The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(76)

“There; one more should do it,” muttered Kearns. “Would you like to give it a try, Will?” He offered me the huge hammer.

“I don’t think I could lift it, sir,” I replied in all honesty. “It’s as big as me.”

“Hmm. You are quite small for your age. What is your age? Ten?”

“Twelve, sir.”

“Twelve! I must have a word with Pellinore. He can’t be feeding you properly.”

“I do all the cooking, sir.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

He gave the rod another whack, dropped the mallet, and tugged on the stake with both hands, grunting with the effort.

“Should do it,” he said thoughtfully. “How much do you weigh, Will?”

“I don’t know exactly, sir. Seventy-five, eighty pounds?”

He shook his head. “The man should be reported. Here.” He threaded the chainless end of the rope through the loop and tied it off in a complicated knot. He bade me take the other end-the one with the chain attached-and walk toward the trees until the rope went taut.

“Now give it a hard pull, Will!” he called softly. “Hard as you can!”

He stood, one hand on his hip, the other caressing his nascent mustache, watching the effects upon the metal rod as I strained toward the trees, my feet slipping on the slick ground. He waved for me to stop, picked up the mallet, and gave the rod one last mighty blow. He motioned for me to return to him.

“A bit too long, Will Henry,” he said. He untied the knot, hiked up his pants leg, and removed a bowie knife from the sheath strapped to his calf. He cut off a two-foot section, the blade slicing through the thick rope as if it were a snatch of sewing thread. Then he reattached the rope to the rod. “You’ll find three bundles of wooden stakes in the same crate, Will Henry. Be a good lad and fetch them for me, will you?”

I nodded, a bit out of breath from my exertions, and ran back to the truck to comply. Warthrop and Morgan were engaged in a whispering heated argument when I arrived, Morgan emphasizing each point with a jab of his pipe stem into the doctor’s chest.

“A full investigation! A thorough inquiry! I cannot be bound by guaranties made under duress, Warthrop!”

As I jogged back to Kearns, he was consulting his soggy diagram and pacing off the dimensions of his “ring of slaughter.” He directed me where to jam the stakes into the ground, at four-foot intervals, until a nearly perfect circle had been marked out, around forty feet in circumference, the metal rod marking the center, the circle’s western edge coming within fifteen feet of the platform. Kearns admired his handiwork for a moment, and then clapped me on the shoulder.

“Excellent work, Will Henry. The Maori tribe who invented this method could not have done better.”

The hunting party had congregated by the back of the truck, each man having armed himself with a shovel. He motioned for them to join us, and they gathered round him, grim-faced, breath high in their chests, their bodies already aching with fatigue. Kearns addressed them in a low, urgent voice, “Night falls sooner than we anticipated, gentlemen. Quickly now. Quickly-but as quietly as you can. Dig, gentlemen, dig!”

Using the stakes as their guide, working in methodical rhythm, the men dug a shallow trench. The rocky, wet soil crunched beneath their biting blades, the sound somewhat muffled by the rain that now fell from the windless sky in a steady thrum, ten thousand tiny drumbeats a second, enough to soak us to our skins and plaster our hair to our heads. Oh, why had I left my hat at home! From the truck several yards away the laboring men looked gray and ghost-like through the opaque curtain of rain.

“Pellinore,” said Kearns, “a hand with my box, please.”

“Now, then, this box,” Morgan muttered as they eased it from the back of the truck. “I would like to know precisely what you’ve got in it, Cory.”

“Patience, Constable, and you’ll know precisely what I’ve got… Easy, Pellinore; set it down easy! Will Henry, grab my bag there, will you?”

He slipped off the silk sheet and pulled off the lid. The doctor stepped back with a sigh of resignation; he had known what was in the box before Kearns had opened it, but knowing and seeing are often two very different things. Morgan stepped forward to peer at the contents, and gasped, all color draining from his cheeks. He sputtered something unintelligible.

A woman lay inside the box, robed in a sheer white dressing gown, reposed as a corpse, eyes closed, arms folded over her chest. No younger than forty, she may have been pretty once; but now her face was fleshy and pockmarked with scars, perhaps from smallpox, her nose enlarged and blushed rose red from the burst capillaries beneath the skin, the result, no doubt, of years of alcohol abuse. Other than the diaphanous gown, she wore nothing, no ring upon her hand or bracelet upon her wrist, except around her neck was a tight band the color of dull copper, a metal ring affixed to the portion beneath her wide chin.

After a few seconds of appalled silence, Morgan found his voice. “This is the bait?”

“What would you have me use, Constable?” wondered Kearns rhetorically. “A baby goat?”

“When you asked for immunity, you never mentioned murder,” Morgan said indignantly.

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Then, where did you-?”

“It’s a woman of the streets, Morgan,” snapped Kearns. He seemed put out by the constable’s outrage. “A common tramp with which the gutters of Baltimore are choked to overflowing. A piece of rum-besotted, disease-ridden filth whose death serves a purpose far nobler than any she achieved in her miserable, squandered life. If using her offends your sense of moral rectitude, perhaps you would like to volunteer to be the bait.”