The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(104)

For a moment I remained there, frozen to the spot, my heart for some reason pounding as if I’d raced up a steep hill, holding in one hand my little hat, which still smelled faintly of wood smoke from a fire long since quenched, and in the other the new one that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, but of course did come from somewhere-from someone.

Bareheaded, a hat-one old, one new-in either hand, I trooped back downstairs. From the library I heard the sound of a heavy object hitting the carpet, and I dashed into the room to investigate. I had assumed Warthrop was still in his study.

The doctor was sitting on the floor before the hearth, stoking the fire. Beside him sat his father’s old trunk. If he noticed my appearance, he gave no sign of it, as he threw open the lid and, one by one, began tossing the contents into the crackling conflagration. The flames leaped and spat with each addition (the smell of the shrunken head’s hair was particularly pungent). I came to his side and sat down. He barely took notice.

The heat intensified upon our faces. He tossed in the old letters, one by one. If he noticed one had been opened (I am quite lonely at times and do not feel entirely at home here), he gave no sign. In fact, his face betrayed no emotion at all, neither sorrow nor anger, regret or resignation. He might have been engaged in a mundane chore rather than the destruction of the sole remaining evidence of his father’s existence.

“What have you got there, Will Henry?” he inquired without taking his eyes from the purifying pyre.

I looked down at the two hats lying side by side in my lap. I raised my head and studied his face, turned away from my own, turned toward the fire. Upon his angular profile shadow warred with light, the obscured visible, the hidden revealed. His father had named him Pellinore in honor of the mythical king who quested after a beast that could not be caught, an act of thoughtless cruelty, perhaps; at the least a fateful portent, the passing on of a hereditary malady, the familial curse.

“My hat, sir,” I answered.

“Which one, Will Henry? That is the question.”

The fire popped and crackled, snapped and growled. That is it, thought I. A fire destroys, but it also purifies.

I tossed my old hat into the center of the flames. Warthrop gave merely the slightest of nods, and in silence we watched the fire consume it.

“Who knows, Will Henry,” he said after it had been reduced, like the effluvia of his father’s life, to ashes. “Perhaps this burden you bear will prove a blessing.”

“A blessing, sir?”

“My colleague nicknamed arawakus the ‘Fountain of Youth Contagion.’”

“Does that mean I’ll never grow up?”

He lifted my new hat, his first gift to me, from my lap and dropped it upon my head. “Or that you will live forever-to carry on my work. Talk about turning burdens into blessings!”

The monstrumologist laughed.

EPILOGUE. May 2008

One hundred and twenty years after the conclusion of the “Anthropophagi Affair,” I called the director of facilities to tell him I had finished reading the first three volumes of William Henry’s remarkable journal.

“And?” he asked.

“And it’s definitely fiction.”

“Well, of course it is.” He sounded annoyed. “You didn’t find anything that might help us identify him?”

“Nothing substantial.”

“His hometown…?”

“He calls it ‘New Jerusalem,’ but there’s no such town, at least not in New England.”

“He changed the name. He has to be from somewhere.”

“Well,” I said, “he mentions two towns, Dedham and Swampscott. Those are actual places in Massachusetts.”

“What about family? Brothers, sisters, cousins… anyone?”

“I’ve only read the first three notebooks,” I answered. “But he indicates his only relatives were his parents.” I cleared my throat. “I guess the police ran his prints when they found him?”

“Yes, of course. No matches.”

“He was given a full physical when they brought him in, right?”

“That’s standard, yes.”

“Did they-Do you normally run any kind of blood test?”

“What do you mean, like DNA?”

“Well. That too, but as part of the physical, do you guys perform a full workup on a person’s blood?”

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

“And there wasn’t anything… unusual about the sample?”

“I’d have to pull the file, but I’d remember if the doctor had told me there was. What are you getting at?”

“What about an autopsy? Is that SOP?”

“Not unless there’s suspicions of foul play or the family requests it.”

“Neither of which applies to Will Henry,” I said. “What was the cause of death?”

“Heart failure.”

“He wasn’t sick right before he died, though? No fever, or maybe a rash?”

“He died peacefully in his sleep. Why?”

“He kind of gives an explanation for his age. Must have made it up, like everything else.”

He agreed. “Well, thanks for taking a look at them.”

“I’m not finished,” I said. “And I’d like to, if that would be okay. Do you mind if I keep them for a little while longer? Maybe I’ll run across something that’ll help.”