The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist)

by Rick Yancey

  “Where is it, Warthrop? Back in the Monstrumarium? That’s my guess. Safest place, at least while you’re here. Gives you time to make arrangements for a more permanent home for it.”

  “Your theory of the case is entertaining, but terribly flawed. I was shot in the leg by my own coconspirator? Why would he do that?”

  “That’s the other thing!” I cried. “Thank you, sir, for reminding me! I should have seen it then—you saw it almost immediately—that Pellinore Warthrop would never give up something so important so easily. ‘Give it to him!’ ” I laughed. “You did want me to give it to him—you had hired him, after all, to take it!”

  “Enough!” he cried, uncoiling from the chair and lunging toward me. “It is one thing to insult my honor, sir—quite another to cross the line into insulting my intelligence! I suppose it assuages your guilt to lay the blame upon my shoulders—to transfer the blood, as it were, onto my hands. It was you who snuck into the Monstrumarium with Lilly Bates that night! It was you who murdered two men in cold blood over the sum of ten thousand dollars! It was you who brought about the death of my dearest and only friend! It was you who in some warped sense of justice executed a king to inaugurate a war!” He took a long, shuddering breath. His voice died away nearly to nothing. “And it was you who sacrificed upon the altar of your selfish need . . .”

  The monstrumologist turned away. He left the rest of it—and all of it—unfinished for another time.

  “Now see what you’ve done,” he muttered at the door. “You’ve upset me again, at the worst possible time—again. Tomorrow I must preside over the opening session, and I am weary and distracted beyond words. When we get back to New Jerusalem—”

  “I’m not going back to New Jerusalem!” I shouted at him. He raised his hand, allowed it to fall to his side: a gesture of resignation.

  “As you wish,” he said. There was nothing left in his voice. No anger, no sorrow, no silly sentimental thing at all. “I have saved you from yourself for the last time.”

  TWO

  He closed the door behind him. The creak of the floorboards faded. He did not return to his room; I could tell that. Probably went to brood in the sitting room, in the dark, his natural habitat. I seethed, my nausea and light-headedness forgotten. I didn’t think I was right; I knew it. He had lied to me, the one who had called lying the worst kind of buffoonery. And worse: He had twisted the facts to justify endangering Lilly and all the inadvertent carnage that followed. If I’d known the truth, Competello and his men would be alive, von Helrung, too. His deception was the monster here, not me. No, not that—the lie was merely the progeny of his colossal ego and his willingness to place an abomination above human life. I’d always thought him vain and arrogant and without normal human emotion. I’d never considered, though, that he might be evil.

  The floorboards creaked again. He had gone into his room. A minute passed, then five, and now the creaks were softer, as if he were tiptoeing down the hall. I threw back the covers and stumbled to the armoire to find some clothes. The room teetered; I nearly fell. I had not eaten in days.

  I knew where he was going—or thought I did. And if he didn’t go there, I would while he was gone. I was sure I knew where he had hidden it. I would find it and chop off its foul head and stuff it into his lying mouth.

  The only thing I could not understand was why he wouldn’t confess. What did it matter now?

  “Evil man,” I muttered. “Evil!”

  The night was freezing cold. In my haste I’d forgotten my coat. I jammed my bare hands into my trouser pockets and trotted along with my shoulders hunched, and the city lights pushed back against the sky, dimming the stars. My vision was cloudy, my thoughts muddled. No matter the hour, the streets are never truly deserted in the city. There are the white-coated sanitation workers and the seamen wandering in drunken clumps looking for an open bar and the pickpockets and whores who prey on them and the occasional homeless restless wanderer digging through trash barrels and the lonely patrolman walking his beat.

  The dark buildings cut off the horizon; here it was impossible to discern the edge of the world. My quarry was well ahead of me, out of sight, like the horizon he guarded: In Egypt, I have told you, he was called Mihos, the one whose sacred charge was to keep me from falling over that edge.

