The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(32)

Soft as a fly’s wing thrumming the empty air.

And we the dried-out husks, one rattling inside the gray carapace of the old house and the other outside in the gray, sterile air, rattling inside the carapace of his own skin.

I collapsed upon the stoop, as exhausted as the day folding into night, my hands singing with pain, rubbed raw by the digging; I was not used to manual labor.

You must harden yourself . . . . You must become accustomed to such things.

Impossible to say how the woman named Beatrice had died. No soft tissue remained, and there were no telling injuries to the remnants of her bones except the marks from the saw where he had dismembered the body. He might have killed her, though if he had, then the Warthrop I had known since childhood was indeed no more. That Warthrop was cruel when he should have been kind and kind when cruelty was called for.

“It is my fault,” I whispered to the bones beneath my feet. “I should have known when I left him that he would fall off the edge of the goddamned world.”

Daylight dwindled, but I remained on the stoop. I resisted the instinct to rush inside and confront him. He was a stranger to me, the man who had been my sole companion for nearly twenty years, the man whose moods I had been able to read like an ancient mystic decoding the bloody entrails of the sacrificial lamb. I honestly did not know how he would react.

I drew my coat tightly across my chest. Ashes swirled in the gray air. A thought flittered across the broken landscape:

It would be better if he were dead.

A mewling cry rose from deep in my throat, and I remembered the lambs, dark-eyed, white-faced, bleating in the gloom.

FIVE

Riverside Drive at dusk: the mournful hoots of tugboats and the handsome facades facing dark water, the sturdy homes of somber men engaged in serious work. Civic clubs and church and jackets at dinner and the politics of respectable people. Fine crystal and crisp linen. Silk from China, tea from India, manners from England. And the lamps that quash the shadows but illuminate nothing, and the long dresses that trail dustless floors, and genteel voices from another room: Ça ne veut dire rien. Je n’y peux rien.

Did I have a card? the butler wanted to know.

No, no, tell Miss Bates that the nine-fingered man is here.

And then, perhaps because she heard my voice, the elegant woman swept into the vestibule, the woman whose angelic voice had sung me back to sleep with words I did not understand, the same who had said, the last we met, It is no accident of circumstance that you’ve come to me—it is the will of God.

“William?” A hand rose to her mouth. “William!”

She abandoned any pretense of formality, the glue that bound her petit bourgeois universe together, and crushed me to her breast in the fiercest of maternal hugs. Then a cool hand against either cheek as her eyes sought out mine, which had seen too much and not nearly enough.

“My, how you’ve grown!” she explained. “Lilly did not mention how very tall you are now!”

“How are you, Mrs. Bates?”

She would fly down the hall chasing the startled, nightmare cries of her accidental charge and gather him into her arms, stroking his hair and pressing her lips to his head, and her voice when she sang to him was unlike anything he had ever heard, and sometimes in his confusion and grief he would forget and call her Mother. She never corrected him.

She slipped her arm through mine and escorted me into the sitting room, where I half expected to find her husband in his reading chair, his patrician nose buried in the afternoon papers. But the room was empty—and unchanged in the three years I’d been gone. Here for a time I had been an ordinary boy playing parlor games and listening to music and reading books without even the hint of monsters in them. There were no monsters then except the one that lurked one ten-thousandth of an inch outside my range of vision.

Had I eaten? Did I want something to drink? And the woman sitting on the edge of her chair with knees demurely pressed together leaning forward and the bright von Helrung eyes shining beacons even here in the gathering shadows. She had held me and sung to me, and now I felt nothing, nothing at all, and was angry with myself for it.

“Is Lilly here?” I asked after an awkward silence.

She left to fetch her, and I was left with no one but the faces upon the mantel, smiling at me from behind glass, Lilly and her brother and the impassive Mr. Bates and the woman who was worth more than he by far. I lowered my eyes as if in shame.

“Well, you are the last person I expected to see,” Lilly said from the doorway. Her mother hovered a few steps behind her in the hall, unsure of her place.

“Perhaps I should leave you two alone,” Mrs. Bates murmured, suddenly timid.

“Yes, you should,” Lilly said curtly. She swept into the room. Her face was free of makeup, and I saw an echo of her there, of the Lilly who’d bounded down the stairs at her great-uncle’s house with the words I know who you are.

“Why the last?” I asked her. “I told you I would come by.”

“I thought you had important scientific work tonight.”

“I do,” I replied. “Later.”

“And you’ve come by to invite me?”

“I wouldn’t want you implicated, Lilly.”

“That presumes you will be caught. Do you think you will be?”

I laughed as if she’d made a joke and changed the subject. “Actually, there is something I forgot to ask you last night.”