The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(92)

I crawled forward until my hand touched the body of my victim. I hopped over it and then got to my feet and began the ascent, left arm pressed into my stomach, right outstretched to feel the wall. I stepped as lightly as I could, breathing shallowly, forcing myself to take it slow, stopping now and then to bend my ear to the dark, listening for any sound that might betray an Anthropophagus’s presence. I had no idea how far I had fallen down the shaft; it seemed, as I’ve said, that it had taken as long as Lucifer fell. Time passes differently when one of your senses is stripped from you, and all else is magnified by the other senses: every breath is thundering, every scraping, scratching step booms a cannonade. I could smell his blood, and my own. The pain in my arm was excruciating. The taste of his infection burned on my tongue.

On I trudged, on and on, ever upward, yet coming no closer to the goal. At times my right hand slipped into open space, a connecting tunnel or perhaps a natural cleft formed by a more benign force of nature. In the commotion of our fall, had we somehow ended up in a secondary branch of the main thoroughfare, and was I now off-course, blindly proceeding from darkness into darkness, hopelessly lost?

Surely, I thought, coming to a halt, leaning dizzily against the cool, moist rock, surely I would have reached the starting place by now. How much time had passed? How long had I been marching, and what now was I marching toward? The thought paralyzed me. Then I thought, Well, that might very well be the case, Will, but you’re still going up, and up is the direction you want to go. Perhaps that tunnel led straight to the surface. Was it still raining? I wondered. Oh, to feel the rain upon my face! To breathe the sweet draft of cool spring air to the very bottom of my lungs! The longing was nearly as unbearable as the pain.

So I soldiered on inside that lightless labyrinth, clinging to the logic of my choice-that moving up meant getting out-and to the memory of rain and sunlight and warm breeze and all such comforting things. Those memories seemed to belong to a different time, to an era long since passed, even to a different person; I felt as if I had absconded with the memories of another boy in another time and place, a boy who was not lost and fighting mindless panic and heart-stopping dread.

For now it was unmistakable: The floor had leveled off. I was no longer moving upward. I had somehow taken a wrong turn.

I stopped walking. I leaned against the wall. I cradled my wounded arm. It throbbed in time with my heartbeat. Besides my heightened respirations there was no sound. There was no light. Every instinct urged for me to cry for help, to scream at the top of my lungs. I had no idea how much time had passed since I had stumbled into the den, but surely the doctor and the others had dug their way through the barricade by now. They had to be somewhere, perhaps somewhere close by, around the next bend (if there was a next bend), their lights just outside my range of vision. It would be insanely risky-idiotic, really-to announce my presence, for the odds were just as good that she was around the next bend. Or were the odds that good? Kearns had said she would take her young to the deepest part of her lair, and it had been no illusion that, up to now, I had been climbing, not descending. Did not that mean the odds were better that I was closer to my companions than to her? And that the real risk lay in holding my silence, stumbling around in the dark for untold hours until dehydration and exhaustion overcame me, if I didn’t bleed to death first?

So the debate raged within, to call for help or to remain silent, and the seconds turned to minutes, and each minute tugged the straitjacket of indecision and paralysis tighter.

My fortitude gave way. I was but a boy, you’ll recall; a boy who had been in his share of tight spots and dire straits, to be sure, a boy who had seen things that would make a grown man blanch, but still a boy, still but a child. I slid down the wall and rested my forehead against my upraised knees. I closed my eyes and prayed. My father had not been a particularly religious man; aspects of the divine he had entrusted to my mother’s care. She had prayed with me every night and had taken me to church every Sunday, to instill a bit of piety in me, but I had inherited my father’s indifference to religion and had gone through the motions of devotion without much conviction. A prayer was mere words repeated by rote. When I arrived at the doctor’s house, of course, all churchgoing and prayer had come to an abrupt halt, and I did not pine over the loss.

But now I prayed. I prayed until I ran out of words, and then I prayed with my entire being, a prayer not composed of words but out of the profound, wordless longing of my soul.

It was while I was thus employed, my eyes clenched tightly shut, rocking back and forth in rhythm to the roiling of my harrowed mind, that a voice spoke out of the darkness. It was not, as I first assumed in my distress, the voice of the one to whom we pray. A million miles from it!

“Well, well. What have we here?”

I raised my head and shielded my smarting eyes against the light in his hand. As bright as a thousand suns, it blinded me. He took my elbow and helped me to my feet.

“The little lost lamb is found,” whispered Kearns.

As it happened, I had succumbed to despair but a dozen yards from deliverance, a connecting passage that was, Kearns informed me, only a short hike from the Anthropophagi’s den.

“You’re a lucky assistant-apprentice monstrumologist, Will,” he informed me with his characteristic playfulness. “I almost shot you.”

“Where are the others?” I asked.

“There are two main arteries leading from their nesting chamber; Malachi and Warthrop took one, and I took the other, the same you took, obviously, but what has happened to your arm?”