The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist)

by Rick Yancey

  I stumble straight back until the wall behind me halts my retreat.

  Do you know how it kills you, Isaacson? You are fully aware of what’s happening as its jaw unhinges to accommodate you whole.

  Back the way I came, careening from wall to wall while over my head the world is consumed.

  Horrendous pressure that crushes your bones . . . and every inch of your body burns as if you’ve been dropped into a vat of acid.

  There he lies; he has not moved. My hand drops into my pocket, for I still have the Camorrista’s switchblade knife. I will gut him. I will feed him his own stinking entrails. I will take his eyes first, then his tongue. I will force him to eat his own stupid, banal, wicked self.

  But wait. He is not alone. Another bends over him, older, dark-haired, bearing a bulging burlap sack. This one looks up at my approach, startled, eyes wide with terror.

  “William!” Acosta-Rojas cries. “We must escape, but how? Not above—we must find another way. Is there a sewage drain somewhere down here? That, I think, is our best—”

  I ram my fist into his Adam’s apple. He topples backward, dropping the sack. The thing within it twists and rolls.

  “Who was it?” I demand. “Was it you or was it Warthrop or was it both of you?”

  He cannot answer. I may have shattered his windpipe. Tears of pain and terror stream down his face.

  “It was his idea, wasn’t it?” I ask. “When you told him you’d captured it in Cerrejón. He wanted all credit—what did he offer you in return?”

  He chokes out the answer, barely audible: “My life.”

  I rock back on my heels as if he struck me. Flat, not round! Not a ball but a plate! And Mihos, the guardian of the horizon, has fallen over the edge.

  Something in my expression makes him raise his hands defensively, like an obedient child lifting his arms for his nightshirt to be put on. So I oblige him: Enraged, I heave the writhing sack from the floor, upend it, and stuff it over his head. The twisting, rolling thing within strikes.

  Acosta-Rojas screams; his exposed lower half jerks and immediately goes stiff. His cries are choked off as the beast coils itself nooselike around his neck. It will hold there until its prey is dead, for it has not reached its full maturity; it cannot swallow a man whole—yet.

  I am not done. Dear God, what am I but man in microcosm? I flick open the switchblade—snick!—and return to Isaacson.

  He is awake. His eyes widen at my approach. “Will . . . ?”

  “Shh, don’t ask, Samuel,” I whisper. “There are some things to which there is no human answer.”

  “I had no choice,” he whimpers. He raises his hands to me in supplication. “Please, Will. I only did as I was told!”

  A terrific explosion above shakes the walls. The floor heaves. The ceiling cracks, sags; chunks of it rain down: The fire has found the gas lines. The jets wink out, plunging the Monstrumarium into utter darkness. Isaacson wails as if the world itself is ending. I thrust out my hand, the empty one, and seize him by the collar. I haul him upright. He squeals, expecting the coup de grâce.

  “To hell with all of you,” I snarl into his ear. “To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me.”

  The building over us is collapsing; the ceiling gives; we’ll be crushed beneath a thousand tons of concrete and marble. There is no way out but down—through the drain in the dissection room. Acosta-Rojas’s instinct was right, though his timing was bad. I fling Isaacson away and stumble over the broken floor, one arm draped protectively over my head, the other extended before me into darkness absolute. Fingers clutch at the back of my jacket: Isaacson, that mediocrity like all mediocrities, always finding a way to come out on top. It is not the meek who will inherit the earth.

  Blind leading the blind, in the belly of the dying beast, its bones splitting and cracking and raining down upon our heads. And of all to whom I might have shown mercy, it is Samuel Isaacson whom I save that day.

  The rest, monstrumologists all, perished upon that day.

  Except one.

  TWO

  The earth spins round nearly seven thousand times, and now crumbs cling to blubbery lips and damp stringy hair hangs over pale forehead.

  And the cold that grips and the hand that holds the knife scraping across dirt-encrusted nails, the monster-hunter, the teacher and the lesson, the cause and the effect, the ending of the circle that has no beginning.

  And the locked door and the thing behind the locked door and the bones that steam in ash barrels and the lie we tell ourselves because the truth is too much for any human heart to bear.

  There are no beginnings or endings or anything in between. Time the lie and we the circle and the infinite contained in the amber eye.

  You know what is coming. Will you turn aside?

  The end is there in the beginning.

  Turn aside or come and see? Choose now, choose now.

  I slapped the knife onto the kitchen table. Warthrop jerked in his chair and his eyes darted away from my face as I rose. He seemed to shrink before me, diminishing to a point infinitesimally small: he the earth and I the rocket ship blasting into the outer atmosphere. I strode to the basement door. He grabbed at my arm with a desperate cry. I yanked free. I did not know what was behind that door. Of course I knew what was behind that door:

  I have found it, Will Henry. The thing itself.

  I brought the heel of my boot against the ancient wood—it was thrice Warthrop’s age—and the door split apart with a satisfying crack, splintering straight down the middle, and behind me the monstrumologist gave an answering cry, as if I were breaking him in half. I ripped the door from its hinges with my bare hands. A putrid, nauseous stench washed over me, like the exhalation of God’s greatest failure locked in Judecca’s ice, the cloying reek of rotting flesh, the thing itself, he called it, the thing itself.

