as Buddha, completely unfazed. No one in my experience had ever talked to my master with such impertinence, with such condescension and disdain—in short, the way he usually spoke to me. Many times I had witnessed eruptions that would rival Krakatoa in their ferocity over the smallest slight, the most trivial of untoward looks, so I expected “the full Warthrop,” as it were.

The curator pinched a bit of the sticky resin between his gloved thumb and forefinger and tugged it free. He rolled it into a tiny ball and snifft, bringing it dangerously close to the end of his nose.

“Not bad,” he opined. “Not bad—very close. More—what is the word?—pungent than the Lakshadweep nidus, but that is to be expected.… But what is this? There are fingerprints here!” He looked across the desk at Warthrop. “Someone has touched it with his bare hands!” Then his gaze shifted to the bandaging on my left hand. “Well, of course! I might have guessed.”

“I didn’t touch it,” I protested.

“Then, what happened to your finger?” He turned to the monstrumologist. “I am surprised and disappointed, Dr. Warthrop. Of all who desire to apprentice under you, and I know there are many, you choose a liar and a sneak.”

“I did not choose him,” the doctor replied, brutally honest as always.

“You should send him away to an orphanage. He’s no good to you or himself. He’ll get both of you killed one day.”

“I shall take my chances,” Warthrop returned with a wan smile. He nodded to the nidus between them; it was not an easy task, keeping Professor Ainesworth on track. “You’ll note it is nearly identical in every aspect—well, except, perhaps, the smell, which of course I had no means to compare to the Lakshadweep nidus.”

“Do you know he tried to bribe me!” the old man barked suddenly with a shake of his cane.

Startled, the monstrumologist asked, “Who? Who tried to—”

“Mr. P. T. Barnum! That old blackguard offered me seventeen thousand dollars for it—just to borrow it for six months, so he could put it on display right alongside Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid!”

“The Lakshadweep nidus?”

“No, Warthrop, my toenail clippings! Gah! You were fairly clever once. What in heaven’s name happened to you?” Click, click, click went the teeth of his son. “I refused, of course. Denied I even knew what he was talking about. How he heard about it, now that’s a mystery. He used to chum around with that unsavory Russian monstrumologist. What was his name?”

“Sidorov,” said my master. Apparently he needed to hear only the words “unsavory” and “Russian” to know the answer.

“Shish kebob? No, no—”

“Sidorov!” shouted Warthrop, his patience at last wearing thin.

“Sidorov! That’s the one. Thick as thieves, those two, and they were, too—thieves, I mean. I suspect it was Sidorov who told him about the nidus. It was my idea, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Professor. Your idea?”

“To boot him! Kick him out upis rapacious two-faced arse!”

“Whose two-faced arse? Barnum’s?”

“Sidorov’s! ‘He’s a schemer,’ I told von Helrung. ‘Up to no good. Expel him! Strip him of his credentials!’ I had it on good authority Sidorov was an agent of Okhranka.” Adolphus looked at me, muttonchops aquiver. “The czar’s secret police. I’ll wager you didn’t know that, which is why I say monstrumology is no business for children! Really, Warthrop, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you’re lonely for companionship, why don’t you just get a dog? At any rate, you can hardly blame him.”

“Blame… Will Henry?”

“The czar! If I were him, I would want a monstrumologist in my secret police! Anyway, that’s how Barnum got wind of it, is my guess. Whatever happened to him, do you know?”

“Barnum?”

“Sidorov!”

“Back in Saint Petersburg, the last I heard,” said the doctor, and then hurried on. “Professor Ainesworth, I promise you, I am no friend to Mr. P. T. Barnum or Anton Sidorov or the czar. I’ve come here today—”

“Without an appointment!”

“Without an appointment—”

“And unannounced!”

“And unannounced, yes… in order to entrust to your care this rare and altogether incredible addition to our—your— collection of extraordinary finds and irreplaceable oddities. It would, in short, be an honor if you would secure it in the Locked Room with its cousin, the Lakshadweep nidus, which you have so admirably protected over the years from the likes of Barnum and Sidorov and the treacherous Russian secret police.”

