The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(62)

I scooped him from the floor and cradled his body in my arms like he was a child. He pressed his freshly washed head beneath my chin.

His hand reached up and touched gently my cheek. “You have always been indispensable to me.”

I kissed his sweet-smelling hair. The ice of Judecca cracks, soft as a feather falling. Creator forgives creation and creation absolves creator.

There is forgiveness. There is justice. There is mercy.

There is room, after all.

I will raise you up. I will not suffer you to drown.

And the beast that waits for us in the final descent.

I turned one last time and started down the stairs.

THREE

Oct. 23, 1911

Dear Will,

The marshal has issued his final report, of copy of which I have taken the liberty of enclosing with this letter. As you will see, it concludes that the fire was “of suspicious, if undetermined, origins.” I sorely wish that I had a more satisfactory answer, not only for your peace of mind but for my own as well. Pellinore was not a dear friend, nor even, I would say, a particularly close one, but he was a singular man, and I daresay the world will not see another like him for a hundred generations.

I have been to the site twice now, the second time in honor of your specific request, and I am sorry to report I can find nothing of any salvageable value—there is nothing left of the house but the chimney—nothing, that is, beyond the contents of the storage shed and old livery, including that fine old automobile, which you stated in your latest letter that you had no interest in.

The memorial service was quite moving, if not the best attended. I would have been overjoyed to have shared with you the melancholy of that final farewell, but I understand all too well the demands of your business. P. would too, I think.

My sole regret—and do not think I say this to add any burden to your loss—is that you were unable to get away last month to see him. No, that burden is mine, for you are there and I was always here, and now my conscience torments me for not having banged on that door until he answered. My theory of the case is that the fire began when the old curmudgeon forgot to pay his power bill and reverted to kerosene and candle wax for his illumination.

Perhaps when you have a few days to spare from your labors, you can make it back to your old stomping grounds. I don’t think you’ve been back for two years or more. It would do this old man’s heart good to see you, and I feel I owe you a personal apology for neglecting the man who was so very dear to you.

As always, I remain

Robert Morgan

P.S. If you’ve truly no interest in the Lozier, I might be interested in taking it off your hands. Not as a gift, of course! I am willing to pay a reasonable price for it.

FOUR

These have been the secrets I kept.

Old man in a dry season.

Boy in a tattered hat.

And the man in the stained white coat, monstrous hunter of nameless things.

The one who blessed me, the one who cursed me.

Who raised me upon his shoulders that I, the dark tide of his making, might carry him down.

Remember me, he said. When all else has been forgotten.

A small fortune was mine afterward. I was all he had and all else he had came to me.

Where did I go? Up and down, to and fro. I wandered the earth, the indispensable companion companionless. I fled the States, ended up on the Continent in time for the monster that digested thirty-seven million souls in its fiery gut. After the war, I bought a little house on the southern coast of France. I hired a local girl to cook and clean. She was young and pretty, and I may have been in love with her.

In the warm summer afternoons we would go for walks on the beach. I liked the ocean. From the shore you could see the edge of the world.

“Let me ask you, Aimée. It is it round or is it a plate?”

And she would laugh at me, slipping her arm through mine. She thought I was joking.

And I was happy for a time.

Her father had died at Verdun. Her lover at the Somme. She met someone new, and when he proposed, she asked if I would give her away. I agreed, though I was heartbroken. I did not hire another girl after she left. I packed up the house and returned to the States.

I ended up back in New York for a time. I still had my apartment there. I wrote some. I drank more. I wandered the streets. Where the old opera house had stood there was now a bank. A different kind of society. A different breed of hunters. Monstrumology was dead, but all of us are, and always will be, monstrumologists. In the afternoons you could usually find me in the park, just another lonely man on a bench among pigeons. I was still caught, you see, inside the glass jar, within the amber eye. You are my memory, he had told me night after sleepless night. And that was what I became: the immortal sack, Judecca’s ice.

The twenties ended with a great crash, and one day I picked up the paper to read about a man who had jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge after losing his entire fortune. His name was Nathaniel Bates. The notice included the particulars of the memorial service.

I was an accomplished hunter and tracker, and was sure she hadn’t seen me, but after her father was laid in the earth she spotted me beneath a sycamore tree. Years had gone by, she was no longer young, but the blue of her eyes was undiluted, pure all the way down.

“William James Henry,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve aged a day.”

“There is something I must tell you,” I said.