The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(7)

Dr. Warthrop picked up the jar and placed it on the workbench. He soaked some cotton in a mixture of halothane and alcohol, dropped it into the jar, and screwed the lid back on. The infant monster attacked the cotton, stripping the fibers apart with its little teeth and swallowing chunks of it whole. Its aggression hastened the effects of the euthanizing agent: In less than five minutes the unholy spawn was dead.

TWO.“His Services Are Indispensable to Me”

Stopping only twice-for another cup of tea around three a.m. and to relieve his bladder near four-the monstrumologist worked through the night and well into the next day, though with noticeably less urgency after the abortion of the abominable creature growing inside the young woman’s corpse.

“Upon reaching full term,” he explained to me in a dry, lecturing tone, which somehow made the topic more horrific, “the infant Anthropophagus bursts from its amniotic sac and immediately begins to feed upon the host, until nothing is left except bones, and those he drills into by means of his needlelike teeth-to suck out the nutrient-rich marrow. Unlike Homo sapiens, Will Henry, the Anthropophagi develop teeth before practically anything else.”

We had separated the bodies with no small effort, for the beast had sunk its two-inch claws completely into its victim. The doctor pulled them out, one rigid digit at a time, using the chisel as a pry bar.

“Note how the claws are barbed,” he pointed out. “Like a whaling hook or the forelegs of a praying mantis. Feel the tip, Will Henry-carefully! It is as sharp as a hypodermic and as hard as diamonds. The natives of its natural habitat use them for sewing needles and spear tips.”

He pulled the massive arm off the dead girl’s chest.

“Their reach exceeds that of an average man by nearly a foot and a half. Observe how large its hand is.” He placed his own hand, palm to palm, against the monster’s. The creature’s hand engulfed the doctor’s as an adult’s would a child’s. “Like the lion, it uses its claws as its primary form of attack, but, unlike the large mammalian predators, it does not attempt to kill its prey before it begins to feed. More like the shark or an insect, the Anthropophagus prefers living flesh.”

It required both of us to drag its leg off the girl. A bit breathless from the effort, the doctor said, “They possess the largest Achilles tendons known to primates, enabling them to leap astonishing distances, up to forty feet… Note the heavy musculature of the calves and quadriceps… Careful now, Will Henry, or he’ll roll off on us.”

He directed me to clear a space on the worktable. He took the shoulders of the girl, I took the legs, and together we moved her corpse. She was so light she seemed to weigh no more than a bird. He folded her arms across her chest and gathered the gown around her violated torso. “Fetch a clean sheet, Will Henry,” he instructed me, and then he covered her. We stood for a moment before the shrouded figure, neither of us speaking.

At last he sighed. “Well, she is free of it now. If there is any mercy in this, Will Henry, she did not suffer. She did not suffer.”

He clapped his hands and turned away, his melancholy vanishing in a wink as he strode back to the examining table, eager to continue his communion with the creature. We pulled it to the center of the table and rolled it onto its back. The black, lidless eyes on its shoulders and the yawning fang-crowded maw in its chest reminded me more than anything of a shark. Its skin was as pale as a shark’s underbelly as well, and, for the first time, I noticed the thing was completely hairless, a fact that amplified its nightmarish appearance.

“Like the lion, they are nocturnal hunters,” the doctor said, as if he had somehow read my thoughts. “Thus the oversize eyes and the complete absence of melanin in the upper dermis. Also like Panthera leo-and Canis lupus- they are communal hunters.”

“‘Communal,’ sir?”

“They hunt in packs.”

He snapped his fingers, called for a fresh scalpel, and the necropsy began in earnest. While he carved up the beast, I was kept busy, taking dictation, handing him instruments, and scurrying from cupboard to table and back again, filling empty specimen jars with formaldehyde, into which he dropped the organs. Out came one of its eyes, the optic nerves dangling like twisted rope from the back. He pointed out the monster’s ears: five-inch-long slits located on either side of its waist, just above the hips.

Then Warthrop opened the chest, just above the leering mouth, using the rib-spreaders to make room for his hand to retrieve the liver, the spleen, the heart, and the lungs, grayish white and oblong like deflated footballs. All the while he continued his lecture, interrupting himself from time to time to dictate measurements and describe the conditions of the various organs.

“The lack of follicles is curious, not something that appears in any of the literature… The eye measures nine-point-seven centimeters by seven-point-three centimeters, perhaps owing to their natural habitat. They did not evolve in temperate climes.”

He made an incision a few inches above the monster’s groin, plunged both hands into the cavity, and pulled out the brain. It was smaller than I expected it to be, about the size of an orange. He placed it on the scale, and I recorded the weight in the little notebook.

Well, thought I. That’s good at least. With a brain this small, they can’t be very smart.

Again, as if he possessed the ability to read my thoughts, he said, “Probably the mental capacity of a two-year-old, Will Henry. Somewhere between an ape and a chimpanzee. Though they lack tongues, they can communicate through grunts and gestures, much like their primate cousins, albeit with much less benign intent.”