The Isle of Blood

“May I remind you, Sir Hiram, that they returned my revolver upon my release? I have it right here—”

“Now, Pellinore,” chided Warthrop’s old teacher. “These last few months have been trying for you, I know, but—”

The doctor laughed harshly. “Do you? ‘Trying’ is not the word I would use. Don’t mistake me; it is very nice there, for a lunatic asylum. The food is surprisingly good; the staff is, on the whole, more humane than inhumane; the rooms are kept clean of bedbugs and lice; and twice a week we are allowed to bathe. It was rather like a long holiday in the English countryside, with one minor difference—you could never leave. I tried to escape—six times. Each time I was returned to my cozy room with the hard sheets and the soft walls. Each time I was gently reminded that I was abusing my privileges as a ‘guest.’ That’s what they call us madmen, you know. The ‘guests.’ Rather like the devil calling the damned his ‘lodgers.’ Ha!”

Conan Doyle laughed out loud. “Oh, this is marvelous! Positively delightful!”

Warthrop rolled his eyes and said to me, “And you—the last person I expected to see when that door opened. Why are you here, Will Henry?”

“He insisted,” von Helrung put in on my behalf. “If I had bound him hand and foot and chained him to a dungeon wall, he would have found a way to come, Pellinore.”

The monstrumologist closed his eyes. “You should not have come, Will Henry.”

And I answered, “You should not have left me, Dr. Warthrop.”

Conan Doyle bade us farewell on the platform at Paddington Station, and then moved not an inch from his proximity to Warthrop; he seemed reluctant to part with his company. I’d seen it happen innumerable times over the years. (In my mind I called it the Warthrop Effect or, less frequently, Warthropian Gravity.) Like any object of eormous mass, the doctor’s ego was endowed with an attractive force nearly impossible for weaker souls to resist.

“I really should be off,” Conan Doyle said after detaining my exhausted and anxious master for several minutes, peppering him with questions (“How did you know I played golf?”), trailing a step or two behind him as we bumped and jostled our way through the crowded station. “Touie is expecting me.”

“What is a Touie?” asked Warthrop.

“Touie is my wife, Louisa. She is at home with our new daughter, Mary Louise, born this January. Would you like to see her picture? She is a beautiful child, if I may say so.”

Warthrop stopped abruptly at the bottom of the stairs going into our hotel. “At the moment, Doyle, all I desire is a cup of decent tea and a long nap. Perhaps some other—” He spied something over the shorter man’s shoulder. He flashed a quick perfunctory smile and abruptly locked his arm around Doyle’s, urging him up the stairs. “Come to think of it, fate may have arranged our meeting. Did you know I was a writer in my youth? Poetry, not prose, but your case inspires me, Doyle. A man can wear two hats. Perhaps I should pick up the pen again and try my hand at some verse…”

Puzzled by the monstrumologist’s sudden about-face, I looked down the platform. Loitering near a column midway down were two men, one tall and broad-shouldered, with a shock of flaming red hair. The other was bald and much shorter, as thin and wiry as his companion was burly. Even from forty yards away and through the hazy gray smoke of the station, the redheaded man’s eyes seemed to burn with a backlit fire. I knew only one other man whose eyes burned like that. They were the eyes of a man consumed by the singularity of his life’s purpose. For Pellinore Warthrop that singularity was the pursuit of monsters. For the man whose gaze pinned me to the steps like a hammer drives home a nail, it was the pursuit of something altogether different.

“What is it, mein Freund Will?” murmured von Helrung. He swung his arm around my shoulders and fairly pushed me up the steps. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not a ghost,” Walker answered, his high-pitched voice warbling with distress. He, too, had seen the redheaded man looking back at us. “That big chap with the bright red hair and his bald companion by the pillar. For heaven’s sake, don’t look now, von Helrung! The same two I saw yesterday. I believe they’re following us.”

“To be honest, things have not been going all that well with the practice,” Conan Doyle was gasping to the monstrumologist when we caught up with them in the third-floor hallway. He was struggling for breath because he was also fighting to match the long strides of my master. “But I don’t complain. It gives me plenty of time to write. And I’ll need to write plenty, what with a new mouth to feed.”

Warthrop stopped suddenly just outside the door to our room. Conan Doyle was not expecting it; he walked directly into the doctor’s back.

“Oh! Sorry…”

The doctor’s hand came up and stayed there, the tips of his fingers lightly drumming the air. I’d seen this geure before and reacted instinctively, stepping quickly to his side.

“Von Helrung,” Warthrop whispered. “Are you armed?”

“No.”

“Walker?”

“No. Why do you—”

“Doyle, do you carry a firearm?”

“I do not, Dr. Warthrop.”

The monstrumologist pulled his revolver from his coat pocket. “Stay here with the others, Will Henry,” he said to me before opening the door and stepping inside.

He wasn’t gone long, no more than two or three minutes, I guessed, when he called for us to come in.

“Shut the door, Will Henry, and throw the bolt,” he instructed me from across the room. His back was to me. He was crouching beside something on the floor, the gun held loosely at his side, his shoulders slightly stooped. I remember vividly how tired he looked—old before his time.

And before him was the recumbent body of Jacob Torrance.

“Mein Gott!” whispered von Helrung. “Pellinore, is he—”

“Dead,” pronounced the doctor.

Von Helrung cursed under his breath. Walker pressed his hand to his mouth.

“Let’s have some light,” Warthrop said. “Will Henry, open the curtains, will you? Doyle, you’re a physician. You might want to have a look at this.”

Conan Doyle joined the doctor beside the corpse while I stepped around it to the windows, and Jacob Torrance’s blood bubbled and oozed around the soles of my shoes. I was not going to look. I did not wish to look. I had no intention of looking. But of course I looked. I threw back the curtains, turned around, and, with the golden afternoon sunlight warming my back, beheld what had befallen Jacob Torrance.

“Extremely deep,” Conan Doyle was saying. “Nicked the spinal column. This poor man was nearly decapitated.”

He had been sliced from ear to ear, the knife—if it had been a knife; perhaps the killer had used a small axe or hatchet—severing the carotid arteries and jugular veins—creating the font that had soaked the carpet… and his clothing… and the linen tablecloth a foot away… and the seat back of the divan. The damask curtains were spotted with the spray from his expiring heart. The room stank with it, the hot coppery smell of fresh blood.

“The body is still warm,” Conan Doyle announced with not a little concern. “He has not been dead long; no more than an hour, I would say.”

“Considerably less,” the monstrumologist replied. He rose, grimacing. I heard his knees pop when he stood. Von Helrung still lingered near the door; Walker was leaning against the wall beside him, a handkerchief pressed against his mouth, his face the color of parchment paper. The sound of his gagging was very loud in the small room.

“We must summon the police,” he said ehind his makeshift mask. No one paid any attention.

Warthrop paced the room, moving in a widening circle around Torrance’s body, eyes roaming the blood-enriched floor, the blood-specked walls, the furniture, the windows and sills. At one point, about five feet from the corpse, he fell to his hands and knees and crawled along the floor, snuffing and sniffing like a hound hot on a scent.

“There were two of them,” he said at the completion of his inspection. “One very tall—well over six feet, right-handed, a cigar smoker, and redheaded. His companion is much shorter—five-six or -seven, in that range, and walks with a pronounced limp—one leg, his right, shorter than the other…”

Conan Doyle’s face was a study in scarlet. He was blushing like a young swain in the first heady throes of unrequited passion.

“Astounding. Completely astounding,” he said hoarsely.

“It’s elementary, Doyle,” returned the doctor. “A killer is like any artist. He cannot help but leave something of himself in his work. One only needs to know how to separate the work from the one who authored it.”

“What I mean to say is I am having the most extraordinary sensation…”

“So am I!” called Dr. Walker from across the room. “I am going to be sick!”

Conan Doyle continued, his eyes growing misty. “A man has been brutally murdered; it is terrible! And yet I find myself overwhelmed by an equally terrible sense of wonder.… Why, it’s as if I have stepped over some mystical threshold and into one of my own stories! And here, before me, the man himself, the same one I created, come to life. Behold the man!”

“Yes, it is similar to one of your stories, with the exception that it is not one of your stories, and there is a very real possibility that you are in mortal danger,” replied the monstrumologist.

“Do you really think so?” Conan Doyle seemed practically giddy at the prospect.

“And not just you.” Warthrop turned to von Helrung. “We must leave this hotel immediately.”

Von Helrung nodded. “What about Jacob?”

The doctor smiled grimly. “He’ll be staying here.”

We grabbed our luggage and hurried downstairs. (The monstrumologist was pleased that I’d remembered to bring his instrument case. “I thought I would never see it again. Bless you, Will Henry, and damn that turncoat Arkwright!”) A line of hansoms sat waiting for customers along the curb outside. Before we enlisted any for our escape, however, I was dispatched to spy out the terrain while the men waited inside the lobby. The doctor did not need to tell me what to look for. I had already seen it inside Paddington Station—a shock of red hair and the disconcerting glow of dark, backlit eyes.

“Well?” Warthrop asked upon my breathless return.

“All clear, sir.”

He nodded briskly. “Two cabs—von Helrung, myself, and Will Henry in one. Doyle, Sir Hiram will go with you—”

“Would you please stop calling me that?” Walker asked. He was leaning against a column, still trying to collect himself. “It’s cruel and childish.” The British monstrumologist’s nickname, bestowed upon him by Warthrop, had originated several years before, at a party at which Walker had been smitten by a certain young woman with ties to the royal family. Trying to impress her, Walker had inadvisably passed himself off as a peer of the realm, and his fellow scientists were not about to let him forget it.

Warthrop ignored him. He said to Conan Doyle, “I suggest you take a circuitous route, and keep an eye open for our redheaded friend and his hairless compatriot. If they do spot us, I think we shall be the ones followed—but then again, they may split up. Pray you get the bald one!”

He seized Conan Doyle’s hand in both of his and gave it a quick, hard shake. “It has been my pleasure to see you again, sir. May our next meeting be in more congenial circumstances!”

“The pleasure has been entirely mine, Dr. Warthrop,” replied Conan Doyle earnestly. “Touie will not believe the story I have to tell her!”

“I would not divulge too much,” cautioned the doctor, his dark eyes twinkling. “She will think you’ve been drinking.”

“The feeling is not so different,” admitted the author. “I don’t know if you’re a spiritual man, but—”

“Not often,” said the monstrumologist, urging Conan Doyle toward the lobby doors. “Hardly ever. No—just once. I was three or four, and my mother caught me deep in a conversation with God.” He shrugged. “I have no memory of it. God might.”

Five minutes later we were inside a hansom cab, on our way to Hyde Park. “Why Hyde Park?” von Helrung wanted to know.

The doctor shrugged. “Why not?”

“I sincerely hope they haven’t followed Doyle,” Warthrop said. “I am uncertain why you recruited him to join your rescue party, but I would hate for him to pay the ultimate price for his altruism. And, of course, it would be a great loss to literature. I normally don’t care much for fiction, but there is something charming about his stories. A kind of grand naïveté—like the British Empire itself—the blindest of faiths that reason will triumph over ignorance, and human intellect over evil.”

Von Helrung looked incredulously at my master. Perhaps he was thinking he did not know Pellinore Warthrop half as well as he’d thought.

“We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?”

Warthrop nodded. He either entirely missed von Helrung’s point or he didn’t care. I did not think it was the former. “It is a pity; for all his faults, I rather liked Torrance. He would have been my choice too, had I been forced to make one, so do not hold yourself to blame, Meister Abram. If you want to assign fault, look no farther than the empty bottle of whiskey on the table in the sitting room. He was three sheets in the wind when his murderers came to call. There is no other explanation for how they overcame him so easily.” He looked at me. “There are only three real causes of death, Will Henry. The first is accidents—diseases, famines, wars, or like what befell your parents. The second is old age. And the third is ourselves—our slow suicides. Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, and I will show a man living under a death sentence.”

Von Helrung was shaking his head vehemently. “You are responsible, Pellinore—not for Torrance, God rest his soul, but for Conan Doyle. Should he perish for what he’s seen this day, it will be to pay the fine for your impulsiveness. Why did you invite him to our rooms? He was taking his leave of us at the station, and you—”

“Yes, he was,” snapped Warthrop. “And I may have saved his life—temporarily, perhaps, but at least I bought him an hour or two to spend with Touie and his newborn babe. You have no understanding of those men you saw on the platform, von Helrung. They are ruthless. They kill without compunction or remorse. I had to act quickly, and I believe I made the best of a very tenuous situation.”

“And what of this ridiculous and bizarre charade in the room? What is your excuse for that? You knew it was those men we saw in the station, and yet you pretended that you deduced everything, down to the color of the killer’s hair! For what reason, Pellinore? In mocking Doyle, you mocked the dead!”

The doctor’s countenance darkened. He leaned forward and poked von Helrung in the chest.

“Do not speak to me of mockery, von Helrung. Do you have any inkling of what it’s like to be sane and have your very sanity be the thing that binds you? Think about that before you judge me for a harmless bit of whimsy!”

They fell silent after this heated exchange, until we reached our destination, at which point the doctor knocked sharply on the hansom’s roof and directed the driver to now take us to Piccadilly Circus. The whip cracked, and we were off again.

“Where are we going?” von Helrung demanded.

“To Piccadilly Circus.”

Von Helrung closed his eyes and sighed wearily. “You know what I meant.”

The doctor glanced behind us, and then settled back into his seat. “I do.”

“They are ruthless, you said. Killers without compunction or remorse, you said. But you fail to say who they are or why they pursue us.”

“I would think the why is obvious. As to who… The big red-haired one is called Rurick. His bald partner goes by the name Plešec. They are Okhranka, Meister Abram, members of the Russian secret police.”

Von Helrung absorbed the news with a crestfallen expression. He had not wanted Torrance to be correct. A part of him, I think, clung to the hope that Jack Kearns had but one coconspirator in the affair, the betrayer Thomas Arkwright, and all the rest of it had sprouted in Jacob Torrance’s fertile imaination. The truth sickened his heart. He was a scientist, and the essence of science is the quest for truth, a noble thing in and of itself, but no human endeavor—no matter how noble—remains unsullied for long. Monstrumology could be characterized as a contemplation of nature corrupted. The same could be said of us.

“We were duped,” my master stated bluntly. “I suppose we could take some small comfort in the fact that we were not the only ones played for fools. Arkwright played us, but the Russians played him, and Jack Kearns, I think, has had his fun with all of us.”

“It was Jacob’s theory that Kearns and the British—and the Russians, too—were using us to find for them the home of the magnificum. They had the golden egg—the nidus—but not the goose who lays it. That’s how Torrance put it.”

Warthrop smiled tightly. “I’m going to miss Jake. He had a way with the colorful metaphor. He was partly right, but mainly wrong. We were being used, though not by Kearns or the Russians; they had what they wanted. Thomas Arkwright of the Long Island Arkwrights was a wholly British creation. Arkwright is an officer in the British secret intelligence service.”

Von Helrung sighed. “So the British are involved… and the Russians. Who else?”

“No one—well, not counting us, and I would not count us out just yet,” Warthrop said grimly. “I didn’t want to believe it. When I was first brought to Hanwell, it suited my naïve faith to believe that Arkwright must have been working with the Russians—a double agent, a traitor to his country—and I bravely hung on to that bit of fiction for quite some time. In the first month of my lunatic holiday, I wrote more than forty letters, none of which, apparently, reached their intended recipient. Someone had to be intercepting them, and it is difficult for me to comprehend that the reach of Okhranka extended to the mails of England or the United States. Six of those desperate missives I personally handed to the superintendent. Now, I suppose he could be in the employ of the czar or be a member of Okhranka, but at some point we must put away childish things, Meister Abram, and acknowledge that, in matters where something like the magnificum is concerned, there are few limits to the perfidy of men and nations—even men like the superintendent and nations like Great Britain.”

“Alas, dear Pellinore, I have lived a very long time and have yet to discern any.”

We rolled to a stop, and the driver called out in a loud voice, “’Ere you are, guv’ner! Piccadilly Circus.”

“The Great Western at Paddington Station, driver. And with all alacrity, please!” called Warthrop. He smiled at the driver’s muttered curses as we started off again, to the place from which we’d begun.

“We are going in circles,” observed von Helrung.

“We were,” replied the doctor. “Though tonight no more! For on this night, my old master, the months in the wilderness come to an end. Ourong exile is over. I have the answer; I know from whence the wind cometh; I have found the hiding place of the grail.”

Von Helrung turned away from his friend with a pained expression. “You should not call it that.”

“Why?” the monstrumologist seemed genuinely puzzled.

“It should not be called that,” the old man insisted vehemently. A tear welled in the corner of his eye.

“Where is it?” I asked. “Where did the nidus come from?” The central question had gone too long unanswered.

Warthrop’s face was glowing with triumph. “The nidus ex magnificum was recovered upon the island of Socotra.”

Von Helrung looked round and stared at the doctor for a long moment. “Socotra!” he whispered. “The Isle of Blood.”

“The Isle of Blood?” I echoed. I could feel the tightly wound thing vibrating to the rhythm of my heart.

“It isn’t what you’re thinking, Will Henry,” said the monstrumologist. “It is called the Isle of Blood because that happens to be the color of the sap of the Dragon’s Blood tree, which grows there—the color of blood. Socotra has other names—better names, if names matter anything to you: the Isle of Enchantment, the Isle of the Phoenix, Tranquility Island, among others. In Sanskrit it is called Dvipa Sukhadhara, the ‘Isle of Bliss.’ Recently it has been dubbed the Galápagos of the East, for the island is so isolated that many of its species, like the Dragon’s Blood tree, are found there and nowhere else on earth.…”

“Socotra is a British protectorate,” von Helrung said.

“Yes,” acknowledged Warthrop. “And if it were not, the nidus never would have found its way to London’s East End and the clutches of Dr. John Kearns. The British have maintained a small presence there since ’76, when the treaty was signed with the island’s sultan, to protect their shipping routes from India and West Africa.”

“So the man who brought the nidus to Kearns was a British soldier or seaman?” asked von Helrung.

“No man brought the nidus to Kearns. A man was brought to Kearns, and that man brought Kearns to the nidus, in a manner of speaking. Once I identified the man, I had my answer. I mean, of course, our answer.”

“And Kearns’s answer—to pass on to his client, the czar of Russia! You will forgive this question, and I pray you will answer in the same spirit of goodwill in which I ask it, but, once you supplied the fiends with what they wanted, wouldn’t it have been much easier for them to simply kill you? Why riskall by arranging your sojourn in Hanwell Lunatic Asylum?”

“Didn’t Arkwright tell you? I am assuming that’s how you found me, through Arkwright, when you saw through his story of my untimely demise.”

“He did not say.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“I could not,” answered von Helrung, avoiding the doctor’s eyes.

“And why couldn’t you?” pressed the doctor. Then he answered his own question. “Arkwright is dead, isn’t he?”

Von Helrung did not answer, so I did. “Dr. Torrance killed him, sir.”

“Killed him?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I answered.

“How does one do something like that ‘in a manner of speaking’?”

“Is not that how all things are done in our dark and dirty business—our ‘science’?” asked von Helrung bitterly. “Pour ainsi dire—‘in a manner of speaking’?”

Our cab jerked to a stop in the exact spot from which our journey had started, before the entrance of the Great Western Hotel at Paddington Station. The driver called down to us, “And will this do for His Excellency?”

“Another fiver for another five minutes!” Warthrop called back. He turned to von Helrung, and in my master’s eyes I saw the same backlit fire that had burned in the Fifth Avenue parlor a lifetime ago—I am the one. I am the one! The same fire I’d seen burning in another man’s eye but two hours past. Ruthless. Without compunction or remorse.