Old Adolphus’s eyes narrowed. His teeth clicked. He pursed his lips and stroked his muttonchops.

“Are you attempting to flatter me, Dr. Warthrop?”

“Shamelessly, but with all sincerity, Professor Ainesworth.”

Down the narrow poorly lit halls of the Monstrumarium we followed him, past darkened chambers wherein thousands of samples and specimens, artifacts and esoterica, relating to the field of monstrumology were housed. The Monstrumarium was the premier research facility of its kind in the world, a treasure trove of rare curiosities from every continent—the kind of rare curiosities that would make a proper lady blush and a grown man faint. The facility’s name literally meant the “house of monsters,” and that it was. Within the Monstrumarium were enough grotesqueries to fill fifty of P. T. Barnum’s sideshow tents—things that did not seem possible—or seemed possible only in our worst nightmares. Stored within those musty rooms were the things your parents told you were not real, floating in jars of formaldehyde or mummified behind thick glass, dismembered in drawers, disembowed, flayed open, hanging from hooks, or stuffed like trophies borne back from a safari in hell.

In all the Monstrumarium there was but one locked room. It had no name; most monstrumologists simply referred to it as “the Locked Room.” An irreverent wag had christened it the Kodesh Hakodashim (“Holy of Holies”), for here was kept that portion of the collection deemed too precious—or too dangerous—to be left unsecured. There were some things—well, as you already know, there still are things—that must have escaped our benevolent Creator’s notice in his haste to make the world in only six days. All other explanations are simply unthinkable.

Admittance to the Locked Room was restricted to only two classes of organisms—those that posed the highest risk to human life and those fools who would pursue them.

I feel shame for saying that; I should not call the doctor a fool. Without question he was the most intelligent man I have ever met, and there are many descendants of those whose lives he saved who would argue that his life’s work was considerably less than foolish. But wisdom and sacrifice were never enough for the monstrumologist. He wanted recognition, to be held in the highest esteem by his fellow man (it was the only kind of immortality in which he could bring himself to believe), but, tragically, he had chosen the wrong profession. There are those who labor in darkness that the rest of us might live in the light.

“He doesn’t like you very much,” I said to the monstrumolo-gist in the cab afterward.

“Adolphus? Oh, no. He dislikes human beings as a general principle; he expects to be disappointed by them. Not an unwise position to take, Will Henry.”

“Is that why he’s so mean?”

“Adolphus isn’t mean, Will Henry. Adolphus merely speaks plainly. The old should speak plainly; it is their prerogative.”

Our knock upon the door of the von Helrung brownstone on Fifth Avenue was answered by the great man himself, who threw his short, thick arms around my master without preamble. The snow flitted and fussed about them with confounding complexity, a fitting metaphor for their complicated relationship.

Von Helrung was more than Pellinore Warthrop’s former teacher in the dark arts of monstrumology; he was friend, surrogate father, and sometimes rival. Three months before, the conflict between them over the future of monstrumology had nearly torn their friendship asunder. If von Helrung had been a less forgiving man, the two might never have spoken again, but the master loved his pupil as a father his son. I will not say Warthrop loved him—that is a very insubstantial limb upon which to venture, indeed!—but he was fond of von Helrung, and my master had lost so much already. Discounting me (and I think the doctor probably would have), the old monstrumologist was the only friend Warthrop had left.

“Pellinore, mein Freund, how wonderful to see you again! And here is William, too—dear, brave Will Henry!” He pulled me into his chest and proceeded to crush the air from my lungs. Leaning over, he whispered into my ear, “Every day I pray for you, and God in his mercy must hear. But what is this?” He had noticed my bandaged handp>

“An accident,” Warthrop said tersely.

“Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife.”

Von Helrung’s brow knotted up in confusion. “By accident?”

“No,” I answered. “That part was on purpose.”

