The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(47)

It was late in the day when I found it—no time to read it before the library closed—and there was a strict no-lending policy toward nonmembers. So I filched it. Tucked it under the back of my coat and walked out, right past Mr. Vestergaard, the head librarian, whom most monstrumologists called (behind his back) the Prince of Leaves—a rather weak bit of whimsy, I thought, but a monstrumologist’s sense of humor, if he had one at all, tended toward the macabre. Efforts at anything lighter of heart invariably fell flat.

Though the slim volume had been composed when Warthrop was only eighteen—a mere five years older than I when I discovered it—as part of his final examination before the Admitting Committee of the Society, as a dissertation of sorts, the writing was remarkably sophisticated, if characteristically prolix. The title alone made my eyes glaze over: Of Uncertain Origin: The Case for Interdisciplinary Openness and Intellectual Collectivism Between All Disciplines of the Natural Sciences, Including Studies in the Field of Aberrant Biology, with Extended Notes upon the Development of Canonical Principles from Descartes to the Present Day.

But I read it—most of it, anyway—because the subject matter wasn’t the thing I was after. Reading his words was the nearest I could get to hearing his voice. The Warthropian diction was there, the authoritative tone, the rigorous—some might say ruthless—logic. Every line held echoes of the older Warthrop’s voice, and reading them, sometimes aloud, late at night in my room, when the house was quiet and it was just Warthrop’s words and me, opened a door for him to return and talk a little while. I caught myself murmuring after certain passages, “Really, sir?” and “Is that so, Dr. Warthrop?” as if we were back in the library at Harrington Lane and he was boring me with some arcane text written a hundred years ago by someone I’d never heard of, a form of mental cruelty that sometimes lasted for hours.

The night of my near-collapse in Washington Square Park, I picked up the book again, because I could not sleep, and I thought, with a little bit of spite, that the book would have definitely found a wider audience if it had been marketed to insomniacs. I opened it to a random page, and my eye fell upon this passage:

A thing is either true (real) or it is not. There is no such thing as a half-truth in science. A scientific proposition is like a candle. The candle can be said to have two states or modes—lit and unlit. That is, a candle is either one or the other; it cannot be both; it cannot be “half-lit.” If a thing is true, to put it colloquially, it is true through and through. If false, then false through and through.

“Is that so, Dr. Warthrop?” I asked him. “What if the candle has a wick at both ends? One is lit, the other not. Could not one say in that hypothetical circumstance that the candle is indeed both lit and unlit, and your argument false through and through?” I chortled sleepily to myself.

You cannot change the central element of an analogy to make it false, Will Henry, his voice spoke into my ear. Is this why you’re reading this old monograph of mine? To make yourself feel better at my expense? After all I’ve done for you!

“And to me. Let’s not forget that.”

How could I? I am constantly reminded of it.

“I’m doomed, like Mr. Kendall. Just doomed.”

What do you mean?

“Even when you’re gone, I can’t get rid of you.”

I don’t see how that is analogous to Mr. Kendall’s fate.

“Once touched, infected. Just tell me, please, if you are dead. If you’re dead, there is hope for me.”

I’m right here. How could I be dead? Really, Will Henry, was there some childhood accident of which I’m not aware? Did you fall down a flight of stairs, perhaps? Did your mother drop you as an infant or suffer a fall while she carried you in her womb?

“Why do you insult me all the time?” I asked him. “To make yourself feel better at my expense? After all I’ve done for you!”

What have you done for me?

“Everything! I do everything for you. I wash and cook and launder and run errands and—and everything except wipe your arse!” I laughed. My heart felt thrillingly light, no heavier than a grain of sand. “Arse wipe.”

Will Henry, did I hear you call me a name?

“I would never call you a name—to your face. I was remembering something Adolphus said. He mistook ‘Arkwright’ for ‘arse wipe.’”

Ah, Arkwright. That’s the perfect alternative to my candle analogy.

“I don’t understand.”

If you will be still and listen, I will explain. Thomas Arkwright is the candle. He is either who he claims to be or he is not. He cannot be both. Either von Helrung is right or you are. You cannot both be.

“I know that, Dr. Warthrop.”

Didn’t I just now, no more than thirty seconds ago, ask you to be still and listen? Seriously, Will Henry—perhaps an accident in the stable? Or milking the irascible family cow? Let us assume for a moment that von Helrung is correct. Mr. Thomas Arkwright is who he claims to be, a brilliant young man with a passion for all things monstrumological, who happens to be enamored with a certain doctor of natural philosophy, so enamored, in fact, that he writes not once, not twice, not three times, but a total thirteen times, begging for a position to study with this modern-day Prometheus, this colossus that bestrides the scientific landscape.

What is required for this one proposition to be true? That you, the said Prometheus’s arse wiper, were so neglectful of your ancillary duties as file clerk that you missed his application not once, not twice, not three times, but a total of thirteen times. That, or you are simply a liar and destroyed them, lest you be replaced by a more convivial or efficient or passionate arse wiper, one who takes his arse wiping seriously, who considers a finely wiped arse a work of art.