“I am going to Socotra,” he whispered hoarsely. “I am taking the train to Dover and I am boarding the first steamer out. I will be in Aden in less than a fortnight, and then on to Socotra—if I can find passage; and if I can’t find passage, I shall swim there. And if I cannot swim there, I shall construct a flying machine and soar like Icarus to heaven’s gate!”

“But Icarus did not soar, mein Freund,” murmured von Helrung. “Icarus fell.”

For the second time, the older man turned away; he would not—or could not—endure that strange, cold fire in his friend’s eyes.

“I cannot go with you,” the old man said.

“I’m not asking you to go with me.”

“I am going with you,” I said.

“No, no,” von Helrung called out. “Will, you do not understand—”

“I won’t be left behind again,” I said. I turned and repeated it to the monstrumologist: “I won’t be left behind.”

Warthrop leaned his head against the seat back and closed his eyes. “So tired. I hn’t had a decent night’s sleep in months.”

“Pellinore, tell Will he is coming home with me. Tell him.”

“You should not have left me,” I said to Warthrop. “Why did you leave me?” I could contain it no longer. It emptied out of me, and once I was empty, it contained me. “None of this would have happened if you’d listened to me! Why didn’t you listen to me? Why don’t you ever listen to me? I told you he was a liar. I warned you that he was false! But it’s just like always: ‘Snap to, Will Henry! Fetch me my instruments, Will Henry! Sit beside me all night while I moan and cry and feel sorry for myself, Will Henry! Will Henry, be a good boy and sit there and watch Mr. Kendall rot inside his own skin! Hold still now, Will Henry, so I can chop off your finger with this kitchen knife! Snap to, Will Henry! Will Henry! Will Henry! Will Henry!’”

He opened his eyes. He said nothing. He observed my tears. He studied my face, knotted up and burning hot. He watched as it spun out, the unwinding thing that was me and not-me, and he was able to do this, to stare at me with the attitude of a man watching an ant struggle with a burden five times its size, because I had suffered him to live, because I had brought Jacob Torrance into the truth by way of a monstrous lie.

“How strange, then, that you would wish to come with me.”

Meister Abram, who had taught my master everything he knew about monstrumology but had failed to teach him what he, von Helrung, knew best, gathered me into his arms and stroked my hair. I pressed my face into his wool vest and smelled cigar smoke, and in that moment I loved Abram von Helrung, loved him as I had loved no other since my parents’ fall into the abyss, loved him as much as I hated his former pupil. What is it? I remembered thinking in panic. What is it? Why did I want to follow this man? What was it about the monstrumologist that consumed me? What demon of the pit chewed and gnawed upon my soul like Judas’s in the innermost circle of hell? What did it look like? What was its face? If I could name the nameless thing, if I could put a face upon the faceless thing, perhaps I could free myself from its ravenous embrace.

We are hunters all. We are, all of us, monstrumologists.

He left us sitting in the cab. He stepped onto the street, swung the door closed, and strode away without a word or backward glance. I pushed against von Helrung’s soft belly, but he held tight; he would not let go despite my keening wails, saying, “Hush, hush, dear Will. He will come back; he is making sure those evil men are gone.… He will come back.”

And he did. Von Helrung was right; he did come back, cautioning me to dry my tears and bring down the curtain on my theatrics, for he did not want to draw attention to ourselves.

“There are no police in the lobby, and the desk clerks are gossiping happily. They haven’t discovered Torrance yet, or if they have, the English are even odder than I thought. Our Russian friends are nowhere to be seen. They have either quit the station or we have drawn them off. Snap—It’s time to go, Will Henry.”

We cut through the lobby to the station entrance unmolested—an unremarkable sight, a boy hurrying to catch his train, flanked by his father and grandfather, perhaps, three generations on holiday.

“There’s a train that leaves for Liverpool in a half hour,” Warthrop informed von Helrung. “Platform three. Here is your ticket.”

“And Will’s?”

The monstrumologist said, “Will Henry is coming with me. I do not know what I will find on Socotra; I may require his services. That is, if he is still of a mind to come with me.”

Von Helrung looked down at me. “You know what that means, Will, if you go?”

I nodded. “I have always known what it means.”

He pulled me into his arms for one last hug. “I do not know for whom I should pray more,” he whispered. “For him to look after you, or for you to look after him. Remember always that God never thrusts a burden upon us that we cannot bear. Remember that there is no absolute dark anywhere, but here”—he pressed his open hand upon my heart—“there is light absolute. Promise Meister Abram that you will remember.”

I promised him. He nodded, looked at Warthrop, nodded again.

“I will go now,” he said.

“Well, Will Henry,” the monstrumologist said after von Helrung had melted into the crowd. “It is just the two of us again.” And then he turned on his heel and strode off without a backward glance. I hurried after him. It seemed I was always hurrying after him.

Back through the hotel and out the main doors and into a hansom, the very same hansom we had vacated a few minutes before. The driver called down, “Goin’ to the Great Western at Paddington, guv’ner?” The remark caught Warthrop off guard; he actually laughed.

“Charing Cross station, my good man! Get us there in twenty minutes or less, and there’s an extra shilling in it for you.”

“Dr. Warthrop!” I cried as he jumped inside. “Our luggage!”

“I’ve already made the arrangements; it will be waiting for us in Dover. Now get in! Every minute is precious.”

We missed the last steamer to Calais by ten of those precious minutes. Warthrop stood on the quay at Dover and shouted invectives at the ship as it chugged toward the horizon. He shook his fist and roared like Lear against the storm, till I thought the famous white cliffs might splinter and crumble into the sea.

There was nothing to do but wait until morning. We took a room at a lodging house within walking distance of the port. Warthrop drank a pot of tea. He stared out the window. He tried out the bed, pronouncing it too short (most beds were for him; he stood just over six-two in his stocking feet), too lumpy, and entirely too small for both of us to rest comfortably. He sent me to inquire at the desk about a larger room or, in lieu of that, a larger bed—both of which were not available.

The hour grew late. The room grew stuffy. He opened the window, letting in a pleasant sea breeze and the sound of the surf, and we lay down to sleep. He flopped and twisted and poked me in the ear with his elbow and complained of my heavy breathing, of my taking up too much room, of “that strange odor peculiar to adolescents.” At last he could abide it no longer. Throwing off the covers, he launched himself from the bed and began to pull on his clothes.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “I am going for a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“I would rather you did not.” He slipped on his coat, felt something in the right-hand pocket—his revolver. It reminded him of something.

“Oh, very well,” he said crossly. “Come along if you must, but please keep quiet so I may think. I need to think!”

“Yes, sir,” I said, pulling on my clothes. “I will try not to be a burden to you, sir.”

The remark, like the gun, reminded him of something. He seized my left hand and held it in the lamplight to examine my injury.

“It’s healed up nicely,” he pronounced. “How is the mobility?”

I made a fist. I stretched my remaining fingers wide.

“See?” I asked. “Part of it’s gone, but it’s still my hand.”

We walked out onto the beach, and the stars were very bright and the moon was high and the towering cliffs to the northeast shone pearl white. To our left were the lights of Dover. On our right was the darkness of open water. The wind coming off the water was stronger and colder than the wind that had come through our window. I shivered; I had left my jacket in the room.

The monstrumologist turned abruptly and walked to the water’s edge. He stared toward the vaguely defined horizon, the thin line between black and gray.

“Pour ainsi dire,” he said softly. “How do you kill someone ‘in a manner of speaking,’ Will Henry?”

I told him what had happened to Thomas Arkwright. He was shocked. He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before.

“And using the pwdre ser was your idea?”

“No, sir. Frightening him with it was my idea. It was Dr. Torrance’s idea to actually use it.”

“Still. There was only one person in that room who had witnessed firsthand what pwdre ser does to a human being.”

“Yes, sir. That’s why I suggested we use it.”

“That is why you…?” He took a deep breath. “It is a very thin line between us athe abyss, Will Henry,” he said. “For most it is like that line out there, where the sea meets the sky. They see it. They cannot deny the evidence of their eyes, but they never cross it. They cannot cross it; though they chase it for a thousand years, it will forever stay where it is. Do you realize it took our species more than ten millennia to realize that simple fact? That the line is unreachable, that we live on a ball and not on a plate? Most of us do, anyway. Men like Jacob Torrance and John Kearns… Those kinds of men still live on a plate. Do you understand what I mean?”

I nodded. I thought I did.

“The very strange and ironic thing is that I left you behind so you wouldn’t have to live on that plate with them.”

I thought of the signet ring of Jacob Torrance and lifted my chin defiantly. “I’m not afraid.”

“Are you not?” He closed his eyes and drew in deep the smell of the sea.

Early the next morning we boarded the first ship out, and some of Warthrop’s anxiety lost its bite, though it still continued to nibble around the edges of his relief to be on our way at last. He paced the foredeck, never looking back at the receding English shore. He was not interested in what lay behind.

But I was. I wanted to hear what had happened, how he’d found the origin of the nidus ex magnificum; how, or if, he’d found John Kearns; and the particulars of how he’d been betrayed by Thomas Arkwright. Every time I broached the subject, however, he deflected it with a shake of his head or ignored my entreaties altogether. I came to realize that the affair was an embarrassment to him. It wounded his ego, and his was not the sort of ego that recovered easily from even the slightest scratch.

At Maritime railway station in Calais, we secured berths in a private sleeping car for the passage south to Lucerne, where we would switch trains for the final leg of our overland journey to Brindisi on the Adriatic Sea. The remainder of our expedition to Socotra would be undertaken by boat, an unhappy prospect; the memory of my recent bout of mal de mer was still quite fresh.

The train was a crowded, rolling city of Babel—English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, with a smattering of Egyptian, Farsi, and Hindi thrown in. Every race, religion, and class was represented, from the well-to-do English family on extended holiday, to the poorest Indian immigrant returning to Bombay to visit the family he had left behind. There were businessmen and Gypsies, soldiers and peddlers, old men in wide hats and newborn babes in bonnets. And everywhere the smell of smoke and human sweat, shouts, laughter, singing and music—a din of accordions and violins, harmonicas and sitars. It enchanted and frightened me, this rolling makeshift village, this rich sampling of humanity. While the doctor holed up in our car, leaving it only thrice a day for meal service, I took to wandering the length and breadth of the train. That was far more preferable to enduring the eerie silence that enveloped him like a pall of doom. Warthrop did not complain of my wanderings; he merely observed that I should be careful lest I become exposed to some rare contagion. “A passenger train is a traveling circus of pestilence, Will Henry. A smorgasbord of human meat. Take care you are not placed upon the menu.”

I was dispatched on the occasional errand, for tea and pastries (the doctor’s profound disappointment that there was not a single scone on board would have been comical, if I had not been the one to bear the brunt of his displeasure) and newspapers, any and all I could find, in any language (the monstrumologist was conversant in more than twenty). He read, he drank copious amounts of Darjeeling tea, he paced the compartment like a caged tiger, or stared out the window, pulling and pinching on his lower lip until it grew fat and red. He muttered under his breath, he started when I opened the door, dropping his hand into his coat pocket, where he kept his revolver—he never ventured anywhere without it. He slept with the light on, he started growing a beard, and he ate constantly and in vast amounts, putting on several pounds on the thirteen-hundred-mile journey to the southern tip of Italy. At one meal service I witnessed him consume two beefsteaks, a half loaf of bread, an entire pie, and four glasses of rich buttermilk. He took note of my wide-eyed astonishment at this gluttonous accomplishment and said, “I am building reserves.” I puzzled over this remark. What should I expect in the coming days—famine? Was there nothing to eat on the island of Socotra?

By the time we reached the Italian Alps, the wound to his pride had entered the contraction stage, and late one night, at the precise moment I’d drifted off, he woke me with the question he reserved for those moments.

“Will Henry, are you asleep?”

“No, Dr. Warthrop, I am not.” Not now, Dr. Warthrop!

“I cannot sleep either. I can’t stop thinking about Torrance. He was twenty-nine—less than a year to go until his Magic Thirty. Do you know most monstrumologists become as reclusive as Tibetan monks during their twenty-ninth year? Rarely do they take to the field or engage in any pursuit that might jeopardize their chances of reaching their thirtieth birthday. There was one colleague of mine who spent the last six months of his twenty-ninth year locked in his room with boards over the windows and without even a book to pass the time. He was afraid of cutting his finger on a page and dying of infection.”

“Dr. Torrance said he became a monstrumologist because he liked to kill things.”

“He was not alone in that, just in his willingness to admit it. But he was a very good scholar and completely fearless intellectually; he was not afraid to tread where wiser men trembled. You could not have chosen a better man to break Thomas Arkwright.”

I heard him rise from his bunk. I raised my head and saw his silhouette against the window and then his face reflected in the glass. His face had changed—the cheeks were fuller, the lower half dark with his new beard—all but the eyes, which still shone with the same cold backlit fire.

“I didn’t know what he was going to do,” I protested. “It happened so fast—”

He raised his hand. Let it fall. “It is part and parcel of the business, Will Henry. Arkwright’s, Torrance’s… ours. Eventually the luck runs out. I suppose I would feel less conflicted about Arkwright if the man had not worked so hard to save my life.”

“That’s what he told Dr. Torrance—right before Dr. Torrance killed him. How did he save your life?”

The monstrumologist clasped his hands behnd his back and spoke to my reflection in the glass. “By presenting a compelling case that I was more trouble dead than alive.”

“It was those Russian agents in Paddington, wasn’t it? Rurick and…”

“Plešec. Yes. Tailing us from the moment we arrived in London. I am not so disappointed in myself that I did not know—but Arkwright, he should have known. He is a professional, after all. It is hard to conceive of a more conspicuous pair of spies—big Rurick with that red hair, and short little Plešec and his shiny scalp.”

He closed his eyes. “I am sure Arkwright thought the worst was over, that all that remained was to convince von Helrung that I had died on the quest. He hadn’t had much trouble selling von Helrung everything else—‘Thomas Arkwright of the Long Island Arkwrights’!”

“It was me, sir. Arkwright lied about the Monstrumarium, and that meant he lied about everything else. It meant he knew about the nidus before he even met you, and that meant—”

His eyes came open and fixed upon my image in the window. “You suspected him? Not von Helrung? Not Torrance? You?”

I nodded. “Dr. von Helrung wouldn’t listen at first, but then the telegram arrived saying you were dead. I didn’t believe it. And Dr. Torrance didn’t either, once I explained it to him. He told me I would make a fine—”

“Yes, that troubled me too—Arkwright’s seemingly serendipitous arrival upon Meister Abram’s doorstep around the time Mr. Kendall showed up on ours. I’ve been kicking myself for missing the many subtle blunders Arkwright committed, but I was understandably distracted and completely focused on the task at hand—finding Jack Kearns and the home of the magnificum.”

“Did you find him—Dr. Kearns?”

He shook his head. “Kearns vanished the day after he dispatched Mr. Kendall with his special delivery. I am uncertain where he went first—most likely it was Saint Petersburg to make the necessary arrangements—but I am fairly certain where he is now. We will see our old friend on the isle of Socotra.”

Upon their arrival in London, Warthrop and Arkwright had stopped by their hotel only long enough to drop their bags, and then they’d split up—Arkwright to Dorset Street in Whitechapel to locate Kearns’s flat and discover what, if any, clues he may have left behind; Warthrop to the Royal London Hospital to question Kearns’s colleagues and interview the hospital director, the man responsible for overseeing Kearns’s work. Warthrop learned how well-liked Kearns had been, how popular with the staff—particularly the female staff—how admired by the other doctors, what a fine physician he was, in addition to being one of the best trauma surgeons the director had ever seen. No, Dr. Kearns had not given notice or any indication whatsoever he was leaving. One day he was there; the next he was not. My master, posing as an old chum of Kearns’s from the States, informed the director he had been asked by Kearns to consult on a most unusual case, one he was certain the director would remember.

“It had been nagging at me since the night we’d met Mr. Kendall,” the doctor told me. “The remark about the yeoman with the case of ‘tropical fever.’ The director remembered the case well. ‘Baffling and tragic,’ he called it, though he did not recall the man being a seaman. He then went on to describe the symptoms, and I knew I had found the owner of the nidus.”

“Pwdre ser,” I whispered.

“Yes. He was in the final stages of exposure when he was brought in—was quite beyond coherent thought or speech. There was nothing on his person to identify who he was, and he refused to give—or could not remember, probably—his own name. The only thing the director recalled the man saying was the words, ‘The nest! The bloody human nest!’ It obviously piqued Kearns’s curiosity. He is no monstrumolo-gist; I’ve no idea if he had ever heard of the nidus ex magnificum, but the sailor’s anguished cries and dramatic symptoms probably alerted Kearns that he was dealing with something of a monstrumological nature.”

The man died within hours of his arrival at the hospital. Kearns signed the order to have the body cremated, the usual precaution when dealing with an unknown disease.

“And then he did precisely what I would have done,” the monstrumologist said. “What I did do that same afternoon. Of course, you already have guessed what that is.”

I had not. I decided to try. “You went to the naval department to research recent—”

“Oh, for the love of God, Will Henry! Really. You have been listening, haven’t you? Neither Kearns nor the director knew at that point he was a yeoman with the navy.”

“But Kearns told Mr. Kendall—”

“Yes, after he had found out who he was. That is my question. How did he—and I—find out who this man was?”

I took a deep breath and tried again. “He did not give his name. He had no papers when he was brought—Someone brought him in?”

He smiled. “Much better. Yes, he was brought there by one Mary Elizabeth Marks, who claimed she’d discovered him lying in the gutter a block from her flat, at number 212 Musbury Street, less than a mile from the hospital. She claimed she didn’t know him, had never seen him before, was playing the Good Samaritan, et cetera, et cetera. Kearns found her—as I did months later—and it did not take him long—or me—to bully the truth out of her. The patient had been a customer of hers. Miss Marks, you see, makes her living by… entertaining young, and not so young, sailors… or any other members of the armed forces, or civilians, who enjoy… being entertained by ladies who… entertain.”

He cleared his throat.

“I would rather not know. Yes, she was a lady of the evening. She stuck to her story at first, until I told her I knew Kearns, and then her whole demeanor changed, from surly thoolgirl giddy.

“‘Oh, you mean Dr. Kearns. Now, he’s the regular charmer, that one,’ she said, giggling. ‘An’ quite the looker, too!’

“‘He is an old friend of mine,’ I told her, to which she replied, laying her hand upon my arm, ‘Well, any friend of Dr. Kearns’, guv’na…’

“She confessed that the man had been a regular customer; that he had, in fact, been staying with her in the flat on Musbury Street since his discharge from the navy a week before he became ill; and that she had hidden the truth based on her fear that her landlord would evict her for living with a man outside the sanctity of holy matrimony. She began to cry at the mention of marriage. She had loved Tim; there had been talk of a wedding. I did not understand, she told me, how cruel life had been to her, how her father had beaten and then abandoned her mother, how her mother had subsequently died from consumption, leaving Mary on the streets to beg for food, and later to sell her own body for it. Timothy was to be her savior, and then her savior died.”

He shook his head; his dark eyes flashed. “She had kept his trunk with all his things, including oddities and other paraphernalia he had gathered in his travels abroad. Kearns had asked to see them. It might help, he explained to her, in his investigation into the cause of poor Timothy’s mysterious demise. You know what he found in that trunk, of course.

