The Isle of Blood

“Mein Gott!” cried my teacher’s former teacher. “I do not know whether to laugh or cry at your answer! But that is the way of truth.”

He went to the stove and returned with the pot of hot chocolate, topped off my cup, and then filled his to the brim, lowering his nose close to the mud-colored surface to breathe in the aroma; the steam painted his cheeks rosy. He looked at me through the steam, and smiled.

“I love chocolate. Don’t you?”

For the briefest of moments, I wanted to throw my arms around him and hug him tight.

“Dr. von Helrung, sir?”

“Ja?”

I lowered my voice. I did not think about it; it seemed appropriate somehow. “What is Typhoeus magnificum?”

His smile disappeared. He pushed his cup away and folded his hands on the tabletop. I had the sense of the space shrinking between us, until I was but a hairsbreadth from his transcendent visage.

“That is hard to say—very hard. Only his victims have seen him, and, forever mute, they keep his secrets.

“We know he lives, for we have held the nidus in our hands, and we’ve seen—you have seen, ah, too much!—the victims of his terrible venom. But his form is hidden from us. There are stories… that he stands twenty feet tall, that his teeth are mobile like a spider’s, which he uses to fashion his ungodly nest, that he swoops down from the blackest sky borne on wings ten feet across to snatch his prey, carrying them past the highest clouds to rip them apart, and the leavings fall back to earth in a rain of blood and spit, what is called the pwdre ser, the rot of stars.” He shuddered violently and breathed deep the soothing scent rising from his mug.

“It sounds like a dragon,” I said.

“Ja, that is one of his faces; he has many more, as many as there are those who have suffered his wrath. And so we call him the Faceless One and the One of a Thousand Faces.

“We are the sons of Adam. It is in our nature to turn and face the faceless, to name the nameless thing. It drives us to greatness; it brings us to ruin. I only pray Pellinore understands this. Many brave men have sought it, all have failed, and now I do not know what I fear more—that the dragon will go unseen or that Pellinore will find it.”

“Why is it so hard to find, though?” I asked.

“Perhaps it is like the devil himself—never seen, always there!” He laughed softly, breaking the somber spell. “The world is large, dear Will, and we, no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise, we are quite small.”

“Will Henry, you’re quiet tonight—even for you,” observed my master in the cab ride back to the Plaza.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For being quiet.”

“It wasn’t a criticism, Will Henry. It was merely an observation.”

“I’m tired, I suppose.”

“That is not something one supposes. Are you tired or are you not?”

“I am tired.”

“Then, say so.”

“I just said so.”

“You don’t strike me as tired. More like angry.” He turned away. His angular profile flitted in and out of shadow as we rattled down the granite street. The fresh snowdrifts glittered diamond-bright in the glow of the arc lights lining Fifth Avenue.

“It’s Mr. Arkwright, isn’t it?” he asked. On those infrequent moments when the monstrumologist decided to take actual note of my existence, he missed very little.

“Dr. Warthrop, he lied to you.”

“What do you mean?” He turned from the window. Light and shadow warred upon the landscape of his face.

“He knew you had an apprentice. Dr. von Helrung told him.”

“Well, he must have forgotten.”

“And he never applied to you. I would have seen the letters.”

“Perhaps you did.”

The implication that I was lying could not have hurt more than if he had physically struck me.

ot making an accusation,” he went on. “I just don’t know why Mr. Arkwright would lie about it. To me, more striking than his mental acuity—which is truly extraordinary—is his sincerity. Truly a remarkable young man, Will Henry. He will make a fine addition to our ranks one day. There is very little of import that escapes his notice.”

“He forgot you already had an apprentice,” I pointed out, not without a note of triumph.

“As I said, of import—” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “Anyway, I’m surprised to hear you use the word ‘apprentice.’ I was under the impression you detested monstrumology.”

“I don’t detest it.”

“So you love it?”

“I know how important it is to you, Dr. Warthrop, so I…”

“Ah, I see. It is not monstrumology you love, then.” He considered the white world outside the cab. The wheels crunched in the newly fallen snow. The snap of our driver’s whip was muffled in the hard wind coming over the East River.

“Oh, Will Henry,” he cried softly. “I should never have taken you in. It was not what either of us desired. I should have known little good would come of it.”

“Don’t say that, sir. Please don’t say that.” I reached over to touch his arm with my wounded hand, and then withdrew. I did not think he would approve of my touching him.

“Oh, no,” he said. “It is an unfortunate habit of mine to say things that probably shouldn’t be said. Little good can come of this, Will Henry; I have known it for quite some time. What I do will kill me one day, and you will be abandoned again. Or worse, what I love will kill—”

His gaze fell to my left hand, and then he continued. “I am a philosopher in the natural sciences. Matters of the heart I leave to the poets, but it has occurred to me, as a failed poet myself, that the cruelest aspect of love is its inviolable integrity. We do not choose to love—or I should say, we cannot choose not to love. Do you understand?”

He leaned very close to me, and my world became the dark fire burning in his eyes. I was overcome with dizziness, as if I teetered on the very edge of a lightless abyss.

“I shall put it this way,” he said. “If we monstrumologists were serious at all about our vocation, we would give up the study of biological aberrations to concentrate on the most terrifying monster of all.”

In my dream I am standing before the Locked Room in the Monstrumarium with Adolphus Ainesworth, and he is fumbling with his keys.

The doctor said you’d want to see this.

But I’m not allowed.

The doctor said.

He unlocks the door, and I follow him inside.

Now, let’s see… Where did I put it? Ah, yes. Here it is!

He’s pulling a container the size of a shoe box from its niche, setting it upon a table.

Go on, open it! He wanted you to see.

My fingers are trembling. The lid doesn’t want to come off. Is the box quivering, or is it my hand?

I can’t open it.

There is something in the box. It is alive. It vibrates against my fingers.

Thickheaded boy! You can’t open it because you’re asleep! You want to know what’s in the box, you have to wake up. Wake up, Will Henry, wake up!

I did as he commanded, breaking the surface between my dream and the dark room with a startled cry, my heart racing in panic; for a moment I could not remember where I was—could not remember who I was… until a voice beside the bed reminded me.

“Will Henry.”

“Dr. Warthrop?”

“You were dreaming, I think.”

“Yes… I was.”

The light in the hall was on; it was the only light. It streamed across the floor and up the wall beside the bed. The monstrumologist stood on the side opposite the light.

“What was your dream?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I—I don’t remember.”

“‘Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there.… Between the rising and resting, it is there.… It is always there.’”

There was the bar of light on the floor and the column of light on the wall, but the bar and the column bled their substance into the room; I could see his face dimly, but I could not read his eyes.

“Is that from a poem?” I asked.

“From a very anemic attempt at one, yes.”

“You wrote it, didn’t you?”

His hand rose, fell. “How is your hand?”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“Will Henry,” he gently chided.

“Sometimes it throbs a little.”

“You must hold it above your heart.”

I tried it. “Yes, sir. It does help. Thank you.”

“Do you still feel it? As if the finger were still there?”

“Sometimes.”

“I had no choice.”

“I know.”

“The risk was… unacceptable.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. More light upon his face, nothing more illuminated. Why had he been standing in the dark, watching me?

“You do not know this, of course. But afterward I took the rope, and I was going to tie you up—only as a precaution…”

I opened my mouth to say, I know. I saw you. But he held up his finger to stop me.

“I couldn’t do it. It was the wise thing to do, but I couldn’t do it.”

He looked away; he would not look at me.

“But I was very tired. I had not slept in… how long? I didn’t know. I was afraid I would fall asleep and you might… slip away. So I tied the other end of the rope to my arm. I bound you to me, Will Henry. As a precaution; it seemed the prudent thing to do.”

He was flexing his long fingers, curling them into fists, uncurling them. Fist. Open hand. Fist. Open hand.

“But it wasn’t. It was absolutely the worst thing to do. Perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever done. For if you did slip away, you would have dragged me into the abyss with you.”

Fist. Open hand. Fist.

“I may not have the poet’s gift for words, Will Henry, but I do have his love of irony. Until that night our roles had been reversed. Until that night it had not been me who’d been bound and by virtue of those bindings been in danger of being dragged into the abyss.”

He reached down and slowly unwound the wrappings on my wounded hand. My skin tingled; the air seemed very cold against the exposed flesh.

“Make a fist,” he said.

I complied, though my fingers were very stiff; the muscles along the back of my hand seemed to groan in protest.

“Here.” He picked up his teacup from the table beside the bed. “Take the cup. Drink.”

My hand was shaking; a drop plopped upon the covers as I brought the cup, shaking, to my lips.

“Good.”

He took the cup with his right hand and held out his left.

“Take my hand.”

I pressed my palm into his. My whole body was trembling now. This man whose every nuance I could instinctively read had become a cipher.

The doctor said you’d want to see this.

“Squeeze. Squeeze my hand, Will Henry. Harder. As hard as you can.”

He smiled. He seemed pleased.

“There. Do you see?” Holding my hand tight. “Part of it’s gone, but it’s still your hand.”

The monstrumologist released me and stood up, and my fingers ached from his grip.

“Go back to sleep, Will Henry. You need your rest.”

“So do you, sir.”

“It is not your place to worry about me.”

He strode to the doorway, into the bar of light, and his shadow stretched across the floor and climbed up the wall. I lay back and closed my eyes. Two breaths, three, four, and then slowly opened them again, but not very much, just enough to peek.

He had not moved from the doorway. He had not left me. Not yet.

My hand throbbed; his hold had been strong. I felt a maddening itch where my index finger should have been. I flexed my thumb into empty space to scratch it.

Warthrop had booked out passage for the next morning on the SS City of New York, the swiftest ship in the Inman Line. As first-class passengers we could expect to endure the most trying of passages—subsisting in a private suite comprising a bedroom and separate sitting room, decorated in the most gaudy of Victorian excesses, with hot and cold running water and electric lighting; forced to take our evening meals at tables shabbily draped in crisp white linen and decorated with crystal vases laden with fresh flowers every evening, under the great glass dome of the first-class dining saloon; trapped for hours in the walnut-paneled library with its eight hundred volumes; or being constantly pestered by the obsessively attentive staff and crew, white-jacketed and always, according to the doctor, at your elbow, ever eager to deliver the most mundane of services.

“Think of it, Will Henry,” he had said in our rooms at the Plaza, before bidding me a good night for the first time, before I’d dreamed of the Locked Room and the box, before his shadow had hung on the wall.

“It took our forebears more than two months to cross the Atlantic, two months of deprivation and disease, scurvy, dysentery, dehydration. It shall take us less than a week, in regal splendor. The world is shrinking, Will Henry, and by no miracle, unless we alter our definition of what makes a miracle.”

His eyes had been misty, his tone wistful. “The world grows smaller, and little by little the light of our lamps chases away the shadows. All shall be illuminated one day, and we will wake with a new question: ‘Yes, this, but now… what?’” He laughed softly. “Perhaps we should turn back and go home.”

“Sir?”

“It will be a seminal moment in the history of science, Will Henry, the finding of the magnificum, and not without some ancillary benefit to me personally. If I succeed, it will bring nothing short of immortality—well, the only concept of immortality that I am prepared to accept. But if I do succeed, the space between us and the ineffable will shrink a little more. It is what we strive for as scientists, and what we dread as human beings. There is something in us that longs for the indescribable, the unattainable, the thing that cannot be seen.”

And then he fell silent.

And the next morning he was gone.

Something was wrong; I knew it the moment I woke. I understood instantly—not in the trivial sense, not intellectually, but with my heart. Nothing had changed. There was the bed in which I lay and the chair in which he’d sat watching me and the large dressing table and the wardrobe and even his teacup on the table. Nothing had changed; everything had changed. I jumped from the bed and raced down the hall into the empty sitting room. Nothing had changed; everything had changed. I stepped over to the windows and threw back the curtains. Eight stories below, Central Park glistened, a white landscape ablaze in sunlight beneath a cloudless sky.

His trunk. His valise. His field case. I ran to the closet and yanked open the door. Empty.

Everything had changed.

I was getting dressed when the knock came. I would have been dressed already, but I was having trouble with the buttons on my trousers. I’d never realized how helpful my finger had been in the procedure. For one irrational moment I was sure the doctor had returned to fetch me.

Ah, good. You’re up. I went downstairs for some breakfast before we board. What is it, Will Henry? Did you really think I would leave without you?

Or, what was more likely:

Snap to, Will Henry! What the devil are you doing? Why is your fly hanging open like that? Come along, Will Henry. I will not miss the most important crossing of my life on account of a thirteen-year-old’s inability to dress himself! Snap to, Will Henry, snap to!

It was not the doctor, though. You have deduced that by now.

“Guten Morgen, Will! I am sorry to be so late, but my carriage dropped an axle, and my driver—he is a Dummkopf. He couldn’t fix a broken smile. I would fire him, but he has a family, which unfortunately is part of my family, being a third or fourth cousin, I cannot remember—”

“Where is Dr. Warthrop?” I demanded.

“Where is Warthrop? What, did he not tell you? Surely he told you.”

I grabbed my coat and muffler from the rack, and the hat he had given me—the only thing he’d ever given me.

“Take me to him.”

“I cannot, Will.”

“I am going with the doctor.”

“He is not here—”

“I know he isn’t here! That’s why you’re taking me to him!”

“No, no, he is not here, Will. His ship departed an hour ago.”

I stared up into von Helrung217;s kind face, and then punched him as hard as I could in his round belly. He grunted softly from the punch.

“I thought he told you,” he gasped.

“Take me,” I said.

“Take you where?”

“To the docks; I must go with him.”

He leaned over, placing his square, pudgy hands upon my shoulders and looking deeply into my eyes.

“He has left for England, Will. The ship is not there.”

“Then, I will take the next ship!” I shouted. I pulled free from his grasp and pushed past him, into the hall, throwing my muffler round my neck, yanking on my hat, fumbling with the buttons of my coat. The floor vibrated with the heaviness of his tread as he followed me to the elevator, where he caught up with me.

“Come, Kleiner. I will take you home.”

“I don’t want you to take me home; my place is with him.”

“He would have you safe—”

“I don’t want to be safe!”

“And he charged me with your safety until he returns. Will. Pellinore has left, and where he has gone you cannot follow.”

I shook my head. I was confounded to the core of my being. The sun vanishes in the wink of an eye and the universe collapses; the center cannot hold. I searched for the answer in his kindly eyes.

“He went without me?” I whispered.

“Do not worry, dear Will. He will come back for you. You are all he has.”

“Then, why did he leave me behind? Now he doesn’t have anyone.”

“Oh, no; do you think his Meister Abram would allow such a thing? Nein! Thomas is with him.”

I was speechless. Thomas Arkwright! It was too much. I remembered the doctor’s words in the cab the night before: Truly a remarkable young man, Will Henry. He will make a fine addition to our ranks one day. That day, it seemed, had come… at my expense. I had been discarded—and for what? What had I done?

Von Helrung was pressing my face against his chest. His vest smelled of cigar smoke.

“I am sorry, Will,” he murmured. “He should have at least told you good-bye.”

It is not your place to worry about me.

“He did,” I answered. “But I didn’t hear him.”

And after this my exile.

“Here, this will be your room, and you see, it is a very comfortable bed, much larger than the bed you’re used to, I’ll wager. And look, here is a nice chair for you to sit in by the fireplace, very cozy, and a lamp for you to read by, and here is the chest for your clothes. And look out there, Will. There is Fifth Avenue, such hustle and bustle and the goings on and doings. Here, look at that man on the bicycle! He’s going to hit that truck! Now, you must be hungry. What would you like? Here, let’s put your bag on the bed. Would you like to sit on the bed? It has a feather mattress and feather pillows; it is very soft. So you are hungry, ja? My chef is excellent, from France—doesn’t understand a word of English—or German—but he understands food!”

“I’m not hungry.”

“But you must be. Why don’t you put down your bag? I will send up your food. You can eat here, by the little fire. I thought later I would show you the library.”

“I don’t want to read anything.”

“You’re right. It’s too fine a day to sit inside. Perhaps the park later, ja? Or we could—”

“Why did the doctor take Arkwright with him?”

“Why? Well, for the obvious reasons. Arkwright is young and very strong and quite clever.” He changed the subject. “But come, you must eat. You’re withered halfway down to nothing, Will.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said again. “I don’t want to eat or read or go to the park or anything else. Why did you let him go without me?”

“One does not ‘let’ Pellinore Warthrop do anything, Will. Your master, he does all the ‘letting.’”

“You could have stopped Mr. Arkwright from going.”

“But I wanted him to go. I could not allow Pellinore to go alone.”

It was absolutely the worst thing he could have said, and he knew it.

“I will go now,” he said meekly. “But I expect you downstairs for lunch. I will instruct François to whip up something extra special for you, très magnifique!”

Von Helrung hurried from the room. I dropped my carpetbag onto the floor, lay down face-first upon the bed, and willed myself to die.

It did not take long for my shock at being cast aside to change to shame (Arkwright is young and very strong and quite clever), or shame to confusion (Do not underestimate him, von Helrung. I would trade a dozen Pierre Lebroques for one William James Henry), and then harden into a white-hot ember of rage. Sneaking off like that without a word of explanation, without even a farewell—fond or otherwise! The bravest man I’d ever known, a coward! How dare he, after all we’d suffered together, after my saving his life more than once. You are the one thing that keeps me human. Yes, I suppose I am, Dr. Warthrop, until you find someone to keep you human in my place. It dumbfounded me; it shook me to the foundations of my being. It did not matter that he had promised to return for me. He had left me; that’s what mattered.

Too much time had passed. I’d been too long with him. For two years he had bound me to him, a mote of dust caught in his Jovian gravity. I didn’t even know what the world looked like without the Warthropian lenses through which to view it. Now they were gone, and I was blind.

“We shall see how Mr. Arkwright likes it,” I told myself with bitter satisfaction. “‘Snap to, Mr. Arkwright! Snap to!’ Let’s see how he likes being laughed at and scolded and mocked and ordered around like a coolie. Have at it, Mr. Arkwright, and welcome to it!”

I refused to eat. I could not sleep. All of von Helrung’s efforts to coax me out of the room failed. I sat in the chair by the fireplace and sulked like Achilles in his tent, while the war of day-to-day life raged on without me. On the evening of the third day von Helrung shuffled in bearing a tray of hot chocolate and pastries and a chessboard.

“We will have a nice game of chess, ja? Now, do not tell me Pellinore failed to teach you. I know him better.”

He had. Chess was one of the monstrumologist’s favorite diversions. And, like many who excelled at the game, he never seemed to tire of utterly humiliating his opponent—that is, me. In the first year of our tenancy together, he wasted more than a few hours trying to instruct me in the finer aspects of strategy, attack, counterattack, and defense. I never bested him, not once. He might have chosen generosity over ruthlessness and allowed me to win a game or two, to build up my confidence, but the doctor never had much interest in building up anything in me other than a strong stomach. Besides, destroying an eleven-year-old boy in six moves—in a game he had been playing longer than the boy had been alive—lifted his spirits, like a fine wine at dinner.

“I don’t feel like playing.”

He was setting up the board. It was a set made from jade, the pieces carved into the shapes of dragons. The dragon king and queen wore crowns. The dragon bishops clutched shepherd crooks in their talons.

“Oh, no, no. We shall play. I shall teach you as I taught Pellinore. Better, so you can beat him when he comes back.” He was humming happily under his breath.

I hurled the board against the wall. Von Helrung gave a soft cry, mewling as he picked up the dragon king, who had lost his crown; it had broken off when the piece had hit the floor.

