The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(57)

“Enough!” he cried, uncoiling from the chair and lunging toward me. “It is one thing to insult my honor, sir—quite another to cross the line into insulting my intelligence! I suppose it assuages your guilt to lay the blame upon my shoulders—to transfer the blood, as it were, onto my hands. It was you who snuck into the Monstrumarium with Lilly Bates that night! It was you who murdered two men in cold blood over the sum of ten thousand dollars! It was you who brought about the death of my dearest and only friend! It was you who in some warped sense of justice executed a king to inaugurate a war!” He took a long, shuddering breath. His voice died away nearly to nothing. “And it was you who sacrificed upon the altar of your selfish need . . .”

The monstrumologist turned away. He left the rest of it—and all of it—unfinished for another time.

“Now see what you’ve done,” he muttered at the door. “You’ve upset me again, at the worst possible time—again. Tomorrow I must preside over the opening session, and I am weary and distracted beyond words. When we get back to New Jerusalem—”

“I’m not going back to New Jerusalem!” I shouted at him. He raised his hand, allowed it to fall to his side: a gesture of resignation.

“As you wish,” he said. There was nothing left in his voice. No anger, no sorrow, no silly sentimental thing at all. “I have saved you from yourself for the last time.”

TWO

He closed the door behind him. The creak of the floorboards faded. He did not return to his room; I could tell that. Probably went to brood in the sitting room, in the dark, his natural habitat. I seethed, my nausea and light-headedness forgotten. I didn’t think I was right; I knew it. He had lied to me, the one who had called lying the worst kind of buffoonery. And worse: He had twisted the facts to justify endangering Lilly and all the inadvertent carnage that followed. If I’d known the truth, Competello and his men would be alive, von Helrung, too. His deception was the monster here, not me. No, not that—the lie was merely the progeny of his colossal ego and his willingness to place an abomination above human life. I’d always thought him vain and arrogant and without normal human emotion. I’d never considered, though, that he might be evil.

The floorboards creaked again. He had gone into his room. A minute passed, then five, and now the creaks were softer, as if he were tiptoeing down the hall. I threw back the covers and stumbled to the armoire to find some clothes. The room teetered; I nearly fell. I had not eaten in days.

I knew where he was going—or thought I did. And if he didn’t go there, I would while he was gone. I was sure I knew where he had hidden it. I would find it and chop off its foul head and stuff it into his lying mouth.

The only thing I could not understand was why he wouldn’t confess. What did it matter now?

“Evil man,” I muttered. “Evil!”

The night was freezing cold. In my haste I’d forgotten my coat. I jammed my bare hands into my trouser pockets and trotted along with my shoulders hunched, and the city lights pushed back against the sky, dimming the stars. My vision was cloudy, my thoughts muddled. No matter the hour, the streets are never truly deserted in the city. There are the white-coated sanitation workers and the seamen wandering in drunken clumps looking for an open bar and the pickpockets and whores who prey on them and the occasional homeless restless wanderer digging through trash barrels and the lonely patrolman walking his beat.

The dark buildings cut off the horizon; here it was impossible to discern the edge of the world. My quarry was well ahead of me, out of sight, like the horizon he guarded: In Egypt, I have told you, he was called Mihos, the one whose sacred charge was to keep me from falling over that edge.

I entered the Society’s headquarters through the same side door Lilly and I had used the night of the dance. Black jacket, purple dress, raven-colored ringlets, and now she was gone, back in England, and who cares? To hell with her. There is something missing. Something that should be there but isn’t anymore. No, Lilly. There is nothing missing. I am complete. I am whole. I am the evolution of man in microcosm. The chrysalis breaks, the amniotic fluid oozes from the fissure, and the amber eye opens, unblinking in a shadowless world.

And now the stairs leading down, narrow, serpentine, dark, like those in Warthrop’s dream. The gas jets had been turned on below, and the light like a creeping seaside fog rose up to greet me. The Beastie Bin, the House of Monsters, Kodesh Hakodashim, the Holy of Holies, and Isaacson saying You’ll be an exhibit there one day.

Voices floated along the dusty passageways, twisting around corners, squeezing between the crates and cases that listed precariously against the walls, the words muffled and indistinct, two voices, male, one undeniably Warthrop’s, the other harder to place, though it sounded vaguely familiar. I slowed as I came close. I could hear something else now—someone else—a soft mewling, the unmistakable moans of a human being in agony.

And then I heard Samuel Isaacson say, “How much longer?”

Then Warthrop: “Impossible to predict. Hours, days . . . it could come in a few minutes; it may never come. Fetch me the syringe. Let’s take another sample.”

“Perhaps we should end it now, sir. The suffering, it’s . . .”

“Would you play God, Isaacson? I am a scientist: a student of nature, not its master. Ours is to observe and record, not judge and execute. Is she doomed? Most likely. There is no remedy, no antidote . . . here, take this now and set it over there on the bench. Another hot cloth now, and step lively.”