The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(91)

“What we seek, gentlemen, is as old as life itself,” von Helrung said. “And as constant as death. It is ruthless and cunning and ever hungry. It may be as devious as Lucifer, but in this at least it has been honest with us. It has not hidden from us its true nature.”

There remained but one small matter—what to do with me. I had expected, naturally, to accompany the doctor, but even Warthrop didn’t seem keen on the idea. He worried with some justification that I might be in danger of falling into a venom-induced delirium at any moment, rendering me an unwanted and potentially fatal hindrance. Equally unattractive was leaving me behind. Von Helrung was particularly opposed to this alternative; he was convinced that the beast had “marked” me the night before. Dobrogeanu suggested they drop me off at the Society.

“If he isn’t safe among a hundred monstrumologists, where will he be?” he wondered.

“I think he should come with us,” Torrance said. Apparently he had not given up on the idea of somehow using me as bait. “Other than Warthrop, he’s the only one among us who’s come face-to-face with one of these things.”

Warthrop winced. “John Chanler is not a ‘thing,’ Torrance.”

“Well, whatever he is.”

“But I do agree that his experience could prove indispensable,” Warthrop continued. “Therefore, he should come, but not with me. Gravois, you and Dobrogeanu shall take him.”

“But I don’t want them to take me!” I cried out, forgetting myself at the intolerable notion of being separated from him. “I want to go with you, Doctor.”

He ignored my entreaty. His eyes had taken on that familiar backlit glow. He seemed both with us and very far away.

He pulled me aside as the men loaded their weapons with silver bullets and strapped the silver blades to their belts.

“Understand, Will Henry—my chief concern is protecting John from these madmen. I cannot be all places at once. I’ve spoken with Pelt, who has agreed to keep the overeager Torrance on a tight leash. I must rely on you to be my eyes with Gravois and Dobrogeanu. Gravois I have little concern about—the man hasn’t fired a weapon in his life and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if he did. And Dobrogeanu can’t see four inches past his own nose. But he is fierce, even if he is old. Do you still have the knife?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“It is nonsense, you know that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“John Chanler is a very sick man, Will Henry. I do not pretend to understand everything about his illness, but he himself would not argue that you have every right to defend yourself.”

I told him I understood. The monstrumologist was giving me permission to kill his best friend.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“The Water”

They were not so different in the end, the place where he was lost and the place where he was found. They differed only in their topography.

The wilderness and the slum were but two faces of the same desolation. The gray land of soul-crushing nothingness in the slum was as bereft of hope as the burned-out snow-packed brûlé of the forest. The denizens of the slums were stalked by the same hunger, preyed upon by predators no less savage than their woodland counterparts. The immigrants lived in squalid tenements, crowded into rooms not much larger than a closet, and their lives were mean and short. Only two of five children born into the ghetto could expect to see their eighteenth year. The rest succumbed to the ravenous hunger of typhoid and cholera, the insatiable appetites of malaria and diphtheria.

It was little wonder that the beast had chosen this for its hunting ground. Here was prey numbering in the hundreds of thousands, packed into a radius measured in blocks, not miles, prey more anonymous and powerless than the most isolated of Iyiniwok villagers, but just as familiar with the call that rode on the high wind, beckoning them in the universal language of desire.

By coming here, the beast had come home.

By lot my group had drawn the Bohemian ghetto, where a young girl named Anezka Nováková had vanished the day before, her disappearance not reported to the police but to the local priest, who in turn had told Riis.

Anezka, we learned, was not the sort of girl who would simply take off. She was extremely shy, and small for her age, a dutiful elder daughter who helped her parents roll cigars for $1.20 a day (to feed, clothe, and house a family of six). She was shut up in their tiny two-room flat for eighteen grueling hours each day, just one of the thousands of indentured slaves of the tobacco lords. Her family had discovered her missing that morning. Sometime in the night, while the family had slept, Anezka Nováková had vanished.

Dobrogeanu, who spoke passable Czech, obtained the address from the priest, who seemed to have some trouble understanding our interest in the case, but the name of Riis held great currency in his parish. The reformer’s involvement granted legitimacy to our cause, though the cleric retained his native distrust of outsiders.

“You are not detectives?” he asked Gravois. He seemed particularly suspicious of a Frenchman poking his Gallic snout into the neighborhood.

“We are scientists,” Gravois answered smoothly.

“Scientists?”

“Like detectives, Father, only better dressed.”

Anezka’s flat was within walking distance of the church, though the walk was more like a hike in the premature twilight of billowing snow. On every corner the fires of the ash barrels burned like beacons marking our descent into the teaming tenement, the smoke from which thickened the curtain of snow and obscured the landscape. We moved in a world of few contrasts, a purgatory of gray.