“Dr. von Helrung… I’m sorry…”

“No, no,” he said. “It is nothing. A gift from my dear wife, may her sleep go undisturbed.” He snuffled. Not knowing how to comfort him, and feeling mortified by my childishness, I awkwardly dropped my hand upon his shoulder.

“I worry too, Will,” he confessed. “The days ahead will be dangerous for him, and dark. Remember that when the tide of self-pity threatens to overwhelm you.”

“I know that,” I replied. “It’s why I should be with him. He doesn’t need me to cook or clean or take his dictation or care for his horse or any of that. Those things anyone can do, Dr. von Helrung. He needs me for the dark places.”

On the morning of the seventh day, a telegramrived from London:

ARRIVED SAFE. WILL ADVISE. PXW.

“Four words?” von Helrung moaned. “That is all he has to say?”

“An overseas cable costs a dollar a word,” I told him. “The doctor is very stingy.”

Von Helrung, who was not nearly as wealthy as my master, or as penny-pinching, returned this reply:

REPORT AT ONCE ANY FINDINGS.

HAVE YOU MET WITH WALKER?

ANXIOUSLY AWAITING YOUR REPLY.

That reply was long—very long—in coming.

After two weeks had passed with no discernible improvement in my condition, von Helrung summoned his personal physician, a Dr. John Seward, to have a look at me. For an hour I was poked and prodded, thumped and pinched. I had no fever. My heart and lungs sounded good. My eyes were clear.

“Well, he’s underweight, but he is small for his age,” Seward told von Helrung. “He could also use a good dentist. I’ve seen cleaner teeth on a goat.”

“I worry, John. He’s eaten little and slept less since he came.”

“Can’t sleep, hmmm? I’ll mix up something to help.” He was staring at my left hand. “What happened to your finger?”

“Doctor Pellinore Warthrop chopped it off with a butcher knife,” I replied.

“Really? And why would he do that?”

“The risk was unacceptable.”

“Gangrene?”

“Pwdre ser.”

Baffled, Seward looked at von Helrung, who laughed nervously and waved his hand in a vague circle.

“Oh, the children, ja? So robust, their imaginations!”

“He cut it off and put it in a jar,” I said, as von Helrung, standing slightly behind Seward, violently shook his head.

“Did he? And why did he do that?” Seward asked.

“He wants to study it.”

“Couldn’t he have done that when it was still attached to your hand?”

“My father was a farmer,” von Helrung announced loudly. “And one day a cow would get sick, she would lie down, and no coaxing would bring her back up. ‘There is nothing to be done, Abram,’ my father would tell me. ‘When an animal gives up like that, it has lost its will to live.’”

“Is that it?” Seward asked me. “Have you lost your will to live?”

“I live here. I don’t want to be here. Is that the same thing?”

“It could be melancholia,” surmised the young doctor. “Depression. That would account for the loss of appetite and the insomnia.” He turned to 220;Do you ever have thoughts of killing yourself?”

“No. Other people sometimes.”

“Really?”

“No, not really,” von Helrung put in. Nein!

“And I have.”

“You have…”

“Killed other people. I killed a man named John Chanler. He was the doctor’s best friend.”

“You don’t say!”

“I do not think that he did!” von Helrung barked in a voice just shy of a shout. “He has bad dreams. Very bad dreams. Terrible nightmares. Ach! He is talking about the dreams. Aren’t you, Will?”

I lowered my eyes and said nothing.

“Well, I can’t find anything physically wrong with him, Abram. You may want to consult an alienist.”

“To confess, I have been thinking of bringing in an expert in the field.”

The “expert” arrived at the Fifth Avenue brownstone the following afternoon—a soft knock on the door, and then von Helrung poked his mane of white hair into the room, saying over his shoulder to someone in the hall, “Gut, he is presentable.”

I heard a woman’s voice next. “Well, I should hope so! You did tell him I was coming, didn’t you?”

He stepped lightly to one side, and in charged a dynamo draped in lavender, wearing a fashionable bonnet and carrying a matching umbrella.

“So this is William James Henry,” she said in a refined East Coast accent. “How do you do?”

“Will, may I present my niece, Mrs. Nathaniel Bates,” said von Helrung.

“Bates?” I repeated. I knew that name.

“Mrs. Bates, if you please,” she said. “William, I have heard so much about you, I cannot help but feel we’ve known each other for years. But stand up and let me get a look at you.”

She took my wrists into her gloved hands and held my arms out from my sides, and puckered her lips in disapproval.

“Much too thin—and how old is he, Uncle? Twelve?”

“Thirteen.”

“Hmmm. And short for his age. Stunted growth for lack of proper nutrition, I would say.” She squinted down her nose at my face. She had bright blue eyes like her uncle’s. And, like his, they seemed to shine by their own soulful light, insightful, a bit wistful, kind.

“I would not speak ill of any gentleman,” she said. “But I am not impressed with the rearing abilities of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop. Uncle, when was the last time this child had a bath?”

“I don’t know. Will, how long has it been since you’ve bathed?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Well, here is the problem as I see it, William, and that is, if one cannot remember the last time one had a bath, it is probably time to take one. What is your opinion?”

“I don’t want to take a bath.”

“That is a desire, not an opinion. Where are your things? Uncle Abram, where are the boy’s belongings?”

“I don’t understand,” I said to von Helrung, somewhat pleadingly.

“Emily has generously proffered an invitation for you to stay with her family for a few days, Will.”

“But I—I don’t want to spend a few days with her family. I want to stay here with you.”

“That is not going so well, though, is it?” Emily Bates asked.

“I’ll eat. I promise. I promise to try. And Dr. Seward, he gave me something to help me sleep. Please.”

“William, Uncle Abram is many things—some of them wonderful and some I would rather not think about—but he hasn’t the first idea how to raise a child.”

“But that’s what I’m used to,” I argued. “And no one is going to raise me. No one has to. The doctor will be coming back soon and—”

“Yes, and when he does, we will give you back, safe and sound and clean. Come along now, William. Bring whatever you have; I’m sure it isn’t much, but that can be remedied too. I will wait for you downstairs. It’s very warm in here, isn’t it?”

“I’ll walk you down,” von Helrung offered. He seemed anxious to remove himself from my presence.

“No, that’s all right. Good-bye, Uncle Abram.” She kissed both his cheeks, adding, “You’ve done the right thing.”

“Oh, I pray so,” he murmured.

And then we were alone.

“I will explain…,” he began, and then shrugged. “She is right. I know nothing about children.”

“I’m not going.”

“Your… situation demands a woman’s touch, Will. You’ve been without one for far too long.”

“That isn’t my fault.”

His eyes flashed. For the first time he lost patience with me. “I do not speak of fault or blame. I speak of remedy. True, I pledged to Pellinore I would watch after you in his absence, but I have other responsibilities that I can no longer neglect.” He puffed out his chest. “I am president of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology, not a nursemaid!”

“Of course you will be the first to know should I hear anything from Europe. The first to know, the moment I know it.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said. “I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to stay with your niece’s family, and I don’t—I don’t want a bath.”

He smiled. “You will like her, I think. Her heart is fierce, like someone else’s you know.”

And so it was in the winter of my thirteenth year that I came to live with Nathaniel Bates and his family, in their three-story townhouse facing the Hudson on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nathaniel Bates was “in finance.” I didn’t learn much of anything else about him during my sojourn there. He was a quiet man who smoked a pipe and was never seen without a tie and never went outside without his hat, and whose shoes were always polished to a dazzling finish and who never had a hair out of place, and he always seemed to have a newspaper tucked under his arm, though I never saw him read one. He communicated, as far as I could tell, by means of monosyllabic grunts, facial expressions (a look over his pince-nez with his right eyebrow raised meant he was displeased, for example), and the occasional bon mot, delivered with such deadpan sincerity that one always laughed at one’s own peril.

Besides their daughter, the Bateses had one other child, a boy of nine named Reginald, whom they called Reggie. Reggie was small for his age, spoke with a slight lisp, and seemed completely enthralled with me from the moment I stepped through the door. My reputation, it seemed, had preceded me.

“You’re Will Henry,” he announced. “The monster hunter!”

“No,” I answered honestly. “But I serve under one.”

“Pellinore Warthrop! The most famous monster hunter in the world.”

I agreed that he was. Reggie was squinting at me through his thick spectacles, his face lit up by the great man’s glow reflecting off me.

“What happened to your finger? Did a monster bite it off?”

“You could say that.”

“And then you killed it, right? You chopped off its head!”

“That’s close,” I answered. “Dr. Warthrop shot it in the head.”

I thought he might faint from excitement.

“I want to be a monster hunter too, Will. Will you train me?”

“I don’t think so.”

Reggie waited until his mother turned her back, and then he kicked me as hard as he could in the shin.

Their daughter I had already met.

“So here you are, and Mother was right, you’ve lost a finger,” said Lillian Bates. I’d just finished my bath—the first in weeks—and my skin felt too loose on my bones, and my scalp burned from the lye. The robe I wore was her father’s and I was lost in it, overly warm, dizzy, and extremely sleepy.

For her part Lilly seemed taller, thinner, and not in the least uncomfortable in her own skin. It had been only a few months since I’d last seen her, but a girl matures faster than her male counterparts. I noticed she had started wearing makeup.

“How did you lose your finger?” she asked.

“Pruning the rosebushes,” I answered.

“Do you lie because you’re ashamed, or do you lie because you think it’s funny?”

“Neither. I lie because the truth is painful.”

“Mother says your doctor left you.”

“He’s coming back.”

She crinkled her nose at me. “When?”

“Not soon enough.”

“Mother says you may be staying with us for a long time.”

“I can’t.”

“You will, if Mother says. Mother always gets her way.” She did not seem particularly happy about the fact. “I believe you are her new project. She always has a project. Mother is a firm believer in causes. She is a suffragette. Did you know that?”

“I don’t even know what a suffragette is.”

She laughed, a tinkling of bright, shiny coins thrown upon a silver tray. “You never were very bright.”

“And you were never very nice.”

“Mother didn’t say where your Dr. Warthrop went.”

“She doesn’t know.”

“Do you know?”

“I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

“Even if I kissed you?”

“Especially if you kissed me.”

“Well, I have no intention of kissing you.”

“And I have no intention of telling you anything.”

“So you do know!” She smiled triumphantly at me. “Liar.” And then she kissed me anyway.

“It is a pity, William James Henry” she said, “that you are altogether too young, too timid, and too short, or I might consider you attractive.”

Lilly’s faith was not misplaced. I was her mother, Emily’s, next project. After a restless, unendurably long night in the same room as Reggie, who pestered me with questions and ntreaties for monster stories, and who exhibited an alarming disposition toward midnight flatulence, Mrs. Bates bundled me up and trotted me to the barber’s. Then she took me to the clothier’s, then to the shoemaker’s, and finally, because she was as thorough as she was determined, to the rector of her church, who questioned me for more than an hour while Mrs. Bates sat in a pew, eyes closed, praying, I suppose, for my immortal soul. I confessed to the kindly old priest I had not been to church since my parents had died.

“This man who keeps you… this—what did you call him? Doctor of ‘aberrant biology’? He is not a religious man?”

“I don’t think many doctors of aberrant biology are,” I answered. I remembered his words the day before he abandoned me:

There is something in us that longs for the indescribable, the unattainable, the thing that cannot be seen.

“I would think it’d be the norm for such men, given the nature of their work.”

I didn’t offer a contrary opinion. I really had nothing to say. What I saw, in my mind’s eye, was an empty bucket sitting on the floor beside the necropsy table.

“Look at you!” cried Lilly when we arrived back at the house on Riverside Drive. She had just gotten home herself. She had not yet changed out of her uniform and had had no time to apply makeup. She looked as I remembered her, a young girl close to my own age, and somehow that made my palms begin to itch. “I hardly recognize you, Will Henry. You look so…” She searched for the word. “Different.”

Later that evening—much later; it was not easy in the Bates home to have time to oneself—I happened to glance in the bathroom mirror and was shocked by the image of the boy captured there. But for the slightly haunted look in his eyes, he bore little resemblance to the boy who had warmed himself by a fire fed with the chopped-up remains of a dead man.

Everything was different.

Each morning there was a full breakfast, for which we were expected to arrive promptly at six. No one was allowed to start this meal—or any meal—until Mr. Bates picked up his fork. After breakfast Lilly and Reggie went off to school, Mr. Bates went off to his job “in finance,” and Mrs. Bates went off with me. She was appalled at the staggering extent of my ignorance in the most elemental aspects of a proper childhood. I had never been to a museum or a concert or a minstrel show or the ballet or even the zoo. I had never attended a lecture, seen a play, watched a magic lantern show, been to the circus, ridden a bicycle, read a book by Horatio Alger, skated, flown a kite, climbed a tree, tended a garden, or played a musical instrument. I hadn’t even played a single parlor game! Not charades or blindman’s bluff, which I’d heard of, and not deer-stalker or cupid’s coming or dumb crambo, which I had not.

“Whatever did you do at night, then?” she inquired.

I did not wish to answer that question; I was honestly concerned she might arrange to have the monstrumologist arrested for endangering a child.

“Helped the doctor.”

“Helped him with what?”

“Work.”

“Work? No, I am speaking of afterward, William. After the work was finished for the day.”

“The work was never finished.”

“But when did you have time for your studies?”

I shook my head. I did not understand what she meant.

“Your schoolwork, William.”

“I don’t go to school.”

She was flabbergasted. When she discovered I had not been inside a classroom in more than two years, she was furious—so furious, in fact, that she brought up the matter to her husband.

“William has informed me that he has not attended a single day of school since the death of his parents,” she told him that evening.

“Humf! You seem surprised.”

“Mr. Bates, I am mortified. He’s treated no better than one of that man’s horrid specimens.”

“More like one of his instruments, I’d say. Another tool in his monster hunting kit.”

“But we must do something!”

“Humf. I know what you’re going to suggest, but we’ve no right, Emily. The boy is our guest, not our responsibility.

“He is a lost soul placed in our path by the Almighty Father. He is the Jew beaten by the side of the road. Would you be the Levite or the Samaritan?”

“I prefer being Episcopalian.”

She dropped the subject, but only for the time being. Emily Bates was not the kind of “expert in the field” who allowed a boil to fester.

I did not see much of Lilly on school days. Her afternoons were devoted to piano and violin lessons, ballet classes, shopping trips, trips to the salon, visits with friends. I saw her at breakfast, at the evening meal, and afterward when the family gathered in the parlor, where I learned all the games in the Bates family repertoire. I detested charades, because I was awful at it. I had no cultural context upon which to draw. But I liked card games (old maid and old bachelor, our birds and Dr. Busby) and I Have a Basket, at which I excelled. When my turn came round, I could always name what was in my “basket,” no matter what letter fell to me. A was easy: Anthropophagi. V? Why, I have a Vastarus hominis in my basket! What about X? That’s a hard one, but not too hard for me. Look here. It’s a Xiphias!

The weekends were a different story. Hardly an hour passed without her company. Bicycling in the park (after an afternoon of instruction; I never got very good at it), picnics by the river when the weather warmed, hours in the library at the Society’s headquarters on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-second Street (when we could sneak away; Mrs. Bates took a dim vif all things monstrumological), and, of course, many hours at her great-uncle’s brownstone. Lilly adored Uncle Abram.

She had not given up her dream to become the first female monstrumologist. Indeed, she possessed an almost encyclopedic knowledge on the topic, from monstrumology’s colorful history to the even more colorful practitioners of the craft, from its catalogue of malevolent creatures to the intricacies of its Society’s governing charter. She knew more about monstrumology from studying on her own than I did after living two years with the greatest monstrumologist since Bacqueville de la Potherie, a rather embarrassing fact she delighted in pointing out at every opportunity.

“Well,” I said one Saturday afternoon while we sat among the dusty stacks on the fourth floor of the old opera house, my patience giving way, “maybe I’m just stupid.”

“I have often wondered.”

“Doing it isn’t the same as reading a book about it,” I shot back.

“The only thing the same as reading a book is… reading a book!” She laughed. “If you’d chosen books instead, you’d still have a finger.”

Like her mother, she had Abram von Helrung’s eyes, as blue as a mountain lake on a sunny autumn day. If you sank beneath the azure surface, you would drown for wanting to stay.

“Where did Dr. Warthrop go?” she asked suddenly. She popped this question at least four times a week. And I always gave the same answer, which was the truth:

“I don’t know.”

“What is he looking for?”

I had searched in the library for a picture of it. There was a very long entry in the Encyclopedia Bestia (cowritten by Warthrop), but no picture and no description of Typhoeus magnificum, except an extensive footnote detailing the various fanciful—that is, unverifiable—depictions of the Unseen One. It was a dragonlike creature, as von Helrung had mentioned, that took its victims “higher than the tallest mountain peak” before ripping them apart in its frenzy; it was a giant troll-like beast that flung pieces of its prey with such force that they fell from the sky miles from where their owners had lost them; it was an enormous wormlike invertebrate—a cousin of the Mongolian Death Worm, perhaps—that spat its venom with such velocity that it blew apart the human body, vaporizing it into a fine mist that came down again as the phenomenon called “red rain.”

The article mentioned the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the Lakshadweep nidus in 1851, the theories about the magnificum’s range (most monstrumologists agreed it was limited to the remote islands of the Indian Ocean and parts of Eastern Africa and Asia Minor, but that belief was based more on native traditions and stories than on hard scientific evidence), and the sad stories of the men who went looking for the Faceless One, the ones who returned empty-handed and the ones who did not return at all. Particularly poignant (and alarming) was the tale of Pierre Lebroque, a well-respected aberrant biologist—though somewhat of an iconoclast—who, after a five-month expedition in which no expense was spared (his party included five elephants, twenty-nine coolies, and a trunk-load of gold coins to bribe the local sultans), returned a raving lunatic. His family was forced into the painful decision of committing him to an asylum, where he lived out the remainder of his days in unrelieved torment, shouting the incessant refrain, “Nullité! Nullité! Nullité! That is all it is! Nothing, nothing, nothing!”

“He is searching for the Questing Beast,” I told her.

I suppose we cannot help it. We are hunters all. We are, for lack of a better word, monstrumologists. Our prey varies depending on our age, sex, interests, energy. Some hunt the simplest or silliest of things—the latest electronic device or the next promotion or the best-looking boy or girl in school. Others hunt fame, power, wealth. Some nobler souls chase the divine or knowledge or the betterment of humankind. In the winter of 1889, I stalked a human being. You might be thinking I mean Dr. Pellinore Warthrop. I do not. That person was me.

Go on, open it! the curator said. He wanted you to see.

Every night the same dream. The Locked Room. The old man jangling keys. And the box. The box and the boy and the stuck lid and the unseen thing moving inside the box and the old man scolding, Thickheaded boy! You can’t open it because you’re asleep!

And the thickheaded boy starting awake, sweating under warm covers in a cold room, teetering on the edge of it, das Ungeheuer, the center not holding, the me unwound, only the not-me awake now, echoing the cry of a madman, “Nullité! Nullité! Nullité! That is all it is! Nothing, nothing, nothing!”

Sometimes the woman down the hall heard him crying, and no matter the hour she rose from her bed and slipped on her robe and went down the hall to his room. She sat with him. “Hush now. Shhhh. It’s all right. It’s only a dream. Hush now. Shhh.” A mother’s refrain. She smelled of lilacs and rosewater, and sometimes he forgot and called her Mother. She did not correct him. “Hush now. Shhh. It’s only a dream.”

Or she would sing to him songs he’d never heard before, in languages he did not understand. Her voice was beautiful, a rich velvet curtain, a river over which the demons could not cross. He did not know a mortal voice could sound so heavenly.

