The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist, Book 2) m-2
Page 18
At the use of the Iyiniwok word, Warthrop stiffened. “How do you know that word, John?”
Chanler’s head lolled upon the pillow. The eyes rolled back in their sockets. “Heard it from the man old, the old man in the woods.”
“Jack Fiddler?” asked the doctor.
“Old Jack Fiddler pulled on his pipe, stuck it up his arse, and gave it a light!”
“Pellinore.” Von Helrung touched the doctor’s arm and whispered urgently, “No more. Call the ambulance if you like, but do not push—”
Warthrop shrugged off the hand and strode back to John Chanler’s side.
“You remember Fiddler,” he said to him.
Grinning, Chanler answered, “His eyes see very far—much farther than yours.”
“And Larose? Do you remember Pierre Larose?”
I heard a snatch of the same nonsense he’d spouted in the wilderness, “Gudsnuth nesht! Gebgung grojpech chrishunct.” In a loud voice Warthrop repeated the question, adding, “John, what happened to Pierre Larose?”
Chanler’s demeanor abruptly changed. A look of profound dismay—eyes welling with tears, the fat lower lip quivering like a child’s when confronted by inexpressible loss—transformed his vaguely bestial appearance into one of heart-wrenching pathos.
“‘You don’t go doin’ it, Mr. John,’ he told me. ‘You don’t go peekin’ up the Grand Lady’s skirts. You don’t look in them woods for the things that’re lookin’ for you.’”
“And he was right, wasn’t he, John?” asked von Helrung, for Warthrop’s benefit more than his own. My master shot him a withering look.
“He left me!” Chanler wailed. “He knew—and he left me!” Blood-flecked tears trailed down his hollow cheeks. “Why did he leave me? Pellinore, you’ve seen them—the eyes that do not look away. The mouth that cries on the high wind. My feet are on fire! Oh, good Christ, I am on fire.”
“It called your name,” murmured von Helrung encouragingly. “Larose abandoned you to the desolation—and the desolation called to you.”
Chanler did not reply. His mouth, its sores ripped open by the contortions of his despair, glistened with fresh blood. He stared vacantly at the ceiling, and I remembered Muriel’s remark, He is there . . . and he is not there.
“Gudsnuth nesht. It’s cold. Gebgung grojpech. It burns. Slow down . . . For the love of Christ, slow down. The light is gold. The light is black. What have we given?”
His hand emerged from beneath the covers. His fingers seemed grotesquely long, the nails ragged and encrusted with his own filth. He reached desperately for the doctor, who gathered the withered claw into both his hands—and it was with utter astonishment that I saw tears shining in my master’s eyes.
“What have we given?” Chanler demanded. “The wind says it is nothing to say nothing. In the center, in the beating heart—the pit. The yellow eye unblinking. The golden light black.”
The doctor rubbed his hand, murmured his name. Shaken by the melancholic scene, von Helrung turned away. He crossed his arms over his thick chest and bowed his head as if praying.
“You must take me back,” the broken man pleaded. “Mesnawetheno—he knows. Mesnawetheno—he will pull me out of the shit.” He glared at the doctor with unalloyed animosity. “You stopped him. You stole me from Mesnawetheno. Why did you? What have you given?”
With that question lingering in the air, John Chanler fell back to the fevered dream of the desolation—that gray land where none can save us from the crush of the soundless depths.
Warthrop did not take him back to Mesnawetheno; he took him by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, leaving me in the care of von Helrung, with instructions—as if he were boarding his horse—that I should be fed and given a proper bath before being put to bed.
“I will come by for him later tonight—or in the morning, if not.”
“I want to stay with you, sir,” I protested.
“I won’t hear of it.”
“Then, I’ll wait for you at the hotel.”
“I’d rather you not be alone,” he said with a perfectly straight face, the man who left me alone for hours—sometimes days—at a stretch.
EIGHTEEN
“What Have I to Live For?”
I supped on warmed-over lentil soup and cold roasted lamb that night, sitting in the von Helrung kitchen with the butler, Bartholomew Gray, who was as kind as he was dignified, and who thoughtfully distracted me from my distress with a hundred questions about my home in New England, and with stories about his family’s progress from slavery in the Deep South to the great “shining city on a hill,” New York. His son, he proudly informed me, was abroad, studying to be a doctor. During my dessert of custard and fresh strawberries, Lilly appeared to rather officiously announce I would be sleeping in the room next to hers and she hoped I didn’t snore because the walls were quite thin and she was a very light sleeper. She still seemed miffed that she had been banished, whereas I had enjoyed an audience with the stricken John Chanler. I thought of her uncle’s gift and the glow in her eye at its macabre contents. I suspected she would gladly have traded places with me.
At a little past one the following morning, my fate caught up with me—the doom that demanded I be disturbed at precisely the moment I was drifting off to sleep. The door to my room opened, revealing the fitful dance of a candle’s flame, followed by Lilly in her dressing gown. Her voluptuous curls had been freed from their ribbons and cascaded down her back.
