The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(10)

“Naked king, sir?”

“Yes, yes, you know the one,” he said testily. “There’s no need to patronize me, you know. While the masses clapped and cheered for his fine regalia, a little child called out from the crowd, ‘But he’s wearing no clothes!’ Just so, Chanler was always in awe of von Helrung—though not the only one, by any means. There has been more than one congress in which his remarks have been received by grown men as Moses cowering before the burning bush. No doubt Chanler raced off to Rat Portage to provide his beloved mentor with proof of his dubious proposition—a specimen of Lepto lurconis.”

“What is a Lepto lurconis, Dr. Warthrop?” I asked.

“I have told you, a myth.”

“Yes, sir. But what kind of creature is it exactly?”

“You really must brush up on your classical languages, Will Henry,” he chided me. “Its formal name is Lepto lurconis semihominis americanus. ‘Lepto’ is from the Greek. It means ‘gaunt’ or ‘abnormally thin’—emaciated. ‘Lurconis’ is Latin for ‘glutton.’ Thus: ‘the starving glutton.’ The rest, ‘semihominis americanus,’ I trust you can decipher for yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “But what is it exactly?”

He said nothing for a moment. He sighed deeply. He ran a hand through his bedraggled hair.

“The hunger,” he breathed.

“Hunger?”

“The hunger, Will Henry. The kind that is never satisfied.”

“What kind of hunger is never satisfied?” I wondered.

“It rides on the wind,” the monstrumologist said, a faraway look in his dark eyes. “In the absolute dark of the wilderness, a fell voice calls your name, the voice of damnation’s desire, from the desolation that destroys . . .”

I shivered. He did not sound like himself at all. I watched as his eyes darted back and forth, his gaze flitting over the ceiling, seeing something there that was beyond my power to see.

“It is called Atcen . . . Djenu . . . Outiko . . . Vindiko. It has a dozen names in a dozen lands, and it is older than the hills, Will Henry. It feeds, and the more it feeds, the hungrier it becomes. It starves even as it gorges. It is the hunger that cannot be satisfied. In the Algonquin tongue its name literally means ‘the one who devours all mankind.’

“You are young,” the monstrumologist said. “You have yet to hear it call your name. But from the moment it knows you, you are doomed. Doomed, Will Henry! There is no escaping it. It is a patient hunter and will endure all hardship, waiting to strike when you least expect it, and once you are in its icy grip, there is no hope of rescue. It bears you to unimaginable heights and plunges you to unfathomable depths. It crushes your soul; it breaks your breath in half. And, even as it eats you, you share in the feast. Yes! As you rise to the very gates of heaven, as you fall to the innermost circle of hell, you rejoice in the misery it brings—you become the hunger. Flying, you fall. Gorging, you starve. . . .”

The doctor breathed deeply. Hard though it might be to accept, it seemed Pellinore Warthrop had run out of words. I waited for him to go on, puzzling over his cryptic dissertation upon the nature of the beast. In one breath he’d called it a myth and in the next had spoken of it as if it were entirely real. You are young. You have yet to hear it call your name. What did this mean? What had yet to call my name?

The room was stuffy and warm—the doctor refused, even on the hottest of nights, to sleep with the windows open, a habit that was most likely common among monstrumologists—and under my nightshirt I had begun to sweat. Though his eyes remained fixed upon the ceiling, I had the discomforting sensation of being watched. The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and my heart quickened. Something was there, just outside my range of vision, incorporeal and ravenously hungry.

“She is right, you know,” he said softly. “I am vain and vindictive, and I have always been a little in love with death. Perhaps I lost her because it was the one thing she could not give me. I had not thought of that. It is hard, Will Henry, very hard, to think about those things that we do not think about. One day you will understand that.”

He rolled over onto his side, turning his back to me.

“Now put out the light and go to bed. We leave for Rat Portage in the morning.”

I retired to my little loft, where I tossed and turned for another hour or more, unable to fall into anything deeper than a fitful, transient doze. I could not shake the feeling that something lurked just outside the periphery of my vision, that the shadows held something, and that something knew my name.

I saw Muriel standing in the rain, a vision rising from fecund memory, her gray shawl glistening with water, the light skittering along her wet lashes, the parting of her lips when she saw me standing in the doorway, and I am filled with astonishment and dismay.

Suddenly she is gone and I am at my mother’s bedside, where I sit at her feet and watch her comb her long hair, and somewhere in the room is my father, but I cannot see him, and the golden light shimmers in my mother’s auburn hair. Her feet are bare and her wrists are thin and delicate, and the hypnotic rhythm of the brush coaxes the light to recline in perfect rows. And the light is golden all around her.

The doctor called out from his room below, and I jerked upright, gasping like a drowning man breaking the surface. I started down the ladder, for his cries were loud and desperate and not totally unexpected, but I stopped at the bottom rung, for he was not calling for me. It was someone’s name, though it was not my own.