The old man turned to my master, who shook his head impatiently and said, “May we go inside, von Helrung? We are quite cold and careworn, and I’d rather not talk about such things on your front stoop.”

Von Helrung ushered us into the well-appointed parlor, marvelously cluttered in the Victorian style, cupboards and cabinets groaning with oddities and knickknacks, overstuffed chairs and settees and sofas, and a mantel the surface of which could not be seen for all the bric-a-brac. The doctor’s tea was ready, and for me von Helrung had thoughtfully arranged for a glass of Mr. Pemberton’s delightful concoction, that remarkable confection of fizzy delight called Coca-Cola. I particularly enjoyed the first sip, that tickling sensation upon the tip of my nose.

Von Helrung settled into his wingback chair, clipped off the end of a Havana cigar, and rolled it back and forth over his wide tongue.

“I shall guess the circumstances of young Will’s ‘accident.’” His expression was stern; he clearly was not pleased with my master for allowing such a calamity to happen. His bright blue eyes shone beneath his bushy white eyebrows. “The child was allowed to handle your special delivery from Dr. John Kearns.”

“Not precisely,” replied the doctor. “The child was ‘handled’ by the one who handled it.”

He then proceeded with the story from the beginning, the midnight call of Wymond Kendall and the astonishing gift he’d borne from England. Von Helrung did not interrupt him, though occasionally he injected an ach! or winced in revulsion or grew misty-eyed with wonder and pity.

“Pwdre ser— the rot of stars!” he said softly at the conclusion of the doctor’s tale. “So the stories are true. I never quite believed them, for I did not wish to believe them. That the Creator of all things could create such a thing! Is it not unbearable, Pellinore, even for us, who devote our lives to this work, the import of its existence? What kind of God is this? Is he mad or is he malicious?”

“I like to refrain from burdening myself with questions that cannot be answered, Meister Abram. Perhaps he is neither mad nor malicious but adores all his creatures equally—or is indifferent to all equally.”

“And you do not find either possibility appalling?”

“They are only appalling in the context of human arrogance. Now you are going to argue that we were given dominion over the earth and all its creatures, as if that sets us apart from the very creation to which we belong. Tell that to Wymond Kendall!”

The monstrumologist returned to the reason for our visit. He found philosophical discussions like this distasteful—not precisely beneath him, but useless in the sense that the unanswerable was a waste of his time.

“What have you learned about Jack Kearns?” he asked.

Von Helrung shook his head. “Vanished, Pellinore. His flat abandoned, his offices at the hospital cleaned out. He is gone, and no one seems to know where he might have fled.”

Now Warthrop was the one shaking his head. “Impossible. He must have told someone.”

“My sources assure me he did not. The hospital staff, his former patients, neighbors—they all know nothing. Or I should say, all they can say is that one day Herr Kearns was there; the next he was not. The only person he seems to have confided in is the man you immolated in your fireplace.”

“Kearns didn’t tell Kendall where he had obtained the nidus; I asked.”

“And I believe him. He would not have told poor Mr. Kendall.”

The doctor nodded. “That is the true prize. More valuable than the nidus is where it came from. How did he get hold of it? Did someone give it to him, and if so, who? And why?”

The ember of the old monstrumologist’s cigar had perished. He placed the expired stogie on the ashtray beside him and spoke somberly to my master. “There is something rotten here, mein Freund. Kearns is no monstrumologist—he would have no scientific interest in nidus ex magnificum— but he is also no fool. He must know how valuable it is.”

Warthrop nodded again. His head bobbed in counterpoint with his foot tapping nervously upon the carpet. “There is more than one bounty being offered for a nidus,” said the doctor. “I’ve heard that the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid has a standing offer of twenty thousand ducats.”

Unable to contain his ardor, the younger monstrumolo-gist leapt to his feet and commenced to pace.

