The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(6)

“Is there something you want, sir?”

“Why, no, I don’t want anything. Why do you ask?” He flicked his finger at the chair by the bed. I sank into it, my head pounding, loose upon my shoulders. “What is the matter with you? You look terrible. Are you sick? James never mentioned that you were a sickly child. Are you sickly?”

“Not that I know of, sir.”

“Not that you know of? Wouldn’t that be something even a simpleton would know? How old are you, anyway?”

“I am almost eleven, sir.”

He grunted, sizing me up. “Small for your age.”

“I’m very fast. I’m the fastest player on my team.”

“Team? What sort of team?”

“Baseball, sir.”

“Baseball! Do you like sports?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What else do you like? Do you hunt?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Father keeps promising he will take me . . .” I paused, slamming head-on into another promise that would never be kept. Warthrop’s eyes bored into mine, glittering with that strange, unnerving, backlit glow. He’d wondered if I was sick, but he was the one who looked sick: dark circles beneath his eyes, hollow-cheeked and unshaven.

“Why do you cry, Will Henry? Do you think your tears will bring them back?”

They coursed down my cheeks, empty stygian vessels, useless. It took everything in me not to throw my body across his and beg for comfort. Beg for it! The simplest of human gestures.

I did not understand him then.

I do not understand him still.

“You must harden yourself,” he told me sternly. “Monstrumology is not butterfly collecting. If you are to stay with me, you must become accustomed to such things. And worse.”

“Am I to stay with you, sir?”

His gaze cut down to my bones. I wanted to look away; I could not look away.

“What is your desire?”

My bottom lip quivered. “I have nowhere else to go.”

“Do not pity yourself, Will Henry,” he said, the man whose own self-pity rose to operatic heights. “There is no room in science for pity or grief or any sentimental thing.”

And the child answered, “I’m not a scientist.”

To which the man replied, “And I am not a nursemaid. What do you desire?”

To sit at my mother’s table. To smell the warm pie cooling on the rack. To watch her tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. To hear her say it isn’t time, Willy, you must wait for it to cool; it isn’t time. And the whole world, down to the last inch of it, to smell like apples.

“I could send you away,” he went on: an offer, a threat. “There is probably not a person in all of North America more poorly constituted to raise a child. Why, I find most people unbearable, and children hardly rise to that level. You may expect the worst kind of cruelty from me, Will Henry: cruelty of the unintended kind. I am not a hateful man—I am merely the opposite, and the opposite of hate is not love, you know.”

He smiled grimly at my puzzled expression. He knew—knew!—that the heartbroken waif before him had no capacity to understand what he was saying. He, the patient gardener, was planting seeds that would take years to germinate. But the roots would dig deep, and the crop would be impervious to drought or pestilence or flood, and, in the fullness of time, the harvest would be abundant.

For bitterness does not envy pleasure. Bitterness finds pleasure in the spot from which bitterness springs. Younger than I when he lost his mother, banished by a cold and unforgiving father, the monstrumologist understood what I had lost. He had lost it too.

In me, himself.

And in himself, me.

Time is a line

But we are circles.

THREE

Sept. 19, 1911

Dear Will,

I would not write to you if the welfare of your former employer had not become a matter of some concern. As you know, I have been dutifully checking on him since last you were here. I am afraid things have taken a turn for the worse.

Bare bough, gray sky, dead leaf. And the old house glowering in the twilight gloom.

I bang upon the door. “Warthrop! Warthrop, it’s me, William.” And then, with an inward moan, “Will Henry!”

I would not trouble you if I did not fear for his welfare.

Cold wind and cobwebs and windows encrusted with grime and warped wood the color of ash. Is he holed up in the basement? Or collapsed in his room? I dug into my pockets for the key. Then cursed: I must have left it in New York.

“Warthrop!” Pounding on the door. “Snap to and answer, damn you!”

The door flew open with a high-pitched screech of its rusted hinges, like the cry of a wounded animal, and there he was, or what was left of him. Face the ash gray of the weathered siding. Eyes vacant as the twilight sky. He’d lost more weight since I’d last seen him, skin pulled taut over bone, lips colorless and thin and stretched over the yellowed teeth that seemed overly large in his emaciation. In one bony hand he clutched a stained and tattered handkerchief; in the other, his old revolver, which was pointed directly at the center of my forehead.

We stared at each other for a long moment, saying nothing, from either side of the threshold—and either side of the universe.

He will not answer my calls. He will not come to the door. Before I notify the authorities, I thought I should inform you. You are, in the most liberal sense, the only family he has.