The Isle of Blood (Monstrumologist)

by Yancey, Rick

  I missed one or two of their opening skirmishes. Hardly had Lady Liberty slipped beneath the horizon than I came down with a horrible case of mal de mer, the bane of land-lubbers, forcing me to become more intimately acquainted with a toilet than any person ought to be. Von Helrung put me to bed, gave me some salt crackers, and suggested, very seriously, that the best cure for seasickness was dancing.

  “No, it’s olives,” countered Torrance. “Or gingerroot. You should gnaw on a root, Mr. Henry.”

  “On every voyage my wife would suffer the same as Will,” von Helrung returned. “We would go dancing, and all would be fine.”

  “So you would like to take Will dancing?”

  “It makes more sense for him to dance than to gnaw on a root.”

  “Maybe he should do both—gnaw on a root while he danced.”

  “I’d rather not dance or eat,” I croaked. “Ever again.”

  On the second day I was feeling a little better—well enough to try out my sea legs, anyway, and left the stateroom to explore the liner. After an hour of wandering the labyrinthine corridors and miles of decks, I discovered von Helrung and Torrance on the upper promenade, sitting in rocking chairs, the ever-present tumbler of Scotch by Torrance’s elbow. He had an annoying habit of smoothing his perfectly trimmed mustache after every sip.

  “… not consistent. Not consistent at all, Jacob,” von Helrung was scolding his former student as I approached. So engrossed were they in the debate that my presence at first went unnoticed.

  “I’m not saying it is there, Meister Abram—merely that we should look into it.”

  “And I ask again, why would Arkwright lie about all things except the most important thing?”

  “He wasn’t lying about Warthrop,” Torrance pointed out. “Well, not on the third go around, anyway.”

  Von Helrung had received the news via telegram on the morning of our departure. His source had reported that the doctor was indeed where Arkwright had said he was—alive and well, or as well as might be expected, if you were Pellinore Warthrop and woke one day to find yourself in a decidedly un-Warthropian milieu. Von Helrung had been beside himself with joy; he actually danced a little jig on the dock when he read the cable. Perhaps he thought it odd, my somewhat muted reaction, but I had never lost hope, not really. You may call me a mystic or attribute my faith to the magical thinking of a child. Still, whatever one might say of mystics or faith or the thoughts of children, I believed if the doctor were really dead I would know it; I would feel it. Though fear for his life had sent me running on a river of blood and fire to save him, when I’d read the words in von Helrung’s vestibule, Warthrop is dead, I’d known them to be a lie—had known it in the way a child knows things only God himself could have told him.

  “But why there of all places?” von Helrung had wondered after his impromptu celebratory dance.

  “It’s perfect!” Torrance had exclaimed. “Can’t think of a more perfect place. Perfectly escape-proof and perfectly poetic. Kearns’s idea, I’m sure. I will give the man his due. The dirty louse has panache.”

  “No, it must have been part of the deceit. It is not Masirah,” von Helrung was now insisting. “It could not be. Too far north and too close to the mainland. Oman is but ten miles to the west.”

  Torrance was not going to give up easily, though. It was difficult to tell with Jacob Torrance. I wondered if he really believed everything he said or if he played devil’s advocate just for the childish thrill of it.

  “But it could work, Meister Abram—sparsely populated, surrounded by treacherous currents, a rough and rocky coastline, a rugged inhospitable terrain. It could work.” He jiggled the ice in his tumbler. “The general area is right. Maybe our quarry has expanded its territory or migrated northward. It has been nearly forty years since the Lakshadweep discovery. Masirah is how far from Agatti? A thousand or so miles? That’s an average migration rate of twenty-five miles per year, very reasonable, particularly if the flying version of the magnificum turns out to be the right one.”

  “I am not saying it is false from a monstrumological standpoint, Torrance,” von Helrung snapped. “If you are correct and the British government is involved, why would its agent reveal the one thing thould most want hidden, and hide all the rest? No. They choose Masirah for Pellinore to meet his Waterloo because it would seem a reasonable nesting ground to us and it was far from the real one.”