“Think of it, von Helrung. The first credible nidus to be found in a generation! And in pristine condition—no more than a few months old, I would guess. Do you understand what this means? We are close—closer than we have ever been.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Typhoeus magnificum, Meister Abram—the Unseen One—the ultimate prize—the Holy Grail of monstrumology! And this time it may be within my grasp—”

“Your grasp?” interrupted von Helrung softly.

“Our grasp. I meant ours, of course.”

Von Helrung nodded slowly, and I noted a sorrowful look in his eyes when he spoke.

“Many are called, dear Pellinore, but few are chosen. How many have been lost searching for our version of the Questing Beast? Do you know?”

My master waved the questions away impatiently. Von Helrung pressed on. “And how many more come bac in humiliation and defeat, reputations ruined, their careers in ashes?”

“I hardly see what that matters,” answered the doctor angrily. “But yes, I do happen to know. Six, counting Lebroque.”

“Ah, Lebroque. I forgot about him, armes Schwein. And who was that talkative little Scotsman, the one with the lisp?”

“Bisset.”

“Ja, Bithet.” Von Helrung chuckled. “All arms and chest and the bluster to match!”

“A dilettante,” said Warthrop dismissively. “The rest quixotic adventurers.”

“But not Lebroque.”

“Especially Lebroque. He allowed his ambition to blind him—”

“Ambition will do that,” allowed von Helrung. “And worse.” He rose and went to my master’s side, placing a pudgy hand on his forearm and gently braking his restless pacing.

“But you are exhausting your old master. Please, Pellinore, sit so we might reason together and decide upon our course.”

The doctor pulled free from the old man’s grasp and said, “I already know the course. I will leave for England tomorrow.”

“England?” Von Helrung was taken aback. “Why do you go to England?”

“To find Jack Kearns, of course.”

“Who has vanished like the mist, leaving no trace of himself behind. How will you find him?”

“I will begin by looking under the largest rock on the continent,” answered the doctor grimly.

Von Helrung chuckled. “And if he isn’t there?”

“Then I shall move on to the smaller rocks.”

“And once you find him—if you find him—what if he refuses to tell you what you want to know? Or worse, doesn’t know what you want to know?”

“Know, know, know,” Warthrop savagely mimicked. “You wish to know what I know, Meister Abram? I know Jack Kearns wanted me to have the nidus. He took great pains to make sure I received it quickly. He also wanted me to know he was leaving England—quickly. There can be only one explanation: He knows where the nidus came from. And that is why he let it go. There is only one thing on earth more valuable than an authentic nidus ex magnificum, and that is the magnificum itself. The nidus is a great prize, but the Unseen One is the prize, the prize of all> prizes.” Warthrop was nodding vehemently. “It is the only explanation.”

“But why send anything to you at all? What was the reason for it? Surely he would want no one to know that the prize of prizes was within his grasp, least of all Pellinore Warthrop.”

The doctor nodded. “It has been troubling me a bit. Why did he do it? The only thing that makes sense only makes sense if you know John Kearns.”

Von Helrung thought for a moment. “He is taunting you?”

“I think so. In the cruelest manner possible. You know Kearns, Meister Abram. You know as well as I the depravities to which he will stoop.”

My master then waved the thought away. He did not wish to dwell on Jack Kearns or what drove him. He was too much in the grip of his own demons.

“He is a cruel man,” he said. “Some might say a monster of a man. But that is no concern of mine.”

“Listen to you; listen! My former pupil! Father in heaven, forgive me for my transgressions, for I have failed you—and my dear student! Pellinore, we are men before scientists; it is the human monster we should most concern ourselves with!”

“Why?” the doctor said sharply. “What of monstrous men? I can’t think of anything more banal. I have no doubt—no doubt whatsoever—that once it has obtained the means to do so, the species will wipe itself off the face of the earth. There is no mystery to it. It is in our nature. Oh, one might delve into the particulars, but really, what might we say about the species that invented murder? What can we say?”

Forgetting myself for a moment, I said, “You sound like him.”

Warthrop whirled on me. “What did you say?”

“What you were saying… It sounded like something Dr. Kearns would say.”