“‘Now, what is this?’ he said. ‘It looks like… Do you know what he kept saying, Mary, over and over again? “The nest! The bloody human nest!’” Mary Marks was horrified. She claimed to never have laid eyes upon the nidus. She said Timothy had never once spoken of it. And so Kearns asked the same question of her that I asked.”

He paused. I knew what he was waiting for.

“What had been his last port of call before his discharge?” I ventured.

“Ah, the faintest glimmer. The slightest ray breaking through the clouds! Yes, and you know the answer, though not the particulars, which are few and as follows: Timothy Stowe served as yeoman second-class aboard the HMS Acheron, a frigate in the Royal Navy that had just returned from its tour in the Arabian Sea, after resupplying the garrison at the British protectorate of Socotra.”

Warthrop hurried back to the hotel to tell Arkwright the news. He was surprised to discover that his companion had not returned.

“I’d been gone for several hours, and his errand should not have taken half as long as mine. I waited more than an hour; by then the sun had begun to set, and still no sign of Arkwright. I began to worry I’d been wrong about Kearns. Perhaps he had not left England after all, and Arkwright had unwittingly walked right into the bear’s den. How close I was with that metaphor! Night fell and with it my hope of his speedy return. I decided I had no choice but to go look for him, and that meant beginning with Dorset Street, not a very inviting place in broad daylight, much less on a foggy night.”

He sighed, tugging on his bottom lip. “They may have followed me there—as one of them must have followed Arkwright—or they may have anticipated my coming there in search of him. I could not have been twenty yards from the spot where the hansom dropped me off, when a hulking shadow loomed out of the mist. I caught a flash of coppery red hair in the lamplight, saw the arm go up, glimpsed the glint of a pistol’s barrel, and then darkness—absolute darkness.”

The monstrumologist awoke to the smell of raw sewage and the far-off echoes of water dripping, to fitful shadows jittering in lamplight and cold wet stone pressing against his back. He was bound hand and foot, his hands tied behind his back and connected by a short length of rope to the noose around his neck. “Like a dog’s leash tied to its collar, so the slightest movement jerked the loop tight, to bring me to heel, as it were.”

On the sewer platform beside him slumped Arkwright, identically trussed up, awake, and, to Warthrop’s eye, remarkably calm given the circumstances. “As if it were an everyday occurrence, finding oneself with a noose around one’s neck in the city’s sewers, with the pockmarked face of a redheaded Russian brute a foot away.”

“Good evening, Dr. Pellinore Warthrop,” the brute greeted him in a heavy Slavic accent. “Kak y Bac rera?”

To which Warthrop replied, “Tak cebe.”

“Ha, ha. Did you hear that, Plešec? He speaks Russian!”

“I heard that, Rurick. The inflection is good, but the accent is horrible.”

The doctor tried to turn his head to locate their other captor, and was rewarded by a hard yank of the rope against his neck, hard enough, he said, to bruise his Adam’s apple. Beside him Arkwright whispered, “Careful, Doctor.”

Rurick’s reaction was immediate. He pressed the long black barrel of his Smith & Wesson revolver against Arkwright’s forehead and pulled back the hammer. Its click was loud and resonant in the hollow space.

“You forget rules. Speak only when spoken to. Tell truth. Break rule one, I shoot you. Break rule two, and Plešec guts you with his knife, make rat fodder out of you.”

The short bald Russian called Plešec stepped into Warthrop’s view. He was turning a bowie knife in his diminutive hands, the same knife that would be used, months later, to nearly decapitate Jacob Torrance.

“You come looking for Mr. Jack Kearns,” Rurick said to the doctor. The monstrumologist did not perceive it as a question, so he did not reply. “You go to hospital”—he turned to Arkwright—“and you go to his flat. Why do you do this?”

“He is an old friend of mine,” Warthrop said. “I heard that he had gone missing, and we were—”

“Now I must think that you are deaf and do not hear rule two. Or you are idiot and do not understand rule two. You tell me, Dr. Warthrop. Are you deaf or are you idiot?”

“I am neither, sir, and I demand to know—”

Arkwright cut him off. “We are looking for Kearns because he sent Dr. Warthrop something very valuable.”

" width="1em">“And?”

“And we wanted to ask him about it.”

“If you seek John Kearns, why do you go see two officers of the British intelligence service, Mr. Arkwright? Do you think they know where he has gone or where he may have gotten this ‘valuable thing’?”

Warthrop could not help himself; he turned his head to look over at Arkwright, the attendant pain a fair trade, he thought, for the sight of Arkwright’s stoic reaction.

“Those men you saw me with this morning left a note for me at the hotel. They understood Dr. Warthrop and I were in London, and wanted to ask me a few questions. I must say, they were far more civilized in their—”

The one called Rurick gathered a fistful of Arkwright’s hair in his massive hand and yanked, pulling the rope tight around his captive’s neck as he rammed the forehead against the upraised knees. Arkwright’s head snapped back, and his eyes glittered beneath the angry red spot above them.

“You are spy,” Rurick snarled down at him. “You seek magnificum.”

Arkwright did not answer. He did not move. He met the Russian’s glare and did not blink.

“We do—,” he began.

“Arkwright, no,” whispered Warthrop.

“But I am not a spy, for the English or anyone else. As I told you, my name is Thomas Arkwright; I am an American from Long Island; and I have accompanied Dr. Warthrop to assist him in his investigation into the disappearance of his friend Jack Kearns.”

“Let me cut him,” Plešec pleaded with Rurick. “He makes fools of us.”

The monstrumologist spoke up. “We do seek the magnificum. Kearns sent the nidus to me but did not tell me anything else. So I came here to ask him, but he is gone, as you know. And you seem to know everything else, a fact that is puzzling in light of this interrogation or prelude to an execution or whatever it is.”

Plešec opened his mouth, closed it again, looked over at Rurick. “Was that rule one or rule two?”

“One. Definitely one,” Rurick answered. He stepped forward and pushed the muzzle of the revolver against the doctor’s forehead, the same spot he’d picked on Arkwright. The thick, hairy index finger twitched on the trigger, and began to slowly squeeze.

“Don’t be stupid, Rurick. Pull that trigger, and you’ll be serving the remainder of your enlistment in Siberia rounding up gamblers and two-bit petty thieves. You know it and I know it, so let us dispense with these childish games and speak together as gentlemen.”

The voice was Arkwright’s; the accent was distinctly and unmistakably British. The monstrumologist closed his eyes. He was not waiting for the bullet; he was kicking himself for not seeing the truth sooner, for ignoring his misgivings and shoving aside his doubts in his lust for glory.

“It was the only way out,” Warthrop confided to me. “He knew if he didn’t confess his true identity, we were done for. To cling to his cover created a stalemate that only one thing could break—a bullet into our brains. Well, two things, counting Plešec’s knife. So he told Rurick what he already knew to be true: He was not Thomas Arkwright of the Long Island Arkwrights; he was an officer of the British intelligence service, a fact of which I had no knowledge, he assured our captors. He’d been assigned by his superiors to infiltrate the Society for the purpose of discovering the origin of the nidus ex magnificum recently delivered to me, courtesy of Dr. Jack Kearns.”

“And how do you British know of the nidus?” Rurick asked next.

“Well, how do you think? Kearns told us about it,” returned Arkwright.

“He tells you of the nidus but does not say where it comes from?”

“No, he did not say. He said he didn’t know where it came from. We knew he had it, and we knew he sent it to Warthrop, and we knew he disappeared. That is all we knew.”

“So you pay Warthrop to be your bird dog?”

“No. It was our understanding that Dr. Warthrop is one of those rare creatures whose honor cannot be bought. We decided to trick him instead. Play to his ego, which by all accounts is considerably large and substantially playable. My job was to stick with him until he found the origin of the nidus.”

“Ah. And then you kill him.”

“No,” Arkwright replied patiently. “We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it. Killing is expensive, risky, and usually results in a plethora of unintended consequences. That is what I’m trying to help you to understand, Rurick. Killing us creates more problems than it solves.”

“Not if you have discovered magnificum,” Rurick argued. He turned to Warthrop. “Do you know where it is?”

The monstrumologist turned from our reflections and sat in the chair beside my bunk. His shoulders swayed in rhythm to the rocking of the train. At that moment its whistle shrieked, a shrill, almost hysterical sound, like a wounded animal.

“It was an interesting dilemma, Will Henry,” he said calmly. We might have been sitting by a cozy fire on Harrington Lane discussing a paradox of his favorite philosopher, Zeno of Elea. “A bit more complicated than the question implies. If I lied and said no, the wisest course for the Russians would be to kill me, for the alternative was setting me free to find the answer, a risk Rurick—and his government—could not afford to take. However, if I told the truth and said yes, the decision would be even easier. He knew that his British rivals did not know the location of the magnificum, a secret they were willing to keep at all costs. He would have to kill us. Neither the truth nor a lie would spare my life.”

“The lady or the tiger,” I said.

“The lady or the what?”

“It’s nothing, sir. A story Dr. Torrance told.”

“Dr. Torrance told you a story?” He was having some trouble picturing it.

“It doesn’t matter, sir.”

“Then, why did you interrupt me?”

“Rurick didn’t shoot you or Mr. Arkwright, so you must have figured something out.”

“Correct, Will Henry, but that is rather like Newton’s saying the apple fell, so it must be on the ground! Understand that my problem was compounded by the presence of Arkwright, whom I had just discovered was an agent of Her Majesty’s government. If I told the truth and by some miracle we were spared, the British would know where to find the magnificum, and that would be only slightly less disastrous than my death.”

The answer to his “interesting dilemma” occurred to him with no more than a second to spare. Saying nothing broke rule one. Lying broke rule two. Telling the truth broke no established rule except the law of necessity; the end result would be the same.

He could feel Rurick’s sour breath bathing his face. He could hear the incessant drip, drip of water and smell the nauseating cocktail of urine and human waste wafting up from the trench below. He looked up into those depthless black eyes, the eyes of a predator, a hunter like himself—into those shining eyes, his eyes, and he said the one thing, the only thing, that could save his life:

“I do know where it is. The Faceless One hails from an island off the coast of Oman, called Masirah.”

“Masirah?” I asked.

“Yes! Masirah, a long-suspected hiding place of the magnificum. It was the perfect bluff, Will Henry. Any other answer, as I’ve demonstrated, would have resulted in our deaths. Our only hope lay in the possibility that the Russians already thought that the origin of the nidus was Socotra. If they believed I was wrong about the nidus’s origin, they might let us go. In fact, it served their interest to let us go. By the time we discovered the magnificum was not on Masirah, their mission to Socotra would be complete. It was perfect in another, albeit secondary, sense. Assuming I was correct and we survived, Arkwright would return to his superiors with the intelligence he’d been tasked to gather: Typhoeus magnificum was on the isle of Masirah!”

“But why would the Russians kidnap you and Mr. Arkwright if they already knew where the magnificum was? I don’t understand, Dr. Warthrop.”

He patted my shoulder and whirled from his seat, strode back to the window, and admired his newly whiskered profile in the glass.

“In the affairs of nations, Will Henry, all governments, whether democtic or despotic, are desperately interested in two things—obtaining information they wish to protect and protecting information they’ve already obtained. Rurick’s question wasn’t ‘Where is the magnificum?’ It was, ‘Do you know where the magnificum is?’ That struck me like a thunderbolt. Not ‘Tell me where to find the magnificum’ but ‘Do you know where the magnificum is?’ It tipped his hand; I played my little bluff, and we survived.”

Rurick’s finger relaxed upon the trigger. He looked over at his bald partner, who wore a thin-lipped smirk and was nodding.

“You are sure of this Masirah?” Rurick asked the doctor.

Warthrop drew himself erect, or as erect as the rope around his neck would allow, and said (Oh, how well I can picture it!), “I am a scientist, sir. I seek the truth and only the truth for truth’s sake, without regard to the interests of governments or principalities, religious beliefs or cultural biases. As a scientist, I am providing you a theory based upon all the data at my disposal. Hence it can only be called a theory until it is proven otherwise—in other words, until someone actually finds the magnificum on the island of Masirah.”

Rurick frowned, trying to wrap his reptilian brain around the doctor’s answer.

“So… you do not know if it is Masirah?”

“I think it is highly probable.”

“Damn it, Warthrop,” Arkwright cried out. “For the love of bloody hell, before he blows both our brains out, did the nidus come from Masirah?”

“Why, yes. I believe it did.”

Rurick and Plešec withdrew to consider their options. There were only two. Warthrop used the time to collect himself. It was not the first time he’d faced down death, but that was one thing to which one never got accustomed. As the Russians whispered urgently—it appeared Rurick still thought the best and simplest option would be murder; his comrade, however, had seen the wisdom of releasing them—Arkwright turned to Warthrop and said quietly, “I can save us both, but you must go along with everything I say.”

“Excuse me, Arkwright. It sounded like you just asked me to trust you.”

“Warthrop, you do not know these men; I do. They’re Okhranka, the Russian secret police, and you could not find a more vicious pair of killers this side of the Ukraine. We’ve been tracking them for more than a year. Rurick is the real brute, a bloody, soulless predator. He was questioned twice by Scotland Yard for the Whitechapel killings last year. He cannot be reasoned with. If he has been given orders to kill you, he will kill you.”

The monstrumologist refused to let go his grip upon the faith he put in reason; he was a scientist, as he’d said; reason was his god. Rurick’s hesitation to pull the trigger had convinced the doctor beyond all doubt that he’d been correct. The Russians knew Socotra to e the home of the magnificum. But he could not explain his reasoning to Arkwright. To do so would give away the game to the British.

“Then, how do you propose we proceed, in that case, Arkwright?” he asked.

The English spy winked at him. “Leave everything to me.”

Warthrop sighed at his reflection. “Well, you know what happened next. Arkwright ‘revealed’ to them the British plan for handling me once I discovered the location of the magnificum. It was, he confessed, not the first time an ‘inconvenience’ to the Crown had found himself in a home for the insane. Rurick was skeptical, or perhaps just confused, but Plešec caught on at once, thought it a capital idea and quite humorous. In another thirty minutes we were on our way to Hanwell. Rurick pulled Arkwright aside at the gatehouse, stuck his Smith & Wesson into his rib cage, and informed him that he knew where his family lived and he’d better keep his end of the bargain, which meant convincing von Helrung that I had met my maker in pursuit of the magnificum. Everyone parted company extremely satisfied, with the exception of the one about to be thrown into a lunatic asylum until the end of his days. Arkwright was pleased that he had walked away with the information he’d sought from us, and with his life; the Russians were satisfied that the secret of Socotra was safe; and both felt that there was nothing more to fear.”

A feeling of sadness unexpectedly swept over me, and heart-crushing guilt over the fate of Thomas Arkwright. I had distrusted and then hated him for taking Warthrop from me, had tried and convicted him in my mind for a crime conceived only in my mind, and in the end it was not a “bloody, soulless killer” who had orchestrated his final test, no “mean king” as in Torrance’s parable. No, it had been a thirteen-year-old boy consumed with jealousy and self-righteousness, casting himself in the role of protector and avenger of a man who had rejected him for another and exiled him from the rarified atmosphere of his presence.

The doctor was not pleased that his great quest for the ultimate prize in monstrumology would be delayed by a six-hour layover in Venice—despite the fact that it was Venezia, La Serenissima, the queen of the Adriatic, one of the most—if not the most—beautiful cities on earth.

We arrived around three o’clock in the afternoon on a warm, bright day in late spring, when the westering sun turned the canals into ribbons of gold and the buildings lining their eastern banks shone like jewels. The sweet serenades of the gondoliers leapt from their boats and gamboled merrily after us, along every narrow lane and back alleyway, and golden light pooled in the archways of the little shops and restaurants and the balconies framed in wrought iron overlooking the water.

Ah, Venice! You recline like a beautiful woman in her lover’s arms, bare-armed and free of care, your beating heart filled with light undefiled. I wished we could have remained nestled in your dewy bosom sixty times six hours. A boy wanders in a dry land of dust and bones, of bleached, broken rocks and the grinding of the wind in a waterless season. The lamentation of the arid earth, the anguish of the bonesbe delaydust and the broken rocks gnawed by the hot wind; this has been his home, this his inheritance… and then the boy turns round. He turns round and beholds Venice singing in golden light, and he is entranced, her loveliness all the more heartbreaking for what he has inherited.

The monstrumologist seemed to know every byway and backwater of this floating city, to be familiar with every tiny shop and sidewalk café. “I spent a summer or two here during my European period,” was how he put it. Perhaps he was reverting to his days as an aspiring poet; it sounded like something an artist might say of himself, ‘my European period.’ We ate an early dinner at a café in the Piazzetta di San Marco, near the lagoon, a welcome respite after hiking for two hours in the city with no clear—or so it seemed to me—purpose or destination in mind. The doctor ordered a caffè and settled back in his chair to enjoy the mild air, and the beautiful women, who seemed so plentiful in Venice and whose careless laughter echoed between the Libreria and the Zecca like water splashing in the fountain of the piazza.

He sipped his espresso and allowed his eye to roam dreamily over the winsome landscape, his gaze as languid as the water of the Canalasso.

“Here is the trouble with Venice,” he said. “Once you have seen it, every other place seems dull and tired by comparison, so you are always reminded of where you are not.” His eye was drawn to two comely young ladies walking arm in arm along the Molo, where the sun sparked and spat bright flashes of gold upon the blue water. “The same is true about nearly everything else Venetian.”

He stroked his new whiskers thoughtfully. “Monstrumology, too. In a different way. You’ve been with me long enough, Will Henry; you must know what I mean. Would not life seem terribly… well, boring, without it? I am not saying it has always been enjoyable or even pleasant for you, but can you imagine how mundane and interminably gray life would be if you had to give it up?”

“I have imagined it, sir.”

He looked closely at me. “And?”

“I was… I had my chance to…” I could not look at him. “I lived with Dr. von Helrung’s niece while you were gone—Mrs. Bates—and she offered to adopt me—”

“Adopt you!” He seemed astounded. “For what?”

My face felt warm. “For my own good, I think.”

He snorted, saw my wounded expression, set down his cup, and said, “And you said no.”

“My place is with you, Dr. Warthrop.”

He nodded. What did that nod mean? He agreed my place was with him? Or was he merely assenting to my decision regardless of his own opinion? He did not say, and I dared not ask.

“I was there, you know,” he said. “On the night you were born. Your mother was staying in one of the guest rooms—a matter of convenience. My convenience, I mean. I had just received a fresh specimen and required your father’s assistance in the dissection. We were in the basement when your mother went into labor two floors above us, so we did not hear her cries until we came upstairs several hours later. James rushed up, came back down again, and then dragged me to her bedside.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “I was born at Harrington Lane?”

“Yes. Your parents never told you?”

I shook my head. It wasn’t something I would have asked them. “And you delivered me?”

“Did I say that? What did I just say? I said I was dragged to your bedside by your agitated father. As I recall, your mother’s words were, ‘Do not let that man come near me!’” He chuckled. “I had the impression your mother did not like me very much.”

“She told Father your work would kill him one day.”

“Did she? Hmmm. A prescient remark, though the prediction came true in a roundabout way.” He stroked the whiskers on his chin and regarded the statue of Saint Theodore slaying the dragon atop the granite column nearby.

“Did you, Dr. Warthrop?”

“Did I what?”

“Deliver me.”