  My eyes adjusted to the gloom below, the perpetual dark of the thing itself, and why had he raised the floor? And why had he painted it a shiny, obsidian black? But it was not paint and it was not the floor, for it moved. It flowed like the muddy sludge left over from a devastating flood. It undulated, black with flashes of brilliant iridescent green.

  And then the head appeared, five feet across, flat at the top, for its ancient brain knew what the opening of the door meant, the toothless mouth stretching obscenely open, and seeing the glistening red gullet is like looking into the fiery abyss leading straight to hell, and I do not imagine that I can see myself reflected in its lidless amber eye. I fill it as its fifty-foot body fills the basement. The massive head, red mouth yawning open, rests upon the stairs, too old or too large to come any closer, or perhaps it cannot. Perhaps it has grown too large for its container. No. Not that. Trapped in its amber eye, I realize that the thing itself has lost the reason for its being. It is a shell, a hollow sack with no purpose but to continue one more meaningless day.

  “You must understand,” its twin said behind me. “Can you understand, Will? I couldn’t just . . . It was unthinkable . . . unendurable. . . . It is the last of its kind. The last of its kind!”

  “It died in the Monstrumarium,” I said. I could not free myself from the amber eye.

  “No. I found it afterward buried in the rubble. Acosta- Rojas’s body had shielded it from the debris.”

  “You didn’t bring it back here, though.”

  “No, that was much later—after you moved away.”

  “And never told me.”

  “For the same reason I lied to you then. It is precious beyond price, and the fewer who knew, the better—for the world, Will, and for it. It is the last of its kind! When Acosta-Rojas told me he’d found it—”

  “Yes, yes,” I snapped, held still by the amber eye. “He told me. You forced him to hand it over—you threatened to kill him if he didn’t.”

  “No! I saved him—or tried to—just as I tried to save Beatrice—as I tried to save you—”

  “Save me from what? Never mind. What
does it matter now?” Filled with disgust and loathing, captive in the amber eye. “You cannot lie your way out of this one, Warthrop. I have it from his own lips: You offered him his life for the prize.”

  “I offered to save his life. The fool had let it out, what he’d found—the news had already reached certain unsavory quarters. He was afraid. And I was afraid that it would be lost. And it is a thing that can never be lost. What choice did he give me?”

  I wrenched myself free of the eye and whirled about. In two strides I was upon him. I yanked him up; the chair clattered to the floor. He was wasted down to nothing, bones no more substantial than a bird’s. I could have hurled him a hundred yards.

  “Yes, let us speak of choices! Did she see it? Is that why you murdered her? To protect it from the world?”

  “I didn’t kill her!” he screeched. “The ridiculous woman’s curiosity got the better of her—she opened the door and went too far down the stairs. Too far, Will! I pulled her from its mouth, but it was too late. Too late! And then what was I to do? Who could I tell? No, no. Not our fault. Her fault, Will. Her fault!”

  I flung him to the floor. He curled into a ball; he did not try to get up. His father had been found this way, curled up like a fetus in its mother’s womb. Ending as he began.

  “Too late,” I gasped. The smell of death loitered in the room. The cold held it still. “You said it was too late. Too late for what?”

  “There is no way out,” he whimpered. “I cannot kill it—it is the last of its kind. I cannot return it to the wild—how could such a thing be accomplished?”

  “You could give it away. There are a hundred universities and—”

  “No!” he cried, striking his fist upon the floor. “Never! It is mine! It belongs to me!”

  “Does it?” I knelt beside him. His hands were folded up, tucked beneath his chin. His eyes were wide and frightened: the hunted cowering in the brush, the child sleepless in the dark. “There is a captive here, but it isn’t at the bottom of those stairs. It has swallowed you already.”

  “The thing itself, Will Henry. The thing itself! The thing to which there is no human answer. The thing I’ve hunted all these many years, the thing I was chasing—until it caught me!”

  He seized my wrist. He pulled me close.

  “You are the one. You have always been the one. You see where I am afraid to look. You are my eyes in the dark places. Look, then, and tell me what you see.”

  I nodded. I thought I understood. I was his eyes. What did I see? Open, expectant mouth. White lamb with skittering black eyes. And the Sibyl, blessed and cursed. What would you?

  I scooped him from the floor and cradled his body in my arms like he was a child. He pressed his freshly washed head beneath my chin.

  His hand reached up and touched gently my cheek. “You have always been indispensable to me.”

  I kissed his sweet-smelling hair. The ice of Judecca cracks, soft as a feather falling. Creator forgives creation and creation absolves creator.

  There is forgiveness. There is justice. There is mercy.

  There is room, after all.

  I will raise you up. I will not suffer you to drown.

  And the beast that waits for us in the final descent.

  I turned one last time and started down the stairs.

  THREE

  Oct. 23, 1911

  Dear Will,

  The marshal has issued his final report, of copy of which I have taken the liberty of enclosing with this letter. As you will see, it concludes that the fire was “of suspicious, if undetermined, origins.” I sorely wish that I had a more satisfactory answer, not only for your peace of mind but for my own as well. Pellinore was not a dear friend, nor even, I would say, a particularly close one, but he was a singular man, and I daresay the world will not see another like him for a hundred generations.