“Just because a man is a homicidal maniac doesn’t make him wrong,” the monstrumologist snarled.

“No,” said von Helrung softly, his bright eyes flashing dangerously. “It merely makes him evil.”

“We are scientists, von Helrung; such concepts are alien in our vocabulary. In India it is a sin to kill a cow. Are we Westerners evil for slaughtering them?”

“Human beings, mein Freund,” replied von Helrung, “are not cows.”

Warthrop did not have a ready retort for that, and he listened silently as his old friend begged him to reconsider. Rushing off to England would be premature. Kearns was gone, and, after all, the quest was not for Kearns but for the place where the nidus had been fashioned.

Warthrop hardly listened. He, the caged lion, might have been pacing the floor, but not so his passion—nothing could contain thatsnarled height="0em">

“There are those who live their entire lives in ignorance,” he shouted into the frightened face of his former mentor. “With no inkling of their purpose, who, if pressed, could not answer why they were even born. Many are called, you said. True, and most are deaf! And the majority of them are blind! I am neither. I have heard the call. I have seen the way. I am the one. I am the one.”

He was in the fever’s full grip. It was the call of destiny—his destiny—the reason he had sacrificed so much, endured so much, lost so much. This was fate, to a man who did not believe in fate. This was deliverance, to a man who did not subscribe to any notion of personal salvation. This was redemption, to a man for whom the idea of redemption was a bit of useless esoterica.

Ah, Warthrop! How often you cautioned me to control my passions, lest my passions control me. What now? Do you contain the fire or does the fire contain you? I see it clearly now—not so much then.

Von Helrung saw it, though. Saw it and was powerless against its infernal force. In all his years as master instructor in the art of monstrumology, never had he a finer pupil—and he had taught dozens. Warthrop was his crowning achievement—a monstrumologist without compunction, a scientist without the slightest bias or qualm. And yet! Sometimes our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness: The flame that lit up Pellinore Warthrop’s genius was the same inferno that drove him pell-mell toward the abyss.

Von Helrung saw that abyss, and von Helrung was afraid.

Von Helrung, who knew where the true Monstrum horribalis of the case lurked, said, “The call has come, then, and you must answer, but you must not answer alone.”

“Well, of course. Will Henry is coming with me.”

“Of course,” echoed von Helrung. His brilliant blue eyes fell upon me. “Will Henry.”

“Will Henry… what? Do not underestimate him, von Helrung. I would trade a dozen Pierre Lebroques for one William James Henry.”

“No, no, you misunderstand, Pellinore. The boy has proved indispensable to you, his father’s untimely demise a tragic blessing. But your right hand, as it were, has been grievously wounded on his left—”

“He lost a finger. A finger! Why, I once had a Sherpa who guided me across the Himalayas with his small intestines hanging out his gut—in winter!”

“There are many fine monstrumologists who would leap at the chance to—”

“Undoubtedly!” Warthrop laughed harshly. “I am certain I’d have enough volunteers to outnumber the entire magnificum population by ten to one. Do you think I am a complete fool?”

“I do not suggest we place an advertisement in the Journal, Pellinore,” returned von Helrung with exaggerated patience, as a forbearing father to a wayward child. “What of Walker? He is a worthy scientist, and quintessentially British. He won’t breathe a word to anyone.”

“Sir Hiram—that simpleton? He’s always been more concerned about advancing his own interests than those of science.”

“An American, then. You always were fond of Torrance.”

“True. I have a soft spot for Jacob, but he is too headstrong. And a libertine. I’d never get him out of the pubs.”

“Caleb Pelt. Now come, Pellinore, I know you respect Pelt.”

“I do respect Pelt. And I happen to know that Pelt is in Amazonia and is not expected back for another six months.”

Von Helrung straightened, puffed out his thick chest, and said, “Then, I shall go with you.”

“You?” Warthrop started to smile and caught himself when he realized the old man was deadly serious. He nodded gravely instead. “A perfect choice, if only the nidus had come to us fifteen years ago.”

