The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)

The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)
Rick Yancey



PROLOGUE

September 2009:

“Cuttings”

The reader was a retired middle school English teacher whose mother had come to live at the facility in 2001. Every week for the next five years, the reader made the thirty-minute drive from Alachua to Gainesville to visit her mother. In clement weather they sat in the same cobblestoned courtyard, nestled between the two main residential buildings of the retirement home, where she now sat with me. A fountain gurgled in the center of the courtyard, ringed on three sides by bistro-style tables that had been painted and repainted to stay the corrosive effects of Florida’s tropical climate. Even now, in late September, the air was thick with moisture and the temperature hovered near ninety—and that was in the shade.

Her mother had passed away in ’06, but the reader still returned each week as a volunteer to read to the residents who either had no family or had family who rarely, if ever, visited. The director of the facility had given me her name and phone number. No, he had told me, to his knowledge the man calling himself William James Henry had not been close to any resident. The only visitor he had had was the volunteer who sat across from me, sipping iced tea from a tall glass in which no ice remained. Perhaps she could help me, the director had said.

“I can’t help you,” the reader told me now.

“He never said anything?” I asked.

“Just his name and the year he was born.”

“1876.”

She nodded. “I’d tease him. I’d say, ‘Now, William, that can’t be the year you were born.’ He would nod—and then he’d say it again.”

“What would he do when you read to him?”

“Stare off into space. Sometimes he’d fall asleep.”

“Did you ever have the impression he was actually listening?”

“That wasn’t the point,” she told me.

“What was the point, then?”

“Companionship. He had no one. Except every Tuesday at two o’clock, when he had me.”

She sipped her tea. The fountain gurgled. The water in its basin dripped off one edge and spattered onto the stones. The fountain had settled several inches on one side into the soft, sandy soil. On the other side of the courtyard, two residents, a man and a woman, sat at another table holding hands, watching—or appearing to watch—the play of light in the cascading water. She nodded in their direction.

“Well, for a while he had her, too.”

“‘Had’ her? Who is she?”

“Her name is Lillian. She was William’s girlfriend.”

“His girlfriend?”

“Not just his. Since I’ve been coming here, she’s had about twelve boyfriends.” The reader gave a little laugh. “She has Alzheimer’s, the poor thing, goes from man to man, sticks to them like glue for a few weeks, and then she loses interest and ‘picks up’ somebody else. The staff calls her ‘the Heartbreaker.’ Some of the residents take it very hard when she moves on.”

“Did William?”

She shook her head. “It’s hard to say. William was . . .” She searched for the word. “Well, sometimes I thought he might be autistic. That it wasn’t dementia at all but something he had been suffering from his entire life.”

“He wasn’t autistic.”

She looked away from Lillian and Lillian’s companion to study me, arching an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“After he died, they found some old notebooks hidden under his bed. A kind of diary or memoir that he must have written before he came here.”

“Really? Then you know more about him than I do.”

“I know what he wrote about himself, but I don’t know anything about him,” I said carefully. “I’ve only read the first three notebooks, and it’s . . . well, pretty far out there.” Her stare was making me uncomfortable. I shifted in my chair and looked across the courtyard at Lillian. “Would she remember him?” I wondered aloud.

“I doubt it.”

“I guess I should ask,” I said without much enthusiasm.

“They would sit together for hours,” the reader said. “Not talking. Just holding hands and staring off into space. It was sweet in a way, if you didn’t think about the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?” I assumed she was talking about death.

“The next one catching her eye. That one she’s sitting with now? His name is Kenneth, and she’s been with him about a month. I give it another week, and poor Kenneth will be all alone again.”

“How did Will take it—when she dumped him?”

The reader shrugged. “I didn’t notice it affecting him in any way.”

I continued to watch Lillian and her beau for another minute.

“Doesn’t mean it didn’t,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

That same afternoon I met with Will Henry’s attending physician, the man who had declared him dead on the night of June 14, 2007. He had treated Will since his arrival at the facility.

“You know,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “he claimed he was born in 1876.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “How old do you think he actually was?”