The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(27)

“Well?” he barked. “Where is it?”

“He got away,” I gasped.

I feared for an irrational moment that he was going to level the revolver at my forehead and pull the trigger. You could see the thought flicker through his mind like a swift-moving thunderhead. Instead he heaved himself to his feet.

“What?” I asked, reflexively taking a step back. “You told me to give it to him.”

“No,” he replied, his voice tight as a constrictor knot. “I told you to let him have it, which is something altogether different—in fact, altogether the opposite.”

He was deathly pale, swaying on his feet. Lilly stepped to his side to offer herself as ballast, but he shrugged her off. “This is a calamity of the highest order, and you are our age’s Pandora, Mr. Henry.”

“Well, he did have a gun pointed at your head,” I snapped. “What would you have had me do?”

“Allow him to blow my brains out before giving up the T. cerrejonensis!” he shouted, astonished by my stupidity. “My life means nothing . . .”

I was nodding. I was in complete agreement. Regardless, I suggested we proceed to Bellevue Hospital posthaste.

“Why?” he demanded, pale, swaying. His shoe was dark with his blood.

“To affect the removal of the bullet from your leg—”

“No, I must go to von Helrung’s at once, and you to gather the others. We haven’t a moment to lose.”

He staggered toward me—or rather toward the exit, which I was blocking. I did not move. He stopped. He had perhaps an inch on me back then, and his dark eyes bored down hard, but I did not move.

“Stand aside,” he said.

“I shall not,” I said.

“You will or I will shoot you. By God I will.”

“Then by God you should, but be sure the shot drops me, Dr. Warthrop.”

“You’re no good to the hunt like this.” Lilly spoke up to break the stalemate—or perhaps to keep me from being shot. “I will take you to the hospital, Dr. Warthrop. Will and Uncle Abram can assemble the search party—and make the report to the police, of course.”

Then Warthrop and I simultaneously: “No! No police!”

The monstrumologist gave in to Lilly’s suggestion, accepting her offer—and her arm—to help him up the stairs. “You have failed me,” he said to me. “Once again.”

I might have pointed out that my “failure” had resulted in the continuation of his disagreeable existence, but I held my tongue—as I so often did. Such retorts only led to an escalation of counter-retorts and counter-counter-retorts ad nauseam, and lately it had struck me how embarrassingly like an old married couple we had become in our discourse. It also occurred to me that the continuation of his disagreeable existence might be the very failure to which he referred.

Pellinore Warthrop had always been a little in love with death.

FOUR

Plop. Thwack! Plop. Thwack!

In the basement on Harrington Lane.

Plop. Thwack! Plop. Thwack!

The motion is fluid and quick, the grace of the practiced hand grasping the thin hairless tail firmly between the thumb and forefinger, lifting the rodent from the cage, plopping it down on the wooden board, and the glint of light off the ball-peen hammer as it rises, and the muffled thwack! of the deathblow to the rat’s head.

Plop. Thwack! Plop. Thwack!

And the tiny claws scratching at empty air and the soundlessly moving mouth and the silkiness of gray fur in the blare of light.

“The first few days of life depend on scavenging,” he explains. “Until it’s large and quick enough to hunt living prey.”

Plop. Thwack! Hard enough to kill instantly, but not so hard to produce a drop of blood. A delicate wallop, a gentle smash. And a line of corpses, plump bodies, flattened heads.

It would hatch before dawn, and like any good mother the monstrumologist knew his newborn would be hungry.

“With the proper diet, we should expect exponential growth,” he goes on. “One foot a week—it will be longer than you are tall by the time I present it to the Society.”

“And how large at full maturity?”

His eyes glitter in the glow of the heat lamp. His face shines with perspiration—and monstrumological exultation.

“Well now, that is one of the great unanswered questions of aberrant biology. The largest specimen ever recorded measured fifty-four feet long and weighed close to two tons, and it was determined to be only a year old! There are some who have seriously argued that there is no maximum length to which T. cerrejonensis grows. It continues to grow throughout its life span, and so, if not for predators and constrictions of habitat and food supply, it could conceivably dwarf every living thing on earth, including the blue whale.”

“Predators? What preys on something that size?”

He rolls his eyes. “Homo sapiens. Us.”

Plop. Thwack! Like blowing out a candle with your fist.

“Thus, if unchecked, our new arrival could grow large enough to consume the world itself?”

He chuckles. “It may come down to that—to who consumes it, us or them or some other species, I mean. That something will consume it one day I have little doubt. It must have occurred to you by this point that life is a self-defeating proposition.