by Rick Yancey
I took a deep breath and plunged back into the labyrinth.
The way is dark, the path is not straight. Easy to get lost, if you don’t know the way, easy to go in circles, easy to find yourself at the place from which you began.
TWO
Hold out your hands. Steady now. Don’t drop it! Carry it over to my worktable and set it there. Careful, it’s slippery.
And the boy, with the tattered hat to keep his head warm in the icy basement, presses the ropy bundle to his chest, shuffling across the floor slick with blood. The slithering and slipping of the cargo in his arms, the offal smearing his shirtfront, and the smell that assaults him. And the antiseptic clink and clatter of sharp instruments, and the man in the white coat with its copper-colored stains leaning over the metal necropsy table, and the boy’s numb fingers wet with effluvia, and the tears of protest that run down his cheeks and the hunger in his belly and the light-headedness of finding himself in this place where no pies cool on racks and no woman sings over a warm fire, just the man and his gore-encrusted nails and the peculiar crunch of the shears snapping through cartilage and bone and the strangely hypnotic beauty of a corpse flayed wide, its organs like exotic creatures of the lightless deep, the surreal humming of the man as he works, fingers digging deep, black eyes burning, forearms bulging, the taut muscles of his neck and the clenched jaw, and the eyes, the eyes burning.
Nothing human yet. We’ll take a look at those intestines in a moment. What are you doing over there? Set it down on the table; I need you here, Will Henry.
Here: by his side. Here: in this cold place where not a molecule of air moves. Here: the boy in the tattered hat smelling of smoke and the blood sticky on his bare hands and the thing opened up before him like a spring flower straining toward the sun.
The monstrumologist’s hands were sure and quick then, like all else about him. He was in his prime. None could match him in dexterity of mind; none shared in the purity of his animus. What heights might he have risen to if he had chosen a different path—if true passion could be chosen, like the ripest apple in the basket? Statecraft or poetry? Another Lincoln, perhaps, or a Longfellow. If a soldier, then a Grant or a Sherman or, to reach further back, an Alexander or a Caesar. It seemed nothing could contain him, in those days. No light shone brighter than his lamp. It was overwhelming for the boy in the tattered hat: He had never been in the presence of genius; he did not know how to behave or think or speak or any human thing; and so he was forced to look to the man in the stained white coat to guide him, to tell him how to behave and think and speak. He was the bloody corpse beneath the bright lamp splayed open, straining toward the sun.
Why are you staring like that? Are you going to be sick? Do you find it hideous? I find it beautiful—more splendid than a meadow in springtime. Hand me the chisel there. . . . I was younger than you when I assisted my father in the laboratory. I was so small I had to stand on a stepping stool to help him. I held a scalpel before I could hold a spoon. Good! Now the forceps; let’s have a look at this fellow’s incisors. No, the large forceps—oh, never mind, hand me the pliers there; that’s a good boy!
Later, at the worktable, standing on my tiptoes to watch him dissect the intestines of the beast, discovering at last evidence of its human victim, and the joy upon his face in counterpoint to my horror as he pulled it free with a soft squish.
We have found him, Will Henry! Or a bit of him anyway. Step lively; hand me that jar over there. Snap to, quickly! It’s falling apart on me. . . . Hmm. Very difficult to tell the age by this, but it could be him; it could be. They said he was a boy around your age. What do you think?
Rolling the molar around in his palm like a dice player.
A boy around your age, or so I’m told. . . . What do you think?
A boy around my age? And that is all that’s left of him? Where is the rest?
Well, where do you think it is? What isn’t used is discarded—defecated, to be technical about it. Like all living things do, what it didn’t convert to energy it shat out. Waste, Will Henry. Waste.
A human being. He is speaking of a human being, a boy around my age was the report, and all that is left is a tooth—the rest now part of the beast or in a pile of its shit.
Waste, waste.
And the boy in the tattered hat, in the tattered hat, in the tattered hat.