I pulled the covers up to my chin. I was self-conscious of my appearance, for I was wearing one of von Helrung’s nightshirts and, though he was a small man, he was much larger than me.
We regarded each other for a moment by the flickering candlelight, and then she said without preamble, “He’s going to die.”
“Maybe he won’t,” I answered.
“Oh, no. He’s going to die. You can smell it.”
“Smell what?”
“That’s why Mr. Skala is keeping watch. Uncle says we have to be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“You have to be quick, very quick, and you can’t just use anything. It has to be silver. So that’s why he carries the knife. It’s silver plated.”
“What’s silver plated?”
“The knife! The pearl-handled Mikov switchblade knife. So when it happens—” She made a slicing motion over her heart.
“The doctor won’t let that happen.”
“That is very odd, Will—the way you talk about him. ‘The doctor.’ All whispery and fearful—like you’re talking about God.”
“I just meant if there’s any way he can help it, he won’t just let him die.” I confided to her the most striking thing about that most striking scene in the sickroom—the tears in the monstrumologist’s eyes.
“I’ve never seen him cry—ever. He’s come close before”—I am a mote of dust—“but it was always for himself. I think he loves Dr. Chanler very much.”
“Do you? I don’t. I don’t think he loves him at all.”
“Well, I don’t think you know him at all.” I was becoming angry.
“And I don’t think you know anything at all,” she shot back. Her eyes sparkled with delight. “Fell into the Danube by accident! He jumped off and nearly drowned.”
“I know that,” I said. “And Dr. Chanler saved him.”
“But do you know why he jumped? And do you know what happened after he jumped?”
“He got very sick, and that’s when Muriel and John met, over his sickbed,” I said with a note of triumph. I would show her who didn’t know anything!
“That isn’t everything. It’s hardly nothing. They were engaged to be married and—”
“I know that, too.”
“All right, but do you know why they didn’t?”
“The doctor is not constitutionally suited for marriage,” said I, echoing Warthrop’s explanation.
“Then why did he propose in the first place?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “Why did he propose?”
“I don’t know. But he did, and then the next day he jumped off the Kronprinz-Rudolph Bridge. He swallowed a gallon of the Danube and got pneumonia and a case of putrid sore throat, coughing up blood and vomiting buckets of black bile. He nearly died, Uncle said.
“They were madly, desperately in love. They were the item, here and on the Continent. He is quite handsome, when he cleans himself up, and she is lovelier than Helen, so everybody thought it was a perfect match. After Dr. Chanler fished him out of the river, she came and sat by his bed day and night. She called to him, and he called to her, though they sat right beside each other!”
She ran her fingers through her thick fall of curls and stared dreamily into the distance.
“Uncle introduced Pellinore to Muriel, so he blamed himself for what happened. When your doctor didn’t get any better after two weeks in Vienna, Uncle shipped him off to a balneologist in Teplice, and that’s when things got really bad.”
She paused for dramatic effect. I found myself fighting the urge to grab her by the shoulders and physically shake the rest of the tale out of her. How often does our desire spring upon us unawares—and from what unexpected hiding places! There was so much about the man that was hidden from me—hidden to this day, I will confess. To now have even the smallest of peeks behind the heavy curtain . . . !
“He stopped eating,” she continued. “He stopped sleeping. He stopped talking. Uncle was desperate with worry. For a whole month this went on—Pellinore in silence wasting away—until one day Uncle said to him, ‘You must decide. Will you live or will you die?’ And Pellinore said, ‘What have I to live for?’ And Uncle answered, ‘That, only you can decide.’ And then . . . he decided.”
“What?” I whispered. “What did he decide?”
“He decided to live, of course! Oh, I’m beginning to think you are thickheaded, William Henry. Of course he decided to live, or you wouldn’t be here, would you? It wasn’t the perfect ending. The perfect ending would have been him deciding the opposite, because it’s the best kind of love that kills. Love isn’t worth anything unless it’s tragic—look at Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet and Ophelia. It’s all there for anyone who isn’t so thickheaded he can’t see it.”
The doctor returned shortly after ten that morning, his morning suit slightly rumpled, the black cravat that had to be tied just so now hanging limply over his collar and dotted with a dark greenish stain—most likely the regurgitations of his friend. When I asked how Dr. Chanler was faring, he replied tersely, “He is alive,” and said no more.
The day had dawned overcast with a blustery wind from the north that brought a plethora of bad memories with it. Von Helrung and Lilly walked us to the curb. Warthrop turned to his old mentor upon seeing Bartholomew Gray in the driver’s seat of the hansom.
“Where is Skala?” he demanded.
Von Helrung muttered a vague reply, and the doctor’s face darkened in anger. “If you’ve sent him over there like some apish angel of death, Meister Abram, I shall have him picked up by the police.”
