The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(56)

“Shut up and listen!” he roared. “Just shut your trap and listen to—”

Now, from the chamber, silence, and the man inside sees before him the two doors, his two doors, and the man asks himself, Which will it be, the lady or the tiger? And he stretches out his hand…

Jacob Torrance stiffened when the shot rang out. His gaze flew toward the low ceiling, and then he closed his eyes.

“It’s the lady, then,” he murmured.

Chapter Nineteen: “Little Good Can Come of This”

Abram von Helrung crossed his arms behind his back and stared out the window to the street below. Beneath him the great city was coming to life. A large gray draft horse clopped along the granite avenue pulling a dray loaded with dry goods. A man on a boneshaker bicycle whizzed along the sidewalk. Two pretty girls with red ribbons in their hair skipped arm in arm across the street, lifting their bare knees high, their high-pitched laughter like the little lame balloon man’s whistle, far and wee.

“‘Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill,’” he said quietly. “‘Come Shepherd, and again begin the quest!’”

He turned from the window and said, “I was ten, and my father took my little sister and me from our little village of Lech to Stubenbach, where a band of Gypsies had arrived with their traveling show. It was just the three of us; my mother refused to go and warned Papa he must watch us with an eagle eye, for the Gypsies were widely believed to steal children. ‘Devil-worshippers,’ she called them. But my Papa, though only a poor farmer, had the heart of an adventurer, and so we went. There were dancers and acrobats and fortune-tellers—and the food! Mein Gott, you had never tasted such food! In the afternoon we were approached by two men, one very old and the other much younger—his son, perhaps—who offered us a peek inside their tent for a small fee. ‘Why?’ asked Papa. ‘What is in your tent?’ And the older one answered, ‘Come and see.’ So Papa paid the fee, and I went inside. Not Papa or my sister. The younger Gypsy said to him, ‘Do not take her. She should stay outside.’ And Papa wasn’t going to leave her and risk her being stolen—or my mother’s wrath for suffering her to be stolen. I went in alone. There was a large wooden crate—it reminded me very much of a coffin—and inside the crate was an abomination. It paralyzed me with dread—froze me to the spot. I wanted to look away, but I could not look away. ‘What is it?’ I asked the old man. ‘It is a monster,’ he said. ‘Slain by my kinsmen in Egypt. It is called a griffin. This one is only a baby. They grow very large, large enough to blot out the sun. Is it not marvelous?’

“It had the body of a lion, the head of an eagle, and a python for a tail. A fake, and not a very good fake. They had sutured the parts together with thick black twine, but I did not come to that conclusion until many years later. I was a child. I saw the beast with a child’s eyes, eyes that could not look away. What sort of thing is this and how could it be? How could such a thing exist? I remember feeling tightness in my chest, as if a great hand were sezing the life from my heart. I would run; I would stay. I would turn aside; I would look closer.… It held me, and in some strange way that I do not pretend to understand, I held it. I still hold it. And it still holds me.”

He turned back to the window. The sun broke over the buildings on the eastern side of the street, flooding the avenue with golden light.

“That day was the beginning.”

“I was fifteen, and my first monster had the same name as me,” Jacob Torrance said. “He came home after a night with his mistress and a bottle of rotgut and started beating my mother with the business end of a joiner’s mallet. So I picked up the closest thing at hand—just happened to be his Springfield musket—and blew a hole the size of a turnip through the back of his head. Been killing monsters ever since.”

Von Helrung was frowning. “Thomas Arkwright was no monster until you made him one.”

“Thomas Arkwright was an agent for the British intelligence service.”

“How do you know this? Did Arkwright tell you? No! You assume it. You guess at it!”

“Besides Kearns, there are at least two sets of players at this poker table, Meister Abram. Three, counting us. There’s the set Arkwright was afraid would kill him if he showed his hand, and the set that was going to hang us if we harmed one little hair on his thinning scalp. I don’t know who that first set could be, but I’m betting the second is Her Majesty’s government. Makes good sense to me. If I were Kearns and knew where the magnificum roosted, I could demand a hefty asking price. A nidus would fetch a pretty penny, sure, but compare that to having the momma whose one drop of spit turns grown men’s brains into jelly. He could expect a king’s ransom—or a queen’s!”

“Why would the English send a spy to infiltrate our ranks if Kearns holds the key to the magnificum?” asked von Helrung.

“Getting to that. Arkwright obviously knew Warthrop had the nidus. Will figured that one out all by himself. And the only way he could have known that, is from Kearns. Unless this first set of people, whoever they are, told him—or another set we don’t know about yet, but I don’t think so. I think Kearns told him. Well, not Kearns personally—the British government, the blokes who sent him. And they sent him because they needed Warthrop for something.”