The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist)

by Rick Yancey

  “I thought they grew to five times that size.”

  “More like ten. It’s just a baby, Lilly.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking about taking it out for a cuddle. . . .”

  She let go of the gun with one hand long enough to punch me in the arm. “I mean after this is done.”

  “He’s going to present it to a group of like-minded men, who will nod with admiration and approval and pat him on the back and vote him a medal or perhaps commission a statue in his honor. . . .”

  “Some boys grow up,” she observed. “And some grow backward.”

  “I shall have to ponder that awhile before I can offer an opinion on it.”

  “What will he do with it after the congress has adjourned? That’s what I meant.”

  “Ah, I see. The cat, as it were, is out of the bag now, so it can’t stay here. I assume that was his original plan. Perhaps he’ll bring it back to New Jerusalem, build a special pit for it, and feed it goats. I don’t think he has any plans to release it back into the wild.”

  “Wouldn’t that be the best thing to do?”

  “Not for the wild. And not for Warthrop. One is much more important than the other, you know.”

  “I would set it free.”

  “It’s the last of its kind, Lilly. Doomed either way you go.”

  “Then why not just kill it?” Looking at the undulating burlap. “He could stuff it like a trophy.”

  “Well, that’s an idea,” I said curtly. The topic had become tiresome. “Tell me something: Have you kissed him?”

  “Kissed . . . Dr. Warthrop?”

  I smiled, picturing that. “Warthrop hasn’t kissed anyone since 1876. I was referring to the mediocrity.”

  “Samuel?” She lowered her eyes; she would not look at me. “Is that any business of yours?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I know not.”

  “Really? Then he must be mediocre, for you not to know!”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “You aren’t half as clever as you think you are, you know.”

  I nodded. “More like a third. Did you meet him in England? Aren’t you lonely there, Lilly? Don’t you miss New York? What sort of person would want to apprentice for Sir Hiram Walker? No one who’s a third as clever as he thinks he is, so he must be a mediocrity.”

  “He’s a friend,” she said.

  “A friend?”

  “A very good friend.”

  “Oh. Hmm. Very good is certainly not mediocre.”

  She smiled. “Not by a third.”

  “I should very much like to kiss you now.”

  “That is a lie.” Still smiling.

  And I, now frowning: “Why would someone lie about that?”

  “If you really wanted to kiss me, you would have kissed me, not—”

  I kissed her.

  Dear Will, I pray this finds you well.

  Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. “Will,” she whispered. “I should very much like for you to kiss me again.”

  And I did, and the thing turned upon itself inside the burlap, and scratch, scratch against the heavy glass and you must harden yourself to such things and there was no room for love or pity or any other silly human thing and never fall in love, never.

  In the snarl of winding passageways and dusty rooms and shelves overflowing with dead nightmarish things and

  I find it beautiful—more splendid than a meadow in springtime.

  There is one last thing I must say before I go.

  In the twisting, scratching, dusty, overflowing, dead, nightmarish chambers of the lightless heatless deep.

  One last thing I must say

  lips slightly parted

  These are the secrets these are the secrets these are the secrets

  FOUR

  The light of the monstrumologist’s lamp kissed the rough surface of the egg; he leaned over it, bringing the lens of the loupe close, and his breath was but a whisper of wind through that beautiful meadow at springtime. He’d taken measurements—mass, circumference, temperature—and listened to it through his stethoscope. He worked quickly. He did not want to expose the egg too long to the basement air. As Maeterlinck had observed, New England was anything but tropical.

  “Well, it certainly matches the descriptions in the literature,” he told me, “scant and imprecise as those may be. It could be the ovum of a T. cerrejonensis. Certainly not a crocodile or turtle egg—much too big for one of those. Definitely reptilian. Perhaps a distant cousin, the giant anaconda or boa, but, again, the size rules them out. Well! In this instance we must rely upon the old adage that time will tell.” He straightened and pushed the loupe onto the top of his head. His cheeks were flushed. He did not know for certain what he had, but at the same time he knew. “We shall nurture it, keep it warm and well insulated, and see what emerges in a few weeks’ time.”

