The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(7)

“Warthrop,” I said. “What the devil are you doing?”

His mouth came open, and he said, “Looking at him.”

And then he fell.

I carried him upstairs, across a sea of dust so thick it eddied and swirled in my wake. The monstrumologist seemed to weigh no more than an eleven-year-old boy. To his room, where I laid him on the bed. Pulled off his shoes. Covered him with a blanket. Collapsed in the chair, the same chair in which I had sat twenty-four years ago. How many times had I sat in this chair while he railed and whined, lectured and questioned and sliced me to my bones like one of his horrid specimens? His breath was uneven and short. His eyes jittered and jerked beneath the charcoal-colored lids. As if he had not slept since I left him, as if he’d been waiting for me to return that he might rest.

“Are you asleep?” I said aloud. My voice hung like fog in the deadened air. He made no reply. “Go to hell,” I said. “You probably put Morgan up to writing that letter. What would you have me do, Warthrop? There is nothing here for me. Nothing for you, either, but that isn’t my responsibility anymore. Well, it never was. I was a child; what choice did I have? You could have beaten me every day and locked me in a closet at night; I still would have stayed.”

I shrugged out of my overcoat, bundled it in my lap. Shivered. Put the coat back on. My breath congealed in the icy air.

“What do I owe you? Nothing. Whatever I owe, I’ve repaid the debt a hundredfold. I did not ask for this. I did not ask for your . . . unintended cruelties.”

He does not look old in the preternatural gloom. He looks like a child. A child who has been starved, a child who has seen things no child should ever see. I don’t think I would have been shocked to see him clutching a tattered hat two sizes too small for him.

“But here I am. In this same damnable chair. ‘Snap to, Will Henry!’ And here I am, indispensable as always. ‘Yes, Dr. Warthrop. Right away, Dr. Warthrop!’ God damn you, anyway.”

I leave him. It is too cold, colder inside than out; he must have failed to pay the heating bill, or the furnace is broken again. I flip the light switch in the hall to make sure the power hasn’t been shut off. Then downstairs, pausing to scoop up the revolver from the floor, and into the kitchen, a disaster of spoiled food and dirty pots and plates and half-filled cups of tea growing mold. I hear something scratching beneath the sink. Rats, probably. Turn toward the basement door, through which I must pass to inspect the furnace, though the basement is the last place I wish to go. The basement is where I lost the last of my childhood—and left a part of it. He kept it all those years, the finger he chopped off with a butcher knife, floating in a jar of formaldehyde.

You kept it?

Well, I didn’t want to just throw it out with the trash.

He did it to save my life. Another unintentional cruelty.

The door has been padlocked. Recently. The lock looks brand-new. I don’t remember it being there the last time I visited.

Back upstairs. He’s moved not an inch. I pull down the blanket and gingerly go through his pockets. Empty. Warthrop, you old conspiracist, where have you hidden the key? And what do you have locked up in the basement?

I cover him, return to the chair, turning the old revolver in my hands. I check the chamber. Empty. I laugh softly. The irony is as thick as the dead leaves upon the stoop.

“I won’t come here again,” I tell him. “This is the last time. You’ve made the bed; sleep in it. And before you judge me, consider that in all the history of the world, no maker has ever despised his own creation.”

“What of Satan?” A hair-thin whisper from the bed. So he is awake. I suspected as much.

“Satan was the destroyer,” I answer. “He created nothing.”

“I am speaking of his creator. The all-loving one who imprisoned him in ice in the lowermost circle of the pit. Satan was his, too: ‘If he was once as beautiful as he is ugly now . . .’ ”

“Oh, what is it this time, Warthrop?” I moan. “What are you dying from today?”

The thin lips draw back in a leering grin. My stomach turns at the sight. “Oh, the usual thing, Will Henry. The usual thing.”

FOUR

Will Henreeeee!

And down I would go in darkness. And he would be curled upon the bed, clutching the covers like a child awakened by an unspeakable nightmare. And the boy in the chair, yawning, dry-mouthed, hardly acknowledged most of the time. It wasn’t the boy’s company he desired. It was an audience. Any audience would do.

FIVE

“Why is it so cold in here?” I asked him.

“Is it? I don’t feel it.”

“When was the last time you had something to eat? Or a bath? Or a change of clothes? Do you think it makes one iota of difference to me, Warthrop? Do you think I waste a single moment wondering what you’re doing to yourself in this . . . this mausoleum you call a house? Well, don’t just lie there grinning at me like some battlefield corpse. Answer!”

“I have found it, Will Henry.”

“Found what?”

“The thing itself.”

“What? What thing have you found? Speak plainly. I haven’t the time for riddles.”

His eyes burn bright—I know that look, and something deep in my chest aches, like a man in the desert who sees water in the distance or one who turns a corner on a crowded city street and bumps into a long-lost friend.