by Rick Yancey
“It?”
“My life.”
“Oh, goodness! So dramatic in your old age! You really should extricate yourself from him, you know. You should ask Mother if her offer is still open.”
“Offer?”
“To adopt you!” Her eyes sparkled. She was enjoying herself.
“I don’t wish to be your brother.”
“Then what do you wish to be?”
“Of yours?”
“Of anything’s.”
“I don’t want to be anything’s—”
“Then why don’t you leave him? Does he chain you up at night?”
“I intend to leave him, when the time is right. I have no interest in becoming what he is.”
“And what is he?”
“Not anything I want to be.”
“That’s my question, Will. What is it that you wish to be?”
I rubbed my hands together, staring at the floor. And her eyes, bird bright, upon my face.
“You told me once that you were indispensable to him,” she said softly. “Do you think you may have that backward?”
I became very still. “When you are leaving?” I asked.
“Soon.”
“When?”
“Sunday. On the Temptation. Why?”
“Perhaps I would like to say good-bye.”
“You could say that now.”
“What have I said to upset you, Lilly? Tell me.”
“It’s what you haven’t said.”
“Tell me what to say, and I will say it.”
She laughed. “You really are the perfect apprentice, aren’t you? Always anxious to be of service, ever eager to please. No wonder he binds you to him so. You are the water that holds the shape of his cup.”
Several hours later, the water in the shape of the human cup was descending the stairs to the Monstrumarium, alone.
“Come with me tonight,” I’d said before we parted.
“I have made plans,” she’d answered.
“Change them.”
“I have no desire to change them, Mr. Henry.”
“I am a forward-thinking person,” I assured her. “I believe in full sexual equality, the right to vote, free love, all of that.”
She grinned. “I wish you luck tonight, and in the hunt. Not that you need much—he is the greatest that ever was or will be. Something thrilling and tragic in that, when you think about it.”
“Yes. Thrillingly tragic. When will I see you again?”
“I shall be here till Sunday; I thought I told you that.”
“Tomorrow.”
“I can’t.”
“Saturday, then.”
“I shall have to check my calendar.”
Standing in the vestibule, hands clenched at my sides, blood roaring in my ears. And his voice: Even the most chaste of kisses carries an unacceptable risk.
“You aren’t going to kiss me again, are you?” she asked, lips slightly parted.
“I should,” I murmured in reply, edging closer to the lips slightly parted.
“Then why don’t you? Not enough wine or not enough blood?”
It burns, my father had said. It burns.
“There is something I must tell you,” I whispered, my lips a hair’s breadth from hers, close enough to feel the heat of them and to smell her warm, sweet breath.
“Does it have to do with free love?” she asked.
“In a very roundabout way,” I answered, the words sticking in my throat. I could see my parents dancing in the blue fire of her eyes. “There is something inside of me . . .”
“Yes?”
I could not go on. My thoughts would not hold still. It burns, it burns, and the worms that fell from his eyes and afraid of needles are you and what would you do, and Lilly, Lilly, do not suffer me to live past you, do not suffer me to see you suffer, and the thing in the jar and the thing in the thief his chest splitting open like the T. cerrejonensis shell splitting open and the unblinking amber eye, and the infestation this is my inheritance and each kiss the bullet, each kiss the dagger plunging home and I would die, I would die and never fall in love, Will Henry, never, never and the insubstantiality of water and she the cup, Lilly the vessel that bears the uncountable years, do not suffer do not suffer do not suffer.
“Good-bye, William James Henry.”
SIX
A burly figure stepped from the shadows pooled at the base of the stairs. He wisely spoke up before I blew his misshapen head off his shoulders.
“I say, put that gun away, old chum. It’s me, Isaacson.”
“What are you doing in the Monstrumarium?” I snapped. “I thought your master’s work here was done.”
He cocked his head inquisitively, like a crow eying a tasty bit of carrion. “I was told to meet you here.”
“By whom? And to what purpose?”
“Dr. von Helrung—to help in the disposal of the evidence.”
“I don’t need any help.”
“No? But many hands make light work.”
“Yes, and too many cooks spoil the broth. Next inanity, please.”
I brushed past him; he trailed behind. Stopped when I stopped at the storage closet for the bucket and mop. Stopped again at the sink while I stopped to fill the bucket.
“I can’t help but feel that we got off on the wrong foot, Will. I really had no idea you even knew Lilly—she never mentioned you, at any rate, in all the time we’ve spent together in London.”
“That’s odd. I’ve known her since we were children and we correspond regularly and she never mentioned you either.”
“Do you think we’re being played for fools?”
“I doubt it. Lilly likes a challenge.”
He remained several paces behind me as I trudged with bucket and mop to the Locked Room. I could have found it with my eyes closed: The stench of decay increased with every step.
“She’s a good girl, not like any other girl her age, in my experience. Fierce. Wouldn’t you say that’s the perfect word for her? Fierce?”
“She is brimming with ferocity.”
“Oh, she’s a capital girl, not anything like the girls from my country. So much more—how do I put it?—unrestrained.”