  “Just in time for the annual congress,” I pointed out. “It obliges you, Doctor.”

  He stiffened slightly. “I am not sure what you mean by that.”

  “The last of its kind,” I said. “As if your cap didn’t already have enough feathers!”

  “Do you know, Will Henry, for about a year now, whenever you make a remark like that, I cannot decide if you are praising me or mocking me or both.”

  “I am acknowledging the obvious, sir,” I said.

  “Usually the purview of politicians and novelists. I would suggest you avoid it.”

  He returned the egg to its bower of straw and for the next thirty minutes fussed with the small heat lamp, using a thermometer to measure the ambient temperature near the surface of the egg.

  “We must keep close watch,” Warthrop said. “Check it upon the hour until it’s ready to hatch, and then we cannot leave it unattended. For our protection as well as its own. At least two others know of its existence and location, perhaps more. Should intelligence of our find fall upon the wrong ears . . . it could pose a greater danger than the thing itself.”

  He was speaking to me but looking at “the thing itself.”

  “Its venom is the most toxic on record, five times as potent as that of Hydrophis belcheri. A drop that would fit upon the head of a pin is enough to kill a grown man.”

  I whistled. “No wonder it is so valuable. You could wipe out an entire army with a cupful. . . .”

  He shook his head and chuckled ruefully. “And thus our own natures determine our conclusions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is valuable not for what it takes away, Will Henry. It is valuable for what it gives.”

  “That was my point, Doctor.”

  “Death as something one gives?”

  “And receives. It is both.”

  Still smiling: “I really have failed, haven’t I?” He looked back at the egg. “Take that same pinhead-size drop. Dilute it in a ten percent solution. It may be injected directly into the vein, or some prefer to soak tobacco in it and ingest it through a pipe. The effect, I hear, is indescribably euphoric—orgasmic, for lack of a better word. One dose—one puff—is sufficient to leave the user more hopelessly ensnared than the most hopeless opium addict. It is irrevocable, like the fruit from Eden’s tree: Once it’s tasted, there is no going back. More begets the desire for more—and more, and more—until the brain has rewired itself. The body needs it as the lungs need air or the cells glucose.”

  I saw it immediately. A supplier of this überopium would become very rich, very quickly. Richer than all the richest robber barons combined, Warthrop had said. Maeterlinck had not been lying: His client’s asking price was ridiculously low—suspiciously so, to my mind.

  “There is something foul here,” I said. “If this client of Maeterlinck’s was willing to practically give it away . . .”

  “Very astute of you, Will Henry. Perhaps I am premature in my assessment. Yes, the price was much too low if he understood what he had—and much too high if he didn�
��t!”

  “Unless Maeterlinck never intended to let you have it. You were to be used to verify its authenticity.”

  “And what purpose would that serve? All he had to do was wait for it to hatch, harvest the venom, and—if you’ll pardon the expression—give it a shot.”

  “Whoever hired him knows you, or knows of you. . . .”

  He crossed his arms and threw back his head, considering me down the length of his patrician nose. “And? What does that tell you?”

  “There is a motive here beyond profit.”

  “Excellent, Mr. Henry! It is true: I must reevaluate to the last premise my conclusions about your acumen. But what could that motive be?” He held up his hand as my mouth came open. “I have a few thoughts along those lines, which I will hold in abeyance for now. Far too many serve the cakes before they’re fully baked.”

  I frowned. “Is that a quote from somewhere?”

  He laughed. “It is now.”