  The old man’s face darkened, and he added, “Of course, the entire issue would be moot if you had kept your head in the Monstrumarium.”

  “I didn’t ask Arkwright, because I didn’t need to, Meister Abram,” returned Torrance.

  “I see! You are adept at mind reading as well as torture.”

  “You’re just trying to get under my skin. That’s all right. The reason I didn’t ask Arkwright is Warthrop. I didn’t need Arkwright to tell me something I can get straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  “And what convinces you that—”

  “Why put the hound back in its kennel unless you’ve bagged the fox? Warthrop had served his purpose. He’d found the home of the magnificum. Now the really interesting question is—”

  His head came round; he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye.

  “And here he is!” he said. “Like Lazarus three days dead from the tomb. Only Lazarus had better coloring. Stand back there, Mr. Henry, and head for the railing if you’re going to be sick again. I’ve just shined these shoes. Now, where is that steward? My glass is empty and my whistle’s dry.”

  He excused himself and strode off without the slightest sway in his step. The more he drank, it seemed, the sturdier he became.

  Von Helrung patted the arm of the rocker Torrance had vacated, and I sat down. Why people would find it pleasant to sit in a rocking chair on a rolling deck of an ocean liner was perplexing, to say the least.

  “Dr. Torrance sounds like him sometimes,” I said.

  “Warthrop?”

  “Kearns.”

  Von Helrung nodded; his expression was sad. “I am sorry to say I agree with you, mein Freund Will. 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. I think now it is not the nature of monstrumology but the nature of man. The truth makes us uncomfortable, as truth often does. In every heart, there lives a Jack Kearns.”

  What he is, that’s what you are inside, I had told the monstrumologist.

  On our final night at sea, unable to sleep and no longer able to endure the rumbling of my roommate’s tummy (von Helrung complained regularly of indigestion), I slipped out of the stateroom and headed for the foredeck. The North Atlantic was restless that night; driven by a sharp southwest wind, the waves smashed and ground angrily against the prow. The deck rose and fell, rose and fell, up toward the cloud-covered sky, then down toward the dark, cold water, as if our ship were balanced upon a fulcrum, teeter-tottering between heaven and hell. I spied two gul flitting in and out of the running lights, but that was the only life—and only light—I saw. There was no horizon; the world was black from top to bottom. I had the vertiginous sense of being very small in an immense space, like a speck of dust floating in the proto-universe, before the sun was born, before the light pushed back the darkness.

  The world is large, dear Will, and we, no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise, we are quite small.

  The next day, my exile would end. But that was the only thing that would. If Torrance was right and Warthrop knew where to find the magnificum, our rescue was not the end.

  I choose to serve the light, he once told me. Though that bondage often lies in darkness.

  Right now was the time of equilibrium between light and dark, the time between before and after.

  I was leaving something behind. It had been within my grasp. I had only had to stretch forth my hand and seize it. Instead I’d watched it burn in the fireplace of the bedroom on Riverside Drive, when the woman who had
sung to comfort me in the lightless, unwinding place had tossed an envelope into the flames.

  I was approaching something. I thought I understood what it was. My place is with the doctor, I had said—a statement of fact, and a promise, too. I thought I knew what to expect after the end of our exile, the doctor’s and mine. I understood—or thought I understood—the cost of service to the monstrumologist. I was reminded of it every time I washed my hands.

  That night on the foredeck, under the starless sky, in the space between before and after, I looked out and saw darkness. He would go into that darkness in service to the light. And where he went, I would follow.

  I thought I knew the cost of service to the one whose path lies in darkness.

  I did not.

  He thought he knew what he would find in that darkness.

  He did not.

  Its name is Typhoeus magnificum, the Magnificent Father, the Faceless One we cannot help but turn and face. The One of a Thousand Faces that is there when we turn to look, and then looks back at us.