  I entered the Society’s headquarters through the same side door Lilly and I had used the night of the dance. Black jacket, purple dress, raven-colored ringlets, and now she was gone, back in England, and who cares? To hell with her. There is something missing. Something that should be there but isn’t anymore. No, Lilly. There is nothing missing. I am complete. I am whole. I am the evolution of man in microcosm. The chrysalis breaks, the amniotic fluid oozes from the fissure, and the amber eye opens, unblinking in a shadowless world.

  And now the stairs leading down, narrow, serpentine, dark, like those in Warthrop’s dream. The gas jets had been turned on below, and the light like a creeping seaside fog rose up to greet me. The Beastie Bin, the House of Monsters, Kodesh Hakodashim, the Holy of Holies, and Isaacson saying You’ll be an exhibit there one day.

  Voices floated along the dusty passageways, twisting around corners, squeezing between the crates and cases that listed precariously against the walls, the words muffled and indistinct, two voices, male, one undeniably Warthrop’s, the other harder to place, though it sounded vaguely familiar. I slowed as I came close. I could hear something else now—someone else—a soft mewling, the unmistakable moans of a human being in agony.

  And then I heard Samuel Isaacson say, “How much longer?”

  Then Warthrop: “Impossible to predict. Hours, days . . . it could come in a few minutes; it may never come. Fetch me the syringe. Let’s take another sample.”

  “Perhaps we should end it now, sir. The suffering, it’s . . .”

  “Would you play God, Isaacson? I am a scientist: a student of nature, not its master. Ours is to observe and record, not judge and execute. Is she doomed? Most likely. There is no remedy, no antidote . . . here, take this now and set it over there on the bench. Another hot cloth now, and step lively.”

  “He’ll burn in hell for this.”

  “What? Have you not been listening? Where did Sir Hiram find you, anyway? If you want to fiddle with notions of heaven and hell, get thee to a seminary! The world is round, Isaacson: a ball, not a plate. If something should happen while I am occupied upstairs tomorrow, you are not to force the issue, do you understand? I shall decide if and when to end her misery. Now take this sample to the curator’s office and prepare the slides. I’ll be there directly.”

  I ducked between two stacks of crates and pressed my body deep into the narrow space. Isaacson hurried past; I glimpsed his face screwed up with worry and fear, a syringe loaded with blood clutched in his hand. Now there was silence but for the feverish moans.

  “There, there.” Warthrop’s voice broke through, oddly tender. “It comes in waves. This too shall pass.”

  And now a quiet sobbing, hopeless and heart-wrenching. Then Warthrop again: “Here, hold this. When the next wave hits, squeeze as hard as you can; it will help. I won’t be long . . .”

  I held my breath as he emerged. He walked with his shoulders rounded, his head down, like a man bearing a thousand-pound burden.

  Then I stepped out from my hiding place and hurried to the open doorway. I knew what I would find. I knew who Warthrop’s patient must be. There was only one female in the entire world who would venture into the Monstrumarium. She must not have gotten on that ship after all. And she must have found Warthrop’s precious “prize.” Or it had found her. Evil, evil. There seemed to be no limit to his unintentional cruelty. Another victim in his wake. Another sacrifice upon the altar of his unbounded ambition.

  A layer of old blankets covered a long, waist-high dissection table. A smaller table had been set at one end, upon which a bowl of hot water steamed. Beside the bowl an array of instruments, vials, and two syringes, one empty, the other loaded w
ith an amber-colored liquid. A large bucket marked HANDLE WITH CARE—CAUSTIC sat in the corner. Sulfuric acid was an indispensable tool in aberrant biology, used primarily for stripping bones to prepare them for study and for cleaning instruments.

  A sheet lay crumpled upon the floor next to the drain used to carry runoff of blood and body fluids into the city sewers. She must have kicked off the sheet in her distress, and I saw that she was naked, and sweat glimmered on her exposed flesh; it pasted her dark hair to her scalp; it pooled in the hollow between her breasts. She was clutching a rubber ball, Warthrop’s parting gift, and she squeezed it rhythmically, as if to keep time with music only she could hear.

