by Rick Yancey
“Where are you?” I whispered. “It isn’t big enough—not yet—to take you anywhere, so wherever you are, you went there of your own accord. Did you run from it or with it, embracing you? Did you make it back to the surface or are you still here?”
Silence answered.
The Monstrumarium spanned the length and breadth of the building above it, which occupied an entire city block. A sprawl of ill-lit, interlocking tunnels and hundreds of storage rooms of various sizes, some stuffed so full that only the hardiest dared navigate them without Adolphus there to guide him. More than once I’d gotten lost down here, wandering for a quarter hour or more, until, unnerved and disoriented, I gave in to my panic and called for him to find me and lead me out: Adolphus! Adolphus, I’m lost again!
The would-be thief could have escaped the encounter with the beast only to find himself wandering down here like I had done, desperate and lost—and hunted. He could have made it back to the street, his pursuer safely sealed below like the Minotaur of the story. Or he could have been overcome—not here, but somewhere else within the labyrinth—and, even now as I considered the possibilities, he was being consumed.
I went over the scene one last time. How long since Lilly had left to fetch the doctor? My sense of time was skewed. It seemed more than a month since I’d pushed her up the stairs with that farewell kiss. I trotted back toward the curator’s office, holding the gun in my right hand while keeping the left before me, the knife and brass knuckles within my trouser pocket knocking against my leg, pausing at each turn and scanning the next tunnel before proceeding on. I had the sense of time slithering down a black hole, carrying me with it. Though the floor rose as I neared the entrance, I felt as if I were skittering down a steep slope, at the bottom of which opened the mouth of a lightless abyss, the entryway to the lowermost circle, Judecca, the frozen heart of hell.
In the last tunnel before the final turn, midway down, a shadow leapt from the murky recesses of a storage room and slammed into me, forcing me sideways into the wall. The impact knocked the gun from my hand. I smelled whiskey and blood as he clamped his fingers around my throat, pinning my back against the wall with his body, and his breath was hot in my ear. I brought up my fists and boxed him hard against the ears, which loosened his grip a bit, but he was maddened by fear and pain and did not let go. His face shone with fresh blood, and was crisscrossed with deep crimson fissures where the fangs must have ripped. His teeth were bared, his eyes red-rimmed and wild with terror.
I brought my knee up and into his crotch; his hold slipped as he doubled over, and I shoved him away. No time for the gun: I pulled the knife from my pocket and flicked it open. The blade sprang free, glinted coldly in the gaslight. He stumbled backward, bending over, clutching at his privates, and then he vomited up a stew of bile and blood and black, curdled blobs of his own gut—the monster’s poison had already necrotized a part of his stomach. His other organs, I knew, were dying as well. That is how the poison kills you: You die from the inside out. Depending on the amount of toxin, the process can take anywhere from minutes to several days.
My turn.
I grabbed him by the throat, pulled him up, pressed the tip of the knife under his jaw. His rancid breath, stinking of his inner rot, washed over my face, and I gagged.
“Where is it?” I choked out. “Where is it?”
“Inside . . .”
“Inside? Here? In the Monstrumarium? Bring me to it!”
He laughed. Then he belched, and a viscous mixture of blood and mucus bubbled over his bluish lips. I saw it then. I had seen the same thing many times before in my service to the monstrumologist:
The light was fading from his eyes.
“I already have.”
FIVE
Nearly seven thousand days after that night, I stepped out the back door into the little alleyway behind 425 Harrington Lane. The monstrumologist was crying for his supper—perhaps my unexpected appearance had reminded him that he, like every other human, needed to eat once in a while. But I refused to cook in the sty he called a kitchen before scrubbing down what could be sanitized and tossing out what couldn’t. I set to work upon returning from the market and hiding the scones, though he cursed me for it. “They are still mine until I give them to you,” I scolded him. He slunk away like a chastened child. There was always, even in his prime, a childishness about the monstrumologist, as if part of him were frozen in that time prior to his mother’s death, the little boy who simply stopped, who could not free himself from the ice, who lived on in the man, forgotten and alone, but whose cries broke free from time to time, like those of the boy he inherited, the boy he tucked away in the attic room, all three of them—the boy, the man, and the boy inside the man—trapped in the Judeccan ice.
I dumped the first load of garbage into the nearest ash barrel. The one next to it was stuffed to overflowing, not by the monstrumologist, surely, but by the girl I had hired to keep him alive. Beatrice, was that really her name? I couldn’t remember, though I could recall the face very well; I am good with faces. Apple-cheeked, fair-skinned, a little on the heavy side, a quick, pleasant smile. I had chosen her carefully from a list of applicants: an old maid with no family in town, used to caring for the sick and infirm (she had ministered to her parents until both died). A God-fearing woman who disdained gossip and had few close ties and, most importantly, whose patience was deep as the Atlantic and whose hide was thick as a tortoise’s. No wonder he’d sacked her.
I filled up the barrel quickly, but the first stars were appearing and the temperature was dropping rapidly, and I thought a fire would be nice—I would have to burn the refuse before I left anyway—so I trooped into the old shed and fetched the kerosene.