THREE
He must have heard them that night: the howls and shrieks of the boy’s soul tearing in half, the cry of damnation’s desire, the rage against the beast that had refused to consume him. The beast that had left behind the black, smoldering casings of his parents—for what it did not use for fuel, it shat out as dust and ash. He must have heard. Every board and window and shingle and nail must have rattled with the force of his anger and grief.
The man must have heard—and he did nothing. In fact, in those early days, the more I cried—always alone in my little attic room—the harsher, colder, and more merciless he became. Perhaps he told himself it was for my own good, and after all this was at a time when children were not coddled. Perhaps his harshness was meant to make me harsh, his coldness to make me cold, his mercilessness to make me merciless. It was the best and only answer to the brutal question as he understood it:
What sort of god is this?
But now I don’t think he was being harsh or cold or merciless. He was not the harsh, cold, merciless one.
Now I think he heard my screams and remembered another boy, a boy from long ago, consigned to that same attic space away from the beating heart of the house, the lonely boy whose mother had died and whose father blamed him for it. The terrified boy who watched his father fade from him while remaining all the while in his sight, a majestic ship disappearing over the endless horizon, the boy alone and sick and sick in his loneliness. The kind of loneliness you never completely leave behind, no matter how crowded your life becomes. He was helpless to save that boy; he was helpless to save me. The distance was too great—there were not enough years in a lifetime to climb that eight-foot ladder and say to the boy, Be still, be still. I know your pain.
These are the secrets I have kept.
This is the trust I never betrayed.
Canto 5
ONE
I knelt beside the dead man in the Monstrumarium, beside the opened door to the Locked Room.
The back of his skull had been blasted open, a single shot at close range. Grimacing with the effort—he was not a small man—I rolled him onto his back. The bullet had passed through; he had no face. I patted his pockets. A pearl-handled switchblade knife. A pouch of tobacco and a weathered pipe. A pair of brass knuckles. His coat was thin, the elbows worn threadbare. His pants were tied with a bit of frayed rope. His hands were heavily calloused, his knuckles scraped raw. In the puddle where his head had been lay his teeth, blown free from his mandible by the impact of the round.
Waste, Will Henry, waste.
I dropped the brass knuckles and knife into my pocket and crouched close to the floor, and the light from the gas jets flung my shadow over the body.
When presented with a problem, look for the simplest solution first; that is always the route nature takes.
He had not expected the blow, obviously. His back had been turned. His killer had crept up unawares or betrayed him—either a competitor or a mutinous cohort, or perhaps more than one. The find was, as Maeterlinck said, a prize for which wealthy men might sacrifice their fortunes and desperate men their very souls.
TWO
Von Helrung understood that too.
“Congratulations are in order, of course, mein guter Freund,” he gruffed, clipping off the tip of his Havana cigar. It was the evening before his niece and I would flee the dance. “Any other natural philosopher, who presented a living specimen of T. cerrejonensis, even if he was a distinguished member of our Society, would be tossed out of the assembly as a charlatan and profiteer.”
“How fortunate, then, that I am not any other—or either,” Warthrop replied dryly.
We were lounging in the well-appointed sitting room of the Zeno Club, where gentlemen of like-minded philosophical outlooks gathered to share a glass of port over quiet conversation or simply to enjoy the languid atmosphere of a vanishing age: the age of reasoned discourse by serious men. We were but two decades away from a worldwide conflagration that would claim thirty-seven million lives. The fire was warm, the chairs comfortable, the carpet lush, the waiters obsequiously attentive. Warthrop had his tea and scones, von Helrung his sherry and cigar, and I my Coca-Cola and cookies. It was like the old days, except I was no longer a boy and von Helrung no longer old, but tending toward ancient. Hair thinner, face paler, stubby fingers not quite as steady. But his eyes still gleamed bird bright, and he had lost none of his acumen—or his humanity. The same could not be said of me.
He’s going to die soon, I decided as I sat silently listening to their conversation. He won’t live out the year. When he spoke or took the smallest breath, you could hear the death rattle deep in his barrel chest. I could feel it when he wrapped his short arms around my waist and pressed his snowy white mane against me: the life force fading, the heat leaching through his vest like the earth’s heat fading into the desert sunset.
