The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(83)

“I did not.”

“Uncle said the police beat and tortured you.”

“They tried to make me confess—or, not confess, but say that the doctor did it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“It wasn’t the truth.”

She would not stop staring at me. I stirred my cold soup.

“They’re going to hunt him down now,” she said.

“Who is?”

“The monstrumologists. Well, not all of them; just the ones Uncle has picked specially for the job. They’re coming over tonight to draw up their battle plans. I told Mother I’m staying. She thinks it’s to keep you company. ‘That lonely little Henry boy,’ she calls you. ‘That poor little orphan stuck with that horrible man.’ ‘That horrible man’ is your doctor.”

For some reason the wound beneath the bandage began to itch terribly. It took everything in me not to dig into it with my nails.

“It’s not altogether a lie,” said Lilly. “For here I am—keeping you company! You’re not angry at me, are you? I didn’t mean for it to happen, you know. I’m not wicked. I honestly didn’t know until Adolphus told me they couldn’t be sexed. He killed it, you know. Not Adolphus—your doctor. Adolphus got it off you and Dr. Warthrop tore it to pieces with his bare hands—as if he were angry at it, as if it had attacked him. I don’t think that’s right, do you? I mean, it wasn’t the Death Worm’s fault. It was just being what it was.”

“What?” I asked. As usual with Lilly Bates, I was having some trouble keeping up.

“A Death Worm! All he had to do was put it back into its crate, but instead he killed it. It’s not like Dr. Chanler. They have to kill him, because if they don’t, he’ll just keep feeding. Uncle says there’s no prison on earth that can hold a Wendigo.”

“He’s not a Wendigo,” I countered, ever Warthrop’s loyal servant. “Wendigos aren’t real.”

“Tell that to Muriel Chanler.”

My cheeks burned. I had a sudden, nearly overwhelming urge to strike her.

“She never stopped loving him,” she went on. “That’s something you don’t understand, Will, because you are a boy. Dr. Chanler knew it and he couldn’t stand it, and so he went off to Canada, and I don’t think he ever really believed he was coming back. His heart was broken. The woman he loved had never stopped loving his best friend. Can you imagine anything more tragic than that? And then his best friend rescues him and brings him back to her, only now he’s not even human anymore—”

“Stop it!” I cried. “Please stop it!”

I pushed away from the table and stumbled toward the door. She followed, saying, “What’s the matter, Will? Where are you going?”

“Leave me alone!”

“Some apprentice monstrumologist you are!” she called after me. “What did you suppose it was all about when he accepted you, William James Henry? What did you suppose it was all about?”

I remained in the room beside the doctor’s, restlessly turning this way and that upon the bed, until the clock struck ten and the monstrumologists began to arrive. I heard their voices below, low-pitched and somber like mourners in a death house, and that made me angry, for them to behave as if the doctor were already lost. My distress motivated me to abandon my desperate need for rest. I peeked into his room on the way downstairs and found him fast asleep. I decided not to wake him. I would risk another encounter with Lilly and join their strategy session, if for no other reason than to represent the doctor. He would want to know what was being plotted in his absence.

I found them in the library—von Helrung, the diminutive Frenchman Damien Gravois, Dr. Pelt, and two other monstrumologists whom I had not met, whose names I came to learn were Torrance and Dobrogeanu. The library had been converted to their budding operation’s command center. A large map of the island had been plastered to one wall. Bright red pins dotted its surface, marking the places where Chanler’s victims had fallen; I counted eight in all, three more than I knew of. The beast had been busier than I’d realized. It will not stop hunting, von Helrung had said. It will kill and feed until someone kills it.

Beside the map were newspaper clippings with blaring headlines: MADMAN STALKS CITY. MASSIVE MANHUNT UNDERWAY FOR AMERICAN “RIPPER.” And this poignant one, from an early edition: POLICE DENY RUMORS OF MISSING WOMAN/WHERE IS MRS. JOHN CHANLER?

“Where is Warthrop?” asked Dr. Pelt. “We shouldn’t decide anything without him.”

“He rests from his ordeal at the hands of our esteemed Inspector Byrnes,” answered von Helrung. “May God in his mercy grant Pellinore succor from his woes—and may God in his divine justice send a plague upon the Metropolitan Police!”

“We can always apprise him of our plans later,” said Gravois. “Or Monsieur Henry, who lurks in the shadows over there by the door. Come, come. Veuillez entrer, Monsieur Henry. You may serve as scribe for our proceedings!”

Von Helrung thought it an excellent idea. He seated me at the table and procured some paper and a pen for me to record, in his words, the minutes of the first official inquiry into the species Lepto lurconis in the history of monstrumology.

“It is a seminal moment, mein Freund, Will. We are like the first explorers stepping onto the shores of a new continent. This shall ever be remembered as the hour when our science met the grandest mystery of all—the intersection of ignorance and knowledge, light and dark. Ah, if only Pellinore were well enough to be here!”