I stopped. He stopped. If I brought the mop handle round against his swollen jaw, the blow would more than merely drop him; it would shatter the bone, imbedding the shards in his cheek and gums, perhaps his tongue. Permanent disfigurement would not be unexpected, and the odds of a life-threatening infection would not be out of the question. I could say we’d been waylaid by more thieves or that I had struck him down in self-defense. In the shadowy outlands of the world in which we lived, few would question my story. Von Helrung had articulated it:
When I was younger, I often wondered if monstrumology brought out the darkness in men’s hearts or if it attracted men with hearts of darkness.
“What is it?” Isaacson whispered.
I shook my head and murmured, “Das Ungeheuer.”
“What?”
I turned back to him. His face was grotesque in the dim light, monstrous.
“Do you know how it kills you, Isaacson? Not the bite; that’s to paralyze you, to separate your brain from your muscles. You don’t lose consciousness, however. You are fully aware of what’s happening as its jaw unhinges to accommodate you whole. You die slowly by asphyxiation; you suffocate to death because there’s no oxygen in its gut. But you’re alive long enough to feel the horrendous pressure that crushes your bones; you feel your rib cage breaking apart and the contents of your stomach being forced up through the esophagus, filling your mouth; you choke on your own vomit, and every inch of your body burns as if you’ve been dropped into a vat of acid, which, in a sense, you have been. You could think of it that way: a forty-foot sack of causticity, the anti-womb of your conception.”
He said nothing for a long moment. Then he whispered, “You’re mad.”
And I replied, “I don’t know what that means. If you define madness a
s the opposite of sane, you are forced into providing a definition of sanity. Can you define it? Can you tell me what it is to be sane? Is it to hold no beliefs that are contrary to reality? That our thoughts and actions contain no absurd contractions? For example, the hypocrisy of believing that killing is the ultimate sin while we slaughter each other by the thousands? To believe in a just and loving God while suffering that is imaginable only to God goes on and on and on? If that is your criterion, then we are all mad—except those of us who make no claim to understand the difference. Perhaps there is no difference, except in our own heads. In other words, Isaacson, madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.”
I forced myself to stop; I was enjoying myself too much.
“I can’t be absolutely certain, Henry,” he said. “But I believe you’ve just proved my point.”
“How long have you been Sir Hiram’s apprentice, Isaacson?” I asked.
“Nine months. Why do you ask?”
“You haven’t been at it long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
I continued down the corridor. His voice scampered along the winding passageway, chasing me. “Henry! Long enough for what?” The metal bucket would be better, I thought. It was heavier. I pictured it smashing into the side of his head. Unrestrained. Ha!
He turned the corner after me and drew up short of the body sprawled before the Locked Room. Frantically, he dug into his coat pocket for a handkerchief. He pressed the starched white fabric against his face, gagging at the smell that hung in the still air like a noxious fog.
“Where is that man’s face?” he choked out, eyes cutting away, cutting back again: the urge to turn aside, the compulsion to look, the unspooling of the coiled thing, the nameless not-me, das Ungeheuer.
“All around you. I believe you are standing in some of it.”
He wasn’t. But my “observation” caused him to stumble backward, hand clamped tight against the handkerchief. I set down the bucket, leaned the mop against the wall, and went to the stack of empty crates on the other side of the door.
“Allow me to hazard a guess about your studies in the dark art of monstrumology, Isaacson. For the past nine months you have been ensconced in some musty library in Sir Hiram’s ancestral home, your nose buried in arcane texts and obscure treatises, far from the field or the laboratory.”
He nodded quickly. “How did you know?”
I was shoving crates around, looking for the proper size. I tossed the smaller ones aside; they smacked against the hard floor with a satisfying wallop.
“Well, this is unfortunate,” I told him. “There’s none quite large enough, and these are the only empties I know of. I’m sure there are larger ones somewhere down here, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to hunt half the night for them.” I looked over at him and said very deliberately, “We’ll have to size him to fit.”
“S-size him?”
“Adolphus keeps the instruments in his office. A long black case beneath the worktable against the right wall, going in.”
“A long black case . . . ?”
“Beneath the worktable—the right wall—as you face the desk. Well, Isaacson, what are you waiting for? Many hands make light work. Snap to!”
I was still chuckling to myself when he returned lugging the instrument case. He had tied the handkerchief around his face like a bandit. I motioned him to drop the case beside the body. He leaned against the wall; I could hear him breathing through his mouth, and the makeshift mask billowed with each shallow breath.
“The boxes are not long, but they’re fairly deep,” I said, throwing back the lid. It clanged against the floor, causing him to jump. “We can fold the arms if he isn’t too stiff, so just the legs, I think, which we’ll lay on top.”
“On top?”
“Of him.”
I pulled the saw from its compartment and ran the pad of my thumb along its serrated edge. Wickedly sharp. Next the shears, which I clicked open and shut several times. With each snick-snick Isaacson flinched.
“All right, Isaacson,” I said briskly. “Let’s get these trouser legs off.”
He didn’t move an inch. His face had turned the color of the handkerchief.
“Can you tell me the difference between a monstrumologist and a ghoul?” I asked. He shook his head soundlessly, wide-eyed, watching me cut away the trousers, exposing the pale leg beneath. “No?” I sighed. “I was hoping one day to find someone who could.”