“I am not a midwife, Will Henry. Neither am I a physician. I know how to kill things, cut things up, and preserve things. How do you suppose that qualifies me to bring life into the world?” He would not look at me, though, and I found it very hard to look at him. He crossed his legs and clasped his hands over his upraised knee, the delicate fingers interlaced. Were those the first hands that had held me? Were those the eyes that first saw me and the eyes that I first saw? It was a dizzying thought for reasons I could not articulate.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“It is not the sort of thing that comes up naturally in conversation,” he answered. “Why the look of dismay, Will Henry? I was born in that house too. It does not carry with it—as far as I know—the mark of Cain.”

We lingered in the piazzetta until sunset. The doctor drank four espressos, the last in a single swallow, and when he stood up, his entire body seemed to vibrate inside his clothes. He strode off without a backward glance, leaving me to keep up the best I could in the burgeoning crowd, passing the magnificent Basilica di San Marco before turning into the Piazzetta dei Leoncini. There I lost him in the throng, then caught sight of him again as he was leaving the square, striding east along Calle de Canonica toward the canal.

He stopped abruptly before an open doorway and stood absolutely still, a striking image after the fury of motion, now as motionless as a statue in the velvet dusk. I heard him murmur, “I wonder if… How long has it been?” He looked at his watch, snapped it shut, and motioned for me to follow him inside.

We entered a dimly lit low-ceilinged room crowded with wooden tables, mostly unoccupied, at the rear of which was a small stage. The platform was bare except for an ancient upright piano pushed against the wall. The doctor sat down at a table close to the stage, beneath a dance hall poster that somehow managed to cling to the crumbling plaster of the wall. A basset-hound-faced middle-aged man wearing a stained apron asked us what we wanted to drink. Warthrop ordered another caffè, his fifth, to which the cameriere replied, “No caffè. Vino. Vino or spritz.” The monstrumologist sighed and ordered a spritz. It would sit untouched; Warthrop did not drink alcohol. He asked our sad-faced waiter if someone named Veronica Soranzo still sang at the club. “Sì. She sings,” he said, and disappeared through the doorway to the right of the stage.

The doctor settled into his chair and leaned his head against the wall. He closed his eyes.

“Dr. Warthrop?”

“Yes, Will Henry.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting back to the station now?”

“I am waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“For an old friend. Actually, three old friends.”

He opened one eye, closed it again. “And the first has just arrived.”

I turned in my chair and saw a hulking, slump-shouldered man filling the doorway. He wore a rumpled overcoat that was much too heavy for the clement weather, and a battered felt hat. It was not by his hair—the hat hid most of that—but by his eyes that I recognized him. I gasped and blinked, and he was gone.

“Rurick!” I whispered. “He followed us here?”

“He has been following us since we left the station house. He and his hairless cohort, the diminutive Gospodin Plešec, have wandered through all of Venice with us; they sat upon the steps of the Basilica di San Marco this afternoon while we enjoyed our drinks in the piazzetta.”

“What should we do?”

His eyes remained closed, his expression serene. He hadn’t a care in the world. “Nothing.”

What was the matter with him? Rurick is the real brute, a bloody, soulless predator, Arkwright had said. Warthrop must have thought we were safe inside this pathetic dive, but we could not stay ensconced here forever.

“That’s two old friends accounted for,” the doctor said. “Rurick is in front, so Plešec must be watching the back.” He opened his eyes and sat up straight. Bits of plaster from the crumbling wall rained to the floor behind his chair.

“And here comes the third!” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. His eyes gleamed in the shivery flicker of the gas jets.

A man in a wrinkled white shirt and black vest emerged from the doorway beside the stage, dipped slightly at the waist toward the meager audience, and sat down at the piano. He raised his hands high over the keys, held them suded there for a dramatic moment, and then brought them smashing down, launching into a rollicking rendition of “A Wand’ring Minstrel I” from The Mikado. The instrument was badly out of tune, and the man’s technique was horrible, but he was a very physical musician, throwing his entire body into the effort. His buttocks popped up and down in rhythm on the rickety stool while he swayed in time, a human metronome, a man who played the piano as if it played him.

Abruptly, with no bridge whatsoever, he switched to Violetta’s aria from La Traviata, and a woman emerged from the doorway dressed in a faded red gown, her long dark hair flowing freely over her bare shoulders. Her face was heavy with stage paint; still, she was a striking woman, on the cusp of her middle years, I guessed, with sparkling chocolate-colored eyes that, like those of so many Italian women, bespoke of promise as well as danger. I cannot say her voice rose to the level of her looks. In fact, it wasn’t very good at all. I glanced at the monstrumologist, who was listening in a state of complete rapture. I wondered what so entranced him; it could not have been her singing.

He pounded on the table at the conclusion of the song, shouting “Bravo! Bravissimo!” while the other patrons politely clapped and then turned back quickly to their bottles. The woman skipped lightly from the stage and swept straight toward us.

“Pellinore! Dear, dear, Pellinore!” She kissed him lightly on both cheeks. “Ciao, amore mio. Mi sei mancato tanto.” She ran her hand over his whiskered cheek and added, “But what is this?”

“Don’t you like it? I think it makes me look distinguished. Veronica, this is Will Henry, James’s son, and my latest acquisizione.”

“Acquisizione!” Her brown eyes danced with delight. “Ciao, Will Henry, come sta? I knew your father well. E ‘molto triste. Molto triste! But, Pellinore, perché sei qui a Venezia? Lavoro o piacere?” she asked, sliding into the chair beside him. At that moment our waiter came back with the doctor’s spritz. Veronica snapped her fingers at him, and he left, returning a moment later with a glass of wine.

“It is always a pleasure to be in Venice,” the monstrumologist answered. He lifted his glass to salute her but did not take a sip.

She turned those laughing eyes back to me and said, “The looks of a farabutto, the words of a politico!”

“Veronica is saying she likes my new whiskers,” the doctor said in response to my baffled expression.

“They make you look old and tired,” she opined with a sniff.

“Perhaps it isn’t the beard,” Warthrop returned. “Perhaps I “Tired, sì. Old, never! You have not aged a day, not an hour since I saw you last. How long has it been? Three years?”

“Six,” he answered.

“No! As long as that? It is no wonder, then, why I have been so lonely!” She turned to me. “You will tell me, yes? What brings the great Pellinore Warthrop all the way to Venice? He is in trouble, isn’t he?” And then to the doctor: “Who is it this time, Pellinore? The Germans?”

“Actually, it’s the Russians.”

She stared at him for a moment before dissolving into laughter.

“And the British,” Warthrop added, raising his voice slightly. “Though I’ve managed to put them off, for a while at least.”

“Sidorov?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Probably somewhere in the mix.”

“So it is business, then. You did not come to see me.”

“Signorina Soranzo, how could I come all this way and not see you? To me, you are Venice.”

Her eyes narrowed; the compliment did not sit well.

“I suppose you could say I am in a bit of trouble,” he hurriedly continued. “The problem being twofold. The first part is very large, heavily armed, and loitering outside on the Calle de Canonica. The second, I think, is in the alleyway behind us. He is not so large but carries a knife that is. My problem is compounded by the fact that my train is scheduled to depart in an hour.”

“So?” she asked. “Perché pensi di avere un problema? Kill them.” She said it casually, like she was advising him on how to treat a headache.

“I’m afraid that would further compound my problem. My business is difficult enough without becoming a fugitive on top of everything else.”

She slapped him across the cheek. He kept himself very still; he took care not to look away.

“Bastardo,” she said. “When I walk out and see you sitting there, my heart, it…Sono stupido, I should have known. For six years I do not see you. I do not receive a single letter. Until I think you must be dead. Why else would you not come? Why else would you not write? You are in the business of death, I think; you must be dead!”

“I never pretended to be something that I am not,” the monstrumologist replied stiffly. “I was very honest with you, Veronica.”

“You sneak out of Venice without even saying good-bye, no note, no nothing, like a thief in the night. You call this honest?” She tilted her chin in his direction. “Sei un cardardo, Pellinore Warthrop. You are a not a man; you are a coward.”

>“Ask Will Henry. It is how I say all my good-byes,” he said.

“I am married,” she announced suddenly. “To Bartolomeo.”

“Who is Bartolomeo?”

“The piano player.”

The doctor couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or hurt. “Really? Well, he seems very… energetic.”

“He is here,” she snapped.

“As am I. Which brings us back to my problem.”

“Exactly! Il problema. I wish the Russian with the knife luck to find your heart!”

She spun from the chair in a dramatic flourish, allowing him to catch her by the wrist before she could escape. He pulled her close and whispered urgently into her ear. She listened with head bowed, her eyes fixed upon the floor. Her heart was clearly torn. Once drawn into the Warthropian orbit, even the strongest of hearts—and women possess the strongest of any—find it hard to break free. She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all. Her love demanded she save him, her hate that she destroy him.

The cruelest aspect of love, the monstrumologist had said, is its inviolable integrity.

Veronica and Bartolomeo lived directly above the nightclub, in a cramped, sparsely furnished apartment that she had labored to brighten with fresh flowers and colorful throws and art poster prints. There was a small balcony in the front that overlooked the Calle de Canonica. The balcony doors were open when we came in; the white curtains undulated in the balmy wind, and I could hear the sound of the Venetian street life below.

Bartolomeo joined us, his shirtfront saturated in sweat, his eyes possessing that distracted, otherworldly stare universal to artists—and to madmen. He embraced Warthrop as if he were a long-lost friend and asked him how he liked his playing. The doctor replied that a musician of his caliber deserved a better instrument, and Bartolomeo threw his arms around him and kissed him sloppily on the cheek.

The monstrumologist explained our predicament and his idea to resolve it. Bartolomeo embraced the plan with the same ferocity he had just employed upon the doctor, but worried that the difference in their height could pose a problem.

“We’ll extinguish the light in here,” Warthrop said. “And Veronica will station herself between you and the street. It won’t be a perfect disguise, but it should buy us the time we need.”

The doctor retired to the bedroom to undress; Bartolomeo stripped right where he stood, smiling all the while, amused, perhaps, by my astonishment at his decidedly un-Victorian lack of modesty.

The bedroom door opened, and Veronica emerged with the doctor’s clothes, fussed in Italian at her husband, returned to the bedroom, and slammed shut the door. Bartolomeo shrugged and said to me, “La signora è una tigre, ma lei è la mia tigre.” The monstrumoloist’s clothes were too big for him—Bartolomeo was not a tall man—but from the street, at night, in dim lighting… I prayed the doctor was right.

After several more minutes the bedroom door came open again and Veronica came out, followed by another woman—or anyway a womanish creature akin to something Mr. P. T. Barnum might include in his sideshow attraction, wearing the same faded red gown that had, just a few moments before, adorned the decidely more curvaceous form of Veronica Soranzo. Bartolomeo burst out laughing at this ludicrous mockery of all things feminine, from the hastily applied makeup to the doctor’s bare heels hanging over the back of his wife’s shoes.

“The lady, I think, needs a shave,” he teased.

“There isn’t time,” Warthrop replied seriously. “I will need a hat.”

“Something with gold,” Bartolomeo suggested. “To bring out the color in your eyes.”

He held out the doctor’s revolver, which he had found in the jacket pocket.

“Give it to Will Henry; I’ve nowhere to put it.”

“If you carried a smaller weapon, you could stick it in your garter.”

“I like your husband,” the monstrumologist told Veronica as she pushed a wide-brimmed hat onto his head.

“He is an idiot,” she said, and Bartolomeo laughed. “Do you see? I insult him and he laughs.”

“That’s what makes me a good husband,” Bartolomeo said.

Veronica hissed something under her breath, grabbed her husband by the wrist, and dragged him toward the balcony.

“You don’t say nothing, understand? You stand by the door and lower your head, and I do all the talking.”

“I thought you said there would be acting involved.”

She peeked through the curtains to the street below. “I don’t see this man you describe, Pellinore.”

“He’s there,” Warthrop assured her, adjusting his hat in the mirror.

She started outside, stopped, turned back, and then abandoned her husband in his baggy clothes, the monstrumologist in miniature, to return to the doctor’s side.

“I will never see you again,” she said.

“We cannot know that.”

She shook her head. “Non si capisce. You are an idiot like him. All men are idiots. I say I will never see you again. Never come here again. Thanks to you, every time I see my husband, I will see the man who he is not.”

She kissed him: the love. Then she slapped him: the hate. Bartolomeo watched all of it, smiling. What did he care? Warthrop might have her heart, but he, Bartolomeo, had her.

They went onto the balcony. Her voice, trained to project itself in large, open spaces, rang out, saying, “How dare you come back here now, after all these years! I am married now, to Bartolomeo. I cannot leave, Pellinore. I cannot leave! What is that? What is that you say, Pellinore Warthrop? Amore! You speak of love?” She laughed cruelly. “I will never love you, Pellinore Warthrop! I will never love another man again!”

“Well, Will Henry.” My master-cum-mistress sighed. “I think that is enough; we’d better go.”

We left through the front door, Warthrop’s hand resting protectively upon my shoulder, a (very tall and overdressed) governess with her charge, walking as fast as the doctor’s wobbly gait would allow, down the Calle de Canonica toward the canal. The doctor kept his head down, but I could not resist and glanced about for the Russian assassin. I spied him lounging in an archway across the street, pretending not to listen to Veronica’s performance overhead. Her acting was only slightly better than her singing; still, it seemed to be doing the trick. Rurick did not abandon his post.

Reaching the Rio di Palazzo unmolested, we climbed aboard a gondola whose pilot was a model of discretion. He made no comment or reacted in any noticeable way to this very homely woman—or very strange man—stepping into his craft. He even asked, with a perfectly straight face, if his passengers would like to hear a song.

The sounds of the street faded. The dark water glittered like the star-encrusted heavens as we passed with but a whispery ripple beneath a limestone bridge shining bone white in the glow of the quarter-moon.

“The Ponte dei Sospiri,” the monstrumologist said in a quiet voice. “The Bridge of Sighs. See the bars over the windows, Will Henry? Through them prisoners would have their last view of the beauty of Venezia. They say lovers will be blessed if they kiss beneath the Ponte dei Sospiri.”

“Sì, signor—signorina… sì. That is what they say,” acknowledged our slightly confused gondolier.

“I might have kissed her here,” said Pellinore Warthrop to himself—the fugitive, the prisoner. “I do not remember.”

The hunt for the Faceless One resumed, with us, the hunters, now hunted ourselves. The doctor adjusted better to this change of fortune than his young apprentice, who could not rid his thoughts of the cold fire in his pursuer’s eyes, so similar to the one that burned in his master’s, the ancient, unquenchable flame that blazes in the eyes of all predators, the flinty remnants of the primordial conflagration. With each tick of the clock, with every passing mile, the fire in the monstrumologist’s eye grew colder and brighter. That which drove him was older than he. It was as old as life and just as inexorable. It burned in him and it consumed him. He was the predator; he was the prey.

“How did they find us?” I wondered aloud that night as we readied for bed.

“I think they never ‘lost’ us,” he answered. “They have been on this train since Calais, or at least since Lucerne. They followed us into Venice because it was thei first and best opportunity.”

“Opportunity to do what?”

“To say hello and catch up on old times. Really, Will Henry.”

“If they let you go before, why do they want to kill you now?”

“They did not let me go, as you recall. Unless you consider throwing someone into a lunatic asylum letting him go.”

“But why would they want to kill you if they think you don’t know where the magnificum is?”

“For the same reason they wanted to kill me when they didn’t know what I thought.” He lay back in his bunk and said, “They’ve had months to consider my little trick in the sewer, long enough for even a man of Rurick’s limited mental agility to come to the conclusion that I might have been lying. Or it could just be they think I’m better off dead.” He gave a dry little laugh. “And they are not alone in that!”

“Who is she, Dr. Warthrop? Who is Veronica Soranzo?”

“Someone I do not wish to talk about.”

“Were the two of you…” I did not know the word I should use.

He apparently did, for he answered, “Yes… and no. And what does it matter?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Then, why did you bring it up?” he asked testily, flopping onto his side and fussily snapping the sheet.

“I just never thought…”

“Yes? What did you never think? There are so many possibilities; don’t make me guess. What? That I might have had a life before you came into it? I did not spring into existence upon your entrance, Will Henry. Before you were, I was, and for a good while too. Veronica Soranzo belongs to what was, and I try to concern myself with what is and what will be. Now, please, give me some peace. I must think.”

When I woke several hours later, for a disoriented instant I thought I was back in my little loft on Harrington Lane, shaken from a deep sleep by his desperate cries beckoning me to his bedside. The doctor had drawn the blinds, the little compartment was as black as pitch, and I found him by the sound of his choked sobs. I reached for him. His body jerked at the touch of my hand.

“Dr. Warthrop?”

“It is nothing. Nothing. A dream, that’s all. Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. It did not seem like nothing to me. I’d never heard him sound so terrified.

“What if he killed her, Will Henry?” he cried. “When he discovered our charade, he would have confronted her, don’t you think? Yes, yes. He would be furious; he would express his rage upon her. Oh, what have I done, Will Henry? What have I done?”

“Should we go back?”

“Go back? Go back for what? To bury her? you ever listen to what I say? Do you ever listen to what you say? I have offered her up in my stead, Will Henry. I have killed her!”

“You don’t know that, sir. You can’t know that.” His terror was infectious. I wrapped the covers around my quivering shoulders. Suddenly the compartment was very cold and very small. I could not see his face; he was an insubstantial shade against the darker gray.

“Look not into my eyes,” he muttered feverishly. “For I am the basilisk. Fear my touch, for I am the Midas of annihilation.” He sought out my hand in the dark, for comfort, I thought, but I was wrong. It was for proof. “James and Mary, Erasmus and Malachi, John and Muriel, Damien and Thomas and Jacob and Veronica, and the ones whose names I have forgotten and the ones whose names I never knew…” He pressed the spot where my finger should have been. “And you, Will Henry. You have given yourself in service to ha-Mashchit, the destroyer, the angel of death whom God created on the first day, the same day he said, ‘Let there be light.’

“And when I step upon the shore of the Isle of Blood to plant the conqueror’s flag, when I attain the summit of the abyss, when I find the thing that all of us fear and all of us seek, when I turn to face the Faceless One, whose face will I see?”

In the darkness he raised my hand and pressed it against his cheek.

His face is beatific when I picture it now, frozen in an attitude of godlike serenity, like a Greek statue of an ancient hero—Hercules, perhaps—or the bust of Caesar Augustus in the Musei Capitolini. The face of the living Warthrop has petrified in my memory, and his eyes, like those of a statue, are blank, devoid of detail, devoid of sight. It isn’t a failure of memory—how well I remember those eyes! It is the mercy I grant myself. And it is my gift to him—the absolution of blindness.

He fell silent. I do not think he spoke more than three words to me between Venice and Brindisi. He broke the verbal drought once, while we were standing in the ticket line at the P&O offices to secure our berths for the passage to Port Said.

“We are a few hours ahead of them, Will Henry. Barring the unexpected delay, we may expect to arrive at Aden long before they do. But there they may catch up to us. I don’t know how long it will take to arrange our passage to Socotra.”

He looked down at me. “Unless you wish to turn back.”

“Turn back?” I thought I must have been hallucinating. The monstrumologist was seriously thinking about giving up? It was so uncharacteristic a remark that I wondered if he had lost his mind—if Arkwright had jumped the gun by four months when he’d brought him to Hanwell.

“I can wire von Helrung to meet you in London.”

“And leave you alone? No, Dr. Warthrop.”

He shook his head ruefully. “I don’t think you understand what your no is saying yes to.”

“It’s never stopped me before,” I replied. “Not understanding the yes in ‘no.’”

The monstrumologist laughed.