“Do you mind my singing to you, William?”

“No, I don’t mind. I like the way it sounds.”

“When I was young girl around Lilly’s age, it was my great ambition to sing opera upon the professional stage.”

“Did you?”

“No, I never did.”

“Why not?”

“I married Mr. Bates.”

I was pursuing the one I had lost, the boy I was before I came to live with him. For a while—a vry long while—I thought I was hunting for the monstrumologist. He was, after all, the one who had dropped off the face of the earth.

I thought I saw him one night at the opera. Mrs. Bates took Lilly and me to a production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which had premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House the previous month.

“I hate the opera,” Lilly complained. “I don’t understand why Mother drags me to it.”

We were sitting in a private box high above the orchestra when I thought I spotted him in the crowd. I knew it was him. I did not question why the monstrumologist would be attending the opera—that did not matter. It was him. The doctor had come back! I started to stand; Lilly tugged me back into the chair.

“It’s Dr. Warthrop!” I whispered excitedly.

“Don’t be silly,” she whispered back. “And don’t say his name in front of Mother!”

I thought I saw him a second time, in Central Park, walking a Great Dane. When he drew close, I realized he was twenty years older and twenty pounds heavier.

Whenever I saw von Helrung, I asked the same question:

“Have you heard from the doctor?”

His answer on the seventeenth day was the same as his answer on the twenty-seventh:

“No, Will. Nothing yet.”

On the thirty-seventh day of my exile, after hearing those words again, No… nothing yet, I said to him, “Something is wrong. He should have written by now.”

“It could be that something is wrong—”

“Then, we must do something, Dr. von Helrung!”

“Or it could mean everything is very right. If Pellinore has picked up the trail of the magnificum, he would not take the time to write two words. You have served the man; you know this to be true.”

I did. When the fever of the hunt was upon him, nothing could distract him from his goal. But I was troubled.

“You have friends in England,” I said. “Can’t you ask them if they know where he’s gone?”

“Of course I can—and I will, if circumstances dictate, but not yet. Pellinore would never forgive me if I allowed that particular cat out of the bag.”

I returned on a blustery afternoon in early April to ask a special favor.

“I want to work in the Monstrumarium.”

“You want to work in the Monstrumarium!” The old monstrumologist was frowning. “What did Emily say?”

“It doesn’t matter what she says. She isn’t my guardian and she isn’t my mother. I don’t need her permission to do anything.”

“My dear little Will, I suspect the sun itself needs her permission to shine. Why do you want to work in the Monstrumarium?”

“Because I’m tired of sitting in the library. I’ve read so much, it feels as if my eyes are bleeding.”

“You have been reading?”

“You sound like Mrs. Bates. Yes, I do know how to read, Meister Abram. Well? I’m sure Professor Ainesworth could use some help.”

“Will, I don’t think Professor Ainesworth cares much for children.”

“I know. And he cares even less for me. That’s why I’m coming to you, Dr. von Helrung. You’re the president of the Society. He has to listen to you.”

“Listen, yes. Obey… Well, that’s something altogether different!”

His hope for success was not high, but he decided to humor me, and together we descended to the old man’s basement office. The meeting went well only in the sense of its outcome; the rest bordered on the disastrous. At one point I actually feared Adolphus might bash von Helrung’s head in. I do not need any help! He will sabotage my system! The Monstrumarium is no place for children! He will get himself hurt! He will get me hurt!

Von Helrung was patient. Von Helrung was gentle. Von Helrung was kind. He smiled and nodded and expressed his utmost respect for and admiration of the curator’s achievements, the finest collection of monstrumological relics in the world, and not merely that but the creation of the most unique cataloguing system in the Western hemisphere. He intended to propose at the next congress that a section of the Monstrumarium be named in his honor—the Adolphus Ainesworth Wing.

The professor was not mollified.

“Stupid! Too wordy! It should be the Ainesworth Wing—or better, the Ainesworth Collection.”

Von Helrung spread his hands apart as if to say, Whatever you like.

“I do not like children,” said the curator, scowling at me over his spectacles. “And I especially do not like children who meddle in dark places!” He pointed a crooked finger at von Helrung. “I don’t know what it is about this boy. Every time I look up, there he stands at the side of another monstrumologist. What happened to Warthrop?”

“He has been called away on urgent business.”

“Or he’s dead.”

Von Helrung blinked rapidly several times, then said, “Well, I am not sure. I don’t think so.”

“That’s the most urgent business there is, when you think about it,” Adolphus pronounced in my general direction. “Death. Sometimes I will be sitting here, just sitting here working away, and I will think about it, and then I will jump up from my chair and think, ‘Hurry Adolphus. Hurry, hurry! Do something!’”

“You should not worry yourself over such things,” said von Helrung.

“Did I say I was worried? Bah! I have been surrounded by death for forty-six years, von Helrung. It isn’t the dead that worry me.” Then, turning to me and glowering, he barked, “What are you good at?”

“I can organize your papers—”

“Never!”

“Maintain the files—”

“Won’t happen!”

“Take down dictation—”

“I have nothing to say!”

“Sort the mail—”

“Absolutely not!”

“Well,” I said wearily. “I’m handy with a broom.”

Spring. Blooms break forth from the startled earth. The sky laughs. The trees, abashed, dress themselves in verdant green. And the heavens are lush with stars. Redeem the time, the stars sing down. Redeem the dream.

And the boy waking in the land of broken rocks, the dry land wet with spring rain, waking in the place where two dreams cross—the dream where seeds grow into trees of gold and the dream of the box that he cannot open.

“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Lilly said. “I really shouldn’t tell you.”

I shall be the ship of a thousand sails.

“Last night I heard them talking about you.”

Go on, open it! He wanted you to see.

“And Father did not say yes, but he did not say no.”

I want to go, Father. I want to go.

“I say no,” she said. “I’ve kissed you now, three times.” And the stars sing down, Redeem the time, redeem the dream, in the land of broken rocks where two dreams cross.

“And that’s a horrid thought, kissing my own brother!”

I don’t want you to take me home. My place is with him.

“Well, William, what do you think?” asked Mrs. Bates.

“I think the doctor will be very displeased when he comes back.”

“Dr. Warthrop, if he comes back, will not have a say in the matter. He has no legal claim to you.”

“Dr. Warthrop, when he comes back, wonÙt care about legal claims.”

“Humf!” grunted Mr. Bates. “Cheeky.”

“I’ve no doubt of that, William. But he would acquiesce to your wishes, I think. What is your wish?”

My prey was in sight. I had but to stretch forth my hand and seize it. The boy with the tall glass of milk in the kitchen that smelled like apples and no darkness, no darkness anywhere, no bodies in ash barrels, no blood caked on the soles of his shoes, no screaming of his name in the deadest hours of the night, no unwinding thing that compelled and repulsed, that whispered like the thunder, I AM. Just the laughing sky, and trees adorned in gold and the abundance of stars that sing down and the boy with his milk and the smell of the earth, the undiminished whole of it, like apples.

The curator of the Monstrumarium tapped my chest with the sneering head of his cane and said, “You are to touch nothing. Ask first. Always ask first!”

I followed him through the snarl of dimly-lit passageways crammed floor-to-ceiling with unopened yet-to-be catalogued crates, walls festooned with cobwebs and coated in fifty years’ worth of grime, his cane going click, click, click on the dusty floor, the smell of preserving solution, the tartness of death upon the tongue, deep pools of shadow, feeble haloes of yellow gaslight, and the awful loneliness of being just one small person in a vast space.

“It may not look it, but there’s a place for everything, and everything is in its place. If a member should happen to ask you for help in finding something, do not help. Find me. I am not hard to find. I am usually at my desk. If I am not at my desk, tell them to come back another time. Tell them, ‘Adolphus is not at his desk. That means he is somewhere in the Monstrumarium, has gone home for the day, or is dead.’”

We paused by an unlabeled door—the Kodesh Hakodashim. He was absently shaking his key ring. It was my dream, down to the jangling of the keys.

“No one is to go in here,” he said. “Off-limits!”

“I know that.”

“Don’t talk back! Better, don’t talk! I do not like chattering children.”

Or quiet children, I thought.

“It’s the nidus, isn’t it?” Adolphus Ainesworth asked suddenly. “The ‘urgent business.’ Hah! Warthrop’s gone after the magnificum. Well, well. Doesn’t surprise me. Always the tilter at windmills. But what about you, Sancho Panza? Why didn’t you go with him?”

“He took another in my place.”

“Another what?”

“Dr. von Helrungnew pupil, Thomas Arkwright.”

“Arse wipe?”

“Arkwright!” I shouted.

“Never met the man. His pupil, did you say?”

“He must have introduced you to him.”

“Why must he? Yesterday was the first time I’ve seen the old fart in six months. He never comes down here. Anyway, what do I care about von Helrung’s pupil or anybody else’s for that matter? Here is the thing, Master Henry. You should never get friendly with a monstrumologist, and I can tell you why. Would you like to know why?”

I nodded. “Yes, I would.”

“Because they aren’t around for very long. They die!”

“Everyone dies, Professor Ainesworth.”

“Not like monstrumologists, they don’t. Now, look at me. I could have been one. Was asked more than once when I was younger to apprentice for one. Always said no, and I shall tell you why. Because they die. They die in droves! They die like turkeys on Thanksgiving Day! And their demise is not the usual untimely type. You know what I mean. A man falls off a boat and drowns. Or a horse kicks him in the head. That’s an accident; that’s natural. Being torn limb from limb by something you went looking for, that’s un natural; that’s monstrumological.”

In the Monstrumarium, in the hall outside the Locked Room, jingling his keys.

“’Tis a pity,” Adolphus said pensively. “I didn’t like Warthrop very much, but I could tolerate him. Not many men know what they’re about. He did and made no apologies for it. Most men have the face they show the world and the other face, the face only God sees. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones. ‘What you see, my God sees,’ was his motto.” He sighed and shook his withered pate. “’Tis a pity.”

“You shouldn’t say that, Professor Ainesworth. We haven’t heard from him yet, but that doesn’t mean—”

“He went hunting the magnificum, didn’t he? And he’s Pellinore Warthrop, isn’t he? Not the kind of man to limp home with his tail between his legs. Not the kind to give up, ever. No, not him. No, no, no. You won’t be seeing your boss anymore, boy.”

Standing outside the Holy of Holies, jingling his keys.

I found von Helrung in his offices on the second floor. The head of the Monstrumologist Society was shuffling about in a pair of old slippers with a watering can, tending to his philodendrons on the dusty windowsill.

“Ah, Master Henry, has Adolphus sacked you already?”

“Dr. von Helrung,” I said, “did you ever bring Mr. Arkwright down to the Monstrumarium?”

“Did I ever—?”

“Bring Mr. Arkwright to the Monstrumarium8221;

“I do not believe so, no. No, I did not.”

“Or send him there for anything?”

He was shaking his head. “Why do you ask, Will?”

“Professor Ainesworth has never met him. He’s never even heard of him.”

He set down the watering can, leaned against his desk, and folded his thick arms over his chest. He regarded me soberly, bristly white eyebrows furrowing.

“I do not understand,” he said.

“The night he met the doctor, Mr. Arkwright said he knew we’d been to the Monstrumarium because of the smell. ‘The smell floats about you like a foul perfume.’ Remember?”

Von Helrung nodded. “I do.”

“Dr. von Helrung, how would Mr. Arkwright know that it smelled like anything if he’s never been there?”

My question hung in the air for a long time, a different kind of foul perfume.

“You are accusing him of lying?” He was frowning.

“I know he lied. I know he lied about applying to study under Dr. Warthrop, and now I know he lied about knowing we’d been to the Monstrumarium.”

“But you had been to the Monstrumarium.”

“That doesn’t matter! What matters is he lied, Dr. von Helrung.”

“You cannot say that with certainty, Will. Adolphus, may God bless him, is an old man, and his memory is not what it once was. And he often falls asleep at his desk. Thomas could have explored the Monstrumarium at his leisure, and Professor Ainesworth would know nothing about it.”

He cupped my cheek with his hand. “This has been hard for you, I know. All you have in the world, all you understand, all upon which you thought you could rely—poof! Gone in an instant. I know you are worried; I know you fear the worst; I know what terrors may fill the vacuum of silence!”

“Something isn’t right,” I whispered. “It’s been almost four months.”

“Yes.” He nodded gravely. “And you must prepare yourself for the worst, Will. Use these days to steel your nerves for that—not to torture yourself over Thomas Arkwright and these perceptions of perfidy. It is easy to see villains in every shadow, and very hard to assume the best of people, particularly in monstrumology—for our view of the world is skewed, by virtue of the very thing we study. But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.”

I nodded. His soothing words, however, brought no solace. I was deeply troubled.

I suppose it is a measure of the depths of my disquiet that I confided my greatest fear to the last person I thought could keep any confidence quiet. It slipped out over a game of chess one afternoon in Washington Square Park. Chess was actually my idea. Perhaps if I practiced more, I reasoned, by the time the doctor returned, I might best him—and wouldn’t that be something! Lilly accepted my challenge. She was very competitive, having learned the game from her uncle Abram. Lilly’s style of play was aggressive, impetuous, and intuitive, not so different from the girl herself.

“You take so long,” she complained as I agonized over my rook. He was trapped between her queen and a pawn. “Do you ever just do something? Just do it without thinking about it? Next to you, Prince Hamlet seems positively impulsive.”

“I’m thinking,” I answered.

“Oh, you think all the time, William James Henry. You think too much. Do you know what happens to someone who thinks too much?”

“Do you?”

“Ha, ha. I suppose that was a joke. You shouldn’t joke. People should know their limitations.”

I said good-bye to my rook and advanced my bishop to threaten her knight. She bopped my rook onto its side with her queen.

“Check.”

I sighed. I felt her eyes on me as I studied the board. I willed myself not to look up. The breeze tickled the new leaves of the trees; the spring air was soft and smelled of her lavender soap. Her dress was yellow, and she wore a white hat with a yellow ribbon and a large yellow bow. Even with a new wardrobe and a fresh haircut, next to her I felt shabby.

“Still no word from your doctor?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say it like that,” I said without looking up. “He isn’t ‘my’ doctor.”

“Well, if he isn’t yours, I’d like to know whose he is. And don’t try to change the subject.”

“One of the benefits about thinking too much,” I said, “is that you notice the little things, things other people miss. You say ‘your doctor’ like that on purpose, because you know it annoys me.”

“And why would I want to do that?” I heard a smile in her voice.

“Because you enjoy annoying me. And before you ask why you enjoy annoying me, I suggest you ask yourself that question. I don’t know why.”

“You’re in a mood.”

“I don’t like losing.”

“You were in a mood before we started playing.”

I moved my king out of danger. She barely glanced at the board before swooping in and capturing my last bishop. Inwardly I groaned. It was only a matter of time now.

“You can always concede,” she suggested.

“I shall fight on until the last drop of blood is spilt.”

“Oh! How so very un-Will-Henry-like! You sounded very much like a doer just then. Like Leonidas at Thermopylae.”

My cheeks were warm. I should have known not to become too pleased with myself, though.

“And all this while I thought of you as Penelope.”

“Penelope!” My cheeks grew hotter, albeit for an entirely different reason.

“Pining away in your bridal chamber, waiting for Odysseus to return from the war.”

“Do you enjoy being mean, Lilly, or is it something you can’t help, like a nervous tic?”

“You shouldn’t talk to me that way, William,” she said, laughing. “I’m to be your big sister soon.”

“Not if the doctor has anything to say about it.”

“I would think your doctor would be relieved. I was not around him much, but I got the feeling he didn’t like you.”

She had gone too far, and knew it. “That was cruel,” she said. “I’m sorry, Will. I—I don’t know what comes over me sometimes.”

“No,” I said with a wave of my wounded hand. “It’s your move, Lilly.”

She moved her knight, exposing her queen to my pawn. A pawn! I glanced up at her. Speckles of sunlight shimmered in her dark hair, a strand of which had come loose from her hat and fluttered, a fitful black streamer, in the soft springtime wind.

“Why do you think you haven’t heard from him, Will?” she asked. The quality of her voice had changed, was as soft as the wind now.

“I think something terrible has happened,” I confessed.

We stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, and then I was up from the bench and trotting across the park, and the world had gone watery gray, bleached of its springtime vibrancy. She caught up to me before I reached the exit at Fifth Avenue, and pulled me round to face her.

“Then, you must do something,” she said angrily. “Not think about how frightened you are or lonely you are or whatever it is you think you are. Do you really think something terrible has happened? Because if I thought something terrible had happened to someone I loved, I would not mope around thinking about it. I would be on the next boat to Europe. And if I had no money for a ticket, I would stow away, and if I couldn’t stow away, I would swim there.”

“I don’t love him. I hate him. I hate Pellinore Warthrop more than I hate anything. More than I hate you. You don’t know, Lilly. You don’t know what it’s been like, living there in that house, and what happens in that house and what happens because I live in that house.…”

“Like this?” She gathered my left hand into hers.

“Yes, like that. And that isn’t all, not everything.”

“He beats you0em">221;

“What? No, he doesn’t beat me. He… he doesn’t see me. Days go by, weeks sometimes… and then I can’t escape him; I can’t get away. As if he’s taken a rope and tied us together with it. And it’s him and me and the rope, and there is no undoing it. That’s the thing you don’t understand, that your mother doesn’t understand, that no one understands. He is thousands of miles away—maybe even dead—and it doesn’t matter. He’s right here, right here.” I slapped my open palm hard against my forehead. “And there’s no getting away. It’s too tight, too tight.”

My knees gave way. She threw her arms around me and held me up. She kept me from falling.

“Then, don’t try, Will,” she whispered into my ear. “Don’t try to get away.”

“You don’t understand, Lilly.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t. But I am not the one who has to.”

I had discovered it during one of my recent forays into the formidable library of the Monstrumologist Society, a slim volume covered in a fine sheen of dust, some of its pages still uncut, its spine creaseless. Apparently no one had bothered to read it since its publication in 1871. What drew my eye to that little book, out of the sixteen thousand others surrounding it, I do not know. But I remember distinctly the small jolt of recognition when I opened to the title page and saw the author’s name. It was like turning the corner in a crowded city and bumping into a long-lost friend you’d given up hope of ever seeing again.

It was late in the day when I found it—no time to read it before the library closed—and there was a strict no-lending policy toward nonmembers. So I filched it. Tucked it under the back of my coat and walked out, right past Mr. Vestergaard, the head librarian, whom most monstrumologists called (behind his back) the Prince of Leaves—a rather weak bit of whimsy, I thought, but a monstrumologist’s sense of humor, if he had one at all, tended toward the macabre. Efforts at anything lighter of heart invariably fell flat.

Though the slim volume had been composed when Warthrop was only eighteen—a mere five years older than I when I discovered it—as part of his final examination before the Admitting Committee of the Society, as a dissertation of sorts, the writing was remarkably sophisticated, if characteristically prolix. The title alone made my eyes glaze over: Of Uncertain Origin: The Case for Interdisciplinary Openness and Intellectual Collectivism Between All Disciplines of the Natural Sciences, Including Studies in the Field of Aberrant Biology, with Extended Notes upon the Development of Canonical Principles from Descartes to the Present Day.

