The Isle of Blood (Monstrumologist)

by Yancey, Rick

  “Von Helrung will wire you whatever’s required.” The monstrumologist checked his watch. “There is one more thing,” he said briskly. “We are on our way to Aden, and I shall need transport from there to our final destination.”

  “What is your final destination?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “What is this, you cannot say? This is me, Fadil!”

  “I need someone who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut and who isn’t afraid of a little risk. A fast ship would be helpful as well. Do you know anyone like that in Aden?”

  “I know many people in Aden, though not very many I would trust. There is one man; he isn’t so bad. He doesn’t have a fast ship, but he will know someone who does.… What is it that you hunt that would interest the czar of Russia and that would keep you from trusting your old friend Fadil? What manner of monster is it this time?”

  “I don’t know,” replied the doctor honestly. “But I intend to find out or die in the attempt.”

  Fadil insisted upon seeing us off, and it seemed everyone on the crowded streets knew him. Cries of “Fadil! Fadil!” followed us from the doorway of the café to the gangplank. The doctor flinched at every “Fadil!”—he had wanted his presence in Port Said to go unnoticed.

  “When your terrible business is done at this place you cannot say, after your hunt for what you do not know is consummated, you will come back and tell me what the czar may know but Fadil may not! We shall feast on fasieekh and kofta, and I shall introduce my daughters to William—or should I say Ophois? Ha, ha!”

  He clapped me hard on the back, glanced about furtively, and then pulled a small object from his trouser pocket. It was a scarab beetle carved from alabaster and fashioned into a necklace. He pressed the amulet into my hands, saying, “A kheper, my new young friend, from the Tenth Dynasty. In ancient Egyptian its name means ‘to come into being.’ It will bring you luck.”

  “And several years in prison if the authorities should catch you with it,” added the doctor drily.

  “It came to me honestly, in a game of hounds and jackals with a very drunk Hungarian viscount who had purchased it from a street urchin in Alexandria. Now, do not insult me by refusing my gift.”

  He embraced Warthrop, topped off the bear hug with a kiss—a sign of friendship in Egypt—and sent me off with one as well, right on the lips. He found my startled reaction extremely funny; his robust laughter followed us all the way up the gangplank and onto the ship.

  “You should not have accepted it,” Warthrop said to me, referring to the scarab. “Now you’ve taken his luck.”

  He smiled wanly. The remark, I think, was only partially in jest.

  It took the French ten years to build the Suez Canal, and it seemed to take that long to traverse its hundred miles. We chugged along at a pace a snail would scoff at, and the scenery, if it could be called that, offered no pleasant distraction—desert to the left, desert to the right, and above a sky on fire, the sun an arm’s length away. The only sign of life outside the boat were the flies, whose painful bites tormented us anytime we stepped on deck. The doctor overheard me cursing them, and said, “To the ancients these flies represented tenacity and viciousness in battle. They would be presented to victorious warriors as symbols of valor.” It was a historical footnote that probably would have been more interesting in our parlor on Harrington Lane. In the moment, the flies seemed more symbols of madness than valor.

  We fed the flies until sunset, when the sky changed from blue to yellow to orange to a velvety indigo blue and the first stars poked hesitantly through the firmament. Then a quick trip below to feed ourselves—quick because the heat above was nothing compared to the ovenlike temperatures achieved inside a coal steamer in the desert—then back on deck to revel in the cool night air. There were no settlements along the canal, no lights twinkling on the shore, no sound or sign of civilization anywhere. There were the stars and the water and the lifeless land we could not see, and the ship’s bow slicing the wakeless surface, as silent as Charon’s ferry in the stygian dark. A feeling odread came over me, a vertiginous sensation of being acutely aware of every breath and yet feeling unmoored from my own body, a living ghost, a shade who has paid his silver to the ferryman for the passage to the underworld. I might have turned to the man beside me for comfort—as he had turned to me on the train to Brindisi, as he had turned countless times in the past, when swamped in what he called “the dark tide.” I might have turned to him and said, “Dr. Warthrop, sir, I am afraid.”

