The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(59)

The day had dawned overcast with a blustery wind from the north that brought a plethora of bad memories with it. Von Helrung and Lilly walked us to the curb. Warthrop turned to his old mentor upon seeing Bartholomew Gray in the driver’s seat of the hansom.

“Where is Skala?” he demanded.

Von Helrung muttered a vague reply, and the doctor’s face darkened in anger. “If you’ve sent him over there like some apish angel of death, Meister Abram, I shall have him picked up by the police.”

I did not hear von Helrung’s response; Lilly had collared me.

“Are you going to be at the congress today?” she asked.

“I suppose,” I said.

“Good! Uncle has promised to take me, too. I will look for you, Will.”

Before I could extend my hearty thanksgiving at this piece of wonderful news, the doctor pulled me into the cab.

“Straight to the Society, Mr. Gray!” he called, knocking sharply against the roof with the heel of his walking stick. He sat back and closed his eyes. He didn’t look much healthier than his dying charge at Bellevue. Thus we are entwined with each another in a fateful dance, until one falls and we must let go, lest we both go down.

I spent the majority of that rainy day on the third floor of the old opera house, in a cavernous room that may have once been a dance studio, while Warthrop attended a meeting of the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Bestia, the Society’s exhaustive compendium of all malevolent creatures great and small, to which he was a contributing member. The gathering was chaired by a lanky Missourian by the name of Pelt, who possessed the most impressive handlebar mustache I had ever seen. Throughout the meeting Pelt munched on salt crackers, and I marveled at his ability to keep the crumbs from lodging in his mustache’s complicated tangles. It was this same Dr. Pelt who would later admit that he was the author of the anonymous letter that had launched our latest foray into the singular wilds of monstrumology.

Having hardly slept the night before, I dozed off in my chair to the droning of the learned men, while the latest treatises were discussed, debated, and dissected, against the pleasant background music of the drumming rain upon the high arched windows. It was in this state of sweet semi-stupor that I received a sharp jab to my shoulder. Jerking awake, I looked up to see Lilly Bates beaming down at me.

“Here you are!” she whispered. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You might have told me where you’d be.”

“I didn’t know where I’d be,” I said honestly.

She plopped onto the chair beside me and watched glumly as a phlegmatic little Argentinean with the rather remarkable name of Santiago Luis Moreno Acosta-Rojas droned on about the poor composition skills of monstrumologists in general. “I understand they are not men of letters, but how can they be such unlettered men?”

“This is dreadfully boring.” Lillian stood abruptly and held out her hand.

“I can’t leave the doctor,” I protested.

“Why? He might need a footstool?” she asked sardonically. She pulled me to my feet and dragged me toward the door. I glanced back at my master, but he was oblivious, as was usual, to my plight.

“Quiet now,” she whispered, leading me to a door across the hall, over which a sign had been posted: ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE. NOT AN EXIT.

The door opened to a flight of stairs that dove downward, the darkness beneath swallowing the pitifully small light of the jets that burned on each landing.

“I don’t think we should be going down there,” I said. “The sign . . .”

She ignored me, pulling me behind her as she descended this little-used shaft, hardly concerning herself with the narrow treads or the fact that there was no railing. The walls—moist and festooned with long strips of peeling black paint—pressed close on either side. Another door confronted us at the bottom landing, two stories beneath the street, and another sign:

MEMBERS ONLY—NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE

“Lilly . . . ,” I began.

“It’s all right, Will,” she assured me. “He falls asleep every afternoon around this time. We just have to be very quiet.”

Before I could ask why it was all right, despite the signs that gave every indication it was not, or ask who fell asleep every afternoon around that time, she forced open the door with her shoulder and flapped her hand impatiently at me to follow, which, for reasons still inexplicable to me, I did.

The door clanged shut, plunging us into absolute darkness. We stood at the threshold of a forgotten hallway that led directly to the holy of holies of natural history’s abhorrent darker side.

Its official title was the Monstrumarium (literally, “the house of monsters”), for it housed thousands of specimens collected from the four corners of the globe, from Gigantopithecus’s malevolent cousin Kangchenjunga rachyyas of the Himalayas to the microscopic but no less terrifying Vastarus hominis (its name literally means “to lay waste to humans”) of the Belgian Congo. In 1875 a wag had nicknamed the Monstrumarium, in a fit of sottish wit, “the Beastie Bin,” and the name had stuck.

The so-called Lower Monstrumarium into which Lilly and I now made our shuffling way—trailing our fingertips along the damp subterranean walls to keep our bearings in the dark—had been added to the original structure in 1867. A warren of winding passageways and claustrophobic low-ceilinged rooms, some no larger than a closet, the Lower Monstrumarium was the repository for thousands of yet-to-be catalogued specimens and macabre curiosities. In room after room, shelves groaned under the weight of thousands of jars wherein unidentified bits of biomass floated in preserving solution, where for all I know they still sit to this day. A tiny percentage carried labels, and those contained only the name of the contributor (if known) and the date of the donation; the rest were innominate reminders of the vast constituents making up the monstrumological universe, the seemingly inexhaustible panoply of creatures designed by an inscrutable God to do us harm.