But I read it—most of it, anyway—because the subject matter wasn’t the thing I was after. Reading his words was the nearest I could get to hearing his voice. The Warthropian diction was there, the authoritative tone, the rigorous—some might say ruthless—logic. Every line held echoes of the older Warthrop’s voice, and reading them, sometimes aloud, late at night in my room, when the house was quiet and it was just Warthrop’s words and me, opened a door for him to return and talk a little while. I caught myself murmuring after certain passages, “Really, sir?” and “Is that so, Dr. Warthrop?” as if we were back in the library at Harrington Lane and he was boring me with some arcane text written a hundred years ago by someone I’d never heard of, a form of mental cruelty that sometimes lasted for hours.

The night of my near-collapse in Washington Square Park, I picked up the book again, because I could not sleep, and I thought, with a little bit of spite, that the book would have definitely found a wider audience if it had been marketed to insomniacs. I opened it to a random page, and my eye fell upon this passage:

A thing is either true (real) or it is not. There is no such thing as a half-truth in science. A scientific proposition is like a candle. The candle can be said to have two states or modes—lit and unlit. That is, a candle is either one or the other; it cannot be both; it cannot be “half-lit.” If a thing is true, to put it colloquially, it is true through and through. If false, then false through and through.

“Is that so, Dr. Warthrop?” I asked him. “What if the candle has a wick at both ends? One is lit, the other not. Could not one say in that hypothetical circumstance that the candle is indeed both lit and unlit, and your argument false through and through?” I chortled sleepily to myself.

You cannot change the central element of an analogy to make it false, Will Henry, his voice spoke into my ear. Is this why you’re reading this old monograph of mine? To make yourself feel better at my expense? After all I’ve done for you!

“And to me. Let’s not forget that.”

How could I? I am constantly reminded of it.

“I’m doomed, like Mr. Kendall. Just doomed.”

What do you mean?

“Even when you’re gone, I can’t get rid of you.”

I don’t see how that is analogous to Mr. Kendall’s fate.

“Once touched, infected. Just tell me, please, if you are dead. If you’re dead, there is hope for me.”

I’m right here. How could I be dead? Really, Will Henry, was there some childhood accident of which I’m not aware? Did you fall down a flight of stairs, perhaps? Did your mother drop you as an infant or suffer a fall while she carried you in her womb?

“Why do you insult me all the time?” I asked him. “To make yourself feel better at my expense? After all I’ve done for you!”

What have you done for me?

“Everything! I do everything for you. I wash and cook and launder and run errands and—and everything except wipe your arse!” I laughed. My heart felt thrillingly light, no heavier than a grain of sand. “Arse wipe.”

Will Henry, did I hear you call me a name?

“I would never call you a name—to your face. I was remembering something Adolphus said. He mistook ‘Arkwright’ for ‘arse wipe.’”

Ah, Arkwright. That’s the perfect alternative to my candle analogy.

“I don’t understand.”

If you will be still and listen, I will explain. Thomas Arkwright is the candle. He is either who he claims to be or he is not. He cannot be both. Either von Helrung is right or you are. You cannot both be.

“I know that, Dr. Warthrop.”

Didn’t I just now, no more than thirty seconds ago, ask you to be still and listen? Seriously, Will Henry—perhaps an accident in the stable? Or milking the irascible family cow? Let us assume for a moment that von Helrung is correct. Mr. Thomas Arkwright is who he claims to be, a brilliant young man with a passion for all things monstrumological, who happens to be enamored with a certain doctor of natural philosophy, so enamored, in fact, that he writes not once, not twice, not three times, but a total thirteen times, begging for a position to study with this modern-day Prometheus, this colossus that bestrides the scientific landscape.

What is required for this one proposition to be true? That you, the said Prometheus’s arse wiper, were so neglectful of your ancillary duties as file clerk that you missed his application not once, not twice, not three times, but a total of thirteen times. That, or you are simply a liar and destroyed them, lest you be replaced by a more convivial or efficient or passionate arse wiper, one who takes his arse wiping seriously, who considers a finely wiped arse a work of art.

Now, you know, of course, that you are neither neglectful nor deceitful, and the candle, as it were, is as cold as a wedge. What does this mean? It means Arkwright is the liar, though his motives may be pure. In other words, he lies because he actually is enamored with our doctor. It does not mean he has insidious intentions; he is not Iago, but more like Puck. Are you following this so far, or would you like for me to speak more slowly and less polysyllabically?

“I am, Dr. Warthrop. I’m following you, sir.”

Excellent! Now to the more recent and infinitely more troublesome development—the second candle, we shall call it. Mr. Arkwright, Adolphus, and the “foul perfume” of the Monstrumarium. Let us assume, for the sake of our argument, that this second candle is lit—in other words that you are correct and von Helrung is wrong. Arkwright is indeed playing false; he has never stepped foot inside Professor Ainesworth’s realm; he would no more recognize the “foul perfume” than a blind man would the color blue. On its surface, a rather innocuous slip—almost trivial. Who cares that he pretended to recognize a smell he could not possibnow? Another attempt to impress his idol with his powers of observation, as he tried to impress him earlier by his overabundance of applications.… We may stop now, yes? Your troubled heart has been assuaged, so you may sleep and I may go?

“I’m not sleepy,” I said. “Don’t go.”

Very well. I will stay. For your heart should not be assuaged, Will Henry. Your unease is justified, though you cannot articulate why.

“But why can’t I, Dr. Warthrop?” My eyes stung with tears of frustration. “I know it’s important, but I couldn’t convince Dr. von Helrung it was. I couldn’t say why.”

That’s it precisely, Will Henry! You have been focusing on the wrong question. You’ve been asking “Why is he lying?” instead of “What does this lie mean?” What does it mean, Will Henry?

“It means…” The truth was I did not know what the lie meant. “Oh, I hate myself; I’m so stupid—”

Oh, stop it. Self-pity is like self-abuse—it may feel good in the moment, but the final result is a disgusting mess. I’ve given you one hint. Here’s another: Mr. Arkwright is like the foolish man who built his house upon sand.

“And the rains came and washed the foundation away. So his slip-up about the smell—that’s the rain—”

Oh, good God! No, no, Will Henry. Not the rain. Why did you bring up the rain? I didn’t even mention it! You are the rain, or would be if you used your head for something other than a hat stand.

I closed my eyes and plugged my ears to remove all distraction. If I was the rain, what was Arkwright? The house? The foundation? Oh, why couldn’t Warthrop just tell me and be done with it? Did he enjoy making me feel like a cretin? Most people do not like to think, Will Henry, he told me once. If they did, we would have fewer lawyers. (He had just been given notice that he was being sued—a common occurrence and occupational hazard.)

Oh, Will Henry, what shall I do with you? You are like the ancient Egyptians, who believed the seat of thought lay in the heart. The foundation is not the object of your jealousy.

“Not Arkwright,” I whispered into the dark, for the light had finally come on. “The lie! His lie is the foundation, isn’t it? And the house is…” Think, think! To think is to be human, the doctor always said, so be human and think. “The house is the conclusion based on the lie… the nidus. The nidus is the house! He couldn’t have deduced you had the nidus, because his deduction began with a lie—that he knew we’d been to the Monstrumarium! He knew about the nidus before he walked through the door!”

I bolted upright and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I fumbled in the drawer of the bedside table for the box of matches.

“And there’re only two ways he could have known. Dr. von Helrung told him…”

Which he said he did not, and we’ve no reason to assume he did.

“… or Jack Kearns told him.” I lit the match and touched it to the candlewick. “He’s working with Kearns!”

Or someone else who knows what Kearns sent me, came Dr. Warthrop’s voice again. Kearns could have told someone, but it is difficult to imagine who and nearly impossible to understand why.

I was on my feet, tugging on my trousers. “Either way, he’s false, but why? What is his game?” I watched the flame sputter in the draft coming from the open window across the room. I could smell the river, and heard, in the distance, a tugboat’s throaty call. The voice within had fallen silent. “It was a trick. He tricked you, Dr. Warthrop. You! He needed to come with you to find Kearns, so he lowered your guard and puffed you up with flattery and made you think he was the perfect replacement.” Yanking on my shirt, searching for my shoes—what had happened to my shoes? “I have to tell Dr. von Helrung, before it’s too late.”

And the voice spoke up again, and said:

It is already too late.

I ran, barefooted, along Riverside Drive, south to Seventy-second Street and then east to Broadway, running as if the devil himself were after me, along a narrow mountain pass and, on either side, the abyss, das Ungeheuer, the tightly wound thing unwinding, and the unspooling refrain repeating until the words became a gibbering howl, It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late, the granite pavement scraping and clawing the soles of my naked feet, the smeared blobs of streetlamps in the early morning mist, and the hellish glow of the ash barrels where you can warm yourself over a dead man’s bones, and the bloody footprints left behind; now the park and there the shadows between trees and the wet rocks and the sensuous whisper of leaf brushing leaf and the silence in between, and then Broadway, the glittering blade thrust into the city’s heart; along its garish edges shrieks of hysterical laughter from darkened doorways and the smell of stale beer, tramps in doorways, whores hanging from second-story windows of bawdy houses, and the tinny music of the dance hall, the drunken cries of sailors, the white coats of the sanitation workers, the thing unwinding pulling me as if by a silver cord, my blood the breadcrumbs marking the way back, but there is no going back now; It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late;Redeem the time, redeem the dream, singing, singing down, between the lightless divide, the vacuity on either side, careening onto Fiftieth, where Broadway’s garish light fades and the buildings are dark and a dog furiously barks, maddened by the blood-smell, bloody rock against bloody bone, and the snarling river of fire that I breathe, the river of fire on which I run, a fire fed by blood, river of fire, river of blood, and the unquiet voice, the silver cord, It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late It is already too late; praying that we not be suffered to perish in the fire, praying we are not divided like the man in the ash barrel, praying, Merciful God, let my prayer come unto thee out of the fire. Let my prayer come unto thee between the division, from the fire that bisects the abyss; turning on Fifth Avenue, six blocks, snap to, snap to!, the sick wet slap of bloody feet on hard pavement, blood black in the yellow streetlights, and do not suffer us to die unrelieved and divided, do not consign us to the ash barrel, headwater of this fiery river upon which I run, where the melting muscles sizzle and the bones sing back to the stars singing down, And after this, our exile, and the river eddies at the foot of the brownstone, and I leap onto shore, and the house is ablaze with light, every window a glowing featureless eye; banging on the door that opens at once, suddenly, like the yanking back of a curtain, and I am there.

I fell into the vestibule like a landed trout gasping for air, clutching my stomach, my bare, bloody toes curling on the wooden planks. Von Helrung’s kindly face swam into view; he pulled me to my feet and held me for a long time.

“Will, Will, what are you doing here?” he murmured.

“It’s the doctor,” I managed to get out after several attempts. “Something… something is… ruh… wrong.” He would listen to me this time. I would make him listen.

To my surprise the old monstrumologist was nodding, and then I saw his wet cheeks, fresh tears welling in his blue eyes, his cottony white hair worried into tangled knots.

“It is late. I was going to call in the morning. Wait for the morning. But now God has brought you here. Ja, it is his will. His will. And his will be done!”

He stumbled away in a gait wobbly like a drunkard’s, muttering to himself, “Ja, ja, his will be done,” leaving me to shiver in the vestibule, sweating, my lungs and feet on fire. A crumpled piece of paper fell from his hand; he did not stop to pick it up. I do not think he realized he’d dropped it.

It was a Western Union telegram; I recognized the yellow paper. He had signed for it but an hour before, around the same time as my lesson with the monstrumologist three miles away on Riverside Drive.

The cable read:

CONFIDENTIAL—

LEAVING LIVERPOOL TOMORROW.

ARRIVING NY THURS. TERRIBLE

NEWS. FAILURE ON ALL FRONTS.

WARTHROP IS DEAD.

It was signed “Arkwright.”

Jacob Torrance downed his glass of whiskey, smoothed his neatly trimmed mustache, and then proceeded to drum his fingers aggressively on the arm of the wingback chair. His ruby red signet ring, stamped with the motto of the Society (Nil timendum est), sparked and spat back the light. His shoes shone as brilliantly as his ring, and besides the ones in his trousers, there was not a crease anywhere on him; he looked like a man carved out of stone, a Greek statue wearing a perfectly tailored suit. He had the face of a statue too, or rather the face of someone who might model for one—jaw square, chin strong, nose straight, eyes large and soulful, if a little too close together, which gave him a perpetually angry look, as if at any moment he might rear back and bash you in the face.

At twenty-nine Jacob Torrance was one year shy of what monstrumologists called “the magic thirty,” a reference to the average life expectancy of a scholar in the field of aberrant biology. (The average life expectancy in the United States at the time was a little more than forty-two years.) Reaching “the magic thirty” meant you had beaten the odds. Usually your colleagues threw you a party. Magic Thirties, as these bacchanals were called, could last for days and were said to rival the debaucheries of Caligula’s court in ancient Rome. There was nothing a monstrumologist delighted in more than cheating death, unless it was discovering some creature that delighted in dealing it out. Warthrop’s Magic Thirty was celebrated before I came to live with him, but by all accounts it put all others before it to shame; in fact, for years afterward many of his colleagues did not dare set foot inside the city limits of Boston for fear of being arrested.

I had suggested Torrance to von Helrung for his youth and physical prowess. (He was somewhat of a legend in monstrumological circles, nicknamed “John Henry” Torrance by his fellow scientists, after the legendary nail-driving strong man. The doctor had told me a story about Torrance flattening a charging Clunis foetidus with a single blow, hitting it so hard in the snout that it dropped dead at his feet.) I’d also suggested Torrance for the simple reason that he was one of the few monstrumologists that Warthrop liked, though the doctor did not approve of Torrance’s hard drinking and irreformable philandering. “It is a shame, Will Henry,” he told me. “With great gifts there always seem to come great burdens. He would be the best of us, if he only could control his appetites.”

Von Helrung was nervously puffing on the expired stub of a Havana cigar. He looked haggard, eyes swollen from lack of sleep, chin stubbly with a three-day-old growth that he rubbed incessantly with the palm of his pudgy hand.

It had not been the best week of his long life. Or my short one.

“Would you like another whiskey, Jacob?” asked von Helrung.

“Do you think I should? Probably shouldn’t.” Torrance clipped off the ends of his words, bit them hard with his large teeth, as if words had a taste and he liked the way they tasted. He swirled the ice in his glass. “Oh, what the hell.”

Von Helrung shuffled to the liquor cabinet. Among the decanters of sherry and brandy, bottles of wine and liqueurs, was a small blue bottle—the sleeping draught prescribed by Dr. Seward. He stared at it for a moment, brow furrowed, bushy white eyebrows nearly touching above his large nose, before he refilled Torrance’s glass with whiskey and scuffled back.

“Thanks.” Back went the finely sculpted head, the large Adam’s apple bobbed once, and the ice tinkled again in the empty glass.

“That’s enough,” he said to no one in particular. He adjusted the signet ring on his finger and mused, “Maybe I shouldn’t be sitting here when he comes in. Might make him suspicious.”

“He may not come,” von Helrung said. “He says nothing of coming, only that he arrives Thursday—today.” He consulted his pocket watch, snapped it closed. In another minute he would check the time again.

“Then, we’ll go to him,” Torrance said. “I’m up for a hunt. What about you, Will?”

“He’ll come,” I said. “He will have to.”

Von Helrung shook his head in consternation, a gesture Torrance and I had seen repeated since the evening had begun.

“I do not like this. I have said it before; I say it again. I do not like any of this. Ack! It goes against everything I believe in—or have said I believed in—or believed I believed in. It is not the way a Christian gentleman behaves!”

“I’ll take your word for it, Meister Abram,” Torrance returned dryly. “Can’t say I’ve met many of those, and those I have didn’t act very Christlike.”

He pulled out his Colt revolver, and von Helrung cried, “What are you doing? Put that away!”

“It’s only Sylvia,” said Torrance slowly, as if speaking to a half-wit. “All right, I’ll put her away.”

“I never should have trusted him,” moaned von Helrung. “I am a fool—the very worst kind of fool—an old fool.”

“How are you a fool? He came with excellent references and letters of recommendation, and claimed to hail from one of the oldest families in Long Island. Why wouldn’t you trust him?”

“Because I am a monstrumologist!” von Helrung replied, striking his breast. “An old monstrumologist. And a monstrumologist does not get to be my age without a healthy dose of skepticism. The eyes and ears are not to be trusted! I have spent my career stripping off nature’s masks; I should have seen through the ruse. But did I see it? No! It took a child to show the way.”

of theight="0em" width="1em">“Don’t take it so hard, Meister Abram. He fooled Warthrop, too, and Warthrop’s no fool.” His fingers drummed on the chair arm the cadence of a galloping horse.

At the mention of the doctor’s name, von Helrung collapsed into his chair with a loud cry. “Pellinore! Pellinore, forgive me. Thy blood is on my hands!”

“We don’t know if he’s dead,” I spoke up. “Arkwright could be lying about that, too.”

“There is only one reason he would say so—because it is so!”

“You said it yourself, Dr. von Helrung,” I returned. “Hope isn’t any less reasonable than despair. I think he’s alive.”

“You hope that he is.”

“Well, he could be alive,” Torrance put in. “So my money’s with Will’s. I hate to think of a world without Pellinore Warthrop—be a hell of a lot less interesting place.”

He stood up, which seemed to take a very long time—he was well over six feet tall—and opened his powerful arms wide to stretch. “Well, I’m going to find something to eat. I suppose you’ve sent François home for the evening?”

“Ja, and the rest.” And then he added bitterly, “We would not want any witnesses, would we?”

“Speaking of that, I think I will stay out of sight till you’re ready for me. Wouldn’t want the little rat to smell one. That’s a shame, about François I mean. That fellow’s crepes are the finest I’ve ever tasted.”

“Will, I am sorry,” von Helrung said after Torrance had left. “If I had only listened to you—”

He was interrupted by the bell. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steel his nerves.

“Our quarry arrives,” he said. “Now we screw our courage to the sticking place, Master Henry. How is my expression? I fear the fly will see me for the spider I am!”

He glanced at himself in the mirror by the front door, tugged at his vest, and ran both hands over his mop of white hair. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught me easing into the vestibule.

“What are you doing?” he cried softly. “No, no. Go back to the parlor.” He waved frantically toward the room. “Lie upon the divan. You have collapsed in grief! You have lost your master—lost everything. Can you feign tears? Rub your eyes, very hard, make them red.”

The bell rang a second time. I scampered back to the parlor, threw myself upon the divan, and practiced a keening wail, softly, but not soft enough, for von Helrung, just before he flung open the door, called out hoarsely, “What is that? What is that? Soft tears—tears of lamentation. You sound like a hog in the slaughterhouse!”

And then: “Thomas! Thank God you hve arrived safely! I was worried.”

“Dr. von Helrung—Meister Abram—that I’ve arrived at all is nothing short of a miracle.”

“But you look terrible—exhausted. Here, I will take your bags; my staff has left for the evening. And we will retire to the parlor, where you may rest from your long and no doubt dangerous journey.”

They stepped into the room. Arkwright started when he saw me, and turned to his host. “Not the boy. I beg you, sir—” He was carrying a worn leather satchel. I recognized it at once, and a dagger pierced my heart. It was the doctor’s field case, an heirloom from his father, who’d received it from his father. Warthrop would never have willingly parted with it.

“I would prefer that Will remain,” von Helrung said stiffly, his jaw tightening. He looked as if he might haul back and coldcock Arkwright; he was not an accomplished actor. “And pray you will indulge me in this, Thomas. The boy has been through much at the side of our fallen friend; I thought he should hear firsthand of his fate.”

Arkwright nodded absently, fell into the chair vacated by Jacob Torrance, cradling the doctor’s field case in his lap as a toddler clutches a favored toy, and promptly forgot my presence. His sole focus was von Helrung, the “mark” of his confidence game.