  I stepped closer. Drawn. Repulsed. She was covered head to toe with splotches of red, a patchwork quilt of inflamed skin; in the center of the angry white boils glistened like the chrysalis in the basement, on the brink of hatching. I recognized what this was. I knew what she suffered from.

  Drawn, repulsed: closer . . . closer.

  Her eyes rolled back in her head. Her dark lashes fluttered. Her delicate, childlike features were clear of boils, but I knew what monster lurked just beneath the surface. I knew what was in her.

  The same was in me.

  Would you like to try?

  What I would really like is something indescribably euphoric—orgasmic, for lack of a better word.

  You will like it.

  I stumbled backward, and my mind recoiled as well. A black roaring tide smashed into my chest, stopping my heart. The most chaste of kisses. The most chaste of kisses! From a great distance, as the dark tide drove me into suffocating depths, I could hear someone wailing: Someone’s soul was being torn in half. It was mine. It was not mine. Faceless thing, nameless thing, thing that dances in the flames.

  And then I smack into his chest, and he wraps his long arms around me, and there is his face overwhelming my vision, filling it to the last centimeter, dark eyes in pale death mask, Mihos, the guardian, but he is too late to save me: I’ve fallen over the edge; my corruption chews on the last of my bones. No room no place no point in mercy or forgiveness or sorrow or any human thing. Just the weeping chrysalis and the perfection of the ancient call, the overarching imperative contained in the most chaste of kisses.

  THREE

  “I am not a physician,” the monstrumologist said. “I am a philosopher. But her mother dragged me into the sickroom regardless. No, no, I said, I have come for the boy, only the boy. But she was a mother and her child was sick and, after I examined the girl, I asked her how long she’d been sick and what were her symptoms, and I suspected—I did not know, of course—the underlying cause of her distress. It posed a serious conundrum. If allowed to run its course, her affliction could result in a wildfire of infection: her sister, her mother, the denizens of the opium joint. From there it might spread throughout the entire city before the outbreak could be contained. She could not go to the hospital—the risk of a serious outbreak was only marginally slighter there. Was it arawakus? I did not know. But better to err on the side of caution.

  “Undoubtedly she is infected. There is nothing to be done, as you know, beyond making her comfortable. I’ve been giving her morphine and treating the boils with hot cloths. There is little left of her mind; the organism has infiltrated her cerebral cortex. I don’t believe she knows where she is or what is happening to her, and that is a mercy. A mercy.

  “I must confess I am torn. Keeping her alive only prolongs her suffering. Only pushes off for another hour the final agony. What do I choose? Is it even my choice to make? I am not God. I act the part at times. I place the mantle upon my shoulders and each time I pay. I pay! Your father loved me, and that love cost him his life, cost you yours in a way that is somehow more terrible. Unendurable pain, Will Henry, unrelieved and unredeemed. This poor girl upon this makeshift altar, this virginal sacrifice, and I the heretical priest who would spill her blood to appease a voracious god!

  “I told you once you must become accustomed to such things, and in this I am a liar and a hypocrite: There are things to which you can never become accustomed—things to which I can never become accustomed. There are some things to which there is no human answer, and God himself is silent.

  “You must tell me, you, what must be done. Tell me, and I will be your instrument. There is the poison, there, next to the empty needle; it will end it quickly and there will be no pain. If we wait, she will break open, she will split apart, the things inside her will pour forth from every fissure and cavity, and we’ll have to use the acid. We cannot wait until her poor heart stops. She will endure unimaginable pain.

  “We have reached the crux of it this day, Will Henry. The bottom of the stairs, if you will. This is the choice my life has forced upon you. You are the spotless lamb, the bearer of my sin, the keeper of my secrets, the guardian of my shame. You are the guilty one and the blameless one, the blessed one and the cursed one, and there are no words—for words are human things.

  “We have reached the bottom of it, you and I. The final descent—and this is the face of the beast that waits for us in the dark.”

