The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(74)

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “I am going for a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“I would rather you did not.” He slipped on his coat, felt something in the right-hand pocket—his revolver. It reminded him of something.

“Oh, very well,” he said crossly. “Come along if you must, but please keep quiet so I may think. I need to think!”

“Yes, sir,” I said, pulling on my clothes. “I will try not to be a burden to you, sir.”

The remark, like the gun, reminded him of something. He seized my left hand and held it in the lamplight to examine my injury.

“It’s healed up nicely,” he pronounced. “How is the mobility?”

I made a fist. I stretched my remaining fingers wide.

“See?” I asked. “Part of it’s gone, but it’s still my hand.”

We walked out onto the beach, and the stars were very bright and the moon was high and the towering cliffs to the northeast shone pearl white. To our left were the lights of Dover. On our right was the darkness of open water. The wind coming off the water was stronger and colder than the wind that had come through our window. I shivered; I had left my jacket in the room.

The monstrumologist turned abruptly and walked to the water’s edge. He stared toward the vaguely defined horizon, the thin line between black and gray.

“Pour ainsi dire,” he said softly. “How do you kill someone ‘in a manner of speaking,’ Will Henry?”

I told him what had happened to Thomas Arkwright. He was shocked. He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before.

“And using the pwdre ser was your idea?”

“No, sir. Frightening him with it was my idea. It was Dr. Torrance’s idea to actually use it.”

“Still. There was only one person in that room who had witnessed firsthand what pwdre ser does to a human being.”

“Yes, sir. That’s why I suggested we use it.”

“That is why you…?” He took a deep breath. “It is a very thin line between us athe abyss, Will Henry,” he said. “For most it is like that line out there, where the sea meets the sky. They see it. They cannot deny the evidence of their eyes, but they never cross it. They cannot cross it; though they chase it for a thousand years, it will forever stay where it is. Do you realize it took our species more than ten millennia to realize that simple fact? That the line is unreachable, that we live on a ball and not on a plate? Most of us do, anyway. Men like Jacob Torrance and John Kearns… Those kinds of men still live on a plate. Do you understand what I mean?”

I nodded. I thought I did.

“The very strange and ironic thing is that I left you behind so you wouldn’t have to live on that plate with them.”

I thought of the signet ring of Jacob Torrance and lifted my chin defiantly. “I’m not afraid.”

“Are you not?” He closed his eyes and drew in deep the smell of the sea.

Early the next morning we boarded the first ship out, and some of Warthrop’s anxiety lost its bite, though it still continued to nibble around the edges of his relief to be on our way at last. He paced the foredeck, never looking back at the receding English shore. He was not interested in what lay behind.

But I was. I wanted to hear what had happened, how he’d found the origin of the nidus ex magnificum; how, or if, he’d found John Kearns; and the particulars of how he’d been betrayed by Thomas Arkwright. Every time I broached the subject, however, he deflected it with a shake of his head or ignored my entreaties altogether. I came to realize that the affair was an embarrassment to him. It wounded his ego, and his was not the sort of ego that recovered easily from even the slightest scratch.

At Maritime railway station in Calais, we secured berths in a private sleeping car for the passage south to Lucerne, where we would switch trains for the final leg of our overland journey to Brindisi on the Adriatic Sea. The remainder of our expedition to Socotra would be undertaken by boat, an unhappy prospect; the memory of my recent bout of mal de mer was still quite fresh.

The train was a crowded, rolling city of Babel—English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, with a smattering of Egyptian, Farsi, and Hindi thrown in. Every race, religion, and class was represented, from the well-to-do English family on extended holiday, to the poorest Indian immigrant returning to Bombay to visit the family he had left behind. There were businessmen and Gypsies, soldiers and peddlers, old men in wide hats and newborn babes in bonnets. And everywhere the smell of smoke and human sweat, shouts, laughter, singing and music—a din of accordions and violins, harmonicas and sitars. It enchanted and frightened me, this rolling makeshift village, this rich sampling of humanity. While the doctor holed up in our car, leaving it only thrice a day for meal service, I took to wandering the length and breadth of the train. That was far more preferable to enduring the eerie silence that enveloped him like a pall of doom. Warthrop did not complain of my wanderings; he merely observed that I should be careful lest I become exposed to some rare contagion. “A passenger train is a traveling circus of pestilence, Will Henry. A smorgasbord of human meat. Take care you are not placed upon the menu.”

I was dispatched on the occasional errand, for tea and pastries (the doctor’s profound disappointment that there was not a single scone on board would have been comical, if I had not been the one to bear the brunt of his displeasure) and newspapers, any and all I could find, in any language (the monstrumologist was conversant in more than twenty). He read, he drank copious amounts of Darjeeling tea, he paced the compartment like a caged tiger, or stared out the window, pulling and pinching on his lower lip until it grew fat and red. He muttered under his breath, he started when I opened the door, dropping his hand into his coat pocket, where he kept his revolver—he never ventured anywhere without it. He slept with the light on, he started growing a beard, and he ate constantly and in vast amounts, putting on several pounds on the thirteen-hundred-mile journey to the southern tip of Italy. At one meal service I witnessed him consume two beefsteaks, a half loaf of bread, an entire pie, and four glasses of rich buttermilk. He took note of my wide-eyed astonishment at this gluttonous accomplishment and said, “I am building reserves.” I puzzled over this remark. What should I expect in the coming days—famine? Was there nothing to eat on the island of Socotra?