Von Helrung took a fresh cigar from the humidor and clipped off the tip. He lit a match after rolling the cut end over his tongue; the flare chased all shadowy crevices from his face. For an instant he looked ten years younger.

“So begin at the beginning, and tell me everything,” he said, bluish smoke enveloping his head. “Warthrop is dead?”

“That isn’t the beginning,” Arkwright objected. “It’s the end—and a terrible one. After these months in his company, I am satisfied he was every bit the great man I thought he was before we met. Ten times greater! The loss to science… to me personally… and to you, of course… to all humanity! Incalculable, Dr. von Helrung. A man like Pellinore Warthrop comes along very seldom, perhaps once in a hundred years, and to lose him now, in the prime of life, at the height of his considerable powers—the mind can hardly grasp it.”

“Alas, dear Thomas,” commiserated von Helrung, “such is the fate of many great men in life, but particularly in monstrumology! At least tell me that God granted him, like his prophet Moses, a glimpse of the promised land before his passing? Did he see—have you seen—the Unseen? Did he, before he faced his end, face the Faceless? Otherwise, all has been for naught.”

Arkwright slowly shook his head. “He was taken up, von Helrung. Snatched from our camp in the dead of night as if the hand of God had reached down and grabbed him, and then…” He made a choking sound, as if he were about to be sick. “And then the rain! The rain!” His body folded up in the chair, crushing the case against his stomach; I heard the faint dull clank of the instruments within. “A rain of blood—a red rain of—of—” His voice dropped to a mortified whisper. “Him.”/em>

“What?” Von Helrung seemed genuinely horrified. “Do you mean to say his body was torn asunder?”

Arkwright opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He nodded helplessly. Von Helrung sighed loudly and looked over at me.

“So Dr. Pellinore Warthrop makes seven,” he said softly. “No—eight now, for your news has torn this old man’s heart asunder. He was like a son to me, Thomas—the one with whom I’d cheerfully trade places. Ach, terrible, terrible.” He wiped his palm over his forehead, and no one spoke for a few minutes. Then von Helrung looked at Arkwright, and his gaze was hard. “But you escaped. How is this so?”

“The simplest answer, sir. I ran.”

“And you did not see it? The thing that took him?”

“It was his turn to keep the watch,” Arkwright answered with a note of defensiveness. “I was sleeping. I woke to the snap and pop of the tent canvas, blown by a gale that came straight down, from the very vault of heaven, strong enough to crack the center pole, and then I heard an unearthly roar, like the sound of thunder or the blasting of a thousand pounds of TNT, followed by a screeching loud enough to split a man’s head in half. I grabbed my rifle and crawled to the opening—and saw his legs fly straight up as he was yanked into the sky, and above… a shadow large enough to blot out the stars, as big as a house, and Warthrop ascending like one of the saved on Judgment Day.… That is what I saw, Meister Abram. And I am satisfied to never see it again for as long as I live!”

“‘Satisfied’?” von Helrung asked, watching impassively the tears coursing down Arkwright’s cheeks. “No, I suppose anyone would be ‘satisfied,’ Thomas, though not the one who might have risked all to see the thing that devoured him!”

“It happened too fast! In the wink of an eye, Meister Abram—the wink of an eye! And a moment later—he returned… raining all around me. I lifted my face to the sky and was soaked to the skin with… him. With him! And you would judge me for it? You were not there; you were not the shore upon which the flotsam of a human being washed down!”

He slumped over again, rocking back and forth, clutching the doctor’s case, caressing it.

“Forgive me, Thomas,” von Helrung said kindly. “I do not pass judgment on your actions. It is not to me you must answer in the final days. But you are here and he is not. And so I am glad and aggrieved, relieved and burdened. As you are, I’m certain. Here, though. You haven’t finished the tale, and I would hear all of it, how you tracked down Jack Kearns and found the home of the nidus maker and all of that, but first a drink to steady your nerves, ja? Will Henry, be a dear and fetch a drink for Mr. Arkwright. What would you have, Thomas?”

“A bit of whiskey would be nice, if you have it, with some ice.”

I went to the liquor cabinet while von Helrung stationed himself directly in front of Arkwright, who raised the case with both hands, holding it toward von Helrung like a high priest making an offering to his god. “I went back at first light, and found this. I thought you might want it. It’s all that’s left of him.”

“All?”

Arkwright swallowed hard and whispered, “The rest I was able to wash off in the tidewaters of the sea.”

His drink was ready. Von Helrung took it from me and handed it to Arkwright, who emptied the glass in a single, shuddering gulp.

“Ahhh.”

“Would you like another?” von Helrung asked.

“It does help somewhat.”

“Then, you shall have another. You deserve it, Thomas. You deserve all you can drink, to the last drop.”

When Thomas Arkwright came to, an hour later, he was no longer in Abram von Helrung’s cozy parlor on Fifth Avenue. Where he found himself was neither cozy nor on Fifth Avenue.

I wonder what he noticed first. Was it the strange smell of moist air mixed with chemicals and the subtle undertones of decay? Or was it how the world had gone gray—gray walls, gray ceiling, gray floor—and was covered in the grimy residua of the smoke from oil lamps. Or did he notice the dust not yet captured by the walls, lazily floating in the tiny chamber’s atmosphere? Perhaps. But I suspect he first noticed the ropes.

“Well, baby’s up from his nap,” murmured Jacob Torrance.

Arkwright jerked in the chair and, as he was bound tightly hand and foot to it, nearly toppled over. He squinted in the weak light of the single kerosene lamp on the table behind Torrance, who stood in front of him, a six-foot-six hulking shadow, with face hidden and the voice of God’s avenging angel come to bring justice to the wicked.

And in me the thing unwinding, a swift, fierce thrill when I saw the fear in Thomas Arkwright’s eyes.

“Who are you?” Arkwright asked in a remarkably steady voice. Sound can play tricks in the underground crypts of the Monstrumarium. It careens from the walls, skitters down the serpentine passageways, smacks back and forth, ceiling to floor, wall to wall and back again. Did I hear the faintest trace of an accent far removed from the shores of Long Island?

“I’m the man who’s going to kill you,” Torrance answered evenly. “Unless Will would like the honor.”

“Will!” He peered into the murk until his eyes fell upon me. I willed myself not to look away. “Where is von Helrung?”

“I killed him,” Torrance answered. “No, I didn’t. Did I? What do you think?”

“Where am I? Why am I tied to this chair?” The drug still floated in his blood. He was fighting it, willing his tongue to mold the words.

“What, you don’t recognize the smell? I thought you’d been here before. And you know why you are tied to that chair. So you’re even now: two questions to which you don’t know the answer, and two to which you do. You are only allowed five, so I would suggest that you ask one from the first category.”

“The last one I don’t—I didn’t know the answer to. What—what has happened? I really don’t understand.… Will, can you tell me what’s happened?”

“You’re asking him because you haven’t liked my answers. That isn’t my fault.”

“Very well, then! I shall ask you: Why do you want to kill me?”

“I didn’t say I wanted to. I said I was going to. I’m not a monster, you know; I just study them.” He shrugged out of his jacket, handed it to me. He pulled out his Colt revolver.

“This is my gun. I named it Sylvia. It’s a long story.”

He flipped open the cylinder and held it a foot from Arkwright’s aristocratic nose.

“She is empty, see?”

He dug into his vest pocket and removed a single bullet.

“A bullet,” he said, holding it up.

He slid it into a chamber and slapped the cylinder closed. Then with no further preamble he stepped forward and pressed the muzzle against Arkwright’s finely formed forehead.

Our captive did not flinch. His gray eyes looked unblinking into Torrance’s face. “Go on; pull the trigger. You don’t frighten me.”

“I don’t want to frighten you,” Torrance replied. He dropped the gun onto the bound man’s lap and said, “I want to tell you a story. It’s one of my favorite stories, written by a very good friend of mine who happens to be the world’s reigning hot dog-eating champion. He ate two and a half hot dogs, plus buns, in sixty seconds. It’s hard to make a decent living eating hot dogs, so he turned to writing—which pays a little better but wins not half the glory of achieving two and a half wieners in a minute—plus the buns. It’s the buns that’s impressive. The story’s pretty famous; you’ve probably heard of it.

“Once upon a time there was a very mean king. He had a beautiful daughter whom, despite the fact that he was very mean, he loved very much. Well, one day this beautiful daughter of his disobeys him and falls in love with a fellow well below her station—a commoner, in other words. This made the mean king very, very angry, and that’s a bad spot to be in if you’re this princess’s paramour. The king threw the poor sucker into the deepest, dankest, darkest dungeon—not too different from this place. He was just going to kill him, but the mean king was an ol’ softie when it came to his daughter, who was just as heartbroken as Juliet over her lover’s misfortune—that is, his being born out of the wrong womb.

“So the mean king doesn’t kill him, but boy, does he set him up good. He plops him down in this big closed-off arena, like a coliseum, the kind the Romans had, and in the arena are two identical doors. Behind one door is a very good-looking woman—not a real looker like the princess, but several degrees from not bad. Behind the other is a ferocious man-eating tiger. The prisonr must choose one door—no coercion, entirely up to him. If he opens the door that hides the lady, he must marry her—the till-death-do-us-part kind of marrying, or the mean king will kill him. If he opens the door to the tiger… Well, you can picture the outcome.

“Now, you might be thinking, ‘Well, I know which one I’d try for!’ But wait. Right as he’s about to pick, he looks up and sees the princess. Ah, true love will triumph! Good will overcome immoderate meanness! For she does indeed know what is behind each door. And lo, when he looks up at her, she flicks her finger to the right—meaning ‘Pick the door on the right; trust me!’

“Now, her lover may have been a commoner and may not have had all the perks of a royal education, but he was no simpleton. He begins to think about it. He begins to wonder how his dear would feel if she had to watch her true love spend the rest of his life in the arms of another, albeit just a notch or two less beautiful, woman. Did that flick of the finger mean, therefore, ‘Dinner’s served?’ Oh, but no, ‘Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not.…’ Wish him to be torn limb from limb and eaten before the king and the court and her? Impossible! So it must be the lady behind the right door.

“But wait! Did I mention who the lady is? She is well-known to the king’s daughter, a woman she despises, loathes with all her being, so if it is her behind the right door, the princess will be forced to watch, for the rest of her life, this hateful creature have what she, the royal princess, cannot. And her poor lover knows this.

“‘Still, I cannot believe she could simply sit there and watch me be eaten,’ our poor lover thinks. ‘So she points to the door that will slay her heart but save my life.’ He starts to turn the knob on the right-hand door.

“‘But wait!’ he thinks. ‘What if she is worried that I do not trust her? That would mean she points out the tiger, thinking I will choose the other door and thus live. I must choose the door on the left!’

“So he steps to the door on the left. But just as he’s about to open it, he thinks, ‘But wait! I do trust her. Her heart could not bear the sight of my mangled corpse being dragged around the arena by a wild animal, entrails trailing in the sawdust, blood everywhere, a mess. The lady must be behind the right door! Unless… unless I shouldn’t trust her. Love may suffer long, but a lifetime is an awfully “long” long. The tiger is behind the right door. I should open the left!’

“Two doors. Behind one, the lady. Behind the other, the tiger. Which should he choose?”

Torrance fell silent. Arkwright, convinced by this point, perhaps, that he was in the presence of a lunatic, said nothing at first, and then, unable to bear the tension any longer, blurted out, “All right, which is it? Which door did he choose?”

“I don’t know! The bugger just leaves it there. He can knock off two and a half hot dogs in a minute, but he can’t finish a damn story. Anyay, it’s the wrong question. The correct question is which will you choose—the lady or the tiger?”

Torrance nodded to me. I stepped into the hall and returned with the rolling cart; its wheels had not been oiled since its construction, most likely; they squeaked and squealed as I pushed it into the small chamber. Arkwright’s eyes cut to the cart and the large jar sitting on top of it—and then cut away. His shoulders bunched and relaxed; his right leg jerked.

“You know what this is,” Torrance said with a flick of his finger toward the thing suspended inside the amber-colored preserving solution. Arkwright did not answer. His face shone with sweat. A nerve beneath his right eye danced. “Now, where did I put my gloves?” Torrance wondered. “Oh, here they are on the table. You too, Will. Put them on.” He picked up the scalpel from the cart and sliced through the wax ring around the lid. “Hold this a moment, please, Will,” he said, handing me the scalpel. He unscrewed the lid. The sound was very loud in the closed space.

“All right,” Arkwright said loudly. “All right! This really is becoming tiresome. I demand to speak to Dr. von Helrung immediately!”

Torrance set the lid aside, and then reached inside to remove the nidus, grimacing a bit, not from fear, I think, but, because his forearms were so large, it was a tight fit. He carefully lowered the nest of woven human remains next to the jar, where it glistened wetly in the lamplight.

“Spatula, Will,” Torrance murmured. I handed him the flat-bladed tool, which he used to coax off a dime-size amount of the bonding material, the sticky sputum of Typhoeus magnificum.

“What is it?” Arkwright shouted. “What are you doing over there?”

“You know what I’m doing.”

“You do not realize it, sir, but you have made a grievous mistake. A grievous mistake!”

“Me? I have made a grievous mistake?” Torrance held up the spatula.

“Do you think that frightens me?” Arkwright laughed derisively. “You won’t do it. You can’t do it.”

“I can’t do it?” Torrance seemed genuinely puzzled.

“No, you can’t—because I don’t have to tell you anything. I won’t tell you anything unless you release me. Ha! Now which shall you choose? If you do this to me, you will never know.”

“Never know what? I don’t recall asking you a damn thing.”

Arkwright tried to laugh. It came out as a strangled hiccup. His hands were locked around the rear legs of the chair, and they were shaking, and so the chair too was shaking. The very air around Thomas Arkwright shook; the dust particles vibrated in sympathy to his terror.

Torrance continued: “The absorption rate varies depending on the location of the exposurzleposure to the upper dermis, for example, results in a more prolonged development of symptoms than, say, exposure to the mouth, or eyes, nose—any body cavity, really, such as the ear canal or the anus.”

He was speaking in a very dry monotone, similar to the one I’d heard the doctor use, as if he were addressing some unseen classroom of students.

“You’re mad,” Arkwright said matter-of-factly.

“No,” Torrance replied. “I’m a monstrumologist. It’s a subtle distinction.”

Then he continued with his presentation: “And the symptoms… Well, I probably don’t need to go into all that. If you’re curious, I suppose Will here could describe them to you—what you may expect in the hours to come. He’s seen it up close.”

I nodded. I felt light-headed. Blood roared in my ears. And in my heart, the tightly wound thing unwinding.

“Will…,” Arkwright echoed. “Will! Will, you can’t do this. Don’t let him do this, Will! Run and find von Helrung. Quick, Will! Go!”

“I wouldn’t appeal anything to Mr. Henry if I were you,” said Torrance. “Truth is, all this was his idea.”

Arkwright stared at me, dumbfounded. I returned his stare frankly; I did not look away.

“He’s the one who figured you out for the stinking liar you are. So I wouldn’t be barking orders at Mr. Will Henry, no sir!”

He stepped toward the seated man, and that one step caused Arkwright to jerk violently. The feet of the chair complained against the concrete floor. The gun fell from his lap.

“Dear God, I don’t know what you want from me!” he cried, his bravado beginning to break.

“Hear that, Will?” inquired Torrance. “That sound like a Long Island accent to you? Doesn’t to me. Sounds English almost.”

“I am a British citizen, a servant to the crown of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, and I will see you hang, sir!”

“I doubt that,” Torrance returned easily. He stepped around the chair to stand directly behind Arkwright, moving with startling alacrity for a man his size. He did not hesitate; he did not wait for his prisoner to turn his head; he reached forward with his free hand and pinched shut Arkwright’s nose.

The reaction was immediate. Arkwright bucked and twisted, threw his body impotently against the ropes, whipped his head from side to side in a vain attempt to dislodge Torrance’s viselike grip. Out of the corner of his eye, before it was covered with the palm of his captor’s large hand, he must have seen the gleaming spatula in Torrance’s other hand. His lips were clamped tightly together, but he and Torrance knew it could be maintained for only so long. He could hold his breath until he passed out, but what would that accomplish? It would make Torrance’s job easier; that’s all.

He had little choice. The lady or the tiger? It was a poor analogy.

He opened his mouth and gasped, “My name is not Arkwright.” With his nose clamped tight, he sounded like he had a bad head cold.

“I don’t care what your name is.”

“You will hang for this!” he shouted. “You and von Helrung and your little bastard assistant.”

“Will isn’t my little bastard assistant. Will is Pellinore Warthrop’s little bastard assistant.”

“Warthrop? Is that it? You want to know what happened to Warthrop? Warthrop is dead. He died on Masirah, the bloody island of Masirah, in the Arabian Sea, just like I told von Helrung!”

Torrance looked across the room at me. I shook my head.

“We don’t believe you,” he told Arkwright. “Will, lend me a hand here. He keeps jerking around like this, and I’m going to drop the spatula.”

I took the implement from him and watched Torrance wrap his huge forearm around Arkwright’s neck.

“You’ve done it now,” Torrance whispered. “See, I might hesitate. I’m at the age where the idea of hanging actually gives me pause, but he’s just a child, and children think they will live forever. He’s got a strong case. He thinks you may have killed Warthrop, you know, and I’m thinking he may be right.”

“I didn’t kill him!”

“Well, he sure didn’t die the way you described it. My money is on Kearns. Kearns killed him.”

“No one killed him—no one. I swear to you, no one!” His eyes fell upon me; I was the one who held death itself—and therefore his life—in my hand.

“He’s alive,” he gasped. “There. He’s alive! Is that satisfactory to you?”

“First he’s dead; now he’s alive,” Torrance said. “Next you’ll have him appearing in a traveling minstrel show.”

He released Arkwright and snapped his fingers at me. He wanted the pwdre ser.

Arkwright cried out, “I’m telling you the truth! And I’ll tell you what else. The bastard wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for me! That’s the ironic thing. Warthrop owes his life to me, and you’re going to take mine for the debt!”

“Owes you his life,” Torrance echoed.

“Yes, his life. They wanted to kill him. Wanted to kill both of us. But I put a stop to it. I stopped them—”

“‘Them,’” said Torrance.

“No, no, please. I can’t tell you that.”

“‘They wanted to kill him.’”

“They’ll kill me. They will hunt me down like a dog and they—”

R="1em"16;They.’”

“Listen to me!” Arkwright screeched. His eyes were darting back and forth—to me, to Torrance, to me again, back to Torrance. To whom should he appeal? The child who had composed this play, or the actor who was performing it? “If I tell you that, I’m a dead man.”

“You’re a dead man if you don’t.”

The lady or the tiger. Perhaps the analogy was not so poor after all.

I could contain myself no longer. “Where is Dr. Warthrop?” I blurted out.

He told us, and the answer held no meaning for me. I had never heard of the place, but Torrance had. He stared at Arkwright for a long moment, and then burst into laughter.

“Well… all right, then! I like it. It’s… Well, it’s crazy. But it also makes some sense. Inclines me toward some skeptical belief, Arkwright.”

“Good! And now you know where he is and you’re letting me go. Aren’t you?”

But Torrance had not finished thinking it through. He had reached the crux of it, the two identical doors.

“‘They,’ you said. ‘They wanted to kill him.’ There was Kearns and you and them. Or was it Kearns and you, and then them?”

“I don’t even know what you’re saying. Oh, Christ help me!” His eyes rolled in my direction. “Christ, help me,” he whispered desperately.