  The vigil lasted nearly a month. As the “big day” approached, his anxiety grew—along with his beard and hair—and his appetite withered. He hovered over the egg for hours, fiddling with the lamp, rearranging the straw, listening to the developing life inside its leathery cocoon through the stethoscope. My major duties, excluding the usual ones of cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping, answering letters, and the like, included keeping watch by the basement door, the doctor’s loaded revolver always by my side. He started at every little noise, slept no more than thirty minutes at a stretch, and generally devolved from philosopher of aberrant biology into a surrogate mother. More than once, when I dragged myself down the stairs to check on him, I would find Warthrop perched upon his stool in a semistupor, resting his chin on his palm, half-shut eyes fixed upon the thing in the straw.

  “Go to bed,” I said to him once. “I’ll watch it.”

  “And if you fall asleep?”

  He said nothing. I let it go. “May I ask you something?”

  His eyebrow rose; the eye beneath remained lidded.

  “It didn’t drop out of the sky, and it wasn’t preserved in a frozen tundra for a hundred years or, I am guessing, laid a century before it will hatch. How can it be the last of its kind? Where is its mother?”

  He cleared his throat. His voice sounded like a shoe scraping over broken glass. “Dead, according to Maeterlinck. Killed by the same coal miner who discovered the nest.”

  “But wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume . . . ?”

  “Her mate had been killed the week before. Reasonable to assume it was her mate—a big male, nearly forty-five feet from tail to snout.”

  “That is my point. Where there is one, but especially where there are two . . .”

  “Oh, I suppose anything is possible. It is possible that a tribe of Neanderthals survives in the inaccessible regions of the Himalayas. It is possible that leprechauns emerge from the Irish woods and dance in the highlands when the moon is full. It is equally possible that you were born of two monkeys mating and switched upon your birth. It is also possible that this entire conversation—no, your entire existence—is but a dream, and you will wake up to find that you’re an old man in your farmhouse next to your stout but practical wife and marvel at the power of dreams while you sleepily milk the family cow!”

  I pondered his argument for a moment and then said, “Must I be a farmer?”

  On one or two occasions he gave in to the human imperative and allowed me to help him upstairs and into his bed. “Well, why are you hovering about like some ghoulish angel of death?” Snapping his fingers at me. “Back to the basement, Will Henry, and snap to!”

  Oh, if I hear that loathsome phrase attached to my name one more time . . . !

  I set the gun beside the nest and contemplated the gestating T. cerrejonensis. It glowed in the orange light of the heat lamp. The basement was cold; the place in which it rested was warm. Three days before, it had begun to quiver, ever so slightly, nearly unperceptively. When you listened through the stethoscope, you could hear it, a wet squishy sound, as the organism writhed and twisted within the amniotic sac. Hearing it gave you a certain thrill: This was life, fragile and elemental, tender and implacable. Entropy and chaos reigns o’er all of creation, destruction defines the universe, but life endures. And isn’t that the essence of beauty? It occurred to me, while I watched the thing shiver with the ancient force, that aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution’s highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us.

  But we do not stand apart from or above or in the middle of anything. There is nothing apart, nothing above, and the middle is everywhere—and nowhere. We are no more beautiful or essential or magnificent than an earthworm.

  In fact—and dare we go there, you and I?—you could say the worm is more beautiful, because it is innocent and we are not. The worm has no motive but to survive long enough to make baby worms. There is no betrayal, no cruelty, no envy, no lust, and no hatred in the worm’s heart, and so who are the monsters and which species shall we call aberrant?

  Sitting in the cold basement before the warm egg, my eyes filled with tears. For true beauty—beauty, as it were, with a capital B—is terrifying; it puts us in our place; it reflects back to us our own ugliness. It is the prize beyond price.

  I reached out my hand and laid it gently upon the pulsing skin.

  Forgive, forgive, for you are greater than I.

  Canto 2

  ONE

  Forgive.

  The empty eye and the tangled strands of hair still clinging to the skull beside the ash barrel.

  And what might Dr. Pellinore Warthrop be needing, Mr. Henry?

