The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(34)

“Yes?”

I could not go on. My thoughts would not hold still. It burns, it burns, and the worms that fell from his eyes and afraid of needles are you and what would you do, and Lilly, Lilly, do not suffer me to live past you, do not suffer me to see you suffer, and the thing in the jar and the thing in the thief his chest splitting open like the T. cerrejonensis shell splitting open and the unblinking amber eye, and the infestation this is my inheritance and each kiss the bullet, each kiss the dagger plunging home and I would die, I would die and never fall in love, Will Henry, never, never and the insubstantiality of water and she the cup, Lilly the vessel that bears the uncountable years, do not suffer do not suffer do not suffer.

“Good-bye, William James Henry.”

SIX

A burly figure stepped from the shadows pooled at the base of the stairs. He wisely spoke up before I blew his misshapen head off his shoulders.

“I say, put that gun away, old chum. It’s me, Isaacson.”

“What are you doing in the Monstrumarium?” I snapped. “I thought your master’s work here was done.”

He cocked his head inquisitively, like a crow eying a tasty bit of carrion. “I was told to meet you here.”

“By whom? And to what purpose?”

“Dr. von Helrung—to help in the disposal of the evidence.”

“I don’t need any help.”

“No? But many hands make light work.”

“Yes, and too many cooks spoil the broth. Next inanity, please.”

I brushed past him; he trailed behind. Stopped when I stopped at the storage closet for the bucket and mop. Stopped again at the sink while I stopped to fill the bucket.

“I can’t help but feel that we got off on the wrong foot, Will. I really had no idea you even knew Lilly—she never mentioned you, at any rate, in all the time we’ve spent together in London.”

“That’s odd. I’ve known her since we were children and we correspond regularly and she never mentioned you either.”

“Do you think we’re being played for fools?”

“I doubt it. Lilly likes a challenge.”

He remained several paces behind me as I trudged with bucket and mop to the Locked Room. I could have found it with my eyes closed: The stench of decay increased with every step.

“She’s a good girl, not like any other girl her age, in my experience. Fierce. Wouldn’t you say that’s the perfect word for her? Fierce?”

“She is brimming with ferocity.”

“Oh, she’s a capital girl, not anything like the girls from my country. So much more—how do I put it?—unrestrained.”

I stopped. He stopped. If I brought the mop handle round against his swollen jaw, the blow would more than merely drop him; it would shatter the bone, imbedding the shards in his cheek and gums, perhaps his tongue. Permanent disfigurement would not be unexpected, and the odds of a life-threatening infection would not be out of the question. I could say we’d been waylaid by more thieves or that I had struck him down in self-defense. In the shadowy outlands of the world in which we lived, few would question my story. Von Helrung had articulated it:

When I was younger, I often wondered if monstrumology brought out the darkness in men’s hearts or if it attracted men with hearts of darkness.

“What is it?” Isaacson whispered.

I shook my head and murmured, “Das Ungeheuer.”

“What?”

I turned back to him. His face was grotesque in the dim light, monstrous.

“Do you know how it kills you, Isaacson? Not the bite; that’s to paralyze you, to separate your brain from your muscles. You don’t lose consciousness, however. You are fully aware of what’s happening as its jaw unhinges to accommodate you whole. You die slowly by asphyxiation; you suffocate to death because there’s no oxygen in its gut. But you’re alive long enough to feel the horrendous pressure that crushes your bones; you feel your rib cage breaking apart and the contents of your stomach being forced up through the esophagus, filling your mouth; you choke on your own vomit, and every inch of your body burns as if you’ve been dropped into a vat of acid, which, in a sense, you have been. You could think of it that way: a forty-foot sack of causticity, the anti-womb of your conception.”

He said nothing for a long moment. Then he whispered, “You’re mad.”

And I replied, “I don’t know what that means. If you define madness as the opposite of sane, you are forced into providing a definition of sanity. Can you define it? Can you tell me what it is to be sane? Is it to hold no beliefs that are contrary to reality? That our thoughts and actions contain no absurd contractions? For example, the hypocrisy of believing that killing is the ultimate sin while we slaughter each other by the thousands? To believe in a just and loving God while suffering that is imaginable only to God goes on and on and on? If that is your criterion, then we are all mad—except those of us who make no claim to understand the difference. Perhaps there is no difference, except in our own heads. In other words, Isaacson, madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.”

I forced myself to stop; I was enjoying myself too much.

“I can’t be absolutely certain, Henry,” he said. “But I believe you’ve just proved my point.”