You’ve put me in a tight spot—once again, I thought. If I leave you with no caretaker, you will succumb to your demons. But your demons prevent anyone from caring for you!
Such is the nature of demons, I suppose.
I doused both barrels with the kerosene. An errant breeze blew out the first match, and suddenly I was thirteen again, up to my ankles in the freezing snow, warming my bloodstained hands beside this same barrel by the immolation of a corpse I had helped dismember.
You must harden yourself. If you are to stay with me, you must become accustomed to such things.
Must I, Warthrop? Must I become accustomed to “such things”? And if I had failed—if you had failed to make me accustomed to them—what then? Would there have been room then for sentimentality, for the absurdities of love and pity and hope and every other human thing? But you didn’t fail; you succeeded beyond your wildest expectations, and I, William James Henry, am your crowning achievement, the most aberrant of aberrant life forms, without love without pity without hope, harsh cold merciless leviathan of the lightless heatless deep.
I lit the second match and dropped it into one barrel. Smoke boiled; fire leapt. Then the third match into the other barrel. And the heat like a barber’s warm rag upon my face, and the smoke a speckled curtain of gray and black, and the stench of organic burning things, rotten food and moldy bread, and underlying it the foul muck of marrow sizzling within bone and the acrid tincture of hair smoldering, and I knew, I knew before I looked, before I kicked the first barrel over, spilling the contents of its gullet onto the damp, hard-packed earth, I knew what I would find, knew to the core of my harsh, cold, merciless self what he had done and to whom he had done it, apple-cheeked, fair-skinned, ready smile, and you bastard, you bastard, what have you done? What have you done?
There was her apron, torn and bloody, and a piece of her calico dress and the remnants of the ribbon that held back her hair.
Long tangled strands of it clung stubbornly to the skull, a light brown giving to gray, and she the Medusa: I am turned to stone.
She grinned up at me, and the empty sockets looked into my face, and both were devoid of expression, her skull, my face, no sorrow, no pity, no horror, no fear, hollow socket and hollow man, hollowed out by his hand.
Arcadia
NOT A DRACHM
OF BLOOD REMAINS IN ME, THAT DOES NOT TREMBLE;
I KNOW THE TRACES OF THE ANCIENT FLAME.
—DANTE, PURGATORIO
Canto 1
ONE
I cannot say to you, This is where it began.
A circle has no starting point.
There are the secrets I have kept.
He encircles me. There is no beginning or end, and time is the lie the mirror tells us.
These are the secrets.
The child in the tattered hat and the boy in the labyrinth and the man beside the ash barrel circle without beginning, without end.
It is hard, he told me once, hard to think about those things we do not think about.
TWO
Deep in the bowels of the Beastie Bin, the man stiffened in my arms. His back arched, his head fell back. Bright red arterial blood boiled from his mouth, blended with stringy globs of black, dead tissue—the remnants of his esophagus, I think—and then he died.
I lowered his body to the floor. Dropped the blade into my pocket. Ran a bloody hand through my hair, still gelled, though no longer so stylishly.
Bring me to it!
I already have.
I knew what he meant, knew where the creature lay hidden: I’d transcribed Warthrop’s notes on the creature. Disaster had been averted—all was not lost—but I would need something to put it in. I returned to the Locked Room and grabbed the burlap sack. The monster wasn’t going anywhere soon. There might be more thieves scurrying about the Beastie Bin, well-armed, desperate thieves at that, but I felt no anxiety, no sense of urgency. I didn’t even bother to pick up the revolver before I went to fetch the sack.
I strolled back to the corridor where I’d left him, turned the corner, and pulled up short: A man was kneeling beside the body. A few feet beyond, an indistinct figure hovered in the shadows. Now, what was the reason I hadn’t picked up that damned revolver?
The man rose. The gun I had abandoned came up. I raised my hands and said, “It’s me, Warthrop.”
The figure standing behind him rushed out of the shadows. Lilly. She drew up suddenly, seeing my blood-spattered face. “Will! Are you hurt?”
Warthrop brushed her aside and yanked the empty sack from my hand.
“Where is it?” he growled.
“Right here,” I answered. I pulled the switchblade from my pocket and offered it to him. “I’ll trade you,” I said.
He understood at once. With a curt nod he took the knife, handed me the bag, and returned to the body. I squatted down beside him. Lilly watched us, puzzled, arms folded over her chest.
“Adolphus is dead,” I told the monstrumologist as he ripped open the man’s shirt to expose his torso.
“So I understand,” Warthrop grunted. He flicked open the knife. Pressed the tip just beneath the sternum. Squared his shoulders. “Are you ready?”
I edged closer, pulling wide the mouth of the sack. “Ready.”
