The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(127)

“But do you relly think there ever was a Pellinore Warthrop?” I could detect a smile in his voice. Will Henry’s words popped into my head at the question. I was pursuing the one I had lost.

“I’m beginning to think there’s some underlying allegory here,” I said carefully. “At the very beginning of the diary, Will Henry says Warthrop has been dead for forty years. If Warthrop ‘died’ around 1912, that means Will began the journals around the same time the house in Auburn burned down, right after he lost everything—not just his sole companion in life but everything he had. Maybe the journals are some weird way of dealing with all that.”

“So he invents a past populated by monsters to understand the monsters of his past?”

“Well, it’s just a theory. I’m no psychiatrist.”

“Maybe we need to get one involved.”

For whom? I wondered silently. Will Henry or me?

I lay awake in bed that night, thinking of fire—the first fire that had yanked his parents away from him and the second fire that had claimed everything else. Fire destroys, he had written, but it also purifies. Here was a man who had lost everything—not once but twice, if that element of the journal was to be believed. He must have questioned, like John Kearns, if our colossal human error was in praying to the wrong god. Perhaps the folios were his attempt at making sense of the senseless, the unseen monster that is always there, the Faceless One that lurks one ten-thousandth of an inch outside our range of vision.

While I pondered that possibility, my heart began to race, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to simply turn away… to not finish the three remaining journals… to return all of them to the director and drop my investigation, or whatever you wanted to call it. A little voice warned me I was heading down a path where I did not want to go, where I should not go. I had the sensation of something coming unwound inside me, something that was an intimate part of me and yet somehow totally foreign and unrecognizable, and those two parts pulled against each other with enough force to break the world in half. Will Henry had called it das Ungeheuer, the monster, and he had promised me I would come to understand what he meant.

He had kept his promise.