The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(69)

“What is it, mein Freund Will?” murmured von Helrung. He swung his arm around my shoulders and fairly pushed me up the steps. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not a ghost,” Walker answered, his high-pitched voice warbling with distress. He, too, had seen the redheaded man looking back at us. “That big chap with the bright red hair and his bald companion by the pillar. For heaven’s sake, don’t look now, von Helrung! The same two I saw yesterday. I believe they’re following us.”

“To be honest, things have not been going all that well with the practice,” Conan Doyle was gasping to the monstrumologist when we caught up with them in the third-floor hallway. He was struggling for breath because he was also fighting to match the long strides of my master. “But I don’t complain. It gives me plenty of time to write. And I’ll need to write plenty, what with a new mouth to feed.”

Warthrop stopped suddenly just outside the door to our room. Conan Doyle was not expecting it; he walked directly into the doctor’s back.

“Oh! Sorry…”

The doctor’s hand came up and stayed there, the tips of his fingers lightly drumming the air. I’d seen this geure before and reacted instinctively, stepping quickly to his side.

“Von Helrung,” Warthrop whispered. “Are you armed?”

“No.”

“Walker?”

“No. Why do you—”

“Doyle, do you carry a firearm?”

“I do not, Dr. Warthrop.”

The monstrumologist pulled his revolver from his coat pocket. “Stay here with the others, Will Henry,” he said to me before opening the door and stepping inside.

He wasn’t gone long, no more than two or three minutes, I guessed, when he called for us to come in.

“Shut the door, Will Henry, and throw the bolt,” he instructed me from across the room. His back was to me. He was crouching beside something on the floor, the gun held loosely at his side, his shoulders slightly stooped. I remember vividly how tired he looked—old before his time.

And before him was the recumbent body of Jacob Torrance.

“Mein Gott!” whispered von Helrung. “Pellinore, is he—”

“Dead,” pronounced the doctor.

Von Helrung cursed under his breath. Walker pressed his hand to his mouth.

“Let’s have some light,” Warthrop said. “Will Henry, open the curtains, will you? Doyle, you’re a physician. You might want to have a look at this.”

Conan Doyle joined the doctor beside the corpse while I stepped around it to the windows, and Jacob Torrance’s blood bubbled and oozed around the soles of my shoes. I was not going to look. I did not wish to look. I had no intention of looking. But of course I looked. I threw back the curtains, turned around, and, with the golden afternoon sunlight warming my back, beheld what had befallen Jacob Torrance.

“Extremely deep,” Conan Doyle was saying. “Nicked the spinal column. This poor man was nearly decapitated.”

He had been sliced from ear to ear, the knife—if it had been a knife; perhaps the killer had used a small axe or hatchet—severing the carotid arteries and jugular veins—creating the font that had soaked the carpet… and his clothing… and the linen tablecloth a foot away… and the seat back of the divan. The damask curtains were spotted with the spray from his expiring heart. The room stank with it, the hot coppery smell of fresh blood.

“The body is still warm,” Conan Doyle announced with not a little concern. “He has not been dead long; no more than an hour, I would say.”

“Considerably less,” the monstrumologist replied. He rose, grimacing. I heard his knees pop when he stood. Von Helrung still lingered near the door; Walker was leaning against the wall beside him, a handkerchief pressed against his mouth, his face the color of parchment paper. The sound of his gagging was very loud in the small room.

“We must summon the police,” he said ehind his makeshift mask. No one paid any attention.

Warthrop paced the room, moving in a widening circle around Torrance’s body, eyes roaming the blood-enriched floor, the blood-specked walls, the furniture, the windows and sills. At one point, about five feet from the corpse, he fell to his hands and knees and crawled along the floor, snuffing and sniffing like a hound hot on a scent.

“There were two of them,” he said at the completion of his inspection. “One very tall—well over six feet, right-handed, a cigar smoker, and redheaded. His companion is much shorter—five-six or -seven, in that range, and walks with a pronounced limp—one leg, his right, shorter than the other…”

Conan Doyle’s face was a study in scarlet. He was blushing like a young swain in the first heady throes of unrequited passion.

“Astounding. Completely astounding,” he said hoarsely.

“It’s elementary, Doyle,” returned the doctor. “A killer is like any artist. He cannot help but leave something of himself in his work. One only needs to know how to separate the work from the one who authored it.”

“What I mean to say is I am having the most extraordinary sensation…”

“So am I!” called Dr. Walker from across the room. “I am going to be sick!”

Conan Doyle continued, his eyes growing misty. “A man has been brutally murdered; it is terrible! And yet I find myself overwhelmed by an equally terrible sense of wonder.… Why, it’s as if I have stepped over some mystical threshold and into one of my own stories! And here, before me, the man himself, the same one I created, come to life. Behold the man!”