“Dear Will, how you have grown, and in the passing of but a year!” he exclaimed when he saw me. He looked up into my face intently. “Pellinore must have finally decided to feed you!” He chuckled at his own joke, and then grew very serious. “But what is it, Will? I can see that your heart is troubled. . . .”
“There is nothing troubling me, Meister Abram.”
“No?” He was frowning. Something in my expression—or perhaps lack thereof—seemed to bother him.
“No, of course not,” snapped the monstrumologist. “Why should anything be troubling Will Henry?”
“I worry, though,” the old Austrian said now, after rolling the tip of the cigar upon his flattened tongue. “On the matter of security . . .”
“I have placed it in the Locked Room,” Warthrop answered. He sipped his tea. “I suppose we could station an armed guard at the door.”
Von Helrung lit his cigar and waved away the plume of bluish smoke. “I speak of your presentation to the colloquium. The less who know of the find for now, the better. A private gathering of our most trusted colleagues.”
Warthrop stared at him from over his cup. “The general assembly is closed to the public, Meister Abram.”
“Pellinore, you know there is none dearer to me than you, unless it is young Will here, such a fine young man, such a tribute to your, may I say, paternal guidance and affection . . .”
I nearly choked on my cola. Paternal guidance and affection!
“. . . so there is no one who understands better your desire to place your name in the firmament of scientific achievement. . . .”
“I do not labor—nor have I suffered—to advance my reputation above the advancement of human knowledge, von Helrung,” the doctor said with a perfectly straight face. “But I do understand your concern. If news of a living T. cerrejonensis reaches certain quarters, we might expect a bit of trouble.”
Von Helrung nodded. He seemed relieved that my master understood the central dilemma. The most astounding discovery in a generation, one that held theory-altering implications not just for aberrant biology but for all the natural sciences, including key tenets of evolution—and it must be kept secret!
“Ach, if only this broker who brought it to you had revealed the name of his client!” cried von Helrung. “For this mysterious personage knows you, knows as well as Maeterlinck that the prize now rests in the possession of a certain Pellinore Warthrop of 425 Harrington Lane! I do not exaggerate, mein Freund. You have been in no greater peril in all your dangerous career. This, your greatest prize, may also be your undoing.”
Warthrop stiffened. “My ‘undoing,’ as you call it, must come sometime, von Helrung. Better that it comes at the height of my career than in the last bitter dregs of it.”
Von Helrung puffed on his cigar and watched his former pupil down the final drops of his tea.
“It may yet,” he murmured. “It may yet.”
THREE
The last bitter dregs of it.
Nineteen years after uttering those words, he was sitting at the foot of his bed wrapped in a towel. I could count every rib in his bony chest, and with his wet hair and haggard features he reminded me, for some reason, of one of Macbeth’s witches. Fair is foul and foul is fair!
“Did you make tea?” he asked.
“No.”
I stepped around to his dresser in search of some clean underwear.
“Really? I thought surely you must be, by all the banging and clattering down there. ‘Dear Will is making me a nice pot of tea,’ I thought.”
“Well, I wasn’t. I was looking to see if you had a crumb of food in the place. Which you don’t. What are you living on, Warthrop? Old carcasses from your collection?”
I tossed a clean pair of underwear—the drawer was full of them; he probably hadn’t changed his shorts in a month—at him. They landed on his head and he giggled like a child.
“You know I have no appetite when I’m working,” he said. “Now, a good, strong cup of some Darjeeling, that is something altogether different! I never could replicate your cup, Will, try as I might. Never tasted the same after you left.”
I went to the closet. Tossed a pair of trousers, a shirt, and the cleanest vest I could find onto the bed.
“I’ll make you a pot when I get back.”
“Get back? But you only just got here!”
“From the market, Warthrop. It will be closing soon.”
He nodded. He was absently turning the underwear in his hands. “I don’t suppose you’d mind picking up a scone or two. . . .”
“I will get you some scones.”
