The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(34)

The room was tiny, hardly larger than my little alcove on Harrington Lane, with no furniture but the rickety bed placed two paces from the door. A kerosene lamp sat on the floor beside it, its smoky flame providing the only source of light. It flung our shadows upon the ceiling and the peeling plaster of the wall opposite the filthy window, beneath which, on the dusty sill, clustered the bodies of desiccated flies. Above them, a congregation of their extant cousins buzzed about and crawled upon glass. My eyes began to water, for the smell of bleach was overwhelming, and I deduced the reason for delaying the doctor downstairs: Mrs. Bratton had needed time to scour and disinfect before our introduction to Captain Varner.

He lay upon the bed beneath several layers of blankets and sheets, the uppermost as white and wrinkleless as a burial shroud, leaving only his head and neck exposed. The bed was not large, but it appeared even smaller due to his enormous bulk. I had imagined him as a frail and shriveled old man, wasted away to a mere husk of humanity after twenty years of confinement and deprivation. Instead, lying before me was a man of monstrous proportions, weighing more than four hundred pounds, I would venture, cradled as it were in a kind of trough created in the mattress by his staggering corpulence. His head was equally huge; in relation to it the pillow upon which it rested appeared to be the size a pincushion. The eyes were lost in folds of grayish flesh; the nose was scarlet and bulbous, rising from the sunken cheeks like a red potato resting upon a parched landscape; and the mouth was a dark, toothless tunnel in which his swollen tongue slithered restlessly over bare gums.

The doctor stepped to his bedside. In her emaciated claws the old woman nervously turned the key ring. The jingling of the keys, the labored breath of the afflicted, and the buzzing of the flies against the window were the only sounds in the tiny, claustrophobic space.

“I wouldn’t touch him,” she cautioned. “Captain Varner hates to be touched. Don’t you, Captain Varner?”

He answered not. Though his eyes were barely visible in their fleshy furrows, I saw they were open. The tip of his tongue, a mottled gray like his skin, wet his lips. His chin, but a knuckle-size knot lodged between his neck and lower lip, shone with spittle.

For a long moment Warthrop regarded this wretched object of his quest, saying nothing, allowing no expression to disclose his feelings. At last he seemed to shake himself from the spell and turned abruptly to the old woman.

“Leave us,” he said.

“I cannot,” replied she curtly. “It’s against the rules.”

He repeated the command without raising his voice but measuring the words as if she had failed somehow to understand them.

“Leave… us.”

She saw something in his eyes, and whatever she saw cowed her, for she at once looked away, furiously shaking her keys, the symbols of her total authority, and said, “The doctor shall hear about this.”

Warthrop had already turned back to the beached behemoth upon the bed. The sound of the jangling keys faded down the hall; she had left the door ajar. He directed me to close it. Then, as I pressed my back against its comforting sturdiness, Warthrop leaned over the bed, bringing his face close to the bloated one beneath him, and said in a loud, clear voice, “Hezekiah Varner! Captain!”

Varner did not respond. His eyes remained focused on the ceiling; his mouth hung open; his tongue restlessly swiped the lower lip, then retreated into the shadowy recesses of the toothless maw. From deep within his chest rose a sound somewhere between a hum and a moan. But for the uneasy tongue, he moved not a muscle, if any muscle remained efficacious buried beneath the rolls of fat.

“Varner, do you hear me?” asked the doctor. He waited for an answer, shoulders tensed, jaw tightly set, as behind him the flies fussed against the glass. The room was stifling and reeked of bleach. I breathed as shallowly as I could, and wondered if the doctor would mind if I cracked open the window for a bit of fresh air.

Warthrop raised his voice and fairly shouted into the man’s face, “Do you know who I am, Varner? Were you told who has come to see you this night?”

The obese invalid moaned. The doctor sighed and looked at me.

“I fear we may be too late,” he said.

“Who…,” moaned the ancient mariner, as if to disprove him. “Who has come?”

“Warthrop,” the monstrumologist answered. “My name is Warthrop.”

“Warthrop!” cried the captain. The eyes, as if loosed by the mention of the name, became as unsettled as his tongue, sliding back and forth in their sockets but refusing to focus upon the doctor’s face. They tirelessly traversed the ceiling, where Warthrop’s distorted shadow danced, thrown there by the lamp on the floor and looming over Varner like a demon spirit, dark, grotesque, huge.

“You know the name,” said the doctor.

The enormous head gave the barest of nods.

“God pity me, I do. I know the name Warthrop,” issued the guttural reply, choked in spittle. “’Twas all Warthrop’s doing, the devil curse him and all his kin!”

“A curse is one explanation,” said the doctor dryly. “Though I lean more toward Darwin ’s. The evidence is on my side, but time may yet prove me wrong and you right, Hezekiah Varner. Alistair Warthrop was my father.”

There was no response but for the odd, strangled, wheezing moans.

“My father,” continued the monstrumologist, “who commissioned you sometime in late ’63 or early ’64, I would guess, to sail to West Africa, perhaps Senegambia or lower Guinea, and return with a special cargo of particular interest to him. Yes? Did he not?”