The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(19)

“Did you make tea?” he asked.

“No.”

I stepped around to his dresser in search of some clean underwear.

“Really? I thought surely you must be, by all the banging and clattering down there. ‘Dear Will is making me a nice pot of tea,’ I thought.”

“Well, I wasn’t. I was looking to see if you had a crumb of food in the place. Which you don’t. What are you living on, Warthrop? Old carcasses from your collection?”

I tossed a clean pair of underwear—the drawer was full of them; he probably hadn’t changed his shorts in a month—at him. They landed on his head and he giggled like a child.

“You know I have no appetite when I’m working,” he said. “Now, a good, strong cup of some Darjeeling, that is something altogether different! I never could replicate your cup, Will, try as I might. Never tasted the same after you left.”

I went to the closet. Tossed a pair of trousers, a shirt, and the cleanest vest I could find onto the bed.

“I’ll make you a pot when I get back.”

“Get back? But you only just got here!”

“From the market, Warthrop. It will be closing soon.”

He nodded. He was absently turning the underwear in his hands. “I don’t suppose you’d mind picking up a scone or two. . . .”

“I will get you some scones.”

I sat in the chair. For some reason I was out of breath.

“They never tasted the same either,” he said. “One wonders how that could be.”

“Stop that,” I said sharply. “Don’t be childish.”

I looked away. The sight of him wrapped in the towel, thin hair dripping wet, the hunched shoulders, the hollow chest, the rail-thin arms and spidery hands—it sickened me. It made me want to hit him.

“Are you going to tell me?” I asked.

“Tell you what?”

“This thing you’re working on, this thing that’s slowly killing you, this thing that will kill you, I suppose, if I let it.”

His dark eyes glittered with that familiar infernal glow. “I believe I am in charge of my own death.”

“It doesn’t appear that way. In fact, it appears that it is in total charge of you.”

The fire went out. He dropped his head. “I must die sometime,” he whispered.

It was too much. I leapt from the chair with a guttural roar and bore down upon him. He shrank at my advance, flinched as if expecting a blow.

“God damn you anyway, Pellinore Warthrop! The days of your puerile attempts to manipulate and control me are over. So save the melodramatic sniveling for someone else.”

His shoulders heaved. “There is no one else.”

“That is your choice, not mine.”

“You chose to leave me!” he shouted up into my face.

“You gave me no choice!” I turned away. “You disgust me. ‘Always tell the truth, Will Henry, all the truth in all things at all times.’ From you, the most intellectually dishonest man I have ever known!”

I spun on my heel, turned round again. We are circles; our lives are not straight.

“You’ve been nothing but a burden to me, an albatross around my neck!” I shouted. “Everything about you is repulsive—you’re living like some feral creature, wallowing in your own filth, and for what? For what?”

“I cannot . . . I cannot . . .” Shaking uncontrollably, hugging his nakedness, dank hair falling over his face in a stringy curtain.

“Cannot what?”

“Say what I cannot—do what I cannot—think what I cannot.”

I shook my head. “You’ve gone mad.” With wonder in my voice. The unconquerable Pellinore Warthrop, the singular man, had crossed that razor-thin fissure unto the other side.

“No, Will. No.” He lifted his head to look at me, and I thought, Those are pearls that were his eyes. “Nothing has changed since the beginning. It is not I who has gone blind. It is you whose eyes have been opened.”

FOUR

With my eyes wide open and three inches from the floor, I crawled in an ever-widening circle around the corpse in the Monstrumarium.

Every second was precious, but I forced myself to go slowly, gathering in what the eye could harvest in the meager light.

Here the outline of a bloody shoe print, six inches from where he fell. Another as the second man stumbled backward toward the wall. Here, against the wall, a stack of empty crates toppled over and broken apart. A terrific struggle had happened here. With a third man? Or with Warthrop’s prize? Had the victim’s betrayer or competitor been overcome inside the Locked Room as he attempted to transfer the prize to another container more suitable for transport? Finding nothing else useful against the wall, I crossed into the room. In my brief inspection earlier I hadn’t seen it: Someone—or something—had flung a large burlap sack into the far corner. I tapped on it with my foot. Empty.

That was it, then: He tried to lift it out of the cage, and it struck, drove him out, and as he stumbled backward he stepped into the puddle of blood, leaving the imprint of his shoe on the floor. Or he could have lost his grip—not been in its grip—panicked, and backed out in terror, slamming against the far wall and knocking over the crates before fleeing the Monstrumarium, the motive for his crime abandoned. The second scenario did not seem satisfactory to me. If he had dropped the prize, it would have pursued him and left some evidence of itself through the same puddle into which the shoe had dipped. Back in the corridor, I ran my fingertips over the damp wall above the pile of shattered wood and bent nails, squinting in the flickering light of the jets, kicking myself for not having fetched a torch from Adolphus’s office. My fingers brushed something sticky. I sniffed. Blood. The wall was speckled with dime-size drops of it around the level of my eyes. Had he smacked his head against the hard stone? Or had he already been punctured several times over? The drops extended for three feet in either direction from the center of the broken crates. From whipping his head back and forth? Or from something whipping him?