The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(100)

“My father introduced you,” said the doctor. It was not a question.

The old man nodded, and even that small gesture propelled him into a coughing jag that lasted at least two minutes, at the end of which he produced the same disgusting scrap of cloth and spat into it. Beside me Kearns chuckled, as if something about the ritual delighted him.

“And who did my father say they were?”

“Philanthropists.”

Kearns stifled a guffaw. The doctor shot him a look and turned back to Starr. “Philanthropists?”

“Interested-keenly interested, in their words-in the advancement of the science of eugenics.”

“Fanatical philanthropists,” ventured Kearns, still chuckling.

“My father,” said Warthrop. “He enlisted their aid in an experiment.”

Starr nodded. “As I understood it, it involved the merger of the two species.”

“Oh, dear God!” Kearns ejaculated with mock horror.

Warthrop’s revulsion was not feigned, however. “Anthropophagi with Homo sapiens? To what possible purpose?”

“The obvious one, Pellinore,” said Kearns. “A killing machine with an intellect on par with its bloodthirstiness. The ultimate predator. The bestial equivalent to Nietzsche’s Übermensch.”

“I don’t think he looked at it that way, Dr. Schmidt,” said Starr. “ They might have, Mason and Slidell, but not Warthrop. ‘It may be in our power to give a soul to the soulless,’ he told me in private. ‘Mercy to the merciless. Humanity to the inhuman.”’

“And you agreed,” said Warthrop.

“Not at first. I rebuffed the offer outright. I had no desire to play God.”

“But you changed your mind. Why?”

Starr stayed silent. His chest rattled in counterpoint to his tortured breath. Warthrop added two more coins to the stack.

“How do you know I changed it?” the geezer croaked.

“You shut up Varner for them. Convinced the court he was insane and locked him away lest anyone ever believe his tale.”

“Varner was mad as a hatter.”

“And you agreed to the second part of the bargain.”

Starr wet his purplish lips. “There was no other part,” he insisted. “What is this about, Warthrop? What do you want from me? I am an old man, a dying old man, I might add. Why have you come here to badger me about the past?”

Warthrop whirled and, seizing my wounded arm, shoved it under the agitated alienist’s nose.

“Because it isn’t the past,” he growled. He released me and leaned into the old man’s face. “You ask what I want. I will answer with the same question: What is it that you want, Jeremiah Starr? You have my word as a gentleman I will tell no one what transpires between us this day. You shall not spend the remainder of your miserable little life in prison or end it upon the gallows, though the blood of your countless victims calls to heaven for it! I know most and suspect I know the rest, but I wish to hear it, and there is no one left alive to confess to it but you. You have my word; what else?”

Starr refused to answer, but his greed betrayed him: His rheumy gaze flickered for an instant to the stack of coins at his elbow. Warthrop opened his purse and dumped the entire contents onto the table. The coins clattered, cascaded to the worn carpet. One landed heads-up on top of the old man’s throw.

“There!” Warthrop cried. “All I have with me. Tomorrow I’ll give you ten times that, only answer the question so the matter can be put to rest once and for all… The creatures in my father’s care needed two things to survive during the course of this ‘experiment’ in eugenics, whatever its true purpose: a safe haven, which no doubt Mason and Slidell funded, and food. Yes? They built the subterranean enclosure and you supplied the meals. Yes? Say ‘yes,’ you damnable monster.”

“Yes,” said Starr. A coughing fit doubled him over, and when he sat back, his face was the color of ripe strawberries. Spittle dotted his stubbly chin. Warthrop recoiled in disgust.

“And when the war ended…?”

“He offered to finance it himself,” Starr admitted. “He could not let it go.”

“Not let it go?” The doctor seemed aghast. “Not let what go?”

“He had grown rather fond of them, I think. Rather like his pets or children. I mean no offense, Warthrop. He was very possessive of them.”

“And you cared not where the money came from.”

“Warthrop,” replied Starr in a condescending tone. “Really. These…” He waved his mottled claw in the air, searching for the word. “Patients, so-called, they are the dregs of society. They come here because there is literally no place else for them to go. No family, or none that would claim them. All are insane-most criminally so, and those who are not have the intellectual capacity of a turnip root. They are human garbage, discarded by men, toxic to the general populace and to themselves, forgotten, unwanted, cruel, comical mockeries of all things that make us human. They could rot here or they could be sacrificed to the higher good.”

“With the added benefit that if they vanished, they would not be missed.”

Starr nodded, appearing relieved that the doctor understood. “They would not be missed,” he echoed.

“And you kept your end of the bargain,” prompted Warthrop, his jaw clenched. He would see the truth out whatever the cost. The coins glittered in the lamplight, part of that cost, but not the greatest to him. “Every month, until he died and the money stopped coming, you transported two or three victims to New Jerusalem.”