I thought I understood, and stepped in as Torrance’s interpreter. “How do you know John Kearns?”

“I don’t know John Kearns from Adam. Never met him, never saw him before, and never heard of him before this bloody business began. And I wish I never had!”

“Got it!” Torrance shouted. “It’s Kearns, then them, and then you. Not you and Kearns—not you with Kearns. You’re not with Kearns, and you’re not with them. You’re with…” He stamped his foot. I was reminded of a rambunctious stallion eager to be free of his stall. “Servant to the Crown… Servant to the Crown! I get it now. That’s good.”

All was still then. Even the dust seemed to pause in its fitful ballet. There was Arkwright in his chair and Torrance standing behind him and me against the wall, and there was the lamplight and the nidus and the spatula, and, glistening on the spatula, pwdre ser, the rot of stars that made men rot, and inside each of us das Ungeheuer, the thing unwinding that whispers I AM with the force to break the world in half, the thing in you and the thing in me, the thing in Thomas and the thing in Jacob wall, o doors, two for each of us.

Jacob chose his door first, reaching down and untying the ropes that bound the hands of Thomas, and Thomas in the chair shivered like a man who opens the front door of his warm house on a cold morning. Jacob chose his door and freed Thomas’s hands, and after he had freed his hands and Thomas knew the bracing wind on his face, the blast that meant he was free, that he’d endured, Jacob yanked back Thomas’s head, and Thomas howled, and his hands came up, but it was too late because Jacob had opened the door; the door was flung wide, and into Thomas’s mouth went the spatula, to the back of his throat, and Thomas gagged.

Torrance stepped back as Arkwright went forward, fighting desperately to stand, but his legs were still bound to the chair and he pitched forward onto the cold floor, and his screams were inhuman slaughterhouse screeches. He scuttled across the floor, the chair’s back pushing his chest down and scraping back and forth as he legs jerked and pulled against the ropes, and then he stopped, his back arched, and he emptied his stomach.

What came next could not have lasted more than a minute:

“Will! Will!” Torrance shouted.

A slap across my cheek, hard enough to rock me back on my heels.

“Get. Out. NOW.”

I skittered around Arkwright’s heaving form.

Sobs and curses were trapped between the chamber walls, echoes smashing against answering echoes, pummeling me, the sound of the world breaking in half.

The amber-colored liquid in the empty jar that sloshed when I bumped into the cart on the way out. Then, behind me, the soft tink of the spatula falling to the floor, and then the wobbly wheels complaining as Torrance shoved the cart toward me.

The nidus was now in the hall, and right behind it was Torrance, who slammed shut the door and threw home the bolt. He hurled his huge fist against the locked door. He howled with unloosed rage.

I do not think the man on the other side heard him.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Bang, bang, BANG! “You stupid, stupid, stupid limey bastard!” BANG!

I slid down the wall of the passageway. I pressed my hands to my ears. It goes on forever, the unwinding thing; it has no beginning or end, no top or bottom; it is not contained by the universe; before the universe was, it had been; and when the universe has burned itself to a handful of dust, it will still be there, the thing in me and the thing in you, das Ungeheuer, the abyss.

“This wasn’t the plan! You weren’t supposed to really do it!” I screamed at Torrance’s back as he pounded on the locked door. “You were supposed to make him just think you were!”

He whirled on me. I saw his eyes clearly, in the lamplight dark, in the dim hall, white-less. Oculus Dei, I thought, the es of God.

“Shut up and listen!” he roared. “Just shut your trap and listen to—”

Now, from the chamber, silence, and the man inside sees before him the two doors, his two doors, and the man asks himself, Which will it be, the lady or the tiger? And he stretches out his hand…

Jacob Torrance stiffened when the shot rang out. His gaze flew toward the low ceiling, and then he closed his eyes.

“It’s the lady, then,” he murmured.

Abram von Helrung crossed his arms behind his back and stared out the window to the street below. Beneath him the great city was coming to life. A large gray draft horse clopped along the granite avenue pulling a dray loaded with dry goods. A man on a boneshaker bicycle whizzed along the sidewalk. Two pretty girls with red ribbons in their hair skipped arm in arm across the street, lifting their bare knees high, their high-pitched laughter like the little lame balloon man’s whistle, far and wee.

“‘Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill,’” he said quietly. “‘Come Shepherd, and again begin the quest!’”

He turned from the window and said, “I was ten, and my father took my little sister and me from our little village of Lech to Stubenbach, where a band of Gypsies had arrived with their traveling show. It was just the three of us; my mother refused to go and warned Papa he must watch us with an eagle eye, for the Gypsies were widely believed to steal children. ‘Devil-worshippers,’ she called them. But my Papa, though only a poor farmer, had the heart of an adventurer, and so we went. There were dancers and acrobats and fortune-tellers—and the food! Mein Gott, you had never tasted such food! In the afternoon we were approached by two men, one very old and the other much younger—his son, perhaps—who offered us a peek inside their tent for a small fee. ‘Why?’ asked Papa. ‘What is in your tent?’ And the older one answered, ‘Come and see.’ So Papa paid the fee, and I went inside. Not Papa or my sister. The younger Gypsy said to him, ‘Do not take her. She should stay outside.’ And Papa wasn’t going to leave her and risk her being stolen—or my mother’s wrath for suffering her to be stolen. I went in alone. There was a large wooden crate—it reminded me very much of a coffin—and inside the crate was an abomination. It paralyzed me with dread—froze me to the spot. I wanted to look away, but I could not look away. ‘What is it?’ I asked the old man. ‘It is a monster,’ he said. ‘Slain by my kinsmen in Egypt. It is called a griffin. This one is only a baby. They grow very large, large enough to blot out the sun. Is it not marvelous?’

“It had the body of a lion, the head of an eagle, and a python for a tail. A fake, and not a very good fake. They had sutured the parts together with thick black twine, but I did not come to that conclusion until many years later. I was a child. I saw the beast with a child’s eyes, eyes that could not look away. What sort of thing is this and how could it be? How could such a thing exist? I remember feeling tightness in my chest, as if a great hand were sezing the life from my heart. I would run; I would stay. I would turn aside; I would look closer.… It held me, and in some strange way that I do not pretend to understand, I held it. I still hold it. And it still holds me.”

He turned back to the window. The sun broke over the buildings on the eastern side of the street, flooding the avenue with golden light.

“That day was the beginning.”

“I was fifteen, and my first monster had the same name as me,” Jacob Torrance said. “He came home after a night with his mistress and a bottle of rotgut and started beating my mother with the business end of a joiner’s mallet. So I picked up the closest thing at hand—just happened to be his Springfield musket—and blew a hole the size of a turnip through the back of his head. Been killing monsters ever since.”

Von Helrung was frowning. “Thomas Arkwright was no monster until you made him one.”

“Thomas Arkwright was an agent for the British intelligence service.”

“How do you know this? Did Arkwright tell you? No! You assume it. You guess at it!”

“Besides Kearns, there are at least two sets of players at this poker table, Meister Abram. Three, counting us. There’s the set Arkwright was afraid would kill him if he showed his hand, and the set that was going to hang us if we harmed one little hair on his thinning scalp. I don’t know who that first set could be, but I’m betting the second is Her Majesty’s government. Makes good sense to me. If I were Kearns and knew where the magnificum roosted, I could demand a hefty asking price. A nidus would fetch a pretty penny, sure, but compare that to having the momma whose one drop of spit turns grown men’s brains into jelly. He could expect a king’s ransom—or a queen’s!”

“Why would the English send a spy to infiltrate our ranks if Kearns holds the key to the magnificum?” asked von Helrung.

“Getting to that. Arkwright obviously knew Warthrop had the nidus. Will figured that one out all by himself. And the only way he could have known that, is from Kearns. Unless this first set of people, whoever they are, told him—or another set we don’t know about yet, but I don’t think so. I think Kearns told him. Well, not Kearns personally—the British government, the blokes who sent him. And they sent him because they needed Warthrop for something.”

“Needed him… for what?” Von Helrung appeared confused.

“Not sure. But I’m pretty sure that Jack Kearns had the nidus, but he didn’t know where it came from. That’s why they infiltrated our ranks. If you know where it comes from, you don’t need an expert monster hunter. You just go straight to the monster. But if you don’t know where it comes from, then you’re up the proverbiaanstalk. So what does our boy Jack do if he has the golden egg but not the goose that laid it? He’ll need a goose hunter. And not just any ol’ goose hunter. This ain’t no ordinary goose; it’s the goose, the goose of all gooses—eh, geese. Not just any goose hunter but the best goose hunter in the world, in the whole history of the world. You don’t dare play it straight with him. You don’t tell him why you want it hunted; he’s got it in his goose-hunting head somehow that morals apply to monstrumology.”

Von Helrung thought for a moment, and then snorted with disgust.

“And Arkwright is sent here to track Warthrop tracking the magnificum? It is absurd, Torrance. Once Pellinore discovered the hiding place of the magnificum, the British would have no reason to pay Kearns a penny.”

“That’s where I think the first set of players comes in. Kearns went to someone else, another government—maybe the French, no love lost there—and he’s playing them off each other.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Warthrop does. That’s the next step. And I say we don’t waste time taking it. They’ll be expecting Arkwright back soon, and Arkwright isn’t coming back… soon or any other time.”

“Because you killed him,” I piped up. I was still furious at him. “You didn’t have to do what you did.”

“Think so? And anyway, I killed him in only the loosest definition of the word.”

“Why did you kill him, Jacob?” von Helrung asked quietly. “What did you fear?”

Torrance said nothing at first; he played with his signet ring. Nil timendum est.

“Well, he did threaten to have me hanged, but never mind that. It’s like you stepping into that Gypsy’s tent, Meister Abram. Once we had him tied up, alea iacta est, the die had been cast. Stick to Will’s plan, and we get arrested—or worse—for the kidnapping and torture of a British officer, and Warthrop rots where they’ve stuck him until he’s older than you.”

“And what if they didn’t stick him there?” I shouted at him. “What if Arkwright lied? You didn’t have to kill him, and you shouldn’t have killed him. Now we may never find the doctor!”

Torrance stared stone-faced at me for a long moment, and then shrugged. Shrugged! I hurled myself toward him. I was going to pummel him to death with my bare hands. I was going to choke the life out of him. Von Helrung saved his life. He grabbed my arm and yanked me back, pulled my head to his chest and stroked my hair.

“So you are at peace with his self-destruction?” von Helrung asked Torrance. “The one you conveniently staged?”

“Everyboshould have a choice when it comes down to it—and, yes, I think I’ll sleep well tonight.”

“I envy you this once, Jacob, for I will not.”

I waited until Torrance had retired to the guest bedroom, to rest from the night’s labor, before I approached von Helrung with my request. I call it a request; it was more like a demand.

“I’m coming with you,” I told him.

“It is too dangerous,” he returned, not unkindly.

“I won’t be left behind again. If you try, I’ll stow away on the boat. And if I can’t stow away, I’ll swim there. I am the one who found him out. I have earned the right.”

He placed a hand upon my shoulder. “I fear it is more burden than right, mein Freund Will Henry.”

That afternoon I said good-bye to Adolphus Ainesworth, who was in a very foul mood, even for him.

“I don’t care what anyone says,” he snarled at me, his false teeth snapping in fury. “Someone has been inside the Locked Room! I always hang my ring with the outside key on the inside, and this morning how do you think I find it facing?”

“Toward the outside?”

“You took them.”

“No, Professor Ainesworth, I did not,” I answered honestly. It had been Torrance who’d entered the Locked Room.

“Well, what do I expect? You are a child, and children are natural-born liars. Some grow out of it; some don’t! And what do you mean, you’re leaving?”

“I am sailing to England in the morning with Dr. von Helrung.”

“Dr. von Helrung! Why is Dr. von Helrung going to England? And why are you going to England?” He was a very old man, but his intellect had not faded with his youth. It took only a moment for him to piece the puzzle together. “The magnificum! You have found it.”

“No, but we’ve found Dr. Warthrop.”

“You’ve found Dr. Warthrop!”

“Yes, Professor Ainesworth. We have found Dr. Warthrop.”

“He isn’t dead?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Why are you smiling like that?” He bared his dead son’s teeth to mock my grin. “Well, I will be sorry to miss the joyous reunion. His gain is my gain, I will say.”

“Sir?”

“I said his gain is my gain!” He leaned across the desk to shout in my face. “Don’t you know I’m the one who’s supposed to be deaf? Well. Good-bye!”

He bver some papers on his desk and shooed me toward the door with a wave of his gnarled hand.

I paused in the doorway. It occurred to me that I might not see him again.

“I enjoyed working for you, Professor Ainesworth,” I said.

He did not look up from his work. “Keep moving, William James Henry. Always keep moving, like the proverbial stone, or you’ll end up an old mossback like Adolphus Ainesworth!”

I started into the hall. He called me back.

“You are a slave,” he said. “Or you must think you are, not to be asking for your pay. Here,” he added gruffly, shoving two crumpled dollar bills across the desk.

“Professor Ainesworth—”

“Take it! Don’t be a fool when it comes to money, Will Henry. Be a fool about everything else—religion, politics, love—but never be a fool about money. That bit of wisdom is your bonus for your long minutes of heavy toil!”

“Thank you, Professor Ainesworth.”

“Shut up. Go. Wait. Why the devil are you going again?”

“To save the doctor.”

“Save him from what?”

“Whatever he needs saving from. I’m his apprentice.”

As I packed my things that evening, Lilly approached me with her request. Oh, very well, I shall admit it: It wasn’t a request.

“I am going with you.”

I did not choose the answer von Helrung had given me. I was tired and anxious, my nerves were shot, and the last thing I wanted was a row.

“Your mother won’t let you.”

“Mother says she won’t let you.”

“The difference is that she isn’t my mother.”

“She’s already been to Uncle, you know. I’ve never seen her so angry. I thought her head might burst—literally burst and roll off her shoulders. I’m very curious to see what happens.”

“I don’t think her head will burst.”

“No, I meant with you. I’ve never known her not to get her way.”

She flopped onto the bed and watched me shove clothing into my little bag. Her frank stare unnerved me. It always did.

“How did you find him?” she asked.

“Another monstrumologist found him.”

“How?”

“I—I am not sure.”

She laughed—spring rain upon the dry earth. “I don’t know why you lie, William James Henry. You’re very bad at it.”

“The doctor says lying is the worst kind of buffoonery.”

“Then, you are the worst kind of buffoon.”

I laughed. It brought me up short. I could not remember the last time I had laughed. It felt good to laugh. And good to see her eyes and smell the jasmine in her hair. I had the impulse to kiss her. I’d never experienced that particular urge before, and the feeling was not unlike standing on the edge of an abyss of an entirely different sort. This was no knot in my chest unwinding; this was the air itself, the whole atmosphere, expanding at speeds unimaginable. I didn’t know quite what to do about it all—except perhaps to kiss her, but actually kissing Lilly Bates entailed… well, kissing her.

“Will you miss me?” she asked.

“I will try.”

She found my answer to be extraordinarily witty. She rolled onto her back and howled with laughter. I blushed, not knowing whether to be flattered or offended.

“Oh!” she cried, sitting up and digging into her purse. “I nearly forgot! Here, I have something for you.”

It was her photograph. Her smile was slightly unnatural, I thought, though I liked her hair. It had been styled into corkscrew ringlets, which more than made up for the smile.

“Well, what do you think? It’s for luck, and for when you get lonely. You’ve never told me, but I think you are lonely a great deal of the time.”

I might have argued; bickering was our normal mode of discourse. But I was leaving, and she had just given me her photograph, and a moment before I’d thought of kissing her, so I thanked her for the present and went on with my packing—that is, rearranging what was already packed. Sometimes, when Lilly was around me, I felt like an actor who did not know what to do with his hands.

“Write me,” she said.

“What?”

“A letter, a postcard, a telegram… write to me while you’re away.”

“All right,” I said.

“Liar.”

“I promise, Lilly. I will write to you.”

“Write me a poem.”

“A poem?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be a poem, I suppose.”

“That’s good.”

“Why is that good? You don’t want to write a poem?” She was pouting.

“I’ve just never written one. The doctor has. The doctor was a poet before he became a monstrumologist. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“I bet you didn’t know I did know that. I’ve even read some of his poems.”

“Now you̵ the liar. The doctor said he burned them all.”

Being caught in a lie did not faze Lillian Bates. She simply moved on, remorseless. “Why did he do that?”

“He said they weren’t very good.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense.” She was laughing again. “If one burned every bad poem that’s been written, the smoke would blot out the sun for a week.”

She watched as I tugged my hat from the top shelf of the closet. Watched as I turned it in my hands. Watched my face as I ran my finger over the stitching on the inside band: W.J.H.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s my hat.”

“Well, I can see it’s a hat! It looks too small for you.”

“No,” I said. I stuffed the hat into my bag. It had been his first—no, his only—gift to me. I was determined never to misplace it.

“It fits,” I said.

I had the dream that night—my last night in New York and the last night I would have it.

The Locked Room. Adolphus fumbling with his keys.

The doctor said you’d want to see this.

The box on the table and the lid that won’t come off.

I can’t open it.

The box trembles. It mimics the beat of my heart. What is in the box?

Thickheaded boy! You know what it is. You’ve always known what’s in the box. It isn’t what’s inside he wanted you to see: It’s the box!

I pick it up. The box trembles in my hand. It beats in time with my heart. I’d been wrong; it was not the doctor’s. It belonged to me.

I was not down for breakfast promptly at six the next morning. Mrs. Bates came up to check on me; I heard her hurrying up the stairs, and then the bedroom door burst open and she stood gasping in the doorway. I noticed she was holding an envelope.

“William! Oh, thank God. I thought you had left.”

“I wouldn’t leave without saying good-bye, Mrs. Bates. That wouldn’t be proper.”

She beamed. “No! No, it most certainly would not. And here you are, and here is your bag with all your things, and I suppose you have not changed your mind?”

I told her that I had not. An awkward silence came between us.

“Well,” I said finally, and cleared my throat. “I’d better go.”

“You must say good-bye to Mr. Bates,” she instructed me. “And thank him for all he’s done.”

“Yes, ma’am8221;

“And, forgive me, William, but really, you must think I’ve gone mad if you think you’re leaving this house with your hair looking like that.”

She found the comb beside the washbasin and ran it through my hair several times. She did not seem pleased with the outcome.

“Do you have a hat?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I dug into my bag for the hat with my initials. I heard what sounded like the soft cry of a wounded animal and looked over at her.

“William, I must apologize,” she said. “I do not have a bon voyage present for you, but, I will say in my defense, I had hardly any notice that you were leaving. It was literally sprung on me at the last moment.”

“You don’t need to give me anything, Mrs. Bates.”

“It is… customary, William.”

She sat on the bed. I remained standing beside my little bag, turning the hat in my hands. She was tapping the envelope upon her lap.

“Unless you would consider this a gift,” she said, nodding to the envelope.

“What is it?”

“It is a letter of acceptance to Exeter Academy, one of the most prestigious preparatory schools in the country, William. Mr. Bates is an alumnus; he arranged it for you.”

“Arranged what?”

“Your acceptance! For the fall term.”

I shook my head; I didn’t understand. The hat turned; the envelope tapped.

“Stay with us,” she said. And then, as if she were correcting herself, “Stay with me. I know it may be too soon to call you ‘son,’ but if you stay, I promise I will love you as my son. I will protect you; I will keep you safe; I will let no harm come to you.”

I sat beside her. My hat in my hands, the envelope in her lap, and the absent man between us.

“My place is with the doctor.”

