The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist #1)(95)

“Yes, sir,” I called to the doctor. “It’s me.”

The monstrumologist rushed to my side. He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked deeply into my eyes, his own reflecting the intensity of his concern.

“Will Henry!” he cried softly. “Will Henry, why are you here?” He pulled me into his chest and whispered fiercely into my ear, “I told you that you are indispensable to me. Do you think I lied, Will Henry? I may be a fool and a terrible scientist, blinded by ambition and pride to the most obvious truths, but one thing I am not is a liar.”

He released me with these words and turned aside for a moment, as if embarrassed by his confession. Then he turned back and asked brusquely, “Now tell me, you silly, stupid boy, are you hurt?”

I lifted my arm, and he played the light of his lamp up and down the length of it. Over his shoulder, on the outer edge of the light’s reach (for the flare had finally fizzled out), I could see Malachi. He was staring not at our touching tableau but over our heads, toward the hole through which I had fallen.

The doctor carefully brushed the dirt and tiny, scratching pebbles from the wounds, bending low to examine them in the wavering light. “It’s a clean bite, and relatively shallow,” he pronounced. “A few stitches and you’ll be good as new, Will Henry, if a bit battle-scarred.”

“There is something up there,” Malachi called hoarsely, jabbing his finger toward the roof of the cave. “Above you!”

He swung the rifle to his shoulder and would have pulled the trigger, I’ve no doubt, if Kearns had not announced his presence and dropped through the hole. He landed on his feet with all the aplomb of a champion gymnast, spreading his arms wide to retain his balance, and he sustained the pose as if to gather us into his metaphorical embrace.

“And so all’s well that ends well!” he said heartily. “Or should I say all ends well very nearly near the end. Perhaps ‘so far so good’ would be better-but here you are, Pellinore, in the nick of time, thank goodness!”

With narrowed eye Malachi returned, “This is very strange.”

“Oh, my dear chap, you should have been with me in Niger back in ’85. Now that was strange!”

“I find it strange too,” said the doctor. “Tell me, Kearns: How did Will Henry come to be down here and you up there?”

“Will Henry fell; I did not.”

“He fell?” echoed Warthrop. He turned to me. “Is this true, Will Henry?”

I shook my head. Lying was the worst kind of buffoonery. “No, sir, I was pushed.”

“Oh, ‘fell,’ ‘pushed’-it’s all a matter of semantics,” pooh-poohed Kearns. He watched, bemused, as Malachi brought the muzzle of his gun a foot from his chest. “Go on,” he urged the enraged orphan. “Pull the bloody trigger, you insufferably melodramatic, semi-suicidal, blubbering bugger. Do you honestly think I care if I live or die? But you may wish to include in your calculations the fact that our work is not finished. She is still out there somewhere in the dark, and not very far, I would guess. That said, sir, I would not presume to pass judgment upon the passage of your judgment. Fire at will, sir, and I shall die as I lived, with no regret!” He thrust his chest in Malachi’s direction defiantly and grinned ear to ear.

“Why were you pushed, Will Henry?” asked the doctor, barely acknowledging the drama. He had long grown weary of Kearns ’s theatrics.

“He tricked me,” I said, lowering my voice and refusing to look in my betrayer’s direction. “I think he found this chamber and he knew they were down here, but he couldn’t get off a good shot, so he marked the spot and sent me straight to it. Finding me hurt, he thought the smell of blood might draw them out. When it didn’t, he-”

“In my own defense,” Kearns said, “I did give you a weapon and I didn’t just throw you to the wolves. That was me up there, you know, shooting at them. I don’t question the demands of circumstance; I simply obey them. Like Malachi here, abandoning his beloved sister when she needed him the most-”

“ Kearns, enough!” admonished the monstrumologist. “Or by God I shall shoot you.”

“Do you know why our race is doomed, Pellinore? Because it has fallen in love with the pleasant fiction that we are somehow above the very rules that we have determined govern everything else.”

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Malachi said with unnerving levelness. “But I like his idea. I say we make him bleed and use him as bait.”

“I would gladly volunteer,” rejoined Kearns easily. “But the circumstances no longer, I think, demand it.” He grabbed the lamp from the doctor’s hand and strode away, his boots squishing in the muddy ground, the heels sinking a good half inch before popping free. When he reached the wall, he turned and gestured for us to join him.

He placed a finger to his lips, then pointed down. A small opening, about twice the width of my shoulders, lay at the base of the wall. He held the lamp close to its jagged mouth while we peered down its murky throat. The passage ran downward at a forty-five-degree angle from the chamber floor. With little jabs of his finger Kearns pointed out the footprints clustered around the wall and the shallow cuts and gouges caused by their nails along the first few feet of the tunnel.

We withdrew to a safe distance, and Kearns said in a soft voice, “Two distinct sets-yes, Pellinore?” The doctor nodded, and Kearns went on. “A cub and a mature female. Two going in and none coming out again. Why she took one and left the others is a curiosity, but undeniably that is what she did. Perhaps these two”-he jerked his head toward the dead Anthropophagi-“wandered back up here for some reason, though the prints don’t substantiate that scenario. There are only two possibilities as I see it: It may lead to another, deeper chamber or it may be an escape route that eventually returns to the surface; there’s only way to find out. Agreed, Pellinore?”