The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(10)

Kendall’s eyes fluttered open, closed again. I noticed the doctor had donned a pair of gloves.

“Did you open it, Kendall? Kendall! Did you touch what was inside?”

He grabbed the unconscious man by the wrists, turned Kendall’s hands this way and that, and then bent low to sniff his fingers. He pulled up Kendall’s eyelids and squinted deep into the unseeing orbs.

“What is it?” I asked.

“At least three have touched it. Was one you, Kendall? Was it you?”

The man answered with a soft moan, deep in his drug-induced dream. Warthrop snorted with frustration, turned on his heel, and marched from the room, pausing at the door to bark at me to remain where I was.

“Watch him, Will Henry, and call me at once if he wakes. And, do not touch him under any circumstances!”

I thought he would race back to the basement, but he fled in the opposite direction, and presently I heard him in the library, yanking old weathered tomes from the shelves and depositing them on the large table with thunderous wallops. I could hear him muttering to himself in agitation, but could not make out the words.

I crept down the hall to the library door. He was standing with his back to me, hunched over a leather-bound book. He stiffened suddenly, sensing my presence, and whirled around.

“What?” he cried. “What do you want now?”

“Did you—Could I—”

“Did I what? Could you what?”

“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”

“I told you already what you could do,Will Henry. Yet here you are. Why are you here, Will Henry?”

“I thought you might want me to—”

“Interrupt my work? Hector me with your incessant sycophantic sniveling? It is not as if I asked you to construct a perpetual motion machine or juggle teacups while you stood on your pointy little head. My distinct memory is that I asked you to watch Mr. Kendall—that is all and nothing else—but you seem incapable of following even that simple injunction!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, fighting back the dueling desires to flee and to throw myself upon the floor in a childish fit. I backed out of the doorway and returned to the parlor. Kendall had not moved a muscle, but mine were moving quite freely, particularly the ones around my mouth.

“I hate him,” I whispered to my incognizant witness. “Oh, how I hate him! ‘Snap to, Will Henry, snap to.’ Why don’t you snap to, Warthrop—straight to hell!”

It was so unfair! I had not asked for this. My father had gladly served the monstrumologist, but my own servitude was more of the involuntary kind, the result of tragic circumstances with which I, at thirteen, had yet fully to come to terms. If not for the man who had just unfairly and savagely upbraided me, my father and mother would still be alive and I would not know a scintilla of the dark and dusty interior of 425 Harrington Lane. Perhaps the monstrumologist was not directly responsible for their deaths, but monstrumology certainly was. Oh, that accursed “philosophy”! That noisome “science” that had doomed my parents—and now me.

The acrid stench of rotting flesh… the sightless orbs of some foul creature staring up at me from the necropsy table… the unutterable horror of Pellinore Warthrop cleaning human flesh from bloody fangs as he whistled with the happiness of a man lost in the thing he loves…

While the boy he’d inherited, the boy who had watched his parents perish in a fire for which he, Warthrop, had supplied the metaphorical match, stood in half-swoon close by, ever the faithful, indispensable companion, feet like ice in blood-flecked shoes on a cold stone floor…

And little by little that boy’s soul, his human animus, growing cold, going numb, atrophying…

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.

Do you know what this means?

I do.

Year after year, month after month, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, second after second, in the company of the monstrumologist, something chews at the soul, like the churning surf shapes the shoreline, eroding the edifice, exposing the bones, revealing the skeletal structure beneath our sense of human exceptionalism.

When I first came to live with him, it was part of our dissection protocol to have a bucket by the table so I might unload the contents of my stomach—it was inevitable. After a year at his side, the pail was no longer necessary. I could reach my hands into the putrid remains of an organism’s corruption as casually as a young girl plucksichsies in the meadow.

I could feel it as I held vigil in that parlor, the loosening of something bound tight inside me, an unraveling that both thrilled and terrified. I had no name for it, not then, not at thirteen, this thing unwinding inside me. It was part of me—the most fundamental part, perhaps—and it was apart from me, and the tension between them, the me and not-me, could break the world in half.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft…

I don’t mean to speak in riddles. I am an old man now. The old speak plainly; it is our prerogative.

If I would speak plainly, I would call it das Ungeheuer, but that is only my name for the me/not-me, the unwinding thing that compelled and repulsed me, the thing in me—and the thing in you— that whispers like thunder, I AM.

You may have a different name for it.

But you’ve seen it. You cannot be human and not see it, feel its pull, hear it whisper like thunder. You would flee from it, but it is you, and so where might you run? You would embrace it, but it is not-you, and so how might you hold it?