The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(61)

“I didn’t ask Arkwright, because I didn’t need to, Meister Abram,” returned Torrance.

“I see! You are adept at mind reading as well as torture.”

“You’re just trying to get under my skin. That’s all right. The reason I didn’t ask Arkwright is Warthrop. I didn’t need Arkwright to tell me something I can get straight from the horse’s mouth.”

“And what convinces you that—”

“Why put the hound back in its kennel unless you’ve bagged the fox? Warthrop had served his purpose. He’d found the home of the magnificum. Now the really interesting question is—”

His head came round; he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye.

“And here he is!” he said. “Like Lazarus three days dead from the tomb. Only Lazarus had better coloring. Stand back there, Mr. Henry, and head for the railing if you’re going to be sick again. I’ve just shined these shoes. Now, where is that steward? My glass is empty and my whistle’s dry.”

He excused himself and strode off without the slightest sway in his step. The more he drank, it seemed, the sturdier he became.

Von Helrung patted the arm of the rocker Torrance had vacated, and I sat down. Why people would find it pleasant to sit in a rocking chair on a rolling deck of an ocean liner was perplexing, to say the least.

“Dr. Torrance sounds like him sometimes,” I said.

“Warthrop?”

“Kearns.”

Von Helrung nodded; his expression was sad. “I am sorry to say I agree with you, mein Freund Will. When I was younger, I often wondered if monstrumology brought out the darkness in men’s hearts or if it attracted men with hearts of darkness. I think now it is not the nature of monstrumology but the nature of man. The truth makes us uncomfortable, as truth often does. In every heart, there lives a Jack Kearns.”

What he is, that’s what you are inside, I had told the monstrumologist.

On our final night at sea, unable to sleep and no longer able to endure the rumbling of my roommate’s tummy (von Helrung complained regularly of indigestion), I slipped out of the stateroom and headed for the foredeck. The North Atlantic was restless that night; driven by a sharp southwest wind, the waves smashed and ground angrily against the prow. The deck rose and fell, rose and fell, up toward the cloud-covered sky, then down toward the dark, cold water, as if our ship were balanced upon a fulcrum, teeter-tottering between heaven and hell. I spied two gul flitting in and out of the running lights, but that was the only life—and only light—I saw. There was no horizon; the world was black from top to bottom. I had the vertiginous sense of being very small in an immense space, like a speck of dust floating in the proto-universe, before the sun was born, before the light pushed back the darkness.

The world is large, dear Will, and we, no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise, we are quite small.

The next day, my exile would end. But that was the only thing that would. If Torrance was right and Warthrop knew where to find the magnificum, our rescue was not the end.

I choose to serve the light, he once told me. Though that bondage often lies in darkness.

Right now was the time of equilibrium between light and dark, the time between before and after.

I was leaving something behind. It had been within my grasp. I had only had to stretch forth my hand and seize it. Instead I’d watched it burn in the fireplace of the bedroom on Riverside Drive, when the woman who had sung to comfort me in the lightless, unwinding place had tossed an envelope into the flames.

I was approaching something. I thought I understood what it was. My place is with the doctor, I had said—a statement of fact, and a promise, too. I thought I knew what to expect after the end of our exile, the doctor’s and mine. I understood—or thought I understood—the cost of service to the monstrumologist. I was reminded of it every time I washed my hands.

That night on the foredeck, under the starless sky, in the space between before and after, I looked out and saw darkness. He would go into that darkness in service to the light. And where he went, I would follow.

I thought I knew the cost of service to the one whose path lies in darkness.

I did not.

He thought he knew what he would find in that darkness.

He did not.

Its name is Typhoeus magnificum, the Magnificent Father, the Faceless One we cannot help but turn and face. The One of a Thousand Faces that is there when we turn to look, and then looks back at us.

It is the magnificum. It lives in that space between spaces, in that spot one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. You cannot see it. It sees you. And when it sees you, it does not see you. It has no conception of you. There is magnificum and nothing else.

You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars.

You may not understand what I mean.

You will.

Chapter Twenty-One: “A Pleasure to Meet You”

A sallow-faced little man was waiting for us in the lobby of our hotel, the Great Western at Paddington Station, upon our arrival in London. He wore a topcoat of Harris Tweed over a cashmere suit and sported the worst haircut I had ever seen; his hair looked as if someone had hacked at it with a dull knife. I would later learn that Dr. Hiram Walker had been a barber—among other things; he’d once made a go of sheep farming—before entering the field of aberrant biology. He had bid adieu to all of his customers except one: himself. He smoked a pipe, walked with a cane, hummed nervously through his nose, and regarded the world through small, shifty eyes, like a cornered rat. Those eyes lighted for a moment upon the powerful physique of Jacob Torrance with undisguised distaste; clearly he was not pleased.