For the first few hours of the Mediterranean leg of our seven-thousand-mile journey, I feared that the mal de mer I’d suffered in the Atlantic crossing would return, like an unpleasant relative who arrives unexpectedly for dinner. You loathe his company, but you cannot turn him away. The monstrumologist forbade me from remaining belowdecks, saying the atmosphere was foul with coal dust and “the effluvia of four continents,” meaning, I guessed, the other passengers. He brought me up to the forecastle and pointed straight ahead.

“Keep your eyes on the horizon, Will Henry. It’s the only trick that works. Works for almost every ailment, when you think about it.”

“Dr. von Helrung said I should dance.”

The doctor nodded seriously. “Dancing isn’t a bad idea either.”

He leaned his arms upon the rail. The southerly wind whipped his long dark hair back, turned his jacket into a snapping semaphore flag. He closed his eyes and raised his face into the wind. “Not yet, not yet,” he murmured. He looked down at my puzzled expression and explained, “Africa. You can smell it, you know.”

“What does it smell like?”

“I cannot tell you. It would be like trying to describe the color blue to a man blind from birth.” And then, because he was Pellinore Warthrop, he proceeded to try. “Old. Africa smells… old. Not old in the sense of something rotten or gone sour; old in the best sense—old because we’ve yet to make it ‘new.’ ‘Old’ meaning the world as it was before we recast it in our image, before we scarred the land with our plows and cut down the forests with our axes, before we dammed the rivers and drilled great holes into the earth, before we learned to take more than what we needed, before we stood upright, that kind of old, which is another way of saying that Africa smells new.”

He turned again toward the horizon. “On those days when I am at my lowest, when it is all I can do to raise my head from my pillow, and all the world seems black and life itself the idiot’s tale, I think of Africa. And the dark tide as if in fear recedes—it has no answer for Africa.”

“‘The dark tide’?”

He shook his head sharply. He seemed chagrinned to have brought it up.

“My name for something that can’t be named, Will Henry. Or that I am too frightened to name. A part of me and somehow not. It is not unlike a tide—it withdraws gently, it roars back in. Yet not predictable like the tides. Governed, though, as the moon guides the tides…” He shook his head in frustration; the monstrumologist was not accustomed to inarticulateness. “On my better days I am able to drive back the dark tide. On my worst, I am overwhelmed—it drives me. I would flee from it, but it is a part of me, and so where might I run? Oh, never mind. It is impossible to say exactly what I mean.”

“That’s all right, sir. I think I understand.”

I closed my eyes and lifted my nto the hot Mediterranean wind. I wanted very badly to know the smell of Africa.

Our stopover in Port Said, at the northern terminus of the Suez Canal, would be brief—two hours for the ship to take on coal and supplies and transfers. The maelstrom that was a steamer’s coaling operation was enough to drive most passengers ashore for the duration, my master and I among them, though his goal was not so much to escape than to arrange a rescue.

We stopped at the telegraph office first, where Warthrop sent this curt missive to von Helrung:

ARRIVED EGYPT. SHOULD ARRIVE

ADEN BY THE 19TH, INSTANT. WIRE

THERE IF NEWS.

And then this, to the one who had saved him in Venice:

RESPOND TO PORT AUTHORITY

OFFICE ADEN WHEN YOU RECEIVE

THIS. PELLINORE.

The office was hot and stuffy and crowded, mostly with Europeans (the telegraph operator himself was German), and most of them were on their way home from India, already having had their continental fill of exotic lands and the romance of foreign travel. We went outside, where it was not quite as stuffy and crowded but was much hotter, a blast-furnace heat to which I, a boy from New England, was wholly unaccustomed. It felt as if my lungs were being slowly crushed.

“Where is your hat, Will Henry?” the doctor asked. “You can’t go anywhere in Africa without a hat.”

“I left it on the boat, sir,” I gasped.

“Come along, then, but we must hurry. There is someone I must see before we depart.”

He led me down a series of narrow, winding streets, a confusion of intersecting lanes hardly wider than forest paths, except here the trees were thin-trunked and branchless, and the dust puffed and boiled beneath our feet.

We turned a corner and came into an open-air market called a souq, a kind of bazaar where one might find practically anything—candies and curiosities (I saw more than one vendor hawking shrunken heads), liquor, tobacco, coffee, and clothing—including a variety of boater hats, though we could not find one that wasn’t at least three sizes too big for me. There was some comment made that the sun must have boiled all the moisture from my head. I didn’t care. The brim rested on my eyebrows, and the thing jiggled annoyingly when I made the slightest movement, but it blocked the hateful sun.

We left the market and retraced our steps to a smoky café not far from the docks. The patrons—they were all male—sat about in small groups, smoking sisha, a fruit-flavored tobacco, from ornate water pipes. Upon seeing my master, the proprietor rushed forward, clapping his hands furiously and shouting the name “Mihos! Mihos!” He wrapped the doctor in a tremendous rib-cracking hug.

“Look what the wind has blown in from the desert! Hullo, hullo, my old friend!” the man cried in nearly unaccented English.

“Fadil, it is good to see you again,” returned Warthrop warmly. “How is business?”

“As bad as that?”

“Worse! It is terrible! But it is always terrible, so what can I complain? But who is this hiding under the big white umbrella?”

“This is Will Henry,” replied the monstrumologist.

“Henry! James’s boy? But where is James?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“Dead,” I put in.

“Dead! Oh, but that is terrible! Terrible!” Tears welled in his mud-colored eyes. “When? How? And you are his son?”

I nodded, and the hat bounced back and forth upon my heat-shrunken head.

“And now you take his place. Very large shoes to fill, little William Henry. Very large indeed!”

“Yes,” said Warthrop. “Fadil, my ship leaves in less than an hour, and there is something I must—”

“Oh, but that is terrible! You will come to my house for dinner, Mihos; take the next boat. Say yes; you will wound my feelings if you say no.”

“Then, I’m afraid I must wound them. Perhaps when—or if—I return…”

“If you return? If? What does this mean, if?”

The doctor peered about in the fragrant haze. Fadil’s customers seemed oblivious to our presence. Still…

“I will explain everything—in private.”

We followed him into the back room, a kind of gambling hall in miniature, where a very fat man was conducting a game of dice with two anxious, sweating, clearly overextended Belgians. They plunked down their silver, watched the dice tumble from the fat man’s wooden box, and then watched their silver disappear. Warthrop grunted in disapproval; Fadil waved his objection away.

“They’re Belgians, Mihos; they don’t care for nothing. Sit; sit, in the corner there, where we cannot hear their cries of pain and sorrow. But this is terrible; where has my mind gone? I will bring you some tea—I have Darjeeling!—and a lassi for William.”

“I’ve really no time for tea, Fadil,” said my master politely.

“What? No time for tea? You, Mihos? Then, your business in Egypt, like mine, must be truly terrible.”

The monstrumologist nodded. “In nearly every aspect.”

“What is it this time? Smugglers again? I told you to stay away from those scum, Mihos.”

“My trouble has to do with scum from an entirely different pond, Fadil. Okhranka, the czar’s secret police.”

“Russians? But this is terrible! What have you done to the czar?”

Warthrop smiled. “Let us say my interests conflict with his.”

“Oh, that is not good—for the czar! Ha!” He leaned his forearms on the table; his eyes glimmered eagerly. “What can Fadil do for his good friend Mihos?

“There are two of them,” the doctor replied. He described Rurick and Plešec. “I managed to avoid them in London and Venice, but they can’t be more than a few hours behind me.”

“And their boat will stop here to take on coal and supplies.” Fadil was nodding grimly. “Leave everything to me, Mihos. These two have seen their last sunrise!”

“I don’t want you to kill them.”

“You don’t want me to kill them?”

“Killing them would only bring you more trouble. In a week Port Said would be drowning in a plague of Ruricks and Plešecs.”

Fadil snorted and smacked his fist into his open palm, an Arabic gesture of contempt. “Let them come. I have no fear of Russians.”

“You’ve not met these Russians. They are sons of Sekhmet the destroyer.”

“And you are Mihos the lion, guardian of the horizon, and I am Menthu, god of war!” He turned his sparkling brown eyes upon me. “Who shall you be, son of James Henry? Your father was Anubis, weigher of men’s hearts. Shall you be Ophois, his son, who opens the way to victory?”

Warthrop said, “What I need is time, Fadil. A fortnight would be good, a month would be better, four months would be poetic. Can you give me that time?”

“If you would let me kill them, I could give you eternity! But yes, I have friends in Port Said who have friends in Cairo who have friends in Tewfik’s court. It could be arranged. It will not come cheap, Mihos.”

“Von Helrung will wire you whatever’s required.” The monstrumologist checked his watch. “There is one more thing,” he said briskly. “We are on our way to Aden, and I shall need transport from there to our final destination.”

“What is your final destination?”

“I cannot say.”

“What is this, you cannot say? This is me, Fadil!”

“I need someone who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut and who isn’t afraid of a little risk. A fast ship would be helpful as well. Do you know anyone like that in Aden?”

“I know many people in Aden, though not very many I would trust. There is one man; he isn’t so bad. He doesn’t have a fast ship, but he will know someone who does.… What is it that you hunt that would interest the czar of Russia and that would keep you from trusting your old friend Fadil? What manner of monster is it this time?”

“I don’t know,” replied the doctor honestly. “But I intend to find out or die in the attempt.”

Fadil insisted upon seeing us off, and it seemed everyone on the crowded streets knew him. Cries of “Fadil! Fadil!” followed us from the doorway of the café to the gangplank. The doctor flinched at every “Fadil!”—he had wanted his presence in Port Said to go unnoticed.

“When your terrible business is done at this place you cannot say, after your hunt for what you do not know is consummated, you will come back and tell me what the czar may know but Fadil may not! We shall feast on fasieekh and kofta, and I shall introduce my daughters to William—or should I say Ophois? Ha, ha!”

He clapped me hard on the back, glanced about furtively, and then pulled a small object from his trouser pocket. It was a scarab beetle carved from alabaster and fashioned into a necklace. He pressed the amulet into my hands, saying, “A kheper, my new young friend, from the Tenth Dynasty. In ancient Egyptian its name means ‘to come into being.’ It will bring you luck.”

“And several years in prison if the authorities should catch you with it,” added the doctor drily.

“It came to me honestly, in a game of hounds and jackals with a very drunk Hungarian viscount who had purchased it from a street urchin in Alexandria. Now, do not insult me by refusing my gift.”

He embraced Warthrop, topped off the bear hug with a kiss—a sign of friendship in Egypt—and sent me off with one as well, right on the lips. He found my startled reaction extremely funny; his robust laughter followed us all the way up the gangplank and onto the ship.

“You should not have accepted it,” Warthrop said to me, referring to the scarab. “Now you’ve taken his luck.”

He smiled wanly. The remark, I think, was only partially in jest.

It took the French ten years to build the Suez Canal, and it seemed to take that long to traverse its hundred miles. We chugged along at a pace a snail would scoff at, and the scenery, if it could be called that, offered no pleasant distraction—desert to the left, desert to the right, and above a sky on fire, the sun an arm’s length away. The only sign of life outside the boat were the flies, whose painful bites tormented us anytime we stepped on deck. The doctor overheard me cursing them, and said, “To the ancients these flies represented tenacity and viciousness in battle. They would be presented to victorious warriors as symbols of valor.” It was a historical footnote that probably would have been more interesting in our parlor on Harrington Lane. In the moment, the flies seemed more symbols of madness than valor.

We fed the flies until sunset, when the sky changed from blue to yellow to orange to a velvety indigo blue and the first stars poked hesitantly through the firmament. Then a quick trip below to feed ourselves—quick because the heat above was nothing compared to the ovenlike temperatures achieved inside a coal steamer in the desert—then back on deck to revel in the cool night air. There were no settlements along the canal, no lights twinkling on the shore, no sound or sign of civilization anywhere. There were the stars and the water and the lifeless land we could not see, and the ship’s bow slicing the wakeless surface, as silent as Charon’s ferry in the stygian dark. A feeling odread came over me, a vertiginous sensation of being acutely aware of every breath and yet feeling unmoored from my own body, a living ghost, a shade who has paid his silver to the ferryman for the passage to the underworld. I might have turned to the man beside me for comfort—as he had turned to me on the train to Brindisi, as he had turned countless times in the past, when swamped in what he called “the dark tide.” I might have turned to him and said, “Dr. Warthrop, sir, I am afraid.”

I did not, because I dared not. It wasn’t his temper that stayed my confession. It wasn’t that he might belittle or judge me. I had grown accustomed to the point of boredom to those things.

No, I held my tongue because I feared he would abandon me again.

The stars above. The water below. The lifeless land on either side. And, over the invisible horizon, its approach marked by each beat of our hearts, the thing we both longed for and feared—the magnificum, das Ungeheuer, the summit of the abyss.

There were two telegrams waiting for the doctor upon our arrival at Steamer Point in Aden. The first was from New York:

ALL QUIET. JOHN BULL ASKED IF WE

FOUND HIS LOST DOG. TOLD HIM

TO ASK IVAN. EMILY SENDS HER

LOVE. GODSPEED. A.V.H.

“John Bull?” I asked.

“The English,” the monstrumologist translated. “The missing ‘dog’ is Arkwright. ‘Ivan’ is the Russians. Von Helrung must have had a visit from British intelligence, looking for their absent operative, and he has pinned the blame on Okhranka. But who is Emily, and why does she send her love?” He pulled on his bottom lip, puzzling over this, to him, enigmatic phrase.

“Emily is Mrs. Bates, sir, Dr. von Helrung’s niece.”

“That’s odd. Why does she send her love to me? I’ve never even met the woman.”

“I think, sir…” I cleared my throat. “I think she is sending it to me.”

“To you!” He shook his head as if the notion baffled him.

The second telegram was from Port Said:

NO SIGN OF SEKHMET’S SONS.

WILL KEEP DOOR OPEN FOR THEM.

MENTHU.

“Not what I expected, Will Henry,” Warthrop confessed. “And I don’t know whether to be heartened or troubled.”

“Maybe they’ve given up.”

He shook his head. “I’ve known men like Rurick; he is not the sort to give up. I suppose they could have been ordered back to Saint Petersburg or replaced after their failure in Venice. It’s possible. Or they’ve taken an alternative route… or Fadil’s men missed them somehow.… Well, there’s no point in worrying about it. We will be vigilant and hope for the best.”

He attempted a reassuring smile and achieved a Warthropian one; that is, a smile that hardly rose above the level of a grimace. He was troubled, clearly, by the telegram from Port Said that had been waiting for him and the one from Venice that had not. There’d been no reply from Veronica Soranzo.

We stepped outside the telegraph office. It was around ten in the morning, but already the day was stiflingly hot, nearly ninety degrees. (By that afternoon it would hover around one hundred.) The quayside was humming with activity—Somali porters and Yemeni hucksters, British colonialists and soldiers. The British controlled Aden; it was an important stopover and refueling point between Africa and their interests in India. Local boys dressed in thobes, traditional long-sleeved tunics, waited along the shore with donkeys to take passengers into the nearby town of Crater. Or, if you were a person of less modest means, you could hire a gharry, an Indian one-horse cab that resembled an American stagecoach.

The doctor picked neither donkey nor gharry, for our destination was within sight of the wharf. The man recommended by Fadil was staying at the Grand Hotel De L’Univers on Prince of Wales Crescent (named in honor of the royal visit in 1874), a street that curved gently away from the sea toward the barren dun-colored hills that brooded over the beach. It did not appear to be a long walk, but all walks are long in the cauldron heat of Aden. On our way we passed a huge coal depot, where scores of shirtless men, Somalis mostly, their ebony torsos shining like obsidian, heaved heavy sacks of coal to the discordant jangle of tambourines. Occasionally a man would drop out of line to roll upon the blackened planks, using the coal dust to soak up his sweat. What dust didn’t coat the workers or the ground hung about the depot in a choking fog. The scene was hellish—like a purgatorial dream—and it was beautiful—the way the harsh sunlight cut through the spinning cloud of dust, the larger particles sparking and spitting golden light.

Beside me the monstrumologist murmured, “‘I believe I am in hell, therefore I am there.’” He was tapping an envelope against his thigh as he walked, keeping time with the tambourine players, who used the thigh bones of calves to make their music. The envelope contained Fadil’s letter of introduction to our contact in Aden. The monstrumolo-gist had become very excited when Fadil had mentioned the man’s name.

“I’d no idea he was back in Yemen,” he’d exclaimed. “I thought he was running guns in Ethiopia.”

“That did not work out so well for him,” Fadil had replied. “In fact, it was terrible! He says King Menelik cheated him, left him with only six thousand francs to show for his trouble. He returned to Yemen—to Harad for the coffee and ivory trade. Though he makes frequent trips back and forth to Crater, where he should be now. If so, I’m certain you’ll find him at the Grand Hotel De L’Univers. He always stays there when he is in town.”

“I sincerely hope you’re right, Fadil,” my master had responded. “Besides needing his aid in a rather desperate humanitarian circumstance, it would give me enormous personal satisfaction to meet him.”

The hotel was a long, low structure with stone archways and patios and lattice shutters on the windows, a common architectural style here and in India. We stepped inside, where the temperature dropped a minuscule two or three degrees. On our left ;lihe hotel shop displaying exotic wares, animal furs from Africa and Asia, silk from Bombay, Arabic swords and daggers, as well as more mundane fare, postcards and stationery, pith sun hats and white cotton suits, the unofficial uniform of the colonist. The lobby itself had been designed to reflect its owners’ pride in empire, all dark woods and rich velvet, but the heat and the humidity had warped and cracked the wood and eaten holes in the velvet, a portent of things to come.

“I have come to see Monsieur Arthur Rimbaud,” the monstrumologist informed the desk clerk, an Arab whose white shirt had probably started out the day crisply starched but now had wilted in the heat, like the Queen of the Night desert flower. “Is he here?”

“Monsieur Rimbaud is staying with us,” acknowledged the clerk. “May I tell him who is calling?”

“Dr. Pellinore Warthrop. I have a letter of introduction…”

The clerk held out his hand, but the doctor did not give him the letter. He insisted upon delivering it to Mr. Rimbaud personally. The clerk shrugged—it was too hot to make an issue of anything—and handed us off to a small boy who led us into the dining hall across the way from the gift shop. The room opened onto a terrace that overlooked the ocean; in the distance I could see Flint Island, a large, bare rock that the British used as a quarantine station during the frequent outbreaks of cholera.

Seated alone at one table was a slender man around Warthrop’s age. His hair was dark, turning gray at the temples, and cut very short. He was wearing the ubiquitous white cotton suit. When he swung his head in our direction, I was immediately struck, as most who knew him were, by his eyes. At first I thought they were gray, but on further inspection determined they were the palest blue, like the color of moonstones, the gems that Indians called “dream stones,” believing they produced beautiful night visions. His gaze was direct and disconcerting, like everything else about Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud.

“Yes?” he asked. There was nothing pleasant in that “yes.”

The doctor introduced himself quickly, and a touch breathlessly, the lowly peasant who suddenly finds himself in the company of royalty. He handed Fadil’s letter to Rimbaud. We did not sit. We waited for Rimbaud to read the letter. It was not a long letter, but it seemed to take a good long while for the man to read it, as I stood there in the blistering Arabian heat with the sparkling ocean a tantalizing few hundred yards away. Rimbaud picked up a crystalline goblet filled with a liquid the color of green algae and sipped delicately.

