The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(36)

“Or so you thought,” murmured the doctor, turning the fly in his hand. “Nothing could equal the vision of hell you saw that day… or so you thought.”

Varner laughed, a sound as thin and crackling as autumn leaves beneath a heavy man’s tread.

“Something went terribly wrong on your return passage to America, didn’t it?” pressed the monstrumologist.

“He tried to warn me,” was the wheezing reply.

“Who? Who tried to warn you?”

“The Oba! The old devil, on the morning we set sail, with a twinkle in his eye and a bright smile lighting his raven cheeks, asked what provisions we had made for them. He told me they can get quite ‘tetchy’ after several days without their ‘victuals,’ and offered two of his slaves to tide them over on the voyage. I rebuked the repulsive savage, for king though he called himself, that is what he was, a godless heathen. I am a Christian, I told him. I fear God and his judgment!”

“But you came to regret your rebuke,” observed Warthrop.

“I had had assurances,” Varner muttered. “I had had strict instructions from the monstrumologist. We reinforced the hold, welded iron bars across the portholes, fastened double locks upon the doors. Two hundred pounds of salt pork we had on board, and in Sapele we took on the livestock in kind and quantity precisely as Warthrop prescribed: twelve goats, five young calves, and seven chimps. ‘Try the chimps if all else fails,’ he told me. ‘They are the closest relative to their preferred prey.’ The closest relative! Heaven help us!”

Warthrop let fall the dead fly from his fingertips. It fluttered to the floor, and he pressed the tip of his boot down upon its desiccated carcass.

“Flies,” he murmured pensively. “What of the flies?” He watched them for a moment bumping and fussing against the smeared pane before he turned to face Varner. “They refused to feed,” he said. It was not a question.

“Aye, refuse they did, as you know, as you know all the rest, and so I will speak no more of it. I know not why you have come here in the dead of night, asking questions the answers to which you already know. I know not why you’ve come except to torment a sick and dying old man. I know not what pleasure my pain brings you, Warthrop, except it be God’s truth you are your father’s son! You know already what special order your father had filled and what fate befell the crew of the Feronia. What sadistic cause brings you here to my deathbed? To remind me of those awful days of death and the dread thereof, to give the knife your father sank a final twist before I am taken down by the dark angel’s last embrace? Have mercy on me! Have mercy on me, Warthrop. Have mercy.”

The doctor ignored this diatribe, this anguished plea punctuated by moans and whines. He ignored it and said, “They would kill immediately what you gave them-they are fiercely territorial-but they would not eat it. In a matter of days the ship’s hold would reek worse than a slaughterhouse.”

“No,” whispered Varner, closing his eyes. “No more. I beg you.”

“So they managed to escape somehow. There is nothing in the literature to suggest they can swim, so they broke into the ship, not out of it. And at least two survived until the grounding of the vessel at Swampscott. The adults, I would guess.”

Varner sighed, a gravelly exhalation, like a shoe scraping over pebbles. The eyes came open, the mouth yawned, the tongue protruded, the voice escaped. “They ate the little one. It was her own cub, or so the Oba told me. The she-beast ripped him to shreds. With my own eyes-ah, these accursed eyes!-I saw her stuff his beating heart into her damnable mouth. The slender pickings that remained she left for her partner.”

“She was the dominant of the two?”

“He was terrified of her; that much was clear.”

“Yet she did not turn on him-why?”

Varner did not answer. His eyes had fallen closed again. Perhaps if he closed them, we, like the frightful images playing on the ceiling, would fall away into oblivion. He became so still for a moment that I thought he had stopped breathing.

“You asked why I’ve come,” began Warthrop, returning to his side. “She sent me here, Hezekiah, for like you she survived the voyage of the Feronia, and her offspring have prospered in their adopted home. Her progeny, perhaps more than thirty strong now, are but a three hours’ ride from this very room.”

Varner moaned. By now we had endured it so long it had become background noise, like the flies beating themselves against the glass. What of the flies? Warthrop had wondered. What of the flies?

“My father tortured himself over your fate,” he continued. “But showed no concern over the destiny of your peculiar cargo. He was many things, but he was foremost a scientist, and he would not have assumed the Anthropophagi had been lost or had perished of starvation at sea. Something or someone had assured him that there was no need to pursue the matter, and there were no witnesses who could do that, save one: the sole survivor of the cargo vessel Feronia. Is that why he sought you out after twenty years, to question you again as to its fate?”

Varner’s flesh shone sickly gray in the lamplight as he perspired beneath the mounds of covers, and for the first time I smelled something other than chlorine, the faintest pungent whiff of decay, and I wondered if perhaps a rat had crawled beneath the bed and died. It might have explained the flies. I glanced toward the blackened window. What of the flies?