  Oh, the usual things. He isn’t an invalid, but he is a careless housekeeper and never cooks for himself. He needs someone for the laundry and the shopping, cooking, cleaning, someone to answer the door, but I don’t anticipate much of that—the doctor receives hardly any callers these days.

  Yes, sir. Bit of a recluse, is he?

  Somewhere between that and a hermit.

  So he doesn’t practice medicine anymore?

  He never did. He isn’t that kind of doctor.

  Oh, no?

  Oh, no. No, he is a doctor of philosophy, and I wouldn’t recommend you broach that topic with him—or any other topic, for that matter. If he wants to talk, he will. If he doesn’t, he won’t. You can expect to be ignored for a great deal of the time. Well, nearly all the time.

  And the rest of the time, Mr. Henry? What might I expect then?

  Well, yes. He has quite the temp— Well, let’s just say he’s a bit hotheaded for a philosopher.

  A hotheaded philosopher? Oh, Mr. Henry, that’s funny!

  More humorous in the abstract, I’m afraid. The best strategy is to agree with everything he says. For example, if he either implies or explicitly states that a worm’s intelligence exceeds your own, a good answer would be, “I have often thought so myself, Dr. Warthrop.” At other times, he may say something that makes no sense—it doesn’t mean he’s off his rocker; he’s just being Warthrop. He speaks out of context. I mean, the context is hidden.

  Hidden, Mr. Henry? Hidden where?

  Inside his own mind.

  He hides things . . . in his mind?

  Well, don’t we all, Beatrice?

  I tapped the skull on its face with the edge of my shoe.

  I knew I should fetch the constable. Have him arrested. It would be a fitting end for a doctor of monstrumology, whose business irrevocably leads to murder. We were both up to our elbows in blood, Warthrop and I.

  But I did not fetch the constable. We are creatures of habit, and I had been his indispensable companion for too long.

  I righted the overturned barrel and returned its macabre contents, her skull last, and I let the moment pass; I did not pause to contemplate the
empty eye like some wavering Dane to whom human life held a measure of value. I tossed the skull into the barrel with the rest of the garbage; it clanged against the metal side, loud in the cold air.

  More kerosene. Another match. And a blast of delicious heat against my face. There is no one on earth who doesn’t enjoy a good fire. The memory is embedded in our genes: Fire has been our friend for millennia. It made us who we are. No wonder the gods punished Prometheus. Master fire and in a few thousand years you will walk on the moon.

  I crossed the yard to the old livery stable. I needed a shovel. Some bones would survive the fire and would have to be buried. All but one stall had been removed in 1909 to make room for the Lozier touring car, the most expensive on the market in those days, a gift from the company president to Warthrop for his help in the initial design. As I stepped into the dusky interior, I heard a soft bleating coming from the remaining stall at the far end. I peeked over the door. Three lambs were crowded together in the straw. They started when they saw me and rushed as one into the far corner. Black eyes against white faces. Startled mewling from dark lips. Stamping anxiously the straw that crackled in the dry air.

  It won’t bother me, Mr. Henry. A bad temper shows a strong heart; that’s what my ma always said.

  And black eyes in white faces and mewling lips and straw that crackles like dry bones in an ossuary.

  TWO

  Scratch, scratch.

  The thing behind the thick glass. The thing in the burlap sap.

  Scratch, scratch.

  Form casts shadow and all shadows are the same: There is no difference between the thing behind the glass and the thing in the sack. Their essence—to ti esti—is the same. All life is beautiful; all is monstrous. And Lilly with eyes like a mountain lake, pure all the way down, lips slightly parted.

  “You are the first and only girl I’ve ever kissed,” I told her that night.

  “You’re lying, William Henry,” she said. “You kiss much too well for that to be true.”

  “Lying is the worst kind of buffoonery,” I said, quoting Warthrop. “You don’t meet many girls in a monstrumologist’s laboratory.”