“Fadil,” he said softly. “I haven’t seen Fadil in eight years or more. I am surprised he is not dead.” He glanced up from the paper, perhaps expecting the doctor to do something interesting, make a witty retort, laugh at the joke (if it was a joke), tell him something he didn’t know about Fadil. The doctor said nothing. Rimbaud flicked his free hand toward a chair, and we gratefully joined him at the table. He ordered another absinthe from the little Arab boy, who had been standing obediently out of the way, and asked the doctor if he wanted anything.

“Some tea would be wonderful.”

“And for the boy?” Rimbaud inquired.

“Just some water, please,” Ioaked. My throat burned with every dry swallow.

“You don’t want water,” Rimbaud cautioned me. “They say they boil it, but…” He shrugged and ordered a ginger ale for me.

“Monsieur Rimbaud,” Warthrop began, sitting forward in his chair and resting his forearms on his knees. “I must tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you, sir. Having dabbled in the craft in my youth, I—”

“Dabbled in what craft? The coffee business?”

“No, I mean—”

“For that is my craft, Dr. Warthrop, my raison d’être. I am a businessman.”

“Just so!” cried the doctor, as if the Frenchman had pointed out another similarity. “That is how it played out for me. I abandoned poetry too, though it was for a very different sort of craft than yours.”

“Oh? And what would be that very different sort of craft, Dr. Warthrop?”

“I am a scientist.”

Rimbaud was lifting the glass to his lips. He froze at the word “scientist,” and then slowly set the glass back down, the absinthe untouched.

“Fadil did not mention in his letter that you were a scientific sort of doctor. I had hoped you could have a look at my leg; it has been bothering me, and the doctors at Camp Aden… Well, they are all very British, if you do not mind my saying so.”

Warthrop, who had just spent several months under the exclusive care of very British doctors, nodded emphatically, and said, “I understand completely, Monsieur Rimbaud.”

The boy came back with our drinks. Rimbaud gulped the remainder of his first absinthe—if it was his first; I suspected it was not—before accepting the fresh one from the boy, as if Rimbaud were hurrying to catch up with the doctor, who had not even begun. Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, the monstrumologist had said, and I will show a man living under a death sentence.

Rimbaud sipped his new drink, decided he liked it better than the old one, and took another sip. His moonstone gaze fell upon my hand.

“What happened to your finger?”

I glanced at the doctor, who said, “An accident.”

“See this? This is my ‘accident.’” Rimbaud held out his wrist, displaying a bright red, puckered area of damaged flesh. “Shot by a dear friend. Also by ‘accident.’ My dear friend is in Europe. I am in Aden. And my wound is right here.”

“I think my favorite line is from Illuminations,” said my master, pressing on. He seemed annoyed by something. “‘Et j’ai senti un peu son immense corps.’ The juxtaposition of ‘peu’ and ‘immense’… simply wonderful.8221;

“I do not talk of my poetry, Dr. Warthrop.”

“Really?” The doctor was stunned. “But…”

“It is… what? What are my poems? Rinçures—leavings, the dregs. The poet is dead. He died many years ago—drowned, at Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears—and I took his body up into those mountains behind us, to the Tower of Silence in Crater, where I left it for the carrion, lest his corruption poison what little was left of my soul.”

He smiled tightly, quite pleased with himself. Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

“Now what is this business that brings you to Aden?” demanded Rimbaud brusquely. “I am a very busy man, as you can see.”

The doctor, his high spirits dampened by Rimbaud’s dismissive attitude—the shoe being on the other foot, for once—explained our purpose in disturbing Rimbaud’s important midmorning absinthian chore.

“I am sorry,” Rimbaud interrupted him. “But you say you are desiring to go where?”

“Socotra.”

“Socotra! Oh, you can’t go to Socotra now.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Well, you could, but it would be the last place you’d want to go.”

“And why is that, if I may ask, Monsieur Rimbaud?” The doctor waited nervously for the reply. Had word of the magnificum reached Aden?

“Because the monsoons have come. No sane person tries it now. You must wait till October.”

“October!” The monstrumologist shook his head sharply, as if he were trying to clear his ears. “That is unacceptable, Monsieur Rimbaud.”

Rimbaud shrugged. “I do not control the weather, Dr. Warthrop. Bring your complaint up with God.”

Of course the monstrumologist, like the monster Rurick, was not one to give up so easily. He pressed Rimbaud. He pleaded with Rimbaud. He came just short of threatening Rimbaud. Rimbaud absorbed it all with a bemused expression. Perhaps he was thinking, This Warthrop, he is so very American! In the end, and after two more absinthes, the poet relented, saying, “Oh, very well. I can’t stop you from committing suicide any more than I could stop you from writing poetry. Here.” He scribbled an address on the back of his business card. “Give this to a gharry-wallah; he will know where it is. Ask for Monsieur Bardey. Tell him what you have told me, and if he doesn’t laugh you out the door, you may get lucky.”

Warthrop thanked him, rose, and beckoned me to rise, and then Rimbaud stood up and said, “But where are you going?”

“To see Monsieur Bardey,” the doctor replied, puzzled.

“But it is not even ten thirty. He wo. I c7;t be in yet. Sit. You haven’t finished your tea.”

“The address is in Crater, yes? By the time I get there…”

“Oh, very well, but don’t expect to be back anytime soon.” He looked at me. “And you should not take the boy.”

Warthrop stiffened and then told a lie—perhaps an inadvertent one, but it was still a lie. “I always take the boy.”

“It is not a good part of town. There are men in Crater who would kill him for his fine shoes alone—or that very nice jacket, which is very fashionable but not very practical here in Aden. You should leave him with me.”

“With you?” The doctor was thinking it over; I was shocked.

“I want to come with you, sir,” I said.

“I would not advise it,” Rimbaud cautioned. “But what business is it of mine? Do what you wish.”

“Dr. Warthrop…,” I began. And finished weakly: “Please, sir.”

“Rimbaud is right. You should stay here,” the doctor decided. He drew me to one side and whispered, “It will be all right, Will Henry. I should be back well before sunset, and you will be safer here at the hotel. I don’t know what I will find in town, and we still do not know the final disposition of Rurick and Plešec.”

“I don’t care. I swore I would never leave you again, Dr. Warthrop.”

“Well, you aren’t. I am leaving you. And Monsieur Rimbaud is being very generous in his offer to look after you.” He lifted my chin with his forefinger and looked deeply into my eyes. “You came for me in England, Will Henry. I give you my word that I will come for you.”

And with that, he left.

Rimbaud ordered another absinthe. I ordered another ginger ale. We drank and sweated. The air was breathless, the heat intense. Steamers pulled up to the quay. Others pulled out. The tambourines of the coal workers jangled faintly in the shimmering air. The boy came up and asked if we wanted anything for lunch. Rimbaud ordered a bowl of saltah and another absinthe. I said I wasn’t hungry. Rimbaud shrugged and held up two fingers. The boy left.

“You have to eat,” Rimbaud said matter-of-factly, his first words since the doctor had left. “In this climate if you don’t eat—almost as bad as not drinking. Do you like Aden?”

I replied that I had not seen enough to form an opinion either way.

“I hate it,” he said. “I despise it. I have always despised it. Aden is a rock, a terrible rock without a single blade of grass or drop of good water. Half the tanks up in Crater stand empty. Have you seen the tanks?”

“Tanks?”

“Yes, the Tawila Tanks up above Crater, gied if we wisterns to capture water—very old, very deep, very dramatic. They keep the town from flooding, built around the time of King Solomon—or so they say. The British dug them out, polished them up, a very British thing to do, but they still don’t keep the place from flooding. The local children go swimming up there in the summer and come back down with cholera. They cool off, and then they die.”

He looked away. The sea was bluer than his eyes. Lilly’s eyes were closer to the color of the sea, but hers were more beautiful. I wondered why Lilly had suddenly popped into my head.

“What is on Socotra?” he asked.

I nearly blurted it out: Typhoeus magnificum. I sipped my warm ginger ale to stall for time, frantically—or as frantically as I could in the horrendous heat—trying to think of an answer. Finally I said the only thing I could remember from the doctor’s lecture in the hansom. “Dragon’s Blood.”

“Dragon’s Blood? You mean the tree?”

I nodded. The ginger ale was flat, but it was wet and my mouth was very dry. “Dr. Warthrop is a botanist.”

“Is he?”

“He is.” I tried to sound firm.

“And if he is a botanist, what are you?”

“I am his… I am a junior botanist.”

“Are you?”

“I am.”

“Hmmm. And I am a poet.”

The boy returned with two steaming bowls of stew and a plate of flatbread, called khamira, for us to use as a kind of edible spoon, Rimbaud explained. I looked at the brown, oily surface of the saltah and apologized; I had no appetite.

“Don’t apologize to me,” Rimbaud said with a shrug. He dove into the stew, his jaw grimly set. Perhaps he hated saltah like he hated Aden.

“If you despise it here, why don’t you leave?” I asked him.

“Where would I go?”

“I don’t know. Someplace else.”

“That is very easy to say. And so ironic. That kind of thinking landed me here!”

He tore off a piece of khamira and stuffed it into his mouth, chomping with his mouth open, as if he wanted to inflict as much suffering as possible upon the incognizant staple of the land he despised.

“A junior botanist,” he said. “Is that what happened to your hand? You were holding a tree limb and his axe slipped?”

I tore my eyes away from his disconcerting gaze. “Something like that.”

“‘Something like that.’ I like it! I think I shall use it the next time someone asks what happened to my wrist. ‘Something like that.’” He was smiling expectantly, waiting for me to ask. I didn’t ask. He went on. “It happens. C’est la vie. So, would you like to see them?”

“See what?”

“The tanks! I will take you there.”

“The doctor expects me to be here.”

“The doctor expects you to be with me. If I go to the tanks, you cannot stay here.”

“I’ve seen cisterns before.”

“You haven’t seen cisterns like these.”

“I don’t want to see them.”

“You do not trust me? I won’t push you in, I promise.” He pushed his bowl away, mopped his lips with a piece of bread, and downed the last of his lime green drink. He stood up.

“Come. It will be worth the trip. I promise.”

He strode off, going into the dining room without a backward glance—another man who assumed others would follow. I watched the terns fishing just beyond the surf and the ships passing Flint Island. I could hear someone singing, a woman or perhaps a young boy; I could not make out the words. If I was gone when he returned, the doctor would not be pleased, to put it mildly. I could picture the fury in his eyes—and that reminded me of another’s eyes, the one who shared that ancient, cold fire, and I finished my ginger ale and went to find Monsieur Rimbaud.

I found him standing just outside the front doors. A gharry was pulled up in front of the hotel, and we ducked inside the cab, out of the sun but still very much in the heat, and Rimbaud told the Somali gharry-wallah where we were going, and we rattled toward the quay, riding on top of our shadow.

The road ran through a small fishing village of thatched-roof huts clustered along the shore, then turned inland and began to rise. Before us loomed a chaos of bare rocks and towering cliffs, the remnants of a volcano whose cataclysmic explosion had created the deep sea port of Aden—though the peninsula did not remind one so much of creation as it did its opposite. There were no trees, no shrubs, no flowers, no life to speak of anywhere, if you discounted donkeys and humans and carrion, or the occasional rat. The colors of Aden were gray and a brownish, rusty red—gray the rocky bones of the violated earth; red the hardened lava that had bled from it.

This was Aden, the land of blood and bones, a great, cauterized wound in the earth where the fist of God had slammed down, thrusting skyward heaps of shattered rock to make the mountains that brooded over the ruined landscape, sullen and lifeless and emptied of all color, except the gray of Gaia’s broken bones and the rusty red of her dried blood.

Crater was the oldest and most populated settlement on the peninsula. Described by one writer as “the Devil’s Punch Bowl,” it wasn’t just called Crater; it was a crater, the hollowed-out center of an extinct volcano, surrounded on three sides by jagged mountains. Camp Aden, the British garrison, was located here, along with a sizeable population of Arabs, Parsi, Somalis, Jews, Malaysians, an Indonesians.

It took more than an hour to cross the old Arab quarter of town. The narrow streets were crowded with donkey carts and gharries and villagers on foot—though there was none of the hustle and bustle that one finds in New York or London. In Crater there is much activity but little motion, for the town bakes in its punch bowl in the afternoon, when the sun fills the sky directly overhead and the shadows disappear, pinned down beneath your feet. The buildings were as drab as the surrounding countryside, tired-looking, even the newer colonial ones, slumping, it seemed to my eye, like painted gourds rotting in the sun.

We bounced along the hot, dusty street until the hot, dusty street came to an abrupt dead end. We had come to the head of Wadi Tawila, the Tawila Valley, where the volcanic heaps of hardened lava and ash reared high their bald heads toward the unforgiving sky. It was the end of civilization and of our gharry ride; we would hike up to the tanks along stone steps that snaked through a mountain defile. Our gharry-wallah said something to Rimbaud in French; I caught the word “l’eau.” Rimbaud shook his head and murmured, “Nous serons bien. Merci.”

“You see the problem,” he gasped over his shoulder as I followed him up the steps. “Look behind you. Spread out below in all her infertile glory is the town of Crater. Aden can’t get more than three inches of rainfall a year, but when it rains, it pours! The tanks were built to stop flooding, and to give the British something to do a thousand years later. Almost there.… Around this next bend…”

He stepped nimbly around an outcropping, stopped abruptly, and pointed down. We were standing on the lip of a large cone-shaped hole excavated from solid rock, fifty feet across at the top and at least as deep, shining brightly, like marble in the sun.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked. His face glistened with sweat, his shirtfront was soaked with it, and his cheeks were ablaze with either excitement or exertion.

“It’s a hole.”

“No, it’s a very big hole. And a very old hole. See how it shines like marble? That is not marble, though; it’s stucco.”

“It’s dry.”

“It’s the desert.”

“I mean, there’s no water in it.”

“This is just one of them. There are dozens all around these hills.”

“Are you going to show me all of them?”

He stared at me for a moment. In the sunlight his eyes appeared to have no color at all.

“Would you like to see my favorite spot in Aden?” he asked.

“Is it in the shade?”

“It isn’t far, about two hundred meters, and there might be some shade.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting back to the hotel? The doctor will be worried about us.”

“Why?”

“Because he expects to find us there.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“No.”

“Does he beat you?”

“No. Never.”

“I see. He just cuts off your fingers.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said something like that.”

“I think I’ll go back to the hotel,” I said, turning carefully around; I didn’t want to tumble into the pit.

“Wait. I promise it isn’t far, and we can rest there before hiking back down.”

“What is it?”

“A holy place.”

I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously, and when I did, sweat dripped into my eyes and the world melted a little.

“A church?”

“Did I say that? No. I said ‘a holy place.’ Come, it is not far. I promise.”

We climbed another series of steps that ran along a low stone wall. I looked to my left and saw Crater spread out below us, the white-washed buildings undulating in the blistering heat. At the end of the wall, Rimbaud turned right, and we continued to climb up a wide dirt path that rose steeply toward the cloudless sky. The crunch of our shoes in the volcanic dust, the heaving of air in and out of our lungs—that was the only sound as we labored to the top, where the end of the path met the pale, bled-out blue of the sky. Cresting the hill, we found ourselves at the base of a small plateau five hundred feet above the extinct crater. Another series of steps led up to the top.

“How much farther?” I asked Rimbaud.

“We are almost there.”

We rested for a moment after this final ascent, in the slice of shade beneath an archway cut into a six-foot-high stone wall that curved out of sight in either direction, a barrier that encircled the holy place of sun and rock and silent sentinel stone, high above the sea.

We sat with our backs against the cool stone, and Rimbaud wrapped his lean arms around his upraised knees and stared dreamily down into the town nestled in the blasted guts of the dead volcano.

“So what do you think?” he asked. “The best view in Aden.”

“Is that why you brought me up here, to show me the view?” I returned. I was weak from the climb, overheated and terribly thirsty. Why had I agreed to come with him? I should have stayed at the hotel.

“No, but I thought you’d like it,” he said. “You are at the entrance to the Tour du Silence, the Tower of Silence, called Dakhma by the Parsi. It is a holy place, as I told you, forbidden to outsiders.”

“Then, why did you bring me here?”

“To show it to you,” he said slowly, as if sp220;To shong to a simpleton.

“But we are outsiders.”

He stood up. “I am outside nothing.”

There were no sentries posted, no guards to man the entrance or patrol the grounds of the Dakhma. Dakhma did not belong to the living; we were the interlopers here. Our approach to the tower was noted only by the crows and kite hawks and several large white birds that glided effortlessly in the updrafts of superheated air.

“Are those eagles?” I asked.

“They are the white buzzards of Yemen,” answered Rimbaud.

The Dakhma occupied the far end of the compound, at the highest spot on the plateau. It was a simple structure—three massive seven-foot-thick concentric stone circles, with a pit dug inside the smallest, innermost ring, and all of it open to the sky.

“This is the place where the Zoroastrians bring their dead,” Rimbaud said quietly. “You cannot burn them. That would pollute the fire. You cannot bury them. That would defile the earth. The dead are nasu, unclean. So you bring them here. You lay them out on the stone, the men atop the outer circle, the women on the second, the children on the last, the one closest to the center, and you leave them to rot. And when their bones have been picked clean by the birds and bleached by the sun, you bring them to the ossuary at the bottom, until they are ground by the wind to a handful of dust. It is the Dahkmanashini, the Zoroastrian burial of the dead.”

He offered to take me inside for a look.

“There’s no one about, and the dead won’t care.”

“I don’t think I want to see them.”

“You don’t think you want to see them? Now, that is interesting to me, the way you said it, like you are not sure of your own mind.”

“I don’t want to see them.”

A sudden breeze kissed our cheeks. The stench of death could not reach where we stood; it rose from the ledges twenty feet over our heads, swept away by the same wind that kissed our cheeks and bore the white buzzards and the kite hawks and the crows. Their shadows raced across the grassless rock.

“Why is this place your favorite?” I asked him.

“Because I am a wanderer, and after going to and fro on the earth and walking up and down on it, I came to this place at last, the part after which there is nothing. I came to the end, and that is why I love this place and why I despise it. There is nothing left when you reach the center of everything, just the pit of bones inside the innermost circle. This is the center of the earth, Monsieur Will Henry, and where can a man go once he’s reached the center?”

I was certain the doctor would be waiting for us when we arrived back at the Grand Hotel De L’Univers. Certain too that he would be furious with me for taking off with the Frenchman without a word to anyone. I was angry at me for doing it and could not understnd whad. There was something about Arthur Rimbaud that brought out the irresponsible spirit, the amoral animus that says yes, when the Gypsy outside the tent urges us to “come and see.”

But the monstrumologist was not waiting for us when we got back around three that afternoon. The clerk informed Rimbaud that he had not seen Warthrop either. We retired to the same table on the terrace outside the dining room (it appeared to be his favorite roosting spot), where the poet-turned-coffee-exporter ordered another absinthe and settled in to await the doctor’s return.

“You see? You worried for nothing,” he said.

“He should be back by now,” I said.

“First you worry he will come back, and then you worry he won’t.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“Into town to arrange your passage to Socotra. Don’t you remember? I tried to tell him it was too soon. Bardey never gets about till five or so. He is nocturnal, like a bat. You seem nervous. What’s the matter? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“You said it wasn’t a good part of town.”

“Because there is no good part of town, unless it’s Camp Aden or the English quarter, and then it is, well, the English quarter.”

“Should we go look for him?”

“We just got back, and I’ve just gotten my drink.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I apologize. When you said ‘should we go look for him,’ I understood you to mean ‘should we go look for him.’ You may do whatever you like. I am going to sit here and finish my drink, and then I am going up to my room for a nap. I am tired from our hike.”