“I am not so old that I cannot handle myself in a pinch,” said the Austrian stoutly. “My knees are not what they were, but my heart is strong—”

The monstrumologist laid a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “The strongest heart I have ever known, Meister Abram, and the truest.”

“You cannot take the burden solely upon your shoulders,” von Helrung pleaded with him. “Some burdens, dear Pellinore, are impossible to put down once—”

The jangling of the bell interrupted him, and caused my master to whirl toward the door in alarm.

“You are expecting someone?” he demanded.

“I am, but upon his insistence, not my invitation,” replied von Helrung easily. “Do not be concerned, mein Freund. I have told him nothing—only that I expected you today. He wants very badly to meet you, and I am softhearted, as you know; I could not refuse.”

Barely had our host cracked open the door than his caller pushed his way into the vestibule. He did not pause, not even long enough to hand his hat and gloves to von Helrung, but barreled into the parlor to practically hurl himself at the doctor.

He was young, in his early twenties, I guessed, tall, athletic of build, fashionably attired (a bit of a dandy was my first impression of him), dark of hair and lean of face. With his high, angular cheeks and sharp, slightly hooked nose, he might have been considered handsome in a patrician sort of way—the “lean and hungry look” so common among the privileged classes. He seized my master’s hand and pumped it vigorously, squeezing hard enough to make Warthrop wince.

“Dr. Warthrop, I cannot begin to express my profound delight to finally meet you, sir. It is truly a… well, an honor, sir! I hope you’ll forgive my intruding like this, but when I heard you were coming to New York, I simply could not allow the opportunity to pass!”

“Pellinore,” said von Helrung. “May I introduce my new student, Thomas Arkwright, of the Long Island Arkwrights.”

“Student?” Warthrop frowned. “I thought you had retired from teaching.”

“Herr Arkwright is very persistent.”

“It’s all I’ve really cared about, Dr. Warthrop,” said Thomas Arkwright of the Long Island Arkwrights. “Since I was no older than your son here.”

“Will Henry is not my son.”

“No?”

“He is my assistant.”

Thomas’s eyes grew wide with wonder. He appraised me with new respect.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an apprentice so young. What is he, ten?”

“Thirteen.”

“Awfully small for thirteen,” Thomas observed. He flashed me a quick, slightly patronizing smile. “You must be very clever, Will.”

“Well,” said the doctor, and then he said no more.

“I feel positively old now, terribly behind in my studies,” joked Thomas. He turned to Warthrop. “I never would have applied, if I had known you already had an apprentice.”

“Will Henry is not precisely my apprentice.”

“No? Then, what is he?”

“He is…” The doctor was staring down at me. In fact, all three men were staring at me. The silence was heavy. What was I exactly to Pellinore Warthrop? I squirmed in my chair.

At last the monstrumologist shrugged and turned back to Thomas. “What did you mean when you said you never would have applied?”

“Why, to apprentice under you, Dr. Warthrop.”

“It is true,” admitted von Helrung. “I am not Thomas’s first choice.”

“I don’t recall receiving your application,” said my master.

Thomas seemed crestfallen. “Which one? I sent twelve.”

“Really?” Warthrop was impressed.

“No, not really. Thirteen, actually. Twelve somehow sounded less desperate.”

To my shock the monstrumologist laughed. It happened so seldom, I thought he had gagged on a crumpet.

“And I never answered any of them?” Warthrop turned toward me with a frown, one eyebrow arching toward his hairline. “Will Henry arranges the mail for me, and I cannot recall receiving even one from you.”

“Oh. Well. Perhaps they were misplaced somehow.”

Again a weighty silence slammed down. My face grew hot. In truth I did arrange the doctor’s correspondence. And, in truth, I could not recall the name of Thomas Arkwright; I was certain I had never seen it before. But to protest would only convince my guardian of my guilt.

“So the saying is true, all is well that ends well,” put in von Helrung at last, with a consoling pat upon my shoulder. “I have a new student, and you, Pellinore, you have your…” He searched for the proper description. “Will Henry,” he finished, with an apologetic shrug.

