The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(26)

Chapter Ten: “I Am the One”

We departed the next morning for New York. I fell asleep on the train, waking upon our arrival at Grand Central Depot with my head in the crook of the doctor’s arm, dizzy and disoriented and feeling sick to my stomach. I’d had a horrible dream in which the monstrumologist had been demonstrating to a group of school children the proper method of removing a brain from a human body—my body.

We dropped our luggage at the Plaza Hotel (save for the doctor’s black valise, into which Warthrop had packed, with exquisite care, the nidus ex magnificum) and left immediately for the Society’s headquarters. As our hansom rattled south along Broadway, the monstrumologist cradled the valise in his lap like a anxious mother with her newborn child. He chided our driver over the slightest delay and eyed every passerby, cart, and carriage suspiciously, as if they were bandits intent on separating him from his precious cargo.

“I am loath to part with it, Will Henry,” he confessed to me. “There is only one other of its kind in the world—the Lakshadweep nidus, named after the place of its discovery in 1851, the Lakshadweep Islands off the Indian coast. If something should happen to it…” He shuddered. “Tragic. It must be safeguarded at all costs, and if I cannot trust him, then no one can be trusted.”

“Dr. von Helrung?” I guessed.

He shook his head. “Professor Ainesworth.”

He was very old, the curator of the Monstrumarium, very cross most of the time, and very hard of hearing. He was also quite vain, a fault that prohibited him from admitting to his near-deafness, which in turn produced his foul temper. Constant disagreement over what was said rendered the old man altogether disagreeable. He had a habit of shaking the head of his cane (fashioned from the bleached skull of a long-extinct creature, a noisome little beast called an Ocelli carpendi that he had nicknamed Oedipus) in the face of any who dared raise their voice to him. Since raising one’s voice was the only way to talk to him, there was not a single monstrumologist—Warthrop included—who had not been the recipient of what one wit had dubbed “the full Adolphus.” The heavy chin thrusts forward; the bushy white eyebrows meet over the bridge of the bulbous, slightly pink, pockmarked nose; the muttonchops bristle and contort in cottony confusion, as a cornered cat’s fur; and then up comes the gnarled fist clutching the walnut cane, at the end of which, waving an inch from your nose, the carpendi’s two-inch fangs and the sightless glare of its oversize ocular cavities.

We found Professor Ainesworth in his musty basement office, perched upon a tall stool behind the massive desk upon which Everests of paper rose halfway to the ceiling. This after we negotiated the serpentine path through books, boxes, and crates—shipments waiting to be catalogued and stocked in the Society’s house of curiosities on the corner of Twenty-second Street and Broadway. On the wall behind the irascible old man hung the Society’s coat of arms, inscribed with the motto Nil timendum est—“fear nothing.”

“There are no children allowed within the Monstrumarium!” he shouted at my master without preamble.

“But this is Will Henry, Adolphus,” replied Warthrop in a loud but respectful tone. “You remember Will Henry.”

“Impossible!” shouted Adolphus. “You can’t be a member until you’re eighteen. I know that much, Pellinore Warthrop!”

“He is my assistant,” protested the monstrumologist.

“You watch your language with me, Doctor! He’ll have to leave immediately.” He shook the head of his cane at me. “Immediately!”

Warthrop placed a hand on my shoulder and said in a voice only slightly softer than a shout, “Iehind the Will Henry, Adolphus! You remember—last November. You saved his life!”

“Oh, I remember very well!” cried the old Welshman. “He’s the reason we have the rule!” He wagged a gnarled finger at my face. “Poking around in places where children shouldn’t poke, weren’t you, little man?”

The doctor’s fingers squeezed the back of my neck, and I, as if his puppet, nodded quickly in response.

“I will keep him under the strictest supervision,” promised the doctor. “He shan’t stray an inch from my sight.”

Before Professor Ainesworth could protest further, Warthrop placed the black valise on the desk. Adolphus grunted, popped the clasps, pried open the top, and peered inside.

“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well, well!”

“Yes, Adolphus” returned the doctor. “Nidus ex—”

“Oh-ho, do you really think so, Dr. Warthrop?” interrupted the curator, clicking his teeth. He shoved his gnarled hands into a pair of gloves and reached inside the bag. The doctor stiffened reflexively, perhaps apprehensive that the arthritic hands might damage his precious cargo.

Adolphus pushed the empty bag aside with his forearm and gingerly lowered the gruesome nest onto the desktop. He produced a large magnifying glass from his coat pocket and proceeded to inspect the thing up close.

“I have already thoroughly examined the specimen for—,” began the doctor, before Ainesworth cut him off.

“Have you now! Hmmmm. Yes. Have you? Hmmmmmmmm.”

His eye, magnified comically large by the glass, roamed over the specimen. His false teeth clicked—a nervous habit. Adolphus was quite proud of his dentures and somewhat emotionally—as well as biologically—attached to them. They’d been fashioned from the teeth of his son, Alfred Ainesworth, who had been a colonel in the Union army. He’d fallen in the battle of Antietam, and his teeth had been rescued after his death and sent to Adolphus, who thenceforward proudly—and literally—sported a hero’s smile.