  I did not, because I dared not. It wasn’t his temper that stayed my confession. It wasn’t that he might belittle or judge me. I had grown accustomed to the point of boredom to those things.

  No, I held my tongue because I feared he would abandon me again.

  The stars above. The water below. The lifeless land on either side. And, over the invisible horizon, its approach marked by each beat of our hearts, the thing we both longed for and feared—the magnificum, das Ungeheuer, the summit of the abyss.

  There were two telegrams waiting for the doctor upon our arrival at Steamer Point in Aden. The first was from New York:

  ALL QUIET. JOHN BULL ASKED IF WE

  FOUND HIS LOST DOG. TOLD HIM

  TO ASK IVAN. EMILY SENDS HER

  LOVE. GODSPEED. A.V.H.

  “John Bull?” I asked.

  “The English,” the monstrumologist translated. “The missing ‘dog’ is Arkwright. ‘Ivan’ is the Russians. Von Helrung must have had a visit from British intelligence, looking for their absent operative, and he has pinned the blame on Okhranka. But who is Emily, and why does she send her love?” He pulled on his bottom lip, puzzling over this, to him, enigmatic phrase.

  “Emily is Mrs. Bates, sir, Dr. von Helrung’s niece.”

  “That’s odd. Why does she send her love to me? I’ve never even met the woman.”

  “I think, sir…” I cleared my throat. “I think she is sending it to me.”

  “To you!” He shook his head as if the notion baffled him.

  The second telegram was from Port Said:

  NO SIGN OF SEKHMET’S SONS.

  WILL KEEP DOOR OPEN FOR THEM.

  MENTHU.

  “Not what I expected, Will Henry,” Warthrop confessed. “And I don’t know whether to be heartened or troubled.”

  “Maybe they’ve given up.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve known men like Rurick; he is not the sort to give up. I suppose they could have been ordered back to Saint Petersburg or replaced after their failure in Venice. It’s possible. Or they’ve taken an alternative route… or Fadil’s men missed them somehow.… Well, there’s no point in worrying about it. We will be vigilant and hope for the best.”

  He attempted a reassuring smile and achieved a Warthropian one; that is, a smile that hardly rose above the level of a grimace. He was troubled, clearly, by the telegram from Port Said that had been waiting for him and the one from Venice that had not. There’d been no reply from Veronica Soranzo.

  We stepped outside the telegraph office. It was around ten in the morning, but already the day was stiflingly hot, nearly ninety degrees. (By that afternoon it would hover around one hundred.) The quayside was humming with activity—Somali porters and Yemeni hucksters, British colonialists and soldiers. The British controlled Aden; it was an important stopover and refueling point between Africa and their interests in India. Local boys dressed in thobes, traditional long-sleeved tunics, waited along the shore with donkeys to take passengers into the nearby town of Crater. Or, if you were a person of less modest means, you could hire a gharry, an Indian one-horse cab that resembled an American stagecoach.

  The doctor picked neither donkey nor gharry, for our destination was within sight of the wharf. The man recommended by Fadil was staying at the Grand Hotel De L’Univers on Prince of Wales Crescent (named in honor of the royal visit in 1874), a street that curved gently away from the sea toward the barren dun-colored hills that brooded over the beach. It did not app
ear to be a long walk, but all walks are long in the cauldron heat of Aden. On our way we passed a huge coal depot, where scores of shirtless men, Somalis mostly, their ebony torsos shining like obsidian, heaved heavy sacks of coal to the discordant jangle of tambourines. Occasionally a man would drop out of line to roll upon the blackened planks, using the coal dust to soak up his sweat. What dust didn’t coat the workers or the ground hung about the depot in a choking fog. The scene was hellish—like a purgatorial dream—and it was beautiful—the way the harsh sunlight cut through the spinning cloud of dust, the larger particles sparking and spitting golden light.

  Beside me the monstrumologist murmured, “‘I believe I am in hell, therefore I am there.’” He was tapping an envelope against his thigh as he walked, keeping time with the tambourine players, who used the thigh bones of calves to make their music. The envelope contained Fadil’s letter of introduction to our contact in Aden. The monstrumolo-gist had become very excited when Fadil had mentioned the man’s name.

