The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(24)

“You would have done what already?”

“Mr. Kendall, Will Henry. We must…” He paused as if searching for the right word. “Resolve this issue of Mr. Kendall.”

We must resolve this issue of Mr. Kendall.

By this the monstrumologist did not mean notifying the family of his demise or making arrangements for returning the body to its native England for burial.

I don’t know why I would think for an instant that it did. How would one go about explaining to his loved ones—or to the British authorities, for that matter—a badly decomposed corpse with a fresh gunshot wound to the head? There was also the sticky matter of the potential virulence of the contagion. As Warthrop put it, “It could be the spark that lights a conflagration that would make the plague seem like a campfire in comparison.”

No, we spent the entirety of that first evening of my recovery in the basement laboratory, dismembering Wymond Kendall.

The monstrumologist wanted samples of every major organ, including the brain (he was very excited to have a look at Mr. Kendall’s brain), which he removed in toto after sawing off the top of his head. I was forced to hold it—an awkward proposition given the thick bandages on my left hand—while the doctor severed the medulla. I had never held a human brain before. Its delicacy surprised me; I thought it would be much heavier.

“The average human brain weighs approximately three pounds, Will Henry,” the doctor said in response to my startled expression. “Compare that to the total weight of our skin, around six pounds, and you have a fact that is as compelling as it is unnerving.”

He took the three-pound seat of Kendall’s consciousness from me and said, “Observe the frontal lobe, Will Henry. The sulci—these deep crevices you see covering the rest of the brain—have all disappeared. The thinking part of his brain is as smooth as a billiard ball.”

I asked him what that meant.

“Well, we may assume it is not a congenital defect, though he did not strike me as all that bright—more gyri than sulci—Sorry, a bit of anatomical tomfoolery there. We may assume it is a manifestation of the toxin. This aligns perfectly with the literature, which claims the victim, in the final stages, becomes little more than a beast, incapable of reason but fully capable of a murderous, cannibalistic rage. Certain indigenous tribes of the Lakshadweep Islands report whole villages wiped out by a single exposure to the pwdre ser, until the last man standing literally eats himself to death.”

The doctor laughed dryly, absently caressing the smooth tissue of Kendall’s brain, and added, “I mean he eats himself to death. When everyone else is dead or has run off, he turns upon himself and feeds from his own body, until he has either bled to death or contracted an infection. Well, you’ve seen the contents of Mr. Kendall’s stomach; I don’t believe he swallowed his tongue by accident.”

He directed me to fill a large specimen jar with formaldehyde, into which he then carefully lowered the brain. As I was heaving the jar onto the shf, my eye was drawn to a nearby container, one I had not seen before. It took a moment for me to recognize what floated inside the amber fluid.

“Is that…”

“It is,” he answered.

“You kept it?”

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

“But why did you—What are you going to do with it?”

“I thought I’d rip a page from Mrs. Shelley’s book and construct another boy, one who won’t pester me with questions, who refrains from getting seriously injured at the most inopportune time, and who does not see it as his mission in life to judge my every decision as if appointed by God to be my conscience.” His attendant smile was quick and humorless. “It’s an important piece of evidence. Forgive me. I thought that would go without saying. When I have the time—which at the moment I most certainly do not—I’ll perform a thorough analysis to determine whether you were actually infected.”

I stared at my finger floating in the fluid for a long moment. It is exceedingly odd to see a piece of yourself apart from yourself.

“If I wasn’t, I don’t want to know,” I said.

He started to say something, and then stopped himself. He nodded curtly. “I understand.”

The monstrumologist next opened up Mr. Kendall’s torso to remove the major organs. He found numerous sacklike growths—“omental cystic lesions,” he called them—lining the interior of the stomach. He gently pressed into one with the tip of his scalpel, and it popped open with a barely audible pompf!, spilling a clear, thick fluid with the consistency of mucus.

After the organs had been preserved and properly labeled, it was time to address, in Warthrop’s words, “the final disposition.”

“The bone saw, please, Will Henry. No, the large one there.”

He began by removing Mr. Kendall’s hollowed-out head. “The ground is much too hard for us to bury the body,” he said as he sawed through the neck. “And I can’t afford to wait until the spring thaw. We’ll have to burn it, Will Henry.”

“What if someone comes looking for him?”

“Who? He fled quickly, in a state of extreme fear. Perhaps he told no one. But let’s assume that he did. What do they know? They know he was coming; he did not have the opportunity or the means to inform them what happened once he arrived. Should the authorities ask questions, I can always say I never met the man, that he may have set out to find me but in the end failed in his quest.”