  It is the magnificum. It lives in that space between spaces, in that spot one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. You cannot see it. It sees you. And when it sees you, it does not see you. It has no conception of you. There is magnificum and nothing else.

  You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars.

  You may not understand what I mean.

  You will.

  A sallow-faced little man was waiting for us in the lobby of our hotel, the Great Western at Paddington Station, upon our arrival in London. He wore a topcoat of Harris Tweed over a cashmere suit and sported the worst haircut I had ever seen; his hair looked as if someone had hacked at it with a dull knife. I would later learn that Dr. Hiram Walker had been a barber—among other things; he’d once made a go of sheep farming—before entering the field of aberrant biology. He had bid adieu to all of his customers except one: himself. He smoked a pipe, walked with a cane, hummed nervously through his nose, and regarded the world through small, shifty eyes, like a cornered rat. Those eyes lighted for a moment upon the powerful physique of Jacob Torrance with undisguised distaste; clearly he was not pleased.

  “Torrance,” he said in a nasally British accent. “I did not expect to see you.”

  “Or you would have brought me a small token of your affection?”

  “Hemmm,” Walker whined through his alphorn nose. His gaze darted bird-quick to me. “And who is this?”

  “This is Will Henry, the son of Warthrop’s former assistant, James,” answered von Helrung, laying a hand upon my shoulder.

  “I am Dr. Warthrop’s apprentice,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Quite. I seem to remember seeing you about at the last congress. Come to fetch your master, have you?” He turned to von Helrung without waiting for a reply. “The matter has proved more complicated than I first reported, Dr. von Helrung. They are refusing to release him.”

  A bushy white eyebrow rose slowly toward the old man’s hairline. “What do you mean?”

  Walker’s restless eyes roamed the crowded lobby.

  “Perhaps we should find a spot with a bit more privacy. Since receiving your telegram, I’ve had the unshakable impression that I am being followed.”

  We went up to our rooms on the third floor, overlooking Praed Street, where von Helrung ordered a pot of tea. Torrance requested something stronger for himself, but his old teacher preferred that his former pupil keep his wits about him.

  “Whiskey is what keeps them,” Torrance protested. He winked at Walker. “The stable to the wild stallion my erudition.”

  Hiram Walker answered with a disdainful sniff. “I am surprised every time I see you, Torrance.”

  “Really? And why is that, Sir Hiram?”

  “Because it is reasonable to assume you have been killed in a bar fight. And stop calling me that.” He sipped his tea and said to von Helrung, “It is outside their protocol to release a patient to anyone outside the immediate family without an order from a magistrate or upon the recommendation of the attending physician.”

  “But surely you explained to them the circumstances of the case?” asked von Helrung. “He is confined under false pretenses.”

  Walker shook his head. “I explained nothing. I made only the most general of inquiries, since I do not know the precise circumstances of the case. Hewas brought there, I was told, by his nephew, a Mr. Noah Boatman—”

  Torrance guffawed. “Noah Boatman! Boatman—Arkwright. Ingenious.”

  “May I continue? Thank you. A Mr. Noah Boatman, who claimed his ‘uncle’ had suffered a complete mental collapse, brought about by the recent death of his wife, who was mauled to death by a tiger—”

  “By a what?” interrupted von Helrung.

  “A tiger. A Bengal tiger, while visiting her sister in India. He believed himself to be, according to the nephew, an American monster hunter by the name of Pellinore Warthrop. His real name was William James Henry, and—Please, Torrance, would you be quiet? Von Helrung, perhaps we should order him up some whiskey—a gallon, so he can drink until he passes out. Now, what was I saying?”

  “You’ve told us enough,” von Helrung said with a heavy sigh. “The rest is not difficult to guess. Mein Freund obliged the devious schemer by insisting he was an American monster hunter named Pellinore Warthrop. Thus, by telling the truth he validates the lie!”

  “But there is more, Dr. von Helrung. And here it gets rather… well, bizarre. Warthrop also claimed, according to my sources, that his ‘nephew’ is a British double agent in the employ of the Russian secret police.”