“Your place! William, your place is wherever the good Lord decides it is. Have you thought of that? In life there are the silly gifts we give one another and there are the real gifts, the gifts beyond all temporal value. It is no accident of circumstance that you’ve come to me. It is the will of God. I believe that. I believe that with all my heart.”

“If it’s God’s will,” I said, “wouldn’t he make sure I couldn’t leave?”

“You’re forgetting his greatest gift, William. That gift does not imprison; it frees. I could refuse to let you go. I could hire a lawyer, report the matter to the police. I could truss you up like a turkey and lock you in this room, but I will not. I will not force you to stay. I am asking you to stay. If you like, William, I will fall on my knees and beg you.” Mrs. Bates began to cry. She cried like she did everything else, with great dignity; there was a stateliness about her tears, a grandness that transcended the mundane—operatic, I would call them, and I mean that in the best sense of the word.

I looked down at the hat. A silly gift, she had called it. Perhaps it was silly compared to the ultimate gift. What gift would not be? And perhaps I was silly to feel any attachment to it or to the man who had given it to me. Little good can come of this, Will Henry. I looked at the spot where my finger should have been. That was nothing, the smallest of losses. In the warm kitchen a woman bakes her little boy an apple pie. A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails.

And in the arena are two identical doors…

She reached out and laid her hand upon my cheek. She knew. She never doubted, in the spot where doubt matters, which door I would choose.

Jacob Torrance filled the majority of his time during the six-day crossing with three things: carousing, philandering, and poker—in that order, with the occasional argument with Dr. von Helrung thrown in to break up the monotony. I suppose he slept a bit as well, but he did not share my state-room. I bunked with the old Austrian monstrumologist, who, I quickly discovered, shed most of his dignity when he put on his nightshirt (he was quite bandy-legged and a little potbellied), though that is true of almost everyone.

I missed one or two of their opening skirmishes. Hardly had Lady Liberty slipped beneath the horizon than I came down with a horrible case of mal de mer, the bane of land-lubbers, forcing me to become more intimately acquainted with a toilet than any person ought to be. Von Helrung put me to bed, gave me some salt crackers, and suggested, very seriously, that the best cure for seasickness was dancing.

“No, it’s olives,” countered Torrance. “Or gingerroot. You should gnaw on a root, Mr. Henry.”

“On every voyage my wife would suffer the same as Will,” von Helrung returned. “We would go dancing, and all would be fine.”

“So you would like to take Will dancing?”

“It makes more sense for him to dance than to gnaw on a root.”

“Maybe he should do both—gnaw on a root while he danced.”

“I’d rather not dance or eat,” I croaked. “Ever again.”

On the second day I was feeling a little better—well enough to try out my sea legs, anyway, and left the stateroom to explore the liner. After an hour of wandering the labyrinthine corridors and miles of decks, I discovered von Helrung and Torrance on the upper promenade, sitting in rocking chairs, the ever-present tumbler of Scotch by Torrance’s elbow. He had an annoying habit of smoothing his perfectly trimmed mustache after every sip.

“… not consistent. Not consistent at all, Jacob,” von Helrung was scolding his former student as I approached. So engrossed were they in the debate that my presence at first went unnoticed.

“I’m not saying it is there, Meister Abram—merely that we should look into it.”

“And I ask again, why would Arkwright lie about all things except the most important thing?”

“He wasn’t lying about Warthrop,” Torrance pointed out. “Well, not on the third go around, anyway.”

Von Helrung had received the news via telegram on the morning of our departure. His source had reported that the doctor was indeed where Arkwright had said he was—alive and well, or as well as might be expected, if you were Pellinore Warthrop and woke one day to find yourself in a decidedly un-Warthropian milieu. Von Helrung had been beside himself with joy; he actually danced a little jig on the dock when he read the cable. Perhaps he thought it odd, my somewhat muted reaction, but I had never lost hope, not really. You may call me a mystic or attribute my faith to the magical thinking of a child. Still, whatever one might say of mystics or faith or the thoughts of children, I believed if the doctor were really dead I would know it; I would feel it. Though fear for his life had sent me running on a river of blood and fire to save him, when I’d read the words in von Helrung’s vestibule, Warthrop is dead, I’d known them to be a lie—had known it in the way a child knows things only God himself could have told him.

“But why there of all places?” von Helrung had wondered after his impromptu celebratory dance.

“It’s perfect!” Torrance had exclaimed. “Can’t think of a more perfect place. Perfectly escape-proof and perfectly poetic. Kearns’s idea, I’m sure. I will give the man his due. The dirty louse has panache.”

“No, it must have been part of the deceit. It is not Masirah,” von Helrung was now insisting. “It could not be. Too far north and too close to the mainland. Oman is but ten miles to the west.”

Torrance was not going to give up easily, though. It was difficult to tell with Jacob Torrance. I wondered if he really believed everything he said or if he played devil’s advocate just for the childish thrill of it.

“But it could work, Meister Abram—sparsely populated, surrounded by treacherous currents, a rough and rocky coastline, a rugged inhospitable terrain. It could work.” He jiggled the ice in his tumbler. “The general area is right. Maybe our quarry has expanded its territory or migrated northward. It has been nearly forty years since the Lakshadweep discovery. Masirah is how far from Agatti? A thousand or so miles? That’s an average migration rate of twenty-five miles per year, very reasonable, particularly if the flying version of the magnificum turns out to be the right one.”

“I am not saying it is false from a monstrumological standpoint, Torrance,” von Helrung snapped. “If you are correct and the British government is involved, why would its agent reveal the one thing thould most want hidden, and hide all the rest? No. They choose Masirah for Pellinore to meet his Waterloo because it would seem a reasonable nesting ground to us and it was far from the real one.”

The old man’s face darkened, and he added, “Of course, the entire issue would be moot if you had kept your head in the Monstrumarium.”

“I didn’t ask Arkwright, because I didn’t need to, Meister Abram,” returned Torrance.

“I see! You are adept at mind reading as well as torture.”

“You’re just trying to get under my skin. That’s all right. The reason I didn’t ask Arkwright is Warthrop. I didn’t need Arkwright to tell me something I can get straight from the horse’s mouth.”

“And what convinces you that—”

“Why put the hound back in its kennel unless you’ve bagged the fox? Warthrop had served his purpose. He’d found the home of the magnificum. Now the really interesting question is—”

His head came round; he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye.

“And here he is!” he said. “Like Lazarus three days dead from the tomb. Only Lazarus had better coloring. Stand back there, Mr. Henry, and head for the railing if you’re going to be sick again. I’ve just shined these shoes. Now, where is that steward? My glass is empty and my whistle’s dry.”

He excused himself and strode off without the slightest sway in his step. The more he drank, it seemed, the sturdier he became.

Von Helrung patted the arm of the rocker Torrance had vacated, and I sat down. Why people would find it pleasant to sit in a rocking chair on a rolling deck of an ocean liner was perplexing, to say the least.

“Dr. Torrance sounds like him sometimes,” I said.

“Warthrop?”

“Kearns.”

Von Helrung nodded; his expression was sad. “I am sorry to say I agree with you, mein Freund Will. When I was younger, I often wondered if monstrumology brought out the darkness in men’s hearts or if it attracted men with hearts of darkness. I think now it is not the nature of monstrumology but the nature of man. The truth makes us uncomfortable, as truth often does. In every heart, there lives a Jack Kearns.”

What he is, that’s what you are inside, I had told the monstrumologist.

On our final night at sea, unable to sleep and no longer able to endure the rumbling of my roommate’s tummy (von Helrung complained regularly of indigestion), I slipped out of the stateroom and headed for the foredeck. The North Atlantic was restless that night; driven by a sharp southwest wind, the waves smashed and ground angrily against the prow. The deck rose and fell, rose and fell, up toward the cloud-covered sky, then down toward the dark, cold water, as if our ship were balanced upon a fulcrum, teeter-tottering between heaven and hell. I spied two gul flitting in and out of the running lights, but that was the only life—and only light—I saw. There was no horizon; the world was black from top to bottom. I had the vertiginous sense of being very small in an immense space, like a speck of dust floating in the proto-universe, before the sun was born, before the light pushed back the darkness.

The world is large, dear Will, and we, no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise, we are quite small.

The next day, my exile would end. But that was the only thing that would. If Torrance was right and Warthrop knew where to find the magnificum, our rescue was not the end.

I choose to serve the light, he once told me. Though that bondage often lies in darkness.

Right now was the time of equilibrium between light and dark, the time between before and after.

I was leaving something behind. It had been within my grasp. I had only had to stretch forth my hand and seize it. Instead I’d watched it burn in the fireplace of the bedroom on Riverside Drive, when the woman who had sung to comfort me in the lightless, unwinding place had tossed an envelope into the flames.

I was approaching something. I thought I understood what it was. My place is with the doctor, I had said—a statement of fact, and a promise, too. I thought I knew what to expect after the end of our exile, the doctor’s and mine. I understood—or thought I understood—the cost of service to the monstrumologist. I was reminded of it every time I washed my hands.

That night on the foredeck, under the starless sky, in the space between before and after, I looked out and saw darkness. He would go into that darkness in service to the light. And where he went, I would follow.

I thought I knew the cost of service to the one whose path lies in darkness.

I did not.

He thought he knew what he would find in that darkness.

He did not.

Its name is Typhoeus magnificum, the Magnificent Father, the Faceless One we cannot help but turn and face. The One of a Thousand Faces that is there when we turn to look, and then looks back at us.

It is the magnificum. It lives in that space between spaces, in that spot one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. You cannot see it. It sees you. And when it sees you, it does not see you. It has no conception of you. There is magnificum and nothing else.

You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars.

You may not understand what I mean.

You will.

A sallow-faced little man was waiting for us in the lobby of our hotel, the Great Western at Paddington Station, upon our arrival in London. He wore a topcoat of Harris Tweed over a cashmere suit and sported the worst haircut I had ever seen; his hair looked as if someone had hacked at it with a dull knife. I would later learn that Dr. Hiram Walker had been a barber—among other things; he’d once made a go of sheep farming—before entering the field of aberrant biology. He had bid adieu to all of his customers except one: himself. He smoked a pipe, walked with a cane, hummed nervously through his nose, and regarded the world through small, shifty eyes, like a cornered rat. Those eyes lighted for a moment upon the powerful physique of Jacob Torrance with undisguised distaste; clearly he was not pleased.

“Torrance,” he said in a nasally British accent. “I did not expect to see you.”

“Or you would have brought me a small token of your affection?”

“Hemmm,” Walker whined through his alphorn nose. His gaze darted bird-quick to me. “And who is this?”

“This is Will Henry, the son of Warthrop’s former assistant, James,” answered von Helrung, laying a hand upon my shoulder.

“I am Dr. Warthrop’s apprentice,” I said.

“Ah, yes. Quite. I seem to remember seeing you about at the last congress. Come to fetch your master, have you?” He turned to von Helrung without waiting for a reply. “The matter has proved more complicated than I first reported, Dr. von Helrung. They are refusing to release him.”

A bushy white eyebrow rose slowly toward the old man’s hairline. “What do you mean?”

Walker’s restless eyes roamed the crowded lobby.

“Perhaps we should find a spot with a bit more privacy. Since receiving your telegram, I’ve had the unshakable impression that I am being followed.”

We went up to our rooms on the third floor, overlooking Praed Street, where von Helrung ordered a pot of tea. Torrance requested something stronger for himself, but his old teacher preferred that his former pupil keep his wits about him.

“Whiskey is what keeps them,” Torrance protested. He winked at Walker. “The stable to the wild stallion my erudition.”

Hiram Walker answered with a disdainful sniff. “I am surprised every time I see you, Torrance.”

“Really? And why is that, Sir Hiram?”

“Because it is reasonable to assume you have been killed in a bar fight. And stop calling me that.” He sipped his tea and said to von Helrung, “It is outside their protocol to release a patient to anyone outside the immediate family without an order from a magistrate or upon the recommendation of the attending physician.”

“But surely you explained to them the circumstances of the case?” asked von Helrung. “He is confined under false pretenses.”

Walker shook his head. “I explained nothing. I made only the most general of inquiries, since I do not know the precise circumstances of the case. Hewas brought there, I was told, by his nephew, a Mr. Noah Boatman—”

Torrance guffawed. “Noah Boatman! Boatman—Arkwright. Ingenious.”

“May I continue? Thank you. A Mr. Noah Boatman, who claimed his ‘uncle’ had suffered a complete mental collapse, brought about by the recent death of his wife, who was mauled to death by a tiger—”

“By a what?” interrupted von Helrung.

“A tiger. A Bengal tiger, while visiting her sister in India. He believed himself to be, according to the nephew, an American monster hunter by the name of Pellinore Warthrop. His real name was William James Henry, and—Please, Torrance, would you be quiet? Von Helrung, perhaps we should order him up some whiskey—a gallon, so he can drink until he passes out. Now, what was I saying?”

“You’ve told us enough,” von Helrung said with a heavy sigh. “The rest is not difficult to guess. Mein Freund obliged the devious schemer by insisting he was an American monster hunter named Pellinore Warthrop. Thus, by telling the truth he validates the lie!”

“But there is more, Dr. von Helrung. And here it gets rather… well, bizarre. Warthrop also claimed, according to my sources, that his ‘nephew’ is a British double agent in the employ of the Russian secret police.”

“That’s it!” cried Torrance, leaping from his chair. Walker flinched, as if expecting a full frontal assault. A bit of tea sloshed from his cup. “‘They’ll hunt me down like a dog,’ he said,” Torrance continued. “It’s the first set, von Helrung!”

“Who?” asked von Helrung. “Who is the first set?”

“Okhranka! Oh, he’s a devil, this John Kearns! Of course. I am a fool for not seeing it. No wonder Arkwright was frightened to the point of soiling himself. That explains the fear, and the fact that he was a double agent explains the bravado. I’m guessing now that the Brits don’t even know about the nidus. It’s a Russian job through and through.”

“The nidus?” Walker echoed, his small eyes widening by half.

“I spoke out of turn,” said Torrance, with an abashed look toward von Helrung, whose cheeks had gone ruddy.

“The Russians have recovered a nidus ex magnificum?” Walker asked.

“We do not know,” von Helrung answered carefully. “There are many unanswered questions.”

“So it appears, Dr. von Helrung, most of which belong to me. Who is this Boatman or Arkwright or whatever his name is? Why would he go to such outlandish lengths to falsely imprison Dr. Warthrop? Why was Warthrop in London in the first place? Who is Jack Kearns, and what does he have to do with the Russian secret police?”

Von Helrung was giving Torrance a withering look.

“What?” demanded Torrance. “You never said it was a secret.”

“It was Pellinore’s wish to pursue the matter…” He searched for the word. “Independently.”

“Well, sure!” returned Torrance. “That’s Warthrop, wanting all the glory for himself.”

“The glory for…,” Walker asked von Helrung.

Von Helrung sighed. He gazed up at the ceiling and stroked beneath his chin.

“The Russians do not have the nidus,” he said finally. “We have the nidus. We have the nidus, the British have Warthrop, and the Russians have Jack Kearns.”

“You’re two thirds right, von Helrung,” Torrance said. “I don’t know if the Russians have Kearns, but I’m willing to bet Sir Hiram a haircut that they have the magnificum.”

There was nothing von Helrung could do at that point but tell his English colleague everything, from the delivery of the nidus on that freezing February morning and the horrific demise of its unwitting courier, to the disappearance of Warthrop and the fate of the traitor responsible for it. He emphasized, with an eyebrow cocked at Torrance, that all else was mere conjecture. We did not know, for example, if the Russians had found the home of Typhoeus magnificum.

“Well, it’s been what?” asked Torrance. “Over four months now? Plenty of time if Warthrop got it right, which he did.”

“And how do you know that, Jacob?” von Helrung demanded. He was beginning to regret, I think, including Torrance in our rescue mission.

Torrance shrugged. “He’s Warthrop.”

“Let’s pray he did,” said Walker. “A living magnificum would be the crowning achievement of our discipline.”

“I don’t think the czar gives a tinker’s damn about any crowns except his own,” Torrance said, and laughed. “If the Russians have it, we won’t be seeing it in the Monstrumarium anytime soon!”

Von Helrung was nodding. His expression was very grave. “I’m afraid Dr. Torrance is correct, at least in this particular aspect. If the magnificum should fall into the wrong hands…” He shuddered. The thought was unbearable.

Not so much to Torrance, though. He seemed intrigued by the possibilities. “It would change everything, gentlemen. It would shift the entire balance of power in Europe—maybe the world. Alexander conquered half of it. Think what he would have done with arrows dipped in monster snot!”

“Must you, Torrance?” whined Walker. “Why did you become a monstrumologist, anyway?”

“Well, I do like to kill things…” “Enough!” cried von Helrung. He slammed his pudgy hand upon the tabletop. “We are forgetting why we are here. We worry first about freeing Pellinore. Then we worry about monster snot.” He bore down on Walker. “We cannot go before a magistrate, and we will not convince his doctor. What does that leave us?”

“As I’ve said, if it’s determined he isn’t a danger to himself or the public, he may be released to a family member.”

“Hmmm,” Torrance hummed. “Too bad his nephew is dead.”

“We must be careful not to arouse their suspicion, or we shall find ourselves in rooms adjoining Pellinore’s,” mused von Helrung. “They are convinced of his condition or they would have released him. A ruse might succeed, but there is no way for us to forewarn him. How can he play a part if he cannot read the script?”

“He can’t,” Torrance said. “But he doesn’t have to.” He turned to Walker. “We’ll need someone to vouch for us. Someone the superintendent there knows and trusts and who’d be willing to play a supporting role. Got anybody like that in mind?”

Walker thought for a moment, sucking on the extinct tobacco in his bowl. Then he smiled around the tooth-dented stem, his rat eyes glinting wickedly.

“By George, I believe I have.”

Walker’s bit player was a compact, athletic-looking man in his early thirties, with very dark, short-cropped hair and even darker deep-set eyes. We met up with him the next morning a few miles west of London, outside the gatehouse of the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum.

After introducing von Helrung and me (Torrance, at the urging of von Helrung, had remained behind; I think Meister Abram was concerned his presence might turn a delicate situation into a dangerous one), Walker quickly reviewed our hastily drawn-up plan to win Warthrop’s immediate release. His friend suggested a few tweaks in our script but overall seemed pleased with the outline of our little scheme.

“I met Warthrop once, you know,” he told us. “Must have been ’77 or ’78, while I was studying at the university in Edinburgh. He’d come to consult with Dr. Bell on some matter or other—I don’t know precisely. Bell was very mysterious about it. He cut a striking figure, I remember that—very tall and lean, with the most piercing black eyes that seemed to slice right through you. He shook my hand and said, quite casually, as if he were remarking upon the weather, ‘A pleasure to meet you. You have recently returned from London, I perceive.’ I was astounded. How had he known that? Bell swore to me afterward he hadn’t told him, and I must confess I never quite believed my old professor’s denial. I have always meant to ask Warthrop how he knew—”

Von Helrung gently cut off the loquacious Scotsman, saying, “And we are delighted to present you with the opportunity! I am sure Pellinore will remember the encounter. His memory is as prodigious as his powers of observation and deduction. It is a gross injustice that he is here. I assure you, sir, he is no more mad than you or me, and we will be forever in your debt for helping us affect his speedy release from his lonely sojourn behind these walls! Lead, sir, and we shall follow!”

And so he did, through the gatehouse, where the watchman directed us to check in at the clerk’s office, located in the main building, a simple—if somewhat imposing—three-story building at the far side of the spacious front grounds. As we walked along the gravel path toward it, my heart began to race as my eyes sought out the doctor. I was excited, apprehensive, and a little frightened. If our impetuous plan should fail, he might never walk out the gates of this place.