The afternoon tide came in. A pleasant sea breeze picked up. The sun slipped behind the Shamsan Mountains, and their shadows stretched over Crater and crawled toward us. Rimbaud finished his drink.

“I am going to lie down for a while,” he told me. “What will you do?”

“I’ll stay here and wait for the doctor.”

“If he still isn’t back when I get up, we will go into town to look for him.”

He left me alone on the terrace with the breeze and the advancing shadows and the ever-present faraway jingling of the tambourines. The little Arab boy came out to fetch Rimbaud’s empty glass and asked if I wanted another ginger ale. I ordered two and drank them both quickly, one right after the other, and was still thirsty afterward, as if this lifeless land had sucked every drop of moisture from my body.

Around five o’clock the door opened behind me and I turned around, expecting—knowing—it was the doctor.

Two men stepped outside. One was very large with a shock of bright red hair. His companion was much shorter and thinner and ad no hair at all. Rurick took the chair on my right; Plešec sat down on my left.

“You will not run,” Rurick said.

I nodded. I would not run.

“Where is Warthrop?” he asked.

The question eased some of my terror. It meant the doctor was still alive. How long he—and I—would stay that way was the issue. For a brief moment I wondered how they had found me, and then I decided it was a pointless speculation. The how did not matter, and the why I already knew. Would it be if or when? That was the salient point.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

Something sharp pressed against my stomach. Plešec was leaning toward me, his right hand hidden beneath the tabletop. When he smiled, I noticed that one of his front teeth was missing.

“I could gut you right here,” Plešec said. “You think I won’t?”

“You are staying at this hotel?” Rurick asked.

“No. Yes.”

“I will explain rules to you now,” Rurick said patiently. “Rule one: tell truth. Rule two: speak only when spoken to. You know these rules, yes? You are child. All children know these rules.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Good boy. Very polite boy too. I like that. Now we start again. Where is Warthrop?”

“He’s gone into town.”

“But he comes back—for you.”

“Yes. He will come back for me.”

“When does he come back?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

Rurick grunted. He looked at Plešec. Plešec nodded and put away his knife.

“We wait with you for him,” Rurick decided. “It is nice here in the shade. Nice breeze, no smell of dead fish.”

It was the best I could hope for in a nearly hopeless situation. Perhaps Rimbaud would wake up and come back downstairs. I thought about leaping from the table and hurdling the railing and chancing I could reach the quay without Rurick putting a bullet into the back of my head. I decided that chance was exceedingly slim. But if I didn’t run, if I did nothing and Rimbaud did not get up before the doctor returned, Warthrop was doomed.

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

As I watched, a tern dove into the surf and emerged with a shiny fish twisting in its beak. I looked farther out and saw the edge of the world, the line between sea and sky.

It is part and parcel of the business, Will Henry. Eventually the luck runs out.

A gull shot from its sentry post on the shore, its shadow long and fleeting on the sun-burnished sand. I remembered the shadows of the carrion birds upon the bare rock at the center of the world.

There is nothing left when you reach the center of everything, just the pit of bones inside the innermost circle.

“What is it?” asked Rurick. “Why do you cry?”

“I’m not waiting for him,” I confessed. “He is waiting for me,” I lied.

This is the time of the dead. The time of the Dahkma-nashini.

In the fourteenth hour, on the second day of the week, a boy dies of cholera in his mother’s arms. Her tears are bitter; he is her only son.

His spirit hovers nearby, troubled by her tears. He calls to her, but she gives no answer.

She holds him until his body goes cold, and then she lays him down. She lays him down, for the time has come; the evil spirit approaches to take his body, and after that she will touch him no more.

The next Geh is begun. He is nasu now, unclean. It is time for the Nassesalars. It is the sixteenth hour of the second day.

“I do not understand,” said Rurick. “Why does he meet you up there?”

“That’s where he was meeting with Dr. Torrance.”

“Who is Dr. Torrance?”

“Dr. Warthrop’s friend. He’s helping us.”

“Helping you to do what?”

“Find a way to the island.”

“What island?”

“The island of the magnificum.”

He was struggling for breath. The way was steep; he was not used to the heat.

“For what are these pits?” he wondered aloud.

“To keep the town from flooding.”

The dry tanks were flooded with deep shadows; they appeared to have no bottom. If you fell into one, you might fall forever.

The corpse bearers take the boy and bathe him in Taro, the urine of the white bull. They dress him in a Sudreh-Kusti, the garments of the dead. Only his face is left exposed. He is nasu, unclean. The boy’s spirit watches them and does notunderstand. It does not remember that this was its body. The spirit is an infant again; it has no memory. It is now the sixth hour of the third day.

“How much farther?” Plešec asked.

“It’s just over that next rise,” I answered.

“You better not be lying to us.”

“This is the place,” I said.

“If you are lying to us, I will gut you. I will cut out your intestines and throw them down the mountain.”

“This is the place,” I said again.

It is the hour of the Geh-Sarna. The Dasturs pray the verses of the Avestan Mathras over the body, to strengthen his soul and help it along its journey. After the prayers the body is carried up and into the Dakhma, where it is laid upon the stone. It is now the twelfth hour of the third day.

“Something is not right,” Rurick said. “This place, it is deserted.”

“He told me to come here.”

“Do you remember rule one?”

“He said he would be here.”

“Here,” Plešec repeated. “But where is ‘here’? What is this place?”

“It’s called a Dakhma,” I answered.

Rurick pressed his hand to his mouth. “What is that smell?”

I decided Rurick had to be first. Rurick had the gun. I dropped my hand into my jacket pocket.

Give it to Will Henry; I’ve nowhere to put it.

If you carried a smaller weapon, you could stick it in your garter.

“Something is not right here,” Plešec said. He turned to Rurick. “Something is not right.”

There is the boy in the inner circle, above the pit in which lies the dry bones and the dust of the dry bones. He is for the sun now and the flies and the birds that take his sightless eyes first. It is the first hour of the fourth day, above the pit, at the summit of the abyss.

Rurick’s eyes widened. His mouth came open. The last thing he saw before the bullet tore into his brain did not make sense. Having been a very self-assured man, he died very confused.

Plešec lunged forward; the knife blade flashed in the final, dying embers of daylight. His thrust tore into my shirt-front; the knife’s tip struck Fadil’s present that hung around my neck, the scarab to bring me good luck; and I fired point-blank into his stomach.

He fell face-first at my feet. I stumbled backward until I smacked against the white wall of the tower, and then my >knees gave out and I sank onto the stony ground with Plešec, who was not dead but bleeding badly and crawling toward me, and his blood shone wetly on the bare rock, trailing behind his jerking legs.

I raised the doctor’s revolver to the level of his eyes. I held the gun in both hands, but I still couldn’t keep it steady.

He stopped. He rolled onto his side. He clutched his bleeding stomach with one hand and reached toward me with the other. I didn’t move. He was nasu, unclean.

I looked past him, to the sea framed in the arched opening of the wall, to the line formed where the water met the sky. The world was not round, I realized. The world was a plate.

“Please,” he whispered. “Don’t.”

Unlike Rurick, Plešec did not die confused.

The boy’s spirit comes to the Chinvato-Peretu, the bridge of sighs joining the two worlds. There he meets himself in the form of a beautiful maiden, his Kainini-Keherpa, who guides him to Mithra to be judged for what he has done and what he has left undone.

I left them there for the flies and the birds and the sun and the wind. In the silence outside the Tour du Silence, I left them. Where the faceless dead faced the sky, I left them there at the center of the world.

I discovered Arthur Rimbaud lounging on the front steps of the Grand Hotel De L’Univers, wearing a fresh shirt and an ironic smile.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?” I felt certain he could see it in my eyes, smell it rising from my being. The Zoroastrians believe the dead do not depart at first; for three days they circle around their abandoned bodies, lost and forlorn. They have been evicted, and they do not understand why.

“Has Dr. Warthrop returned?” I asked.

“Yes, but he is about to leave again—to look for you.”

“Where is he?”

“There,” he said, with a nod toward the lobby. I took the steps two at a time. “Better have something good to say. He has a few good things to say to you,” he called after me.

The monstrumologist was standing in the middle of the room surrounded by several uniformed members of the British colonial police, as well as one or two armed sepoys. Warthrop, by far the most experienced hunter in the group, spotted me first. He shoved a man out of his way and strode over to greet me with a hard slap against the side of my head.

“Where have you been, Will Henry?” he cried. His face was contorted with fury and pent-up anxiety. I’d seen him that way before. I will not suffer you to die! He grabbed my shoulders and roughly shook me. “Tell me! Why did you wander off like that? Didn’t I tell you to stay with Monsieur Rimbaud? Why didn’t you wait for me? Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself? Speak!”

“I’m sorry, sir—”

“Sorry? You are sorry?” He shook his head with wonder. Keeping one hand on my shoulder—fearing, perhaps, I might fly away unless anchored—he turned to the search party, informed them that the lost little lamb had wandered home, and thanked them for their speedy response to his call for help. He said no more until they had gone, and then he said to me, “With no further halfhearted apologies, Will Henry, please explain why you snuck off without a word to anyone.”

I avoided his eyes. “I went to look for you, sir.”

“Will Henry…”

“I tried to get Monsieur Rimbaud to come with me, but he said he was tired and wanted to take a nap.”

“And the reason you took it into your head to look for me?”

“I thought…” The words would not come.

“Yes, I am interested in hearing those—your thoughts. What were you thinking? And if you were thinking some ill fate had befallen me, why did you go off by yourself? Did it not occur to you to wake Rimbaud from his nap and at least tell him where you were going?”

“No, sir, it didn’t.”

“Hmmm.” Some of the anger had drained from his face. “Well,” he said, relaxing a bit. “The day seems to have been a success all around, Will Henry, for you have found me and I have found us passage to Socotra. We leave at first light for the Isle of Blood.”

We were both tired and hungry, but the doctor insisted on walking down to the telegraph office before anything else, where he sent off a wire to von Helrung:

LEAVING TOMORROW FINAL

DESTINATION. PXW.

There was a message waiting for him. He read it and then slipped it into his pocket without showing it to me. I deduced from his concerned expression that it had not come from Venice. He was very quiet on the walk back.

We took a room at the hotel for the night, changed quickly for dinner—we were both ravenously hungry—and ended up sharing our table with Rimbaud, who kept mum about our sightseeing foray into the Shamsan Mountains above Crater. Instead he talked about his early days in Aden and the coffeehouse where he oversaw a “harem” of women workers preparing the beans for shipment to Europe. The doctor listened politely but spoke little. His mind was elsewhere.

Later that evening I woke from a light sleep to find myself alone. A shadow moved outside the window. I peeked between the wooden slats onto the veranda. Silhouetted against the silvery sea was the form of the monstrumologist facing east, looking toward Socotra.

He turned suddenly and peered down the beach toward the quay, his body stiffening, his right hand dropping into his coat pocket, searching for his revolver. He would not find it, I knew.

Tell him, a voice whispered inside my head. You must tell him.

I got out of bed and dressed in the semidarkness, shivering, though it was not cold. I’d never hidden anything from him—had never tried, because my faith in his ability to see through any lie was insurmountable.

I was pulling on my shoes when the floor creaked outside the door. In a panic—apparently my quick thinking was done for the night—I jumped back into bed and yanked the covers up to my chin.

Through half-open eyes I watched him cross the room to the chair where I had carelessly thrown my jacket. If he checked the revolver’s chamber, I was done for. But what did it matter? I was going to confess, wasn’t I?

He went to the same window through which I had spied on him and stood for a long while with his back to me before saying, “Will Henry.” And again, with a sigh, “Will Henry, I know you are awake. Your nightshirt is on the floor and your shoes have gone missing.”

I opened my eyes fully. “I saw you outside and—”

“And when you heard me coming back, you jumped into bed fully dressed.”

I nodded.

“Do you think such behavior might strike someone as odd?” he asked.

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“So the most reasonable thing that occurred to you was jumping into bed and pretending to sleep?”

He turned to me and said, “I know why you left this afternoon.”

I swallowed hard. My faith in his powers was not misplaced. He did not need my confession. He knew.

“Do you trust me, Will Henry?”

“Of course.”

“Your actions today give lie to your words. Why did you think I wouldn’t come back for you? I told you I would, and yet you left to look for me. And just now, finding me gone, you threw on your clothes to chase after me. It’s New York, isn’t it? You remember New York and you fear at any moment I may abandon you. Perhaps I need to point out the difference between New York and this afternoon. I made no promise in New York.”

I was wrong. The monstrumologist had not discerned the truth. I felt the burden settle back upon my shoulders.

“I don’t know what we will find on Socotra, Will Henry. Kearns and the Russians have beaten us to the treasure, and there is a possibility that once again the grail has slipped from our grasp. I hope not. I pray it is not too late. If it is not, then you and I must shoulder a burden greater than most men can carry. Our only hope for success lies not in the force of arms or in numbers, or even much in our wits. No, this is what will save us.” He pulled my left hand into his a squeezed hard. “It saved you in America and it saved me in England, the thing in which I must now put absolute faith—the one thing I do not begin to understand! The thing that frightens me more than the abominations I pursue—the monster whose face I cannot bring myself to turn and face. We have been—we are—we must be—indispensable to each other, Will Henry, or both of us will fall. Do you understand what I mean?”

He let go of my wounded hand, rose, turned away.

“On the night you were born, your father drew me aside and with great solemnity—and tears in his eyes—told me your name would be Pellinore. He did not, I think, expect my reaction to this flattering gesture, of which I’m sure your mother was unaware. I unreservedly upbraided him, disavowing him of any notion that I was honored by the choice. My own anger confounded me. I did not understand why it enraged me, the thought of you carrying on my name. So many times we express our fear as anger, Will Henry, and now I think I wasn’t angry at all but afraid. Terribly, terribly afraid.”

It was time to confess. Were not my actions that day the indispensable proof that his faith in me was not misplaced? I tried. My mouth came open, but, like with Rurick’s before I killed him, no sound came out. Though I had most likely saved both our lives, though I had chosen the only door through which our salvation lay, I remembered his quiet despair on the beach at Dover. The very strange and ironic thing is that I left you behind so you wouldn’t have to live on that plate with them. If I confessed, there would be no absolution; I would still be nasu.

And so would he. He would be made unclean by my touch. My “success” at the Tower of Silence would be his failure, the fulfillment of his deepest fears. He would know beyond all doubt that by my saving him he had lost me forever.

Captain Julius Russell, owner of the cargo clipper Dagmar, was a tall, flush-faced, one-eyed expatriate, a former officer in the British cavalry who’d retired from the army following the second Afghan campaign. He’d come to Aden in ’84 to make his fortune in the coffee trade, plunking down his life savings on a retired packet steamer that in its day had been the fastest vessel of its class in the British fleet. He’d had trouble finding contracts, though—most of the coffee exporters used their own ships to transport their goods to Europe—and his hopes to undersell them by buying directly from the growers, thus cutting out the middlemen, had been dashed by the near monopoly held by companies like the one Rimbaud used to work for in Aden.

“It’s the bloody heat,” Russell told my master. “It melts the honor right out of a man. The customs officers are so corrupt they’d sell their mums for a sixpence and a bottle of araq.”

Bankrupt and desperate, Russell turned to trading in a decidedly more lucrative commodity—diamonds. Twice a month he sailed the Dagmar down the African coast to Sofala, where he picked up the contraband from a corrupt Portuguese official for transport to brokers based in Port Said. The diamonds were hidden in coffee bags, not so much to fo customs officials as to provide reasonable cover for the inevitable raid of Somali and Egyptian pirates who prowled along the glittering corridor between Mozambique and the Bab-el-Mandab Strait, the Gate of Tears, where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, and where the poet in Arthur Rimbaud had died.

We met the captain and his first mate, a Somali of gargantuan proportions named Awaale, in the hotel dining hall for breakfast. Awaale took an immediate fancy to me, his landlubbing equivalent.

“What does your name mean?” He spoke perfect English.

“What does it mean?”

“Yes. I am Awaale; it means ‘lucky’ in my language. What does your name mean?”

“I don’t know that it means anything.”

“Oh, all names mean something. Why did your parents name you William?”

“I never asked them.”

“But now you will, I think.” His eyes danced and he broke into a wide smile.

I looked away. The doctor and Captain Russell were engaged in a rather heated conversation about the portage fee, the continuation of an argument that had taken up the majority of Warthrop’s visit the day before. Russell wanted the entire amount up front, and the doctor, as tightfisted as ever, would agree to only half, with the remainder to be paid upon our safe return.

“What happened to your parents?” asked Awaale. He had read my reaction correctly.

“They were killed in a fire,” I answered.

“Mine are gone too.” He laid his huge hand over mine. “I was just a boy, like you. You are walaalo, little Will. Brother.”

He glanced at Russell, whose naturally rosy countenance now burned a deep crimson, and smiled. “Do you know how Captain Julius lost his eye? He fell off his horse at Kandahar, and his gun misfired when he hit the ground. He missed the entire battle. He tells people he was wounded in a charge, which like many stories of war is true but also not quite!”

“I must cover my risk, Warthrop,” Russell was insisting vehemently. “I’ve told you, no one attempts Socotra this time of year. The British won’t bring even their biggest frigate within a hundred miles of the place until October. They shut down Hadibu during the monsoon, and Hadibu is the only decent deepwater port on the whole bloody island.”

“Then, we make landing at Gishub or Steroh in the south.”

“You can attempt a landing there. The currents in the south are treacherous, especially this time of year. I will remind you, Doctor, I did not promise you a stroll from deck onto shore.”

Awaale leaned close to me and asked in a quiet voice, “Why do you go to Socotra, walaalo? That place is xumaato, evil… cursed.”

“The doctor has important business there,” I whispered back.

“He is a dhaktar? They say there are many strange plants there. He is going to collect herbs for his medicines, then?”

“He is a dhaktar,” I said.

We boarded the Dagmar at a quarter past eight, and for once I could not wait to put out to sea. The quay was swarming with British military police and soldiers; I expected to be pulled aside for questioning about the two bodies left for the carrion birds on the front porch of the world, for I was certain they had been discovered by now.

We would make excellent time, Russell promised my anxious master; our journey should take no more than five and a half days. The Dagmar had been recently refitted with new boilers (a wise investment if you are running diamonds), and her holds would be empty, which would nearly double her speed.

“That is the last thing I wanted to confirm with you,” Warthrop said, casting his eyes about for eavesdroppers. “We are agreed as to the particulars for our return to Brindisi?”

Russell nodded. “I’ll take you all the way to Brindisi, Doctor. And port your special cargo for you, though it goes against my better judgment. I would hope we could trust each other, like gentlemen.”

“Like yours, Captain Russell, my business is fraught more with scoundrels than gentlemen. You’ll know soon enough the nature of my special cargo and will be well compensated for the risk of its transport, I promise you.”

The monstrumologist and I walked forward as the Dagmar chugged through the harbor for the open sea. To our left were the towering rust-colored mountains of Aden, the roiling black dust of the coal depot, the graceful sweep of the Prince of Wales Crescent, and the tired-looking facade of the Grand Hotel De L’Univers, where I spied a man in a white suit sitting on the veranda, caressing a tumbler filled with a vile green liquid. Did I see him raise his glass in a mock toast?

“So, Will Henry,” said the doctor, “what did you learn from the great Arthur Rimbaud?” He must have seen the same man.

There is nothing left when you reach the center of everything, just the pit of bones inside the innermost circle.

“What did I learn, sir?” The breeze was delicious upon my face. I could smell the sea. “I learned a poet doesn’t stop being a poet simply because he stops writing poetry.”