I did not hear von Helrung’s response; Lilly had collared me.
“Are you going to be at the congress today?” she asked.
“I suppose,” I said.
“Good! Uncle has promised to take me, too. I will look for you, Will.”
Before I could extend my hearty thanksgiving at this piece of wonderful news, the doctor pulled me into the cab.
“Straight to the Society, Mr. Gray!” he called, knocking sharply against the roof with the heel of his walking stick. He sat back and closed his eyes. He didn’t look much healthier than his dying charge at Bellevue. Thus we are entwined with each another in a fateful dance, until one falls and we must let go, lest we both go down.
I spent the majority of that rainy day on the third floor of the old opera house, in a cavernous room that may have once been a dance studio, while Warthrop attended a meeting of the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Bestia, the Society’s exhaustive compendium of all malevolent creatures great and small, to which he was a contributing member. The gathering was chaired by a lanky Missourian by the name of Pelt, who possessed the most impressive handlebar mustache I had ever seen. Throughout the meeting Pelt munched on salt crackers, and I marveled at his ability to keep the crumbs from lodging in his mustache’s complicated tangles. It was this same Dr. Pelt who would later admit that he was the author of the anonymous letter that had launched our latest foray into the singular wilds of monstrumology.
Having hardly slept the night before, I dozed off in my chair to the droning of the learned men, while the latest treatises were discussed, debated, and dissected, against the pleasant background music of the drumming rain upon the high arched windows. It was in this state of sweet semi-stupor that I received a sharp jab to my shoulder. Jerking awake, I looked up to see Lilly Bates beaming down at me.
“Here you are!” she whispered. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You might have told me where you’d be.”
“I didn’t know where I’d be,” I said honestly.
She plopped onto the chair beside me and watched glumly as a phlegmatic little Argentinean with the rather remarkable name of Santiago Luis Moreno Acosta-Rojas droned on about the poor composition skills of monstrumologists in general. “I understand they are not men of letters, but how can they be such unlettered men?”
“This is dreadfully boring.” Lillian stood abruptly and held out her hand.
“I can’t leave the doctor,” I protested.
“Why? He might need a footstool?” she asked sardonically. She pulled me to my feet and dragged me toward the door. I glanced back at my master, but he was oblivious, as was usual, to my plight.
“Quiet now,” she whispered, leading me to a door across the hall, over which a sign had been posted: ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE. NOT AN EXIT.
The door opened to a flight of stairs that dove downward, the darkness beneath swallowing the pitifully small light of the jets that burned on each landing.
“I don’t think we should be going down there,” I said. “The sign . . .”
She ignored me, pulling me behind her as she descended this little-used shaft, hardly concerning herself with the narrow treads or the fact that there was no railing. The walls—moist and festooned with long strips of peeling black paint—pressed close on either side. Another door confronted us at the bottom landing, two stories beneath the street, and another sign:
MEMBERS ONLY—NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE
“Lilly . . . ,” I began.
“It’s all right, Will,” she assured me. “He falls asleep every afternoon around this time. We just have to be very quiet.”
Before I could ask why it was all right, despite the signs that gave every indication it was not, or ask who fell asleep every afternoon around that time, she forced open the door with her shoulder and flapped her hand impatiently at me to follow, which, for reasons still inexplicable to me, I did.
The door clanged shut, plunging us into absolute darkness. We stood at the threshold of a forgotten hallway that led directly to the holy of holies of natural history’s abhorrent darker side.
Its official title was the Monstrumarium (literally, “the house of monsters”), for it housed thousands of specimens collected from the four corners of the globe, from Gigantopithecus’s malevolent cousin Kangchenjunga rachyyas of the Himalayas to the microscopic but no less terrifying Vastarus hominis (its name literally means “to lay waste to humans”) of the Belgian Congo. In 1875 a wag had nicknamed the Monstrumarium, in a fit of sottish wit, “the Beastie Bin,” and the name had stuck.
The so-called Lower Monstrumarium into which Lilly and I now made our shuffling way—trailing our fingertips along the damp subterranean walls to keep our bearings in the dark—had been added to the original structure in 1867. A warren of winding passageways and cl
austrophobic low-ceilinged rooms, some no larger than a closet, the Lower Monstrumarium was the repository for thousands of yet-to-be catalogued specimens and macabre curiosities. In room after room, shelves groaned under the weight of thousands of jars wherein unidentified bits of biomass floated in preserving solution, where for all I know they still sit to this day. A tiny percentage carried labels, and those contained only the name of the contributor (if known) and the date of the donation; the rest were innominate reminders of the vast constituents making up the monstrumological universe, the seemingly inexhaustible panoply of creatures designed by an inscrutable God to do us harm.
We entered a small antechamber, where Lilly grabbed a lamp that was hung upon an iron pike embedded in