Thomas begged to take his leave shortly thereafter. He’d only interrupted Dr. Warthrop to express his undying admiration; he knew the doctor had pressing business and he did not wish to delay him.

“What do you know of my business?” asked the monstrumologist sharply, with an accusatory glance toward von Helrung—You did tell him!

“I know nothing of the present matter. Professor von Helrung has been quite annoyingly coy about it,” said Thomas, running to his mentor’s rescue. “I know it is urgent—monstrously urgent, if I may make a play on the word. The rest of it I can only guess at. You are here in New York to entrust to Professor Ainesworth a nidus ex magnificum, which has recently come into your possession from overseas—England, I would guess.” He shrugged apologetically. “But that is all I can guess.”

Thomas Arkwright waited for the monstrumologist’s reaction with a slightly smug expression, for he did not guess that he was correct; he knew he was.

“That is a remarkable ‘guess,’ Mr. Arkwright,” said Warthrop, glowering at von Helrung. He clearly thought he had been misled and betrayed.

“Not all that remarkable,” replied Thomas. “I know you have been to the Monstrumarium—that’s easy. The smell floats about you like a foul perfume. And I know you went straight there from the depot, for you are still in your traveling clothes, which suggests your errand was of the utmost exigency—not a moment to lose.”

“You are correct so far,” allowed my master. “But that much, as you said, is easy. What of the rest?”

“Well, you didn’t go to get something from the old man. The Monstrumarium has not been called Fort Adolphus for nothing. You must have brought something—and not just any something, but a something that could not sit even for a moment in your hotel untended, being too large a something to secure upon your person. In other words, a very special something, a something so rare and valuable you had to secure it at once, without delay.”

Clearly intrigued, the doctor nodded quickly and flicked his finger at him, a gesture he had given me innumerable times—Go on, go on!

“So it is quite rare, this prize you brought—extremely rare, and that leaves but a handful of monstrumological curiosities. And out of that handful only one or two might compel a scientist of your stature to drop everything and rush straight to the Monstrumarium after a long journey by stage and rail. Nidus egnificum is the obvious choice and, since no nidus has ever been discovered in the New World, in all likelihood it came from Europe—”

“Hah!” cried the monstrumologist, holding up his hand. “The scaffold of your reasoning grows unsteady, Mr. Arkwright. Why would you assume my special something came from Europe, since the only authenticated something comes from the Lakshadweep Islands in the Indian Ocean?”

“Because I know you too well—or of you too well, I should say. If you knew the origin of the something, you would not be in New York. You would have sent the something to Dr. von Helrung to place in the Locked Room, and been on the first boat out.”

“Why England, though?”

“England is a guess, I will admit that. I passed on France. The French contingent of the Society has never cared much for us Yanks—less so after that unfortunate incident last fall involving Monsieur Gravois, for which, I hear, they blame you, unfairly in my opinion. The Germans would never trust a nidus to an American—even if his name is Pellinore Warthrop. The Italians—well, they are Italians. England was the most logical choice.”

“Extraordinary,” murmured Warthrop with an appreciative nod. “Truly extraordinary, Mr. Arkwright! And precisely right in all details; I shan’t mislead you.” He turned to von Helrung. “My congratulations, Meister Abram. My loss seems to be your gain.”

The Austrian monstrumologist smiled broadly. “He reminds me of another promising student from many years ago. I confess in my dotage I sometimes forget myself and call him Pellinore.”

“Oh, I hope not!” said my master with uncharacteristic humility. “I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone—or the world. One is enough!”

Thomas did not take his leave until the doctor and I departed for our hotel; I suppose he forgot in the excitement of the moment his humble desire not to delay the great man in his important scientific pursuits. The great man himself seemed to forget the pressing matters before him, utterly absorbed in a conversation that revolved entirely around him or that singular extension of himself called monstrumology.