He thought that was very clever of me, for very complicated reasons. The monstrumologist clapped me on the back, and laughed.

First there was the land receding behind us, until the horizon overcame the land. Then a bevy of ships, packets and cargo steamers, light passenger crafts filled with colonists escaping the heat, and Arab fishing dhows, their great triangular sails snapping angrily in the wind, until the horizon rose up to swallow them. The terns and gulls followed us for a while, until they gave up the chase and returned to their hunting grounds off Flint Island. Then it was the Dagmar and the sea beneath a cloudless sky and the sun that hurled her shaow upon the churning wake, and the empty horizon in all directions. There was the great rumbling of the ship’s engines and the faint singing below of the coal-heavers and the laughter of the indolent crew lounging topside. Somalis all, and none who spoke a word of English, with the exception of Awaale. They had been told nothing about our mission and did not seem in the least curious. They were grateful for the respite from pirates and nosy customs officials; they laughed and joked like a group of schoolboys on holiday.

There were only two cabins on board. One was the captain’s, of course, and the other belonged to Awaale, who cheerfully gave it up for the doctor, though there was room for only one.

“You shall sleep with me and my crew,” Awaale informed me. “It will be grand! We’ll swap stories of our adventures. I would know what you have seen of the world.”

The doctor took me aside and cautioned, “I would be judicious in describing the parts I had seen, Will Henry. Sometimes the best stories are better left untold.”

Situated near the boiler room, the crew’s quarters was small, noisy, constantly hot, and therefore nearly always deserted in the summer months, when those not on the night watch slept on deck in a row of hammocks suspended midship. I did not get much sleep our first two nights at sea. I could not relax with the incessant sway and counter-sway of the hammock beneath me and the naked night sky refusing to stay still above me. Closing my eyes only made it worse. But by the third night I actually started to find it pleasant, swinging back and forth while the warm salty air caressed my cheeks and the dancing stars sang down from the inky firmament. I listened to Awaale beside me, weaving tall tales as intricate as a nidus ex magnificum.

On the third night he said to me, “Do you know why Captain Julius hired me to be his mate? Because I used to be a pirate and I knew their ways. It is true, walaalo. For six years I was a pirate, sailing up and down the coast. From the Cape of Good Hope to Madagascar, I was the scourge of the seven seas! Diamonds, gold, silks, mail packets, sometimes people… Yes, I even trucked in people. After my parents died, I signed on to a pirate ship, and when I had learned all I could from the captain of that ship, I snuck into his cabin one night and slit his throat. I killed him, and then I gathered the crew together and said, ‘The captain is dead; all hail the new captain!’ And the first thing I did as captain? Put a heavy lock upon the cabin door!” He chuckled. “I was all of seventeen. And in two years I was the most feared pirate on the Indian Ocean; Awaale the Terrible, they called me. Awaale the Devil.

“And I was a devil. The only ones who feared me more than my victims were my crew. I would shoot a man for hiccupping in my direction. I had everything, walaalo. Money, power, respect. Now all that is gone.”

“What happened?” I asked.

He sighed, his spirit troubled by the memory. “My first mate brought a boy to me—a boy he vouched for, who wanted a berth—and like a fool I agreed. He was about the age I was when I began, also an orphan like me, and I took pity on him. He was very bright and very strong and very fearless—is trueanother boy who decided he wanted to be a pirate. We became quite close. He was devoted to me, and I to him. I even started to think, if I ever became tired of it, I would quit the pirate’s life and give the ship to him as my heir.”

Then one day a member of the crew brought to Awaale troubling news. He had overheard the boy and the first mate, the man who had vouched for him, whispering one night about their captain’s tyrannical rule and, most damning of all, his refusal to share fairly the ill-gotten spoils of their labors.

“He trusts you,” the first mate told the boy. “He will not suspect the knife until the knife strikes home!”

Awaale did not hesitate. He seized the alleged conspirators immediately and confronted them. Both denied the plot and accused their accuser of scheming against them in order to curry favor and increase his share of the booty. Awaale’s judgment was swift and ruthless: He killed all three of them, accuser and accused, including the boy he loved, though he admitted that had been hard—very hard. Then he decapitated them with his own hand, and hung their heads from the mizzenmast as a reminder to his crew that he was their lord and master.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If the first man was telling the truth, why did you kill him? He warned you about the mutiny.”

“I did not know if he was telling the truth, walaalo. I did not know who to believe.”

“Then, you killed at least one innocent man.”

“I had no choice,” he cried in a voice broken with despair. “If I let the wrong one live, then I would die! Spill the blood of the innocent or have the guilty spill my own! You do not know, walaalo. You are a boy. You’ve never faced the faceless one.”

“The faceless one?”

“That is my name for it. I wept when I plunged the dagger into his heart; I cried bitter tears for the boy whom I loved, while his blood, scalding hot, poured through my fingers. And crying, I laughed with a fierce, unconquerable joy! I laughed because I was free of something; I cried because I was bound to something. I was saved; I was damned. Bless you, walaalo, you have never had to face the faceless one; you do not know.”

Freed and enslaved, Awaale did not remain a pirate long after his impossible choice. He abandoned his ship at Dar es Salaam, whose name is a mangling of the Arabic andar as-salām, the “harbor of peace.” Penniless and friendless in a foreign land, he wandered deep into the African interior until he reached Buganda, where he was taken in by a group of Anglican missionaries who taught him how to read and write English and prayed daily for his immortal soul. He prayed with them, for it seemed to him he shared a special kinship with their God.

“The spilling of innocent blood is nothing new to him—no, not to him!” said Awaale. “His own son he suffered to die a bloody death that I might live to worship him. This God I think understands the space between ‘may’ and ‘must’; he’s seen the face of the faceless one!”

I did not speak for some time. I watthe stars swing back and forth, left and right and back again; I listened to the slap of the sea against the clipper’s bow; I felt the beat of my heart.

“I saw it too,” I said finally. “I know that space.” It existed between Warthrop and Kendall in the bedroom at Harrington Lane, between Torrance and Arkwright in the Monstrumarium, between Rurick and me in the place of silence at the center of the world.

“Where, walaalo?” He sounded incredulous. “Where did you see it?”

“It’s here,” I said, and pressed my hand to my chest.

On the fourth day the horizon before us turned black and the seas rose, driven by a stiff wind that pushed against the Dagmar like a giant hand pressing upon her chest. Captain Russell turned the ship southward to skirt the worst of the storm, a decision that did not sit well with the monstrumolo-gist, who ground his teeth and tugged on his bottom lip and paced the foredeck while the gale bent him nearly double and whipped his hair into a cyclonic confusion. I braved the elements to urge him inside, convinced he would be swept overboard at any moment by the tempestuous waves crashing furiously across the bow.

“You know what von Helrung would say!” he shouted above the whipping wind and pounding sea. “The fury of a merciful God! Well, I say let him loose his signs and wonders! Array the powers of heaven against me, and I will contend against them with every fiber of my being!”

The deck shuddered violently and then bounced upward, throwing me off my feet. The monstrumologist’s hand shot out and grabbed my arm, yanking me back from the edge.

“You shouldn’t be out here!” he screamed.

“Neither should you!” I hollered back.

“I will never sound the retreat! Never!”

He shoved me toward the stern and turned his back upon me, planting his legs wide for balance and spreading his arms as if inviting the fullness of God’s wrath upon his head. A burst of lightning flashed, thunder shook the planks, and Warthrop laughed. The monstrumologist laughed, and his laughter overtook the wind and the lashing rain and the thunder itself, trampling the maelstrom under its unconquerable heels. Is it any wonder the power this man held over me—this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and, without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into that purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.

You may call him mad. You may judge him vain and selfish and arrogant and bereft of all normal human sentiment. You may dismiss him entirely as a fool blinded by his own ambition and pride. But you cannot say Pellinore Warthrop was not finally, fully, furiously alive. height="1em" width="0em">I retreated to the safety of the bridge, where I could at least keep an eye on him, though the water splattering and streaming down the glass obscured my view, turning him into a maddened, wraithlike shadow against the lighter gray of the white-capped sea. As it happened, Awaale had taken the helm. His massive arms flexed and stiffened as he fought the wheel.

“What is he doing?” he wondered. “Does he wish to be blown out to sea?”

“He is anxious,” I answered.

“Anxious for what?”

I said nothing. To face the Faceless One, I might have answered, but said naught.

The storm chased us well past nightfall, forcing the Dagmar miles off course, far south of the island, and putting her directly in the path of the monsoon winds driving down from the north. When the weather cleared, Russell planned a heading to bring us back to the west of Socotra; it was, he told the doctor, the only prudent course.

“We can’t approach from the south, not with winds like these,” he said.

“That would cost us at least a day,” the monstrumologist pointed out, his jaw tightening with barely suppressed ire.

“More than that,” answered Russell grimly.

“How much more?”

“Two days, two and a half.”

Warthrop slammed his hand down hard on the table. “Unacceptable!”

“No, Dr. Warthrop, unavoidable. I tried to tell you back in Aden. No one goes to Socotra this time of—”

“Then, why in God’s name did you agree to it?” the doctor snarled.

Russell called upon all his English fortitude and said, in the calmest manner he could muster, “Coming from the west is our only hope of getting you close enough for a landing. Forcing our way north against this wind could take just as long and entail twice the risk.”

Warthrop drew a deep breath to collect himself. “Of course I will defer to your judgment, Captain. But I hope you can understand the urgency of my mission.”

“Well, I do not understand it. You’ve been marvelously obtuse about your purpose, Dr. Warthrop. Perhaps you could realize your hope by telling me what the bloody hell is so important on that desolate rock that you’re willing to risk life and limb—my life and limb—for it.”

The doctor said nothing for a moment. He stared at the floor, weighing something in his mind. Then he looked up and said, “I am not a botanist.”

“I have seen some strange things in this dark part of the world,” the captain confided at the conclusion of the doctor’s confession. “But none as strange as those you describe, Warthrop. I’d heard of—what did you call it?—that foul jelly tht brings madness and death, but never thought it to be real. I’ve also heard men speak of the so-called red rain, blood pouring from the sky like some biblical scourge, but I never put much stock in sailors’ tales. You could very well be mad, which is of no concern to me, except when that madness threatens my ship and the safety of my crew.”

“I assure you, Captain Russell, I am neither mad nor naïve. The stories are true, and I intend to show you the proof when you return for us. If, that is, we ever manage to get there!”

“I will get you there, Warthrop, but I must ask how you plan to prevail over a squadron of Russians and capture this monster of yours, both intent on killing you, with nothing more than this boy by your side and a revolver in your pocket.”

Both Russell and I waited for his answer. I did not think he’d give the one he gave to me in Aden—this is what will save us—and he didn’t.

“I will leave all things nautical to you, Captain Russell,” he said. “If you will leave all things monstrumological to me.”

“Did you hear, walaalo?” Awaale asked me later that night as we lay in our hammocks belowdecks. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the thrumming of the engines. “I am going with you.”

I was stunned. “What do you mean?”

“Captain Julius asked me tonight what I thought about it. ‘This damn Yank may be the biggest fool I’ve ever met,’ he told me. ‘He could very well be mad as a hatter, but I can’t just drop him on the beach and be done with it.’ He offered to double my pay and I said yes, but not for the money. I said yes for you, walaalo. I said yes for you and for the one whose life I took all those years ago. I think God has sent you to me that I might save my soul.”

“I don’t understand, Awaale.”

“You are my redemption, the key to the prison of my sin. By saving you, I will save myself from judgment.”

He stroked my arm in the dark. “You are his gift to me, my walaalo.”

There are spirits in the deep. On this night, the last night in the long march of nights, you can hear their voices on the open water, in the sea spray and the wind and the slap, slap of the water breaking across the bow. Voices of the quick and the dead, like the sirens calling you to your doom. As you face that spot where the sea meets the sky, you hear their portentous lamentations. And then, before your startled eyes, the horizon breaks apart, thrusting up jagged shards of itself to blot out the stars.

And the voices speak to you.

Nullité! Nullité! Nullité! That is all it is!

In Sanskrit it is called Dvipa Sukhadhara, the Isle of Bliss.

This night is the last in the long march of nights. The night Mr. Kendall appeared at our door. The night the monstrumologist bound himself to me and cried, I will not suffer you to die! The night he abandoned me. The night I ran upon a river of fire and blood to save him. The night Jacob Torrance showed Thomas Arkwright two doors. The night of my master’s despair—You have given yourself in service to ha-Mashchit, the angel of death—and the night of my own despair at the center of the world.

The island is black as it rises toward you, a rip in the sky through which only darkness pours, and the wind wails, pushing you back upon your heels, while the tear in the endless vista draws you ever closer, as if the sea is draining into the abyss, bearing you down with it. The mass of darkness slips off to your left as your boat swings south and east. For a moment it seems like you are still and it is the island that moves, a massive black barge silently cutting through the sea.

This is the home of Tυφωεύς the magnificum, the Lord of the Abyss, the most terrifying monster of all, who lives in that space between spaces, in that spot one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. I understand you may wish to turn away. And you can, if you wish. That is your blessing.

The monstrumologist and I do not have that luxury. We labor in the dark that you might live in the light.

At Warthrop’s insistence the Dagmar dropped anchor a half mile from the southern shore, the closest Russell dared bring his ship. The currents were treacherous this time of year, he told us; they swirled around Socotra with the fury of Charybdis; the beaches were littered with the rotting skeletons of ships that had ventured too close during the monsoon. In June the stratospheric winds from Africa are dragged down by the five-thousand-foot Hagghier Mountains and sent howling along the northern coastline. For three months without pause the winds rage at a nearly constant speed of sixty miles per hour, with gusts up to well over a hundred. June is also the month of the rains, torrential downpours that deluge the interior and the south, where we would attempt our landing.

The doctor and I followed Russell up to the forecastle, where he trained his spyglass north, looking for Gishub, a small fishing village that lay—or should have lain—due north and about a mile from our position. The captain was troubled. He knew we were in the right place, but no lights shone in the distance indicating Gishub’s existence.

“Completely dark,” he murmured. “That’s odd. It appears to be deserted.” He handed the spyglass to Warthrop, who swung it back and forth a few times before admitting he saw nothing but varying shades of gray rock.

“Look at twelve o’clock,” Russell advised. “Find the fishing boats on the beach, then straight back.… The natives fashion their buildings from stone—there’s precious little wood on the island—if they bother building anything at all. Quite a few, I hear, live in the caves at Moomi and Hoq.”

“I don’t… Yes, now I see them. You’correct, Captain. All the windows are dark, not a single candle lit or lamp burning.”

“There’s another little village called Steroh about ten miles to the east. I could bring the Dagmar down there.”

“No,” said Warthrop firmly. “This must be investigated, Captain. We shall go ashore here.”

“You’ll have an easier time of it in the morning, when the tide shifts,” Russell said as we descended to the main deck.

“I prefer to go now,” answered the monstrumologist. “Immediately.”

The knots that bound the dinghy to the ship were loosed. The ropes that bore it were paid out. We sat clutching the sides of the little boat as it fell, jerked, fell again, then plopped with a teeth-jarring splash into the water. Captain Russell’s face appeared over the quarter railing, his one eye shining in the glow of the lamp beside him.

“I’ll see you in three weeks, Warthrop! And I expect my first mate to be returned in good working order!”

“Don’t worry, Captain Julius,” Awaale called back. “I’ll keep them out of trouble!” He pushed against the Dagmar’s hull with the end of his oar and then set to with arms and shoulders bulging, swinging us round toward the looming, lightless shadow that was Socotra. The lights of the Dagmar receded into the night.

Warthrop leaned forward, every muscle tense, his eyes shining. Behind him the path lay strewn with bodies—the young sailor who had borne the nidus from the Isle of Blood and Bliss; Wymond Kendall, who had carried it to us; Thomas Arkwright, who had tasted its rot; Jacob Torrance, who had fed it to him; Pierre Lebroque and all the ones who had fallen in the quest for the Faceless One of a Thousand Faces. Before him the way was dark, the path unknown. I am the one! he had cried from the depths of his soul, the same fathomless well from which had risen, Look not into my eyes, for I am the basilisk! There was no difference, really. The monstrumologist’s desire was Pellinore Warthrop’s despair.

Beside me Awaale fought against the swift current that swept east to west, pushing us sideways as he labored to drive us forward. Our progress was nearly indiscernible. Warthrop slapped his hand upon the rail in frustration, and Awaale grunted, “I’m sorry, dhaktar. The current is very strong.”

“Then, you must be stronger!” snapped Warthrop.

Awaale gritted his teeth and strained against the insistent sea. It would keep us away, I thought. It doesn’t want us here. I imagined the behemoth ocean dragging us to the middle of its landless expanse where it would devour us. Socotra mocked us—drawing closer, pulling away again, while Warthrop cursed under his breath and Awaale prayed under his.

“Pull, damn you. Pull!” the monstrumologist shouted at him. He shoved Awaale aside, seized the oars, and strove against the tide, digging the oars furiously into the black, swirling water. With each thrust Warthrop roared, and Awaale gave me a look of grave concern. We’d not made landing, and already the doctor seemed on the edge of reason.

“Awaale is stronger, Dr. Warthrop,” I said gently. “You should let him—”

“And you should keep your mouth shut,” he growled. “I did not come all this way… I did not sacrifice what I have sacrificed… I did not endure that which I’ve endured…”

Awaale leapt from the boat a dozen yards from the beach, wrapped the rope around his powerful forearm, and pulled us the rest of the way, until the hull of the dinghy bumped against the bottom.

There was no rest upon our landing. There was no celebratory moment. Awaale hauled the boat out of the surf, and we quickly unloaded our supplies—the large rucksack containing the provisions and ammunition (Captain Russell had generously loaned Awaale his rifle), a lamp to light our way in the dark, and the doctor’s field case, the latter two entrusted to me. We set off at once toward Gishub, a small collection of stone buildings clustered at the foot of the towering cliffs that marked the edge of the Diksam Plateau.

“Will Henry, walk a little in front and keep the light low,” the doctor instructed. “Awaale, step carefully. If you see something that looks like a jellyfish, it probably isn’t. When we reach the village, touch nothing—nothing—without putting on a pair of gloves first.”

“Gloves, dhaktar?”

“Gishub has either been abandoned or overcome. I see no other possibility.”

Awaale whispered to me, “Gloves, walaalo?”

“To protect you from the pwdre ser,” I said.

“Pwdre ser?”

“The rot of stars,” I answered.

“Death,” the monstrumologist clarified.

The way became steep, the ground hard. Before we’d come within a hundred yards of the first building, I smelled it—Awaale did too. He covered his mouth and nose, shuddering with revulsion: Gishub had not been abandoned; it had been overcome.

“Xumaato!” came his muffled voice from behind his large hand. With the other he quickly crossed himself.

Warthrop suddenly rushed forward, toward a building on the western end of the little village, commanding me to follow closely with the light. Stones had been piled against the doorway, blocking the entrance. The smell of rotting flesh permeated the atmosphere around the barrier; it seeped through the cracks between the hastily stacked rocks. The monstrumologist donned a pair of gloves and tore into the rocks. When the makeshift wall was halfway down, Warthrop seized the lamp from my hand and swung it through the opening. ="0em" width="1em">It had been a curing house for fish. The last catch still hung in rows from the low ceiling; the blank, dead eyes of the fish glowed ghastly yellow in the lamplight. Scattered about the floor were several corpses—I counted fourteen in all—in various stages of decomposition. No more a curing house, now it was a charnel house.

The doctor ordered me to put on gloves and bade me to follow him with the light.