Lilly gasped—couldn’t help herself, I guessed; though she had always bragged she would be the first female monstrumologist, she’d never been this close to actual practice of the craft. The doctor rammed the knife in and drew the blade down, the muscles in his neck bulging from the effort. When he reached the navel, he tossed the knife to the floor and slid his hands, palms pressed together, into the body. “Careful,” I murmured, and he nodded sharply, muttering, “Slippery . . .” He was sweating in the cool air, brows knotted in concentration, eyes closed, because he didn’t need them for this: just quick, sure hands and the iron-hard will to guide them. “Hold steady now,” he murmured to me, to the thing curled up inside the man’s chest cavity. “Now, Will Henry!”
He opened his eyes and rose up on his knees, and his hands came out of the man’s middle with a soft plop!, and the thing in his grip twisted and coiled sensuously around his arms, dripping with gore and oddly beautiful in the smoky yellow light, shimmering like the midnight surface of a river. With one smooth motion the monstrumologist swung the prize into the sack. “Now the truly tricky part,” he muttered. He did not rush. He forced himself to go slowly. First one hand, then the hand that held the base of its head. The critical moment in which he was at the greatest danger of being bitten. Then he was free and I twisted the mouth of the bag closed. We were a bit out of breath.
“Well, Will Henry,” he panted. “I suppose we should have posted a watch after all.”
THREE
After examining the two victims and inspecting the scene of the crime—or crimes, since both murder and burglary were involved—the monstrumologist concurred with my assessment of the sequence of events.
“They were not rivals or enemies,” he said. “They were companions. Too much risk for one man to take on alone—one was to act as lookout while the other transferred the treasure from crate to sack. But one carried the seed of perfidy in his heart—the lookout, I think, since he also carried the gun, which he used once the Locked Room was open.” We had found the weapon in the eviscerated thief’s coat pocket. Warthrop sniffed the barrel; it had been recently fired. “He goes into the room. It fools him, the apparent lassitude of his quarry. Perhaps he even assumes that it sleeps. Bag in one hand, he pops open the cage door, and it strikes.” Warthrop smacked a fist into his open palm. “The fangs sink deep. In his panic, he flings aside the bag to use that hand to pull off the mouth, though the jaws are locked in a grip too tight for three strong men to break. He stumbles backward out of the room, stepping into his victim’s blood as he goes, hits the far wall, upending the crates. By this point it is too late—well, it was too late the moment he was struck. His instinct is to run, and so he does, but he doesn’t get far—the poison has already reached his brain. He is disoriented, dizzy; the world spins; the center will not hold. He careens into this storage room, where he collapses, and his pounding heart speeds the toxin into every muscle and organ.”
“But how did it get inside him?” Lilly blurted out. She was visibly shaken by this, her first real exposure to aberrant biology. You may study it in a thousand books and hear about it in a thousand lectures and discuss it with a thousand learned philosophers, but you can never know it until you have seen it—and what she had seen was but a glimpse.
Warthrop seemed perplexed by her question. “Well, the number of available orifices is quite small. I think it is safe to assume it entered through the largest one.”
“But why did it crawl inside him?”
The monstrumologist blinked several times. The answer was obvious—to him and, to his mind, anyone who had one. But his tone was patient with her, more so than it ever had been with me. “To eat, Miss Bates. And to hide from anything that might eat him.”
He clapped his hands softly. “Well! I must have a look at Adolphus now, I suppose. Hang on to that revolver, Mr. Henry; I shall help myself to this fellow’s Colt and meet you back here. Stay in this room and do not venture out until I return or unless your life depends upon it. Miss Bates, after you.”
Lilly slipped her arm through mine. “I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.”
“It may be a little much to ask of him,” Warthrop replied. He nodded to the bag in my hand. “I wouldn’t want for him to find himself in the unfortunate position of having to choose between you.”
I laughed. Lilly failed to see the humor, though. She said, “I can manage myself.”
The doctor started to say something, shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and then without a word darted out the door. We were alone, Lilly and the monster and me.
I sank to the floor and rested my back against a shipping crate emblazoned with the Society’s coat of arms. Nil timendum est. With the squirming sack between my legs, I looked up at Lilly, who seemed very tall and nearly goddesslike from my inferior position, haughtily regal in her purple dress, though it suffered now from a smudge or two.
“May I say how striking you look right now?” I asked. “I can’t decide if i
t’s the angle or the lighting. Perhaps both. I am very tired. I think the alcohol has worn off.”
“You used to be so serious,” she observed after a studied silence. “Even when you were trying to joke, you were serious.”
“The work gives one perspective.”
“What kind of perspective would that be?”
I pursed my lips, thinking about it. “The loftiest humanly possible. Or just possible, period.”
She shook her head. “Where is the gun?”
“In my pocket. Why?”
She squatted beside me and fished into my pocket. “Don’t take my firearm, Miss Bates,” I cautioned her.
“Your hands are full.”
“If you take my firearm, I shall be forced to shoot you.”
“The more you try to be funny, the less funny you become.”
She held the gun with both hands against her stomach. She with the gun, I with the bag.
“It isn’t my fault you don’t have a sense of humor,” I said. “Please don’t worry it; you’re making me nervous.”
She sat down beside me, her eyes upon the lump beneath the burlap.