  “I’d no idea he was back in Yemen,” he’d exclaimed. “I thought he was running guns in Ethiopia.”

  “That did not work out so well for him,” Fadil had replied. “In fact, it was terrible! He says King Menelik cheated him, left him with only six thousand francs to show for his trouble. He returned to Yemen—to Harad for the coffee and ivory trade. Though he makes frequent trips back and forth to Crater, where he should be now. If so, I’m certain you’ll find him at the Grand Hotel De L’Univers. He always stays there when he is in town.”

  “I sincerely hope you’re right, Fadil,” my master had responded. “Besides needing his aid in a rather desperate humanitarian circumstance, it would give me enormous personal satisfaction to meet him.”

  The hotel was a long, low structure with stone archways and patios and lattice shutters on the windows, a common architectural style here and in India. We stepped inside, where the temperature dropped a minuscule two or three degrees. On our left ;lihe hotel shop displaying exotic wares, animal furs from Africa and Asia, silk from Bombay, Arabic swords and daggers, as well as more mundane fare, postcards and stationery, pith sun hats and white cotton suits, the unofficial uniform of the colonist. The lobby itself had been designed to reflect its owners’ pride in empire, all dark woods and rich velvet, but the heat and the humidity had warped and cracked the wood and eaten holes in the velvet, a portent of things to come.

  “I have come to see Monsieur Arthur Rimbaud,” the monstrumologist informed the desk clerk, an Arab whose white shirt had probably started out the day crisply starched but now had wilted in the heat, like the Queen of the Night desert flower. “Is he here?”

  “Monsieur Rimbaud is staying with us,” acknowledged the clerk. “May I tell him who is calling?”

  “Dr. Pellinore Warthrop. I have a letter of introduction…”

  The clerk held out his hand, but the doctor did not give him the letter. He insisted upon delivering it to Mr. Rimbaud personally. The clerk shrugged—it was too hot to make an issue of anything—and handed us off to a small boy who led us into the dining hall across the way from the gift shop. The room opened onto a terrace that overlooked the ocean; in the distance I could see Flint Island, a large, bare rock that the British used as a quarantine station during the frequent outbreaks of cholera.

  Seated alone at one table was a slender man around Warthrop’s age. His hair was dark, turning gray at the temples, and cut very short. He was wearing the ubiquitous white cotton suit. When he swung his head in our direction, I was immediately struck, as most who knew him were, by his eyes. At first I thought they were gray, but on further inspection determined they were the palest blue, like the color of moonstones, the gems that Indians called “dream stones,” believing they produced beautiful night visions. His gaze was direct and disconcerting, like everything else about Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud.

  “Yes?” he asked. There was nothing pleasant in that “yes.”

  The doctor introduced himself quickly, and a touch breathlessly, the lowly peasant who suddenly finds himself in the company of royalty. He handed Fadil’s letter to Rimbaud. We did not sit. We waited for Rimbaud to read the letter. It was not a long letter, but it seemed to take a good long while for the man to read it, as I stood there in the blistering Arabian heat with the sparkling ocean a tantalizing few hundred yards away. Rimbaud picked up a crystalline goblet filled with a liquid the color of green algae and sipped delicately.

  “Fadil,” he said softly. “I haven’t seen Fadil in eight years or more. I am surprised he is not dead.” He glanced up from the paper, perhaps expecting the doctor to do something interesting, make a witty retort, laugh at the joke (if it was a joke), tell him something he didn’t know about Fadil. The doctor said nothing. Rimbaud flicked his free hand toward a chair, and we gratefully joined him at the table. He ordered another absinthe from the little Arab boy, who had been standing obediently out of the way, and asked the doctor if he wanted anything.

  “Some tea would be wonderful.”

  “And for the boy?” Rimbaud inquired.

  “Just some water, please,” Ioaked. My throat burned with every dry swallow.

  “You don’t want water,” Rimbaud cautioned me. “They say they boil it, but…” He shrugged and ordered a ginger ale for me.

  “Monsieur Rimbaud,” Warthrop began, sitting forward in his chair and resting his forearms on his knees. “I must tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you, sir. Having dabbled in the craft in my youth, I—”

  “Dabbled in what craft? The coffee business?”

