The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(16)

She pursed her lips impatiently and shook her curls and her luminous eyes glittered with a fire too bright for such dingy surroundings and I might have kissed her then, before that final turn, that last juncture, in her lavender dress with lace that whispered against her bare skin. But a man must control his passions lest they control him—if he has them. And that is the rub, the central question, the paramount if.

“Of course,” she scolded me. “Don’t be a fool.”

“I am no fool,” I assured her, and, clasping her hand firmly in mine, drew her around the last corner, the final turn, the terminus of the labyrinth, where the Locked Room waited for us.

I held up immediately, pushing her behind me with one hand while fumbling in my pocket for the doctor’s revolver with the other.

The door hung open.

The Locked Room was not.

And outside it a man lay facedown in a pool of blood that shimmered black in the amber light.

Behind me Lilly gasped. I eased forward, stepped carefully over the body, and stuck my head inside the room.

“Will!” she called softly, edging closer.

“Stay back!” I took in the scene within the room quickly, and then stepped back into the hall.

“Is it . . . ?”

I nodded. “Gone.”

I knelt by the man in the hall. Body warm, blood cool but tacky; he had not been dead long. The fatal wound was not hard to discern: a high-caliber bullet administered to the back of the head at close range.

I looked up at her; she looked down at us, at me and the dead man beside me.

“The key is still in the lock,” I said.

And she replied, “Adolphus.”

I sprang forward, seizing her hand as I went, and together we raced back to the office of the old man, the one who had told me, not so very long ago, that he would never join the monstrumological ranks because, in his words, They die! They die like turkeys on Thanksgiving Day!

His body was not quite as warm as the one lying in the hall. I flung him to the floor and pounded upon his chest and breathed into his open mouth—after flinging aside the upper dentures—and cried his name into his sightless eyes. I pulled open his jacket. His entire shirtfront was soaked in blood. I looked up at Lilly and shook my head. She covered her mouth and turned away, stumbled through the dusty detritus toward the door. I was upon her in two strides.

“Lilly!” I grabbed her arm and whirled her round. “Listen to me! Warthrop—you must find him. He’ll be back at our rooms at the Plaza—”

“The police . . . ?”

I shook my head. “This is no matter for the police.”

Pushing her toward the stairway.

“You aren’t coming?”

“I’ll wait for him here. We did not miss it by much, Lilly. He may still be down here—it, too.”

We had reached the foot of the stairs.

“Who may still be down here?”

“Whoever shot that man by the Locked Room.” But it wasn’t his killer I was most concerned about—it was Warthrop’s prize. Should it somehow escape . . .

“Then you cannot stay!” Pulling on my arm.

“I can handle myself.” On impulse I grabbed her bare shoulders and kissed her hard on the mouth. “For how long I cannot say—so hurry. Hurry!”

She clattered up the stairs, and the darkness swallowed her quickly. Then the resounding clang of the door slamming closed. Then silence.

I was alone.

Or was I?

Warthrop’s prize was down here in the pit with me, if someone hadn’t carted it off or, more terrible still, slain it.

Its sense of smell is exquisite, he had told me, making it a marvelous nocturnal hunter; it can sniff out its prey for miles.

I could huddle at the top of the stairs with my back to the door and wait for the doctor to arrive. That would give the creature but one way to reach me and myself a fair chance of killing it before it could kill me. It would be the prudent thing to do.

But it was the last of its kind. If cornered, I would have no choice but to defend myself, and Warthrop would never forgive me.

I took a deep breath and plunged back into the labyrinth.

The way is dark, the path is not straight. Easy to get lost, if you don’t know the way, easy to go in circles, easy to find yourself at the place from which you began.

TWO

Hold out your hands. Steady now. Don’t drop it! Carry it over to my worktable and set it there. Careful, it’s slippery.

And the boy, with the tattered hat to keep his head warm in the icy basement, presses the ropy bundle to his chest, shuffling across the floor slick with blood. The slithering and slipping of the cargo in his arms, the offal smearing his shirtfront, and the smell that assaults him. And the antiseptic clink and clatter of sharp instruments, and the man in the white coat with its copper-colored stains leaning over the metal necropsy table, and the boy’s numb fingers wet with effluvia, and the tears of protest that run down his cheeks and the hunger in his belly and the light-headedness of finding himself in this place where no pies cool on racks and no woman sings over a warm fire, just the man and his gore-encrusted nails and the peculiar crunch of the shears snapping through cartilage and bone and the strangely hypnotic beauty of a corpse flayed wide, its organs like exotic creatures of the lightless deep, the surreal humming of the man as he works, fingers digging deep, black eyes burning, forearms bulging, the taut muscles of his neck and the clenched jaw, and the eyes, the eyes burning.