I sat in the chair. For some reason I was out of breath.
“They never tasted the same either,” he said. “One wonders how that could be.”
“Stop that,” I said sharply. “Don’t be childish.”
I looked away. The sight of him wrapped in the towel, thin hair dripping wet, the hunched shoulders, the hollow chest, the rail-thin arms and spidery hands—it sickened me. It made me want to hit him.
“Are you going to tell me?” I asked.
“Tell you what?”
“This thing you’re working on, this thing that’s slowly killing you, this thing that will kill you, I suppose, if I let it.”
His dark eyes glittered with that familiar infernal glow. “I believe I am in charge of my own death.”
“It doesn’t appear that way. In fact, it appears that it is in total charge of you.”
The fire went out. He dropped his head. “I must die sometime,” he whispered.
It was too much. I leapt from the chair with a guttural roar and bore down upon him. He shrank at my advance, flinched as if expecting a blow.
“God damn you anyway, Pellinore Warthrop! The days of your puerile attempts to manipulate and control me are over. So save the melodramatic sniveling for someone else.”
His shoulders heaved. “There is no one else.”
“That is your choice, not mine.”
“You chose to leave me!” he shouted up into my face.
“You gave me no choice!” I turned away. “You disgust me. ‘Always tell the truth, Will Henry, all the truth in all things at all times.’ From you, the most intellectually dishonest man I have ever known!”
I spun on my heel, turned round again. We are circles; our lives are not straight.
“You’ve been nothing but a burden to me, an albatross around my neck!” I shouted. “Everything about you is repulsive—you’re living like some feral creature, wallowing in your own filth, and for what? For what?”
“I cannot . . . I cannot . . .” Shaking uncontrollably, hugging his nakedness, dank hair falling over his face in a stringy curtain.
“Cannot what?”
“Say what I cannot—do what I cannot�
��think what I cannot.”
I shook my head. “You’ve gone mad.” With wonder in my voice. The unconquerable Pellinore Warthrop, the singular man, had crossed that razor-thin fissure unto the other side.
“No, Will. No.” He lifted his head to look at me, and I thought, Those are pearls that were his eyes. “Nothing has changed since the beginning. It is not I who has gone blind. It is you whose eyes have been opened.”
FOUR
With my eyes wide open and three inches from the floor, I crawled in an ever-widening circle around the corpse in the Monstrumarium.
Every second was precious, but I forced myself to go slowly, gathering in what the eye could harvest in the meager light.
Here the outline of a bloody shoe print, six inches from where he fell. Another as the second man stumbled backward toward the wall. Here, against the wall, a stack of empty crates toppled over and broken apart. A terrific struggle had happened here. With a third man? Or with Warthrop’s prize? Had the victim’s betrayer or competitor been overcome inside the Locked Room as he attempted to transfer the prize to another container more suitable for transport? Finding nothing else useful against the wall, I crossed into the room. In my brief inspection earlier I hadn’t seen it: Someone—or something—had flung a large burlap sack into the far corner. I tapped on it with my foot. Empty.
That was it, then: He tried to lift it out of the cage, and it struck, drove him out, and as he stumbled backward he stepped into the puddle of blood, leaving the imprint of his shoe on the floor. Or he could have lost his grip—not been in its grip—panicked, and backed out in terror, slamming against the far wall and knocking over the crates before fleeing the Monstrumarium, the motive for his crime abandoned. The second scenario did not seem satisfactory to me. If he had dropped the prize, it would have pursued him and left some evidence of itself through the same puddle into which the shoe had dipped. Back in the corridor, I ran my fingertips over the damp wall above the pile of shattered wood and bent nails, squinting in the flickering light of the jets, kicking myself for not having fetched a torch from Adolphus’s office. My fingers brushed something sticky. I sniffed. Blood. The wall was speckled with dime-size drops of it around the level of my eyes. Had he smacked his head against the hard stone? Or had he already been punctured several times over? The drops extended for three feet in either direction from the center of the broken crates. From whipping his head back and forth? Or from something whipping him?