  “No, I mean—”

  “For that is my craft, Dr. Warthrop, my raison d’être. I am a businessman.”

  “Just so!” cried the doctor, as if the Frenchman had pointed out another similarity. “That is how it played out for me. I abandoned poetry too, though it was for a very different sort of craft than yours.”

  “Oh? And what would be that very different sort of craft, Dr. Warthrop?”

  “I am a scientist.”

  Rimbaud was lifting the glass to his lips. He froze at the word “scientist,” and then slowly set the glass back down, the absinthe untouched.

  “Fadil did not mention in his letter that you were a scientific sort of doctor. I had hoped you could have a look at my leg; it has been bothering me, and the doctors at Camp Aden… Well, they are all very British, if you do not mind my saying so.”

  Warthrop, who had just spent several months under the exclusive care of very British doctors, nodded emphatically, and said, “I understand completely, Monsieur Rimbaud.”

  The boy came back with our drinks. Rimbaud gulped the remainder of his first absinthe—if it was his first; I suspected it was not—before accepting the fresh one from the boy, as if Rimbaud were hurrying to catch up with the doctor, who had not even begun. Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, the monstrumologist had said, and I will show a man living under a death sentence.

  Rimbaud sipped his new drink, decided he liked it better than the old one, and took another sip. His moonstone gaze fell upon my hand.

  “What happened to your finger?”

  I glanced at the doctor, who said, “An accident.”

  “See this? This is my ‘accident.’” Rimbaud held out his wrist, displaying a bright red, puckered area of damaged flesh. “Shot by a dear friend. Also by ‘accident.’ My dear friend is in Europe. I am in Aden. And my wound is right here.”

  “I think my favorite line is from Illuminations,” said my master, pressing on. He seemed annoyed by something. “‘Et j’ai senti un peu son immense corps.’ The juxtaposition of ‘peu’ and ‘immense’… simply wonderful.8221;

  “I do not talk of my poetry, Dr. Warthrop.”

  “Really?” The doctor was stunned. “But…”

  “It is… what? What are my poems? Rinçures—leavings, the dregs. The poet is dead. He died many years ago—drowned, at Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears—and I took his body up into those mountains behind us, to
the Tower of Silence in Crater, where I left it for the carrion, lest his corruption poison what little was left of my soul.”

  He smiled tightly, quite pleased with himself. Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

  “Now what is this business that brings you to Aden?” demanded Rimbaud brusquely. “I am a very busy man, as you can see.”

  The doctor, his high spirits dampened by Rimbaud’s dismissive attitude—the shoe being on the other foot, for once—explained our purpose in disturbing Rimbaud’s important midmorning absinthian chore.

  “I am sorry,” Rimbaud interrupted him. “But you say you are desiring to go where?”

  “Socotra.”

  “Socotra! Oh, you can’t go to Socotra now.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Well, you could, but it would be the last place you’d want to go.”

  “And why is that, if I may ask, Monsieur Rimbaud?” The doctor waited nervously for the reply. Had word of the magnificum reached Aden?

  “Because the monsoons have come. No sane person tries it now. You must wait till October.”

  “October!” The monstrumologist shook his head sharply, as if he were trying to clear his ears. “That is unacceptable, Monsieur Rimbaud.”

  Rimbaud shrugged. “I do not control the weather, Dr. Warthrop. Bring your complaint up with God.”

  Of course the monstrumologist, like the monster Rurick, was not one to give up so easily. He pressed Rimbaud. He pleaded with Rimbaud. He came just short of threatening Rimbaud. Rimbaud absorbed it all with a bemused expression. Perhaps he was thinking, This Warthrop, he is so very American! In the end, and after two more absinthes, the poet relented, saying, “Oh, very well. I can’t stop you from committing suicide any more than I could stop you from writing poetry. Here.” He scribbled an address on the back of his business card. “Give this to a gharry-wallah; he will know where it is. Ask for Monsieur Bardey. Tell him what you have told me, and if he doesn’t laugh you out the door, you may get lucky.”