  Canto 4

  ONE

  The tall, lean man rises from his chair and crosses the stage to the rostrum. The only sound in the cavernous auditorium is the scuffing of his shoes upon the worn boards. Spectral thin, whittled down to his bones, black jacket hanging loosely upon his frame, a hollow scarecrow of a man, this is the interim president of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology, newly elevated to its head but long its soul. And I, the soul’s keeper, sitting high above in the private box, watching him like the buzzards that circle in the wilderness sky. There is no applause, no congratulatory cheer. This was to be his moment of triumph, the crowning achievement of his legendary career. Instead there is only sorrow and suspicion in the gathering of his brother scientists, his kindred spirits in the study of God’s cruelest jests. Hundreds have packed the old opera house to hear him—and to challenge him. There sits the chinless Hiram Walker, leaning forward in his front-row seat, little rat eyes narrowed, waiting for his chance to pounce: Why did we hire criminals and thugs to guard the greatest treasure to come to aberrant biology in a hundred years? And what did we learn from that mistake if we beg for them to find it for us? Why is our president and beloved Meister dead? Warthrop’s nemesis is clutching a piece of paper in one of his little rodent claws: a resolution for permanent expulsion, that’s the well-trod rumor. The monstrumologist will be banished from monstrumology, and then what will he be? What is Pellinore Warthrop if he isn’t purely and fundamentally that?

  On the altar table down below, the sacrifice nears its final consummation, wholly innocent and wholly doomed, tended to by Samuel Isaacson. Isaacson, that crushing mediocrity who could not face the nameless, faceless thing any more than a whore could reclaim her virginity. The innocent perish. The stupid, the banal, the wicked—they go on and on.

  “It is my duty,” the monstrumologist said from the podium, “and with heavy heart . . . to call this one hundred thirteenth congress to order.”

  He raised the ceremonial gavel, and the hall abruptly plunged into darkness. A voice broke the shocked silence: “Greetings from Elizabeth Street, you bastards!” Dozens of flaming globes sailed from the back of the auditorium. Some smashed upon the stage, the fiery buds blossoming into fireballs, others fell into the crowd, and in the panicky uproar few heard the exit doors slamming and the metal rods ramming through the handles, sealing us inside. The fire spread quickly as men clogged the aisles like stampeding cattle, trampling one another to escape that which was inescapable. The old carpeting, the upholstered chairs, the thick damask curtains succumbed; thick, choking smoke rapidly filled the hall. Before I fled, I saw a figure engulfed in flames racing the opposite way, toward the stage, his high-pitched squeals not unlike a rat’s as the vermin realizes its doom.

  Down the back stairway to the private entrance—a small door; perhaps they missed it. It would not yield. And the handle
was hot to the touch. Like the conscientious farmer, the Camorra had not confined the sowing to a single fertile row: The entire building had been lit.

  Tears streamed down my face. Smoke gripped my lungs. I rammed my shoulder into the door. It burns, it burns! I would not endure it, not a second time, not ever again. I kicked the center of the door as hard as I could. There was no light and no way I could see through my tears if there had been. Another kick. A third. The wood cracked. The superheated air on the other side snapped the barrier in two, split it neatly down the middle like an axman a fence rail. The blast hurled me backward; my head smacked against the steps behind me. A tide of black smoke barreled through the opening. I pressed my hand over my nose and mouth and shut my eyes: I did not need to see to know where I was going.

  Across the hall inundated with flame. Through the door direly marked that opened to the stairs, serpentine and narrow, and below the friendly yellow glow of the jets, the rush of cooler air against my face, and now my eyes are open and I am sprinting along the tortuous path to her chamber and I will not suffer you, I will not let it stand, and there is Isaacson running toward me as above us the edifice groans and cries, saying It burns, it burns! as it’s eaten alive.

  “Too late! Too late!” he cries, coming straight at me. He snatches at my sleeve; I reward him with a roundhouse punch to the side of his head that drops him. I step over his writhing body and race on.

  I skitter to a stop in the doorway. The fumes are chokingly thick—the hellish stench of rotten eggs sears my mouth, scorches my lungs. Too late: In his panic, he must have doused her with the entire bucketful. I can see what’s left of her sizzling away; her blood bubbles and steams; she has no face; her skull leers at me, the mouth open in a frozen scream. She was alive when he did it.