The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(49)

“Does it matter?” I asked. “I didn’t drop him, in any case.”

I stood up. I felt extraordinarily large; I even flinched, expecting my head to smack into the ceiling. She did not move as I advanced. She lay still as I came on. I knelt beside the bed to bring my face level with her eyes.

“The monster is dead; the monster never dies. You may catch it; you will never catch it. Hunt it for a thousand years and it will forever exceed your grasp. Kill it, dissect it, place its parts in a jar or scatter them to the four corners of the world, but it remains forever one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. It is the same monster; only its face changes. I might have killed him, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The next one I will, and the next, and the one after that, and the faces will change but not the monster, not the monster.”

There were tears in her faultless eyes and the inarticulate fear in them was not too different from the fear in the dead eyes of the head in the box. And then she grabbed my face in her hands, and her hands were cool and slickly dry as silk. She pressed her lips gently onto mine and spoke, “Don’t be afraid,” mobile moist lips rubbing over mine, “Don’t be afraid,” and I saw the head with the amber eyes in her uncle’s open mouth, the eyes that held me that shamed me that trapped me that crushed me that ground me into dust.

I was on the bed—I don’t remember climbing up, but I found myself crushing her against me, as I was crushed by the amber eye, and she both resisted and yielded, fought and surrendered, and there was loathing in her longing, fear in her joy, and the unspeakable sorrow of insatiable fullness.

And in me the thing unwinding.

“Stop,” she said, pushing against my chest. “Will. Stop.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I don’t care what you want.”

She slapped me across the cheek. I flung her away and fell off the bed—literally, for my feet slipped out from under me on the wooden floor. I hit my knee hard and grunted with pain.

“You’re not being honest with me,” she said from above.

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“I’m leaving.”

“I think that would be best.”

“There is something I have to do.”

“I won’t ask you.”

“I wouldn’t tell you if you did.”

“Then why bring it up? Just go.”

“I just wanted to say . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . just one thing. One thing before I go.”

“Then?”

“Then I will go.”

“Then you should say it.”

“If he had said yes on that bridge, I wouldn’t have dropped him.”

“Really?” She laughed. “I would have.”

FIVE

Warthrop slept on. I was wide awake; I would never sleep again though I lived for the next one thousand years.

I arrived at the Zeno Club at a quarter till eight and requested a private room. There were no private rooms. I slipped the manager a hundred-dollar bill. Oh, how could he have forgotten about the private room? There had been a last-minute cancellation. The room was cold. A fire was lit. Dark-paneled, thick carpeted, lined with bookshelves and crowded with overstuffed furniture, with paintings of stern men hanging on the walls. The room had a second door that opened to a back hallway. It was perfect. I handed the manager another twenty and told him to admit my guests when they arrived. I ordered a Coca-Cola and sat in the chair closest to the fireplace; I was cold down to my bones. I couldn’t shake the memory of that afternoon. The most chaste of kisses . . . Had I passed to her my curse, my blessing? After leaving Riverside Drive, I had wandered the streets, feeling as if I were descending a long winding stair, a descent not measured in feet or miles but in hours and years. Darkness closed round me; faces receded into the grasping dark. Down, down I went, and there was no terminus; there was no bottom to reach. A loud voice called out to me, a woman’s voice, and I looked up and saw a face painted garishly, her blouse unbuttoned immodestly, winking and waving from her superior height, I at the bottom and she at the top: Come up, deary, come up. And I imagined climbing the stairs of the tenement and the smell of cabbages and the reek of human desperation and her sour-faced broker who collected the money and protected her from the overzealous sailor or merchant marine, and then I imagined her room and the roughness of the boards beneath my bare feet and the roughness of her hands and the heaviness of her scent, and would it not be better to touch and be touched than to never touch at all? And then I’d hurried on, seething with that most dangerous kind of anger: the anger quietly conceived.

By a quarter past nine, in the private room of New York’s most exclusive club, that anger had departed, like a recalcitrant child retreating to his alcove to pout, and I was empty. My mind was as unruffled as the surface of a mountain lake.

The outer door swung open and Mr. Faulk stepped into the room, followed by a short, burly man wearing a wool jacket and a bowler hat. Behind him was a jowly, taller, and much older gentleman in a calf-length mink coat, carrying a shiny black cane. Mr. Faulk divested him of his outer garment, but his companion declined. I rose and crossed the room.

“Don Francesco,” I said with a bow. “Buon giorno.”