And Arkwright appeared to be an expert on both. With alacrity he demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Warthropian—his sickly childhood in New England; the “lost years” in the London boarding school; his tutelage under von Helrung; his early adventures in Amazonia, the Congo, and “that ill-fated expedition to Sumatra”; his invaluable contributions to the Encyclopedia Bestia (more than a third of the articles were written or cowritten by Warthrop); his championing of the cause to the broader world of the natural sciences. The monstrumologist drank deep the sycophantic draft until he was positively drunk. It had taken thirty-odd years, but at last it appeared he had met someone who admired Pellinore Warthrop as much as he did.

Indeed, the atmosphere in the room was so saturated with Warthrop that I found it difficult to breathe.Von Helrung noticed my discomfort and proposed, sotto voce, a foray into the kitchen for a raid on the pantry. I gladly accepted the commission, and we charged the larder, conquering two platefuls of sweet pastries and two steaming cups of hot chocolate.

“He is very bright,” said von Helrung, meaning Thomas Arkwright. “But one can look into the sun for only a moment, and then… blindness! Frequent respites are called for, but you must know what I mean, Will. Pellinore is the same.”

I nodded slowly, avoiding his gaze. He understood at once, and said quietly and with great compassion, “It is hard, I know, to serve him. Men like Pellinore Warthrop—one must exercise the utmost caution or be subsumed by their brilliance. The fate of your father, I’m afraid. In the presence of men like Warthrop, the lesser light is consumed by the greater.”

“How does Thomas know so much about him?” I asked. In the space of a half hour, I had learned more about the monstrumologist from a stranger than I had after two years of living with him.

“From me primarily. The rest from any and all who will talk about him.”

“Well, he doesn’t know everything about him,” I said. “He didn’t know the doctor already had an apprentice.”

“Yes, that did strike me as strange. He does know; I told him upon our first meeting a fortnight ago. Perhaps he forgot.”

“Or he’s lying.”

“Is this wise, Will? Given the choice, should we not always choose the good motive over the bad? It probably wasn’t important to him, so he forgot.” Not important to him! I pushed my plate away; I had lost my appetite.

“No, no, eat, eat!” he said, sliding the plate back. “You are far too slight for a boy of ten.”

“I’m thirteen,” I reminded him.

“Then you are much too thin. A growing boy is like an army, ja? He travels upon his stomach! I must speak to Pellinore about it. I do not imagine he cooks very much.”

“He doesn’t cook at all. We used to have a cook,” I added, “but the doctor fired her. She boiled one of his specimens.”

It was true. A delivery had arrived at the kitchen door the night before he sacked her, and the cook, a kindly old woman named Paulina, who was nearly blind (Warthrop considered this deficiency a plus), had mistaken it for an order she had placed with Mr. Noonan the butcher. That evening we unknowingly dined upon the carcass of the rare Hallux turpis of Cappadocia, which Paulina had transformed into a hearty stew. The doctor fired her, of course, the moment he realized, to his horror, that he had consumed one of monstrumology’s most sought after prizes. Afterward, after he had calmed down, he acknowledged that it wasn’t a total loss to science. We had discovered that Hallux turpis tasted remarkably like chicken.

“I do everything for him,” I said with an uncomfortable knot of pride and resentment in my heartShe b220;All the cooking and cleaning, and the washing, and I write his letters and run the errands and keep his files, and take care of the horses, of course, and assist him in the laboratory—that too. Especially that.”

“Well! I am surprised you have time for your studies.”

“My studies, sir?”

“You do not go to school?”

“Not since I came to him.”

“Then, he tutors you, yes? He must tutor you. No?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so!” He clucked in disapproval.

“He doesn’t sit me down with books and pencils and teach me lessons—nothing like that. But he does try to teach me things.”

“Things? What things does he try to teach you, Will? What have you learned from him?”

“I’ve learned…” What had I learned? My mind went blank. What had the monstrumologist taught me? “I’ve learned that half the world prays they will be given what they deserve, and the other half that they will not.”