The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(52)

“Ahhh.”

“Would you like another?” von Helrung asked.

“It does help somewhat.”

“Then, you shall have another. You deserve it, Thomas. You deserve all you can drink, to the last drop.”

When Thomas Arkwright came to, an hour later, he was no longer in Abram von Helrung’s cozy parlor on Fifth Avenue. Where he found himself was neither cozy nor on Fifth Avenue.

I wonder what he noticed first. Was it the strange smell of moist air mixed with chemicals and the subtle undertones of decay? Or was it how the world had gone gray—gray walls, gray ceiling, gray floor—and was covered in the grimy residua of the smoke from oil lamps. Or did he notice the dust not yet captured by the walls, lazily floating in the tiny chamber’s atmosphere? Perhaps. But I suspect he first noticed the ropes.

“Well, baby’s up from his nap,” murmured Jacob Torrance.

Arkwright jerked in the chair and, as he was bound tightly hand and foot to it, nearly toppled over. He squinted in the weak light of the single kerosene lamp on the table behind Torrance, who stood in front of him, a six-foot-six hulking shadow, with face hidden and the voice of God’s avenging angel come to bring justice to the wicked.

And in me the thing unwinding, a swift, fierce thrill when I saw the fear in Thomas Arkwright’s eyes.

“Who are you?” Arkwright asked in a remarkably steady voice. Sound can play tricks in the underground crypts of the Monstrumarium. It careens from the walls, skitters down the serpentine passageways, smacks back and forth, ceiling to floor, wall to wall and back again. Did I hear the faintest trace of an accent far removed from the shores of Long Island?

“I’m the man who’s going to kill you,” Torrance answered evenly. “Unless Will would like the honor.”

“Will!” He peered into the murk until his eyes fell upon me. I willed myself not to look away. “Where is von Helrung?”

“I killed him,” Torrance answered. “No, I didn’t. Did I? What do you think?”

“Where am I? Why am I tied to this chair?” The drug still floated in his blood. He was fighting it, willing his tongue to mold the words.

“What, you don’t recognize the smell? I thought you’d been here before. And you know why you are tied to that chair. So you’re even now: two questions to which you don’t know the answer, and two to which you do. You are only allowed five, so I would suggest that you ask one from the first category.”

“The last one I don’t—I didn’t know the answer to. What—what has happened? I really don’t understand.… Will, can you tell me what’s happened?”

“You’re asking him because you haven’t liked my answers. That isn’t my fault.”

“Very well, then! I shall ask you: Why do you want to kill me?”

“I didn’t say I wanted to. I said I was going to. I’m not a monster, you know; I just study them.” He shrugged out of his jacket, handed it to me. He pulled out his Colt revolver.

“This is my gun. I named it Sylvia. It’s a long story.”

He flipped open the cylinder and held it a foot from Arkwright’s aristocratic nose.

“She is empty, see?”

He dug into his vest pocket and removed a single bullet.

“A bullet,” he said, holding it up.

He slid it into a chamber and slapped the cylinder closed. Then with no further preamble he stepped forward and pressed the muzzle against Arkwright’s finely formed forehead.

Our captive did not flinch. His gray eyes looked unblinking into Torrance’s face. “Go on; pull the trigger. You don’t frighten me.”

“I don’t want to frighten you,” Torrance replied. He dropped the gun onto the bound man’s lap and said, “I want to tell you a story. It’s one of my favorite stories, written by a very good friend of mine who happens to be the world’s reigning hot dog-eating champion. He ate two and a half hot dogs, plus buns, in sixty seconds. It’s hard to make a decent living eating hot dogs, so he turned to writing—which pays a little better but wins not half the glory of achieving two and a half wieners in a minute—plus the buns. It’s the buns that’s impressive. The story’s pretty famous; you’ve probably heard of it.

“Once upon a time there was a very mean king. He had a beautiful daughter whom, despite the fact that he was very mean, he loved very much. Well, one day this beautiful daughter of his disobeys him and falls in love with a fellow well below her station—a commoner, in other words. This made the mean king very, very angry, and that’s a bad spot to be in if you’re this princess’s paramour. The king threw the poor sucker into the deepest, dankest, darkest dungeon—not too different from this place. He was just going to kill him, but the mean king was an ol’ softie when it came to his daughter, who was just as heartbroken as Juliet over her lover’s misfortune—that is, his being born out of the wrong womb.

“So the mean king doesn’t kill him, but boy, does he set him up good. He plops him down in this big closed-off arena, like a coliseum, the kind the Romans had, and in the arena are two identical doors. Behind one door is a very good-looking woman—not a real looker like the princess, but several degrees from not bad. Behind the other is a ferocious man-eating tiger. The prisonr must choose one door—no coercion, entirely up to him. If he opens the door that hides the lady, he must marry her—the till-death-do-us-part kind of marrying, or the mean king will kill him. If he opens the door to the tiger… Well, you can picture the outcome.