The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(71)

I smelled it the moment I stepped inside—the sickly sweet odor of death, the unmistakable perfume of decay. The doctor reacted to it immediately. He pushed past his winded companion and strode to the grand staircase. Von Helrung, now holding the derringer, grabbed Warthrop’s cloak with his free hand and pulled him back.

“We stay together,” he whispered harshly. “Where is the knife?”

Warthrop clucked impatiently, but took out the knife and handed it to me. “I have my revolver,” he said.

“Good, but you will need these.” Von Helrung held out several shining silver bullets. They clinked softly in the eerie silence. Warthrop pushed the offering away.

“I think my ordinary ones will do, thank you.”

We followed Warthrop up the grand staircase, past portraits of the Chanler clan’s progenitors, the occasional marble statue of a Greek god, and the bust of some anonymous personage glaring down from its perch upon the pedestal.

Upon the first turning of the stair, we found the body of a young girl in a chambermaid’s uniform, lying faceup—but she was upon her stomach. Someone had twisted her head completely around. Her eyes and face were gone. Her skirt was pushed up around her waist, exposing her na**d backside. There was nothing but a gaping wound where her bu**ocks should have been, and the air was saturated with the smell of excrement.

Von Helrung recoiled in shock, but Warthrop hardly took note of the gruesome find. He hopped over the pitiful creature and continued up the stairs, shouting Muriel’s name at the top of his lungs, his eyes wide with panic. Von Helrung and I took more care in our ascent, carefully squeezing around her before continuing after him. I told myself not to look down, but I did, and I nearly swooned with disgust, for what I saw exceeded everything I’d ever witnessed in my tenure as a foot soldier in the service of Warthrop’s exacting mistress.

Someone—or something—had carefully arranged her facial mask, including her bright brown eyes, inside her evacuated bowels, so she appeared to stare up at me from the violated depths.

“Stay back, Will!” whispered von Helrung.

I nearly ran into the doctor upon the second turning of the stairs. Another body lay in our path, lying on its back with legs together and arms spread wide, the same position in which we’d discovered Sergeant Hawk. He had been eviscerated. His organs, still shimmering with bodily fluid, lay in disarray, as if they had been rummaged through to find a special prize—which might have been the heart (I could see its half-eaten remains), or perhaps the intestines, which had been cleaved from his abdomen and wound about his faceless head like a crown.

It was Bartholomew Gray.

The monstrumologist barely paused. He barreled onto the second floor, bellowing her name, kicking open doors with such force that their hinges splintered. Von Helrung caught up with him, touched his shoulder, and cried out when Warthrop swung around and jammed the end of his revolver against his forehead. The older scientist pointed to a door at the end of the hall, over which someone had scrawled this, perhaps with blood, perhaps with the contents of the poor girl’s bowels:

Von Helrung called softly, “No, Pellinore!” but the doctor was already at the door, which stood slightly ajar, his revolver held at the level of his ear.

He pushed open the door, and something fell from its hiding place above—a chamber pot brimming over with a sludgy mass. The pot had been balanced between the top of the door and the wall, a trap my master had fallen for years before, only this time the joke wasn’t a pail filled with a Tanzanian Ngoloko’s blood. It was a chamber pot filled with human feces.

Warthrop stumbled backward, gagging and spitting (his mouth had been slightly open), his cloak and hair saturated in stinking excrement. He recovered himself quickly, however, and rushed into the room. Von Helrung and I followed close behind.

Reposed upon the bed was a third body, wearing the same green dress she had worn when I’d danced with her, legs obscenely spread, arms folded over her head. On the headboard had been scrawled the words “Good Job!”

Warthrop rushed toward the bed with a strangled cry of despair, and abruptly stopped, a look of nearly comical bewilderment upon his haggard features.

“Oh, no,” he murmured.

I peered over his shoulder—and into the face of Bartholomew Gray.

The beast had stripped it off and laid it over her face.

Beside me von Helrung gave a small, horrified sob. The doctor took a deep breath, set his jaw, and pulled the makeshift mask away.

The beast had left the face beneath intact.

“Regina,” whispered von Helrung. “It is Regina, the cook.”

Warthrop turned, and his eyes were flint-hard. He pushed past us and strode to the opposite side of the room to the remains of a window; the frame still held a few wickedly gleaming broken shards. He gazed past them, down to the small courtyard below.

“We’ll search the rest of the house,” he said, “but I do not think we will find him.”

He turned around to face us. I looked away. The expression in his eyes was unendurable.

“His business here, I think, is done.”

TWENTY-TWO

“The Story of a Lifetime”

The doctor’s prediction proved to be correct. We did not find John Chanler—or the thing that once had been John Chanler. Neither did we find Muriel. Either she had escaped or he had taken her. We searched every room from the damp cellar to the dusty attic. While von Helrung remained inside to call the police, Warthrop and I explored the grounds, focusing our attention on the small courtyard beneath the broken window. We found nothing out of the ordinary. It was as if John Chanler had taken to the high wind.