I did not see the monstrumologist, but I saw other patients tending shrubbery with pruning shears and watering cans, some carrying loads of laundry and baskets of bread from the washhouse and bakery, and some in leisurely perambulation about the well-tended lawn, deep in earnest conversation or convulsed in carefree laughter, as if they were holiday campers out for a Sunday stroll in the park rather than patients in a lunatic asylum. I did not know it then, but Hanwell was well ahead of its time in the treatment of the mentally ill. Plop a poor soul from an American asylum—Blackwell’s Island, for example—into Hanwell, and he might have thought he had died and gone to heaven.

I do not think Warthrop would agree with me, though.

Our coconspirator signed us in at the front office.

“Dr. Hiram Walker, Mr. Abraham Henry, and grandson, to see the superintendent,” he informed the clerk. “And please tell him Dr. Conan Doyle is with them.”

“Arthur Conan Doyle! It is indeed a pleasure, sir,” the superintendent of Hanwell Lunatic Asylum said as he ushered us into his private office. “I must confess to you that I am quite the ardent admirer of your writing. My wife, too. She will be green with envy when I tell her I’ve met the creator of the great Sherlock Holmes!”

Conan Doyle accepted the praise humbly; in fact, he seemed almost embarrassed by it, and quickly changed the subject.

“I hope you’ve had the opportunity to read my note this morning,” he said.

“Yes, I have it here somewhere,” said the superintendent, rifling through the stacks of papers on his desk. “I shall keep it, if you don’t mind, as a memento of… Yes, here it is; I have it. Ah, yes, William Henry. A very interesting case.”

“This is Dr. Walker, a good friend of mine and Mr. Henry’s personal physician,” said Conan Doyle. “And this gentleman is Mr. Abraham Henry, William’s father, and this is his grandson, William’s eldest child, William Jr.”

“Billy,” von Helrung piped in. “The family calls him Billy, Herr Doctor.”

“You are German, Mr. Henry?”

“I am Austrian, but my son William was born in America.”

The superintendent was surprised. “But Mr. Boatman claimed your son was a British citizen.”

“He is, he is,” said von Helrung quickly. “Noah did not deceive you, Herr Doctor. William was born in America but immigrated to this country when he was twenty to study medicine—at the University of…” He was drawing a blank. So hasty had been our preparations, we had not thought to fill in every page in Warthrop’s fictitious history.

“Edinburgh,” Conan Doyle. “A year or so after I left.”

“And then he falls in love with a girl here, gets married, and becomes citizen,” von Helrung finished with a loud sigh of relief.

“Ah, Annabelle,” the superintendent said.

“Who?”

“Annabelle, Mr. Henry’s wife, your daughter-in-law.”

“Ack! Forgive an old man for the paucity of his faculties. I thought you said something else about… something else. Yes, poor, dear Annabelle! He loved her with a love that was more than love, in this kingdom by the sea.”

“Yes,” the superintendent concurred with a slight frown. “Though Mr. Boatman never mentioned there were children by the marriage. In fact, he told us that he, Mr. Boatman, was the only family William had.”

“Well, my grandson Noah is correct, in a manner of speaking.”

“In a manner of speaking?”

“I will explain.”

“I am anxious that you do,” the superintendent replied with a puzzled look toward Conan Doyle, who was smiling noncommittally. The author drummed his fingers nervously on his bowler hat.

Von Helrung tried his best. “Noah’s mother—William’s only sibling—died tragically at the age of twenty-two, when Noah was but three years old—the consumption. He was her only child. At the time, I was living with my wife, Helena, in Massachusetts, where we had raised William and Gertrude—”

“Gertrude?” The superintendent had begun taking notes. It was not an encouraging development.

“Ja, she is William’s sister, Noah’s mother, and my dear, dead daughter, Helena.”

“Helena?”

“I mean Gertrude. She was the spitting image of her mother; often I called her Helena by mistake.” He scratched his head, shrugged his shoulders, sighed. “Now I do not know where I am.”

Walker chimed in helpfully, “Gertrude has just died.”

“Gertrude, yes.” Von Helrung nodded somberly. “She was too young. Too young!”

“Then Noah was raised by his father, your son-in-law?”

“For a time, until he died, when Noah was seventeen.”

“How did he die?”

“He drowned.”

“Drowned?”

“He had too much to drink one night and fell off his fishing boat into the Thames—he’d never recovered from Helena’s death, you see—”

“Gertrude,” Walker corrected him. “Helena hasn’t died yet.”

“William’s mother is still alive?”

“Oh, no, I just haven’t gotten to her yet. My darling wife passed away last year of the dropsy—and that is what began it, I would say.”

“Began… what?”

“William’s slow march into darkness. He was very close to his mother, more so than most sons, I would say. And then when the tiger tore his sweet Annabelle limb from limb!” Von Helrung’s lower lip quivered; he tried to force a tear. “Oh, may God have mercy on my boy! May I see him now, Herr Doctor?”

“I’m afraid I’m still a bit confused, Mr. Henry, about the family history. You see this? This is the admission form signed under oath by your grandson, stating Mr. Henry had no living relatives other than himself. It’s a discrepancy that must be resolved before we can release him.”

“Hemmm. If I may.” Walker rested a hand on von Helrung’s arm. “Noah Boatman has not been in touch with the family in years.”

“The blackest of sheep,” von Helrung interjected tearfully.

“I would not wish to cast aspersions upon Mr. Boatman’s character,” Walker went on. “It is entirely plausible he thought he was the sole surviving relative, having neither seen nor heard from Abraham in decades.”

“But surely he would know about William’s children.” The superintendent was now looking at me. I squirmed in my chair.

“I was raising the children, in America,” von Helrung said hastily.

“You were raising them? Why?”

“Because they were…” Von Helrung was beginning to panic.

“It is delicate; I hope you can understand,” Walker said, stepping into the breach.

“I am trying very hard to, Dr. Walker.”

“They are the children of William’s first marriage,” von Helrung said. Beside him Walker stiffened suddenly, as if someone had just hit him very hard in the back.

“His first marriage?” the superintendent asked.

“In America, before he came here and met Isabel.”

“Annabelle,” Walker corrected him. “

Ja. The children live with us—me. My wife is dead of the dropsy.” Von Helrung swung his thick arm around my shoulder. “The dropsy.”

“Well,” the superintendent said slowly. “I suppose the only way to clear this up is to speak with Mr. Boatman.”

“Ahhh! Mein Gott!” von Hlrung cried out. He slumped forward in his chair.

“You are about to tell me that Mr. Boatman is dead, aren’t you?” asked the superintendent.

It was ironic, I later thought, that this was the one nugget of truth in the entire passel of lies.

If not for our recruitment of the superintendent’s literary idol, I do not think our ill-conceived and worse-executed plan would have succeeded. The presence of Conan Doyle probably kept us from being booted from the asylum forthwith—or locked up there until a qualified visiting physician could examine us.

“I’m afraid I must share a bit of the responsibility for William Henry’s condition,” Conan Doyle confessed.

“You, Dr. Doyle?”

“It appears from what Dr. Walker has told me that a portion at least of his delusions are based upon my stories.”

“Which portion might that be? I have interviewed the patient at length, and I do not recall…”

“Well, his occupation for one. There is not so much difference between a consulting detective and a hunter of monsters—a distinction more than a difference. And, of course,” he added casually with a shrug of powerful shoulders (Conan Doyle was a star cricket player and avid golfer), “the name.”

“Whose name?”

“Mr. Henry’s. Not his real name. The name he chose for himself, Pellinore Warthrop.”

“I am sorry, Dr. Doyle. I don’t recall seeing that name in your work.”

“Because you are not an American. In the States, Holmes’s name is Warthrop.”

“It is?”

“It’s not uncommon to change a character’s name to suit the tastes of a particular culture.”

The superintendent expressed his surprise. He’d had no idea that Great Britain’s Sherlock Holmes was America’s Pellinore Warthrop. It seemed to shake him to his existential marrow, for if Holmes were not, well, Holmes, then he would not be Holmes!

“Can I see him now?” von Helrung pleaded. “I assure you, sir, he will know me, his father, and if not me, Billy here, his son. We would take him back to America with us, but if you say no, we cannot. Have mercy and do not send us away without at least the chance to say good-bye!”

The superintendent relented then. I doubt he believed for a second one word of our outlandish story, but he was curious now—intensely curious—to see how this bizarre play might end. He rang for the keeper of Warthrop’s ward, who appeared a moment later.

“Where is Mr. Henry this morning?” the superintendent inquired.

“In his room, sir, as usual. After breakfast I asked if he’d care for a walk in the garden, but he refused again.”

“Did he eat his breakfast this morning?”

“Sir, he hurled it at my head.”

“He’s in one of his moods today.”

“Yes, sir, one of the bad ones.”

“Perhaps his visitors will lighten his spirits. Please let him know. We shall be up momentarily.” He turned to us. “Last week Mr. Henry ended a hunger strike—his third since coming to Hanwell. ‘I would gladly die,’ he told me. ‘But I will be damned to give you the satisfaction!’ I must say, Dr. Walker, your patient has developed a highly sophisticated delusion, the most detailed and intricate that I’ve ever encountered. A ‘philosopher in the natural science of aberrant biology,’ he calls himself, a ‘monstrumologist,’ one of several hundred around the world who devote themselves to the study and eradication of certain malevolent species, upon which he claims to be the foremost expert. He claims to belong to a ‘society’ of these so-called monstrumologists, based in New York City, the president of which—”

“Is me,” finished von Helrung sadly. “I know this story, Herr Superintendent. Alas, I have heard it many times. To William I am not Abraham Henry, humble shoemaker from Stubenbach, but Abram von Helrung, the head of this imaginary society of monstrumologists. And young William here, not William anymore, no! But Will Henry, his faithful apprentice who aids him in this mythical monster hunting of his.”

“He even includes me in his fantasy,” Walker interjected. “I am, it seems, also a member of the Monstrumologist Society, somewhat of a rival, too, substantially more accomplished and therefore a threat to him—”

Von Helrung cleared his throat noisily, and said, “I want to take him home. He is no danger to anyone—unless you happen to be a three-headed dragon! My grandson, God rest his soul, should never have taken upon himself the burden that rightly belongs to the father. I came at once, as soon as I heard he was here. I will leave at once, as soon as I see my boy again. Will you bring me to my boy now, Herr Superintendent, to ease his burden and my own?”

We were escorted to the third floor, where the most dangerous inmates were housed. There were no bars on the doors, but the locks were sturdy and in the rooms the furniture was bolted to the floor. Some rooms were padded for the patients’ own protection, but no one was shackled or restrained in any way, another humane distinction of the Hanwell philosophy. It occurred to me that Warthrop could have suffered a fate much worse than confinement in a house of the mad. No doubt it had been torture for him; without question he had suffered to be sane and to have that very sanity cited as the proof of his madness, but he was alive. He was alive.

The keeper of the ward was waiting for us in the hall. The superintendent nodded to him, the keeper threw back the bolt and swung wide the door, and I saw my master seated on the small bed on the other side, wearing a white robe and slippers that seemed to glow in the shaft of light pouring through the window behind him. He was pale and thin and haggard but alive, his exile at its end, alive—the monstrumologist.

For a moment I forgot my lines. My mind went blank, my knees shook, and I almost shouted Dr. Warthrop! which would have abruptly brought down the curtain. There was joy at seeing him again—I will not deny that—yet there was trepidation, too, a little thrill of dread. The monstrumologist may have been all that I had in the world, but that meant the monstrumologist was all that I had!

He stood as I stepped forward, a look of nearly comical astonishment on his drawn features, dominated by the expression in his dark eyes—the strange, haunted look of slow starvation.

“Will Henry?” he whispered, hardly daring to believe it.

I remembered my lines then. “Papa! Papa!” I rushed forward. I threw myself into his chest, hard enough to rock him back on his heels, and hugged him with all my might.

“Papa! Papa, you’re alive!”

“Well, of course I’m alive. For the love of God, Will Henry… Von Helrung, is that you? Good! I was beginning to think you were fool enough to believe—Who is that beside you? Not Walker? Why did you bring Walker? What did you tell Walker? Please, Will Henry, release me. You are crushing my spine.”

“Oh, my son! My son!” von Helrung cried. Now it was his turn to crush my master to his chest. “William! Your father has come for you!”

“I hope not! My father has been dead over fifteen years, von Helrung.”

“What? You do not remember me? William, you must remember me; I am your father!” Von Helrung was standing between Warthrop and the suspicious superintendent. He seized the opportunity to give the doctor an exaggerated wink. “Your father, Mein Sohn!”

Warthrop missed it entirely. Perhaps it was the suddenness with which he had been shoved upon the stage. Perhaps it was the result of a constitution weakened from three attempts at self-starvation. Or perhaps it was the inevitable consequence of caging a man like Pellinore Warthrop—like trying to stuff the sun into a bottle. Whatever it may have been, he refused to step into the part.

“No,” he said. He was calm now; the door had at last opened. The rest was simply a matter of walking through the open doorway. “You are Dr. Abram von Helrung, president of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology. The man standing behind you is Dr. Hiram Walker, a colleague of ours of rather mediocre talent, who for some inexplicable reason you’ve brought along—I pray only to help in affecting my release from this accursed place. The one standing beside Walker I do not know, but his face is vaguely familiar—a physician, I think, and he enjoys the game of golf, I will guess.

“And you…” He turned to me. “You are William James Henry, my indispensable assistant, my cross—and my shield. But mostly my cross.”

He turned to the superintendent.

“Do you see? I told you I was telling the truth!”

“Mr. Henry,” the superintendent said. “You do not recognize these people?”

“Yes, I do recognize them. In fact, I just told you who they are!” He snarled in von Helrung’s direction, “Do you see what I’ve been forced to endure for the past one hundred and twenty-six days, seven hours, and twelve minutes? The more I profess the truth, the madder I become!”

He shouted at the superintendent, “My name is Pellinore Xavier Warthrop, of 425 Harrington Lane, New Jerusalem, Massachusetts! I was born in the year of our Lord 1853, the only child of Alistair and Margaret Warthrop, also of New Jerusalem, Massachusetts! I am not now, nor have I ever been—nor do I have any desire to be—a citizen of Great Britain. You have no right to hold me here against my will, under English law or international law or the higher laws of decency and reason that govern all civilized human beings!”

“If I may,” Walker said sotto voce to the superintendent. “Perhaps we should retire to your offices. The patient is becoming a bit agitated—”

“I heard that!” roared the monstrumologist. “Von Helrung, I am, of course, forever in your debt for rescuing me from these imbeciles, but I will never forgive you for involving Hiram Walker in my case.”

“As I told you earlier,” Dr. Walker said to the superintendent with a mealymouthed little grin.

My master took that as the cue for the next movement in his symphony, his curtain-dropping aria: “Upon all that’s holy, Walker, if they hadn’t confiscated it, I would pull out my revolver and shoot you. I would shoot you point-blank right between those devious little rat eyes of yours. God save me, I can’t stand the English! I challenge anyone in this room to name one worthwhile thing that ever came out of the British Isles, besides William Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, and Tiptree jams! England is home to the most unattractive people on earth!” He glared at Walker. “You are the perfect example. You are a very homely man, and don’t get me started on your queen—”

“Now, William—,” the superintendent vainly tried to interrupt.

“It comes down to natural selection—to Darwin, like everything else. Isolated for thousands of years upon an island roughly the size of Texas, inbreeding is unavoidable. We may look no further than to Sir Hiram here, who seems to have misplaced his chin. And not only that. I could gather the collective intelligence of the British people in a teacup. Do you require proof? What other civilized nation would place a man in a padded room without the benefit of a trial, without the opportunity to face his accuser, without making any effort whatsoever to corroborate his story?” He pointed a quivering finger at the superintendent’s nose. “I shall have you sacked. I shall have this abomination you call a hospital razed to the ground, and then I shall spit on its ashes! For my name is not William James Henry.” He glanced at me.

“It is Pellinore Warthrop,” he roared. “And you may take that to your grave, sir, as will I. As will I.”

I don’t believe the superinendent of Hanwell Lunatic Asylum was entirely satisfied that anyone, in nearly any regard, was telling the truth about the strange case of William “Pellinore Warthrop” Henry. I do believe, however, that on this, the eighth hour of the one hundred and twenty-sixth day, he was heartily sick of the whole thing and ready to wash his hands of it. It was time for the monstrumologist to be someone else’s problem, and we were asking for the problem, after all, so the paperwork was handled without delay (Dr. Walker signed for my master’s release—the one person in our cabal, besides Conan Doyle, who would not have to sign a fake name.) By the dawn of the ninth hour, we were on the train bound for Paddington.

“Well, as the Bard did say, all is well that ends well!” von Helrung boomed out with forced good cheer. “You are rescued, mein Freund Pellinore!”

Warthrop was in no mood to celebrate. He glowered at the two Englishmen seated across from us. Walker could not meet his icy glare, but Conan Doyle replied to it with a convivial smile.

“Arthur Conan Doyle,” the author said. “How do you do? We met several years ago in Dr. Bell’s office at Edinburgh.”

“Yes, of course. Doyle. Are you still penning those clever diversions about the policeman?”

“Consulting detective.”

“Hmmm.” He turned to von Helrung. “Whose idea was it to make you my father?”

“Well, it is hard now for me to recall,” von Helrung replied weakly, avoiding his eyes.

“It was Dr. Torrance’s idea, sir,” I said.

“Torrance!” The monstrumologist’s cheeks turned scarlet. “Do you mean to tell me Jacob Torrance is part of this too?”

“The inclusion of Dr. Torrance was young Will’s idea,” von Helrung said to deflect the blame. And then he promptly assigned credit. “And thank God Will had it! It was Torrance who—” He realized Conan Doyle was listening, and stopped himself.

“Sir Hiram, Jacob Torrance, a writer of popular fiction who isn’t even a doctor of monstrumology… Who else have you involved in the most sensitive case to present itself to us in almost forty years, von Helrung? Might I expect Mr. Joseph Pulitzer to be waiting in our rooms at the Great Western?”

“I would watch the manner in which I expressed my gratitude if I were you, Warthrop,” warned Dr. Walker. “If not for Torrance, you would still be just another poor, anonymous face in a sea of troubled faces, your presence there wholly unknown, if not forgotten. And if not for myself—”

“I would prefer that you not talk,” the doctor said levelly. “It reminds me of all the things I don’t like about the English in general and you in particular, Sir Hiram.”

“Stop calling me by that name!”

“Speaking of names,” Warthrop said to von Helrung. “How in the world did you think you could pass off a surname like Henry as Austrian?”

“We had hopes you would discern our little farce, Pellinore,” returned the Austrian stiffly, parrying the thrust. “Your obtuseness could have cost us the game!”

“You think I was obtuse? I am not deaf, Meister Abram—or should I call you Father Abraham? Neither am I blind. I saw that ‘little’ wink of yours. Of course I understood I was to play along, but I realized at once the potential downfall of the improvisation. The superintendent—as if he were not enough already—would be immediately, almost certainly, suspicious, for what sort of madness is it that cures itself in the wink of an eye? If I had shouted ‘Papa!’ to you or ‘Son!’ to Will Henry, I do not think I would be sitting on this train right now. I think you, me, all of us, would be having a conversation with officials from Scotland Yard. And so it is the greatest irony that the same truth that imprisoned me has now set me free!”

“Truth with a little assistance from us.” Walker, it seemed, could not help himself.