  I have been to the site twice now, the second time in honor of your specific request, and I am sorry to report I can find nothing of any salvageable value—there is nothing left of the house but the chimney—nothing, that is, beyond the contents of the storage shed and old livery, including that fine old automobile, which you stated in your latest letter that you had no interest in.

  The memorial service was quite moving, if not the best attended. I would have been overjoyed to have shared with you the melancholy of that final farewell, but I understand all too well the demands of your business. P. would too, I think.

  My sole regret—and do not think I say this to add any burden to your loss—is that you were unable to get away last month to see him. No, that burden is mine, for you are there and I was always here, and now my conscience torments me for not having banged on that door until he answered. My theory of the case is that the fire began when the old curmudgeon forgot to pay his power bill and reverted to kerosene and candle wax for his illumination.

  Perhaps when you have a few days to spare from your labors, you can make it back to your old stomping grounds. I don’t think you’ve been back for two years or more. It would do this old man’s heart good to see you, and I feel I owe you a personal apology for neglecting the man who was so very dear to you.

  As always, I remain

  Robert Morgan

  P.S. If you’ve truly no interest in the Lozier, I might be interested in taking it off your hands. Not as a gift, of course! I am willing to pay a reasonable price for it.

  FOUR

  These have been the secrets I kept.

  Old man in a dry season.

  Boy in a tattered hat.

  And the man in the stained white coat, monstrous hunter of nameless things.

  The one who blessed me, the one who cursed me.

  Who raised me upon his shoulders that I, the dark tide of his making, might carry him down.

  Remember me, he said. When all else has been forgotten.

  A small fortune was mine afterward. I was all he had and all else he had came to me.

  Where did I go? Up and down, to and fro. I wandered the earth, the indispensable companion companionless. I fled the States, ended up on the Continent in time for the monster that digested thirty-seven million souls in its fiery gut. After the war, I bought a little house on the southern coast of France. I hired a local girl to cook and clean. She was young and pretty, and I may have been in love with her.

  In the warm summer afternoons we would go for walks on the beach. I liked the ocean. From the shore you could see the edge of the world.

  “Let me ask you, Aimée. It is it round or is it a plate?”

  And she would laugh at me, slipping her arm through mine. She thought I was joking.

  And I was happy for a time.

  Her father had died at Verdun. Her lover at the Somme. She met someone new, and when he proposed, she asked if I would give her away. I agreed, though I was heartbroken. I did not hire another girl after she left. I packed up the house and returned to the States.

  I ended up back in New York for a time. I still had my apartment there. I wrote some. I drank more. I wandered the streets. Where the old opera house had stood there was now a bank. A different kind of society. A different breed of hunters. Monstrumology was dead, but all of us are, and always will be, monstrumologists. In the afternoons you could usually find me in the park, just another lonely man on a bench among pigeons. I was still caught, you see, inside the glass jar, within the amber eye. You are my memory, he had told me night after sleepless night. And that was what I became: the immortal sack, Judecca’s ice.

  The twenties ended with a great crash, and one day I picked up the paper to read about a man who had jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge after losing his entire fortune. His name was Nathaniel Bates. The notice included the particulars of the memorial service.

  I was an accomplished hunter and tracker, and was sure she hadn’t seen me, but after her father was laid in the earth she spotted me beneath a sycamore tree. Years had gone by, she was no longer young, but the blue of her eyes was undiluted, pure all the way down.

/>   “William James Henry,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve aged a day.”

  “There is something I must tell you,” I said.

  There was a tall, broad-shouldered man watching us from the grave site. He was frowning.

  “Is that your husband?” I asked Lilly.

  “The latest one. Promise you won’t punch him or eviscerate him or feed him to anything.”

  “Oh, I’m done with that. I haven’t killed anyone for a very long time.”

  “You sound almost wistful about it.”

  “I am not a monster, Lilly.”

  “No, more like a ghost. Frightening but impotent. What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “What you’ve come to tell me.”

  “Oh. Never mind. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “After nearly forty years, it must a little.”

  It was a lovely spring day. Cloudless. Cool. The leaves of the sycamore tree a startled green. The man was still frowning at us from the grave site, but he had not moved.

  “What’s his name? Your latest husband.”

  She told me. “James?” I asked, thinking she had left out his last name. “Like the philosopher?”

  “No, but James is his middle name.”

  “Ah. His parents must have admired the brothers.”

  “Brothers?”

  “His brother was a novelist.”

  “Whose brother?”

  “The philosopher’s.”

  She laughed, and still the sound was like coins tossed upon a silver tray.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s have a drink.”

  Her laughter stopped. “Now?”

  “We’ll celebrate your father’s life.”

  “I can’t go with you now.”

  “Later, then. Tonight.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? He won’t mind.” Nodding toward the frowning man. “I’m harmless; you said so yourself. The impotent ghost.”

  She turned her head away. Her profile was lovely beneath the sycamore tree.