I explained that it was a simple below-the-knee amputation as I forced the man’s heel back toward his rump, raising the knee several inches off the ground. “Both hands firmly around the ankle, Isaacson, so it doesn’t sway on me. The blade is very sharp, and I shall hold you responsible if I cut myself.”
The pale flesh parting like a mouth coming open and the bloody drool dripping and the protesting whine of bone when the blade bites. I don’t know what he was expecting, but when the leg came free in his hand, Isaacson gave a strangled cry and flung the limb away; it smacked into the wall with a sickening thunk. He scuttled a few feet on his hands and knees. His back arched, and I thought, There is only one smell on earth worse than death, and that’s vomit.
I rested for a moment, studying my blood-encrusted fingernails. Why hadn’t I thought to bring along some gloves?
“It isn’t going to work, you know,” I said quietly.
“What?” he gasped, wiping his mouth with the handkerchief. He eyed it with dismay: Now what would he do?
“It might have, if he had picked Rojas—or even von Helrung; the old man isn’t as quick as he used to be. But Pellinore Warthrop is the last one I would choose to hoodwink.”
“I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about, Henry.”
“Not that he couldn’t be hoodwinked—he has blind spots like any man—but the fact is Pellinore Warthrop is no ordinary man: He is the prince of aberrant biology, and you remember your Machiavelli, don’t you?”
“Oh, bugger off.” He waved his hanky in my direction. “You’ve gone daft.”
“He’ll find you out, both of you, and what do you think will happen to you when he does? You’ve said it yourself: ‘Warthrop’s attack dog.’ You know what happened in Aden. You know about the Isle of Blood.”
“Is that a threat? Are you threatening me, Henry?” He did not seem afraid. I found his incredulous reaction curious.
“It was Hiram Walker who sent the prize to him. So he would bring it here. So Walker could steal it back again, sweetening his profit with a heaping spoonful of humiliation and revenge. Am I not correct? Tell me the truth and I’ll spare you. I make no promises regarding your master, but you have my word as a scientist and a gentleman that I won’t touch a hair on your slightly misshapen head.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Then why are you shaking like that?”
“I’m n-n-not sh-shaking.”
“Well, you can’t be afraid of him. He’s dead and legless.”
I dragged a crate over and shoved the sundered body inside, placed the severed legs on top, and nailed down the lid. One down, one to go.
He drew back when I stood up, as if he were the one left to pack up.
“I am innocent,” he said. “Dr. Walker is innocent.”
I shook my head and tsk-tsked, an echo of the monstrumologist when I said something particularly moronic. “Can’t say I believe you, old chum.”
He protested his innocence no further, a mark in his favor, and I doubted Walker would have confided in him a scheme so dangerous on so many levels. Still, I couldn’t rule out the possibility. Maybe there wasn’t a tribe of Neanderthals hiding out in the Himalayas, but the unlikelihood wasn’t absolute proof.
I made short work of the eviscerated thief outside the storeroom, and after another half hour we had both crates at the side door facing Twenty-third Street. A light, cold rain was falling, the temperature h
overed just above freezing, and the streetlights sizzled, shrouded in haloes of golden fire.
I stepped outside first, instructing Isaacson to wait for my signal, and crossed the street, my hands jammed deep into my pockets. A huge chestnut-colored draft horse came clopping around the corner when I reached the opposite side, pulling behind it a weathered dray wagon. The driver swung hard to the right and stopped before the side door. He did not look at me as I crossed back over. He wore a floppy hat and a black overcoat, and the hands holding the reins were very large, the knuckles swollen from more fights than anyone—including him—could remember. He was one of Warthrop’s “special men,” known for discretion, a penchant for risk, and a disdain for the law. Such unsavory characters were a necessary evil in the study of nature’s criminal side. They were Warthrop’s couriers and spies, the muscle to his mind. This one I had never met before.
“Mr. Faulk.” I greeted him cordially.
“You must be Mr. Henry, then,” he replied in a voice scraped raw by whiskey.
“There’s been a slight change in plans,” I informed him, slipping him a five-dollar note. He tucked the bill into his pocket and gave the barest of shrugs.
Five minutes later we were loaded up and making good time. I rode alongside Mr. Faulk; Isaacson sat in the back with our cargo, casting a wary eye up and down the street and clutching the side rail like a child on a Coney Island roller coaster. The temperature continued to drop, and hard pellets of ice stung our cheeks as we drew closer to the river. Ahead of us loomed the Brooklyn Bridge, its uppermost part lost in the freezing mist.
And in me the thing unwinding.
Mr. Faulk stopped at the height of the span. I stepped down carefully. Ice crunched beneath my boots. High above the river the wind screeched, and the rain drove nearly sideways and scraped the skin like icy sandpaper. Isaacson was waiting impatiently for me at the back of the dray; for him the night had been too long already. At least it will end for you, I thought bitterly. He took one end of the first crate and I the other, and we shuffled sideways to the rail. We could not see the water below, but we could hear it and smell it and sense the drop, the empty space between our feet and its blank, black surface.