  “That’s it!” cried Torrance, leaping from his chair. Walker flinched, as if expecting a full frontal assault. A bit of tea sloshed from his cup. “‘They’ll hunt me down like a dog,’ he said,” Torrance continued. “It’s the first set, von Helrung!”

  “Who?” asked von Helrung. “Who is the first set?”

  “Okhranka! Oh, he’s a devil, this John Kearns! Of course. I am a fool for not seeing it. No wonder Arkwright was frightened to the point of soiling himself. That explains the fear, and the fact that he was a double agent explains the bravado. I’m guessing now that the Brits don’t even know about the nidus. It’s a Russian job through and through.”

  “The nidus?” Walker echoed, his small eyes widening by half.

  “I spoke out of turn,” said Torrance, with an abashed look toward von Helrung, whose cheeks had gone ruddy.

  “The Russians have recovered a nidus ex magnificum?” Walker asked.

  “We do not know,” von Helrung answered carefully. “There are many unanswered questions.”

  “So it appears, Dr. von Helrung, most of which belong to me. Who is this Boatman or Arkwright or whatever his name is? Why would he go to such outlandish lengths to falsely imprison Dr. Warthrop? Why was Warthrop in London in the first place? Who is Jack Kearns, and what does he have to do with the Russian secret police?”

  Von Helrung was giving Torrance a withering look.

  “What?” demanded Torrance. “You never said it was a secret.”

  “It was Pellinore’s wish to pursue the matter…” He searched for the word. “Independently.”

  “Well, sure!” returned Torrance. “That’s Warthrop, wanting all the glory for himself.”

  “The glory for…,” Walker asked von Helrung.

  Von Helrung sighed. He gazed up at the ceiling and stroked beneath his chin.

  “The Russians do not have the nidus,” he said finally. “We have the nidus. We have the nidus, the British have Warthrop, and the Russians have Jack Kearns.”

  “You’re two thirds right, von Helrung,” Torrance said. “I don’t know if the Russians have Kearns, but I’m willing to bet Sir Hiram a haircut that they have the magnificum.”

  There was nothing von Helrung could do at that point but tell his English colleague everything, from the delivery of the nidus on that freezing Fe
bruary morning and the horrific demise of its unwitting courier, to the disappearance of Warthrop and the fate of the traitor responsible for it. He emphasized, with an eyebrow cocked at Torrance, that all else was mere conjecture. We did not know, for example, if the Russians had found the home of Typhoeus magnificum.

  “Well, it’s been what?” asked Torrance. “Over four months now? Plenty of time if Warthrop got it right, which he did.”

  “And how do you know that, Jacob?” von Helrung demanded. He was beginning to regret, I think, including Torrance in our rescue mission.

  Torrance shrugged. “He’s Warthrop.”

  “Let’s pray he did,” said Walker. “A living magnificum would be the crowning achievement of our discipline.”

  “I don’t think the czar gives a tinker’s damn about any crowns except his own,” Torrance said, and laughed. “If the Russians have it, we won’t be seeing it in the Monstrumarium anytime soon!”

  Von Helrung was nodding. His expression was very grave. “I’m afraid Dr. Torrance is correct, at least in this particular aspect. If the magnificum should fall into the wrong hands…” He shuddered. The thought was unbearable.

  Not so much to Torrance, though. He seemed intrigued by the possibilities. “It would change everything, gentlemen. It would shift the entire balance of power in Europe—maybe the world. Alexander conquered half of it. Think what he would have done with arrows dipped in monster snot!”

  “Must you, Torrance?” whined Walker. “Why did you become a monstrumologist, anyway?”

  “Well, I do like to kill things…” “Enough!” cried von Helrung. He slammed his pudgy hand upon the tabletop. “We are forgetting why we are here. We worry first about freeing Pellinore. Then we worry about monster snot.” He bore down on Walker. “We cannot go before a magistrate, and we will not convince his doctor. What does that leave us?”