The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(46)

He seemed to think it a wondrous witticism. He was still laughing when the telephone rang. I made a move to answer it and he waved me away. His chuckles died abruptly as he listened to the party on the other end of the line.

“Yes, please, have him bring it up at once,” he said, and hung up. “Help me move this dresser, Will. We have a delivery.”

A moment later there was a soft rap upon the door. Warthrop, leaving nothing to chance, drew out his revolver and shouted, “Who is it?”

“Faulk.”

He threw back the bolt and opened the door. Mr. Faulk stepped inside holding a hat-size box. The doctor motioned for him to set it on the table by the windows and locked the door.

“Who?” Warthrop demanded, dropping the gun back into his pocket and examining the box without touching it. His agitation was palpable.

“Didn’t give his name, but he’s an old friend from earlier this evening,” Mr. Faulk answered. “Short, swarthy, ill-smelling.”

“Competello’s courier,” I said.

Warthrop waved his hand at me without turning.

“ ‘A present for the goodly Dr. Warthrop,’ was the message,” Mr. Faulk said.

“Stand back—against the far wall, please,” the monstrumologist instructed us. “I suspect I know what this ‘present’ is, but one cannot be too careful.”

“That’s my motto, Doctor,” Mr. Faulk replied. He edged toward the other side of the room and urged me to follow. Warthrop rubbed his hands together vigorously, then cupped them to his mouth and blew hard. He placed his index finger on the edge of the lid and gingerly exerted upward pressure. Mr. Faulk and I held our breaths, our bodies tense.

The lid fell back—and then the monstrumologist fell too, bringing up his hands to hide his face, his voice rising in an unearthly cry of anguish, the same cry I had heard years before from the summit of a manure block, where he had found the faceless corpse of his beloved among the stinking refuse. He spun round, colliding with the coffee table, lost his balance or perhaps his will to remain upright, and fell to his knees with a keening wail. Mr. Faulk and I rushed forward, he to Warthrop and I to the box.

A tangled mass of feathery white hair seemed to float above the blood-speckled forehead and prominent nose and age-mottled cheeks and bright blue eyes, the brightest blue I had ever seen, staring into oblivion with an expression of horror pure all the way down to the bottom: the severed head of Dr. Abram von Helrung, full lips stretched wide around the thing they had stuffed into his mouth, the thing with the lidless amber eyes that had captured me first in the basement when it broke through its shell, and I the corrupted, crowning achievement of evolution dumbstruck by the purity of its being, its godless, sinless, conscienceless perfection, now staring sightlessly back at me, dead yellow eye and dead blue eye sucking me under to be crushed in the airless, lightless depths.

From behind me the monstrumologist screamed, “What have you done?”

I did not know whether he spoke to von Helrung or to me. It may have been both. It may have been neither.

“What in God’s name have you done?”

Nothing, nothing, nothing, in God’s name, nothing.

FOUR

Abram was dead, and Pellinore was inconsolable. I’d never seen him so broken and helpless, borne down by what he had called “the dark tide.” He wailed and railed, cried and cursed; even Mr. Faulk sensed that it could not continue indefinitely: Either Warthrop would best the spell or the spell would best him. I bore a special responsibility, not because I felt in any way responsible for von Helrung’s death—no, fate had decreed me his sole caretaker, the lone guardian of the Warthropian animus. It had taken me years to understand this. He didn’t need me to sustain his body. He could hire a cook to feed him, a tailor to clothe him, a washerwoman to keep those clothes clean, a valet to wait upon him hand and foot. What he could not afford, though he possessed the wealth of Midas, the one indispensable service that only I could provide, was the care and feeding of his soul, the nurture of his towering intellect, and the incessant stroking of his pitiful, mewling, insufferable ego, the I am! squeal to the silent, inexorable Am I?

I understood my duty in that hour. Understood it with greater clarity than I had in Aden, on Socotra, or even on Elizabeth Street. I understood all too well. What are you? he had asked. It was a disingenuous question. He knew very well what I was, what I had always been without either of us understanding it, much less acknowledging it. And what did it matter if we did? Would it have changed anything?

There is no place where it begins. No place where it ends.

I called down to the desk and ordered up a pot of tea. I mixed a healthy dosage of sleeping draft into his cup and pressed the cup into his hands. Drink, Doctor. Drink. After a few moments he allowed me to lead him to his room, where he threw himself upon the bed and curled into a ball, and I was reminded of his father, whom he had found in the same position years before, na**d as the day he was born, dead. I closed the door and returned to the sitting room, where Mr. Faulk was waiting for me. He was contemplating the head, his massive brow furrowed in existential concentration. He, too, understood his duty in that hour.

“It’s a shame, Mr. Henry. I always liked the old man.”

“The last of his kind,” I said, not without some irony. “He must have changed his mind and gone to see Competello himself. I only hope he brought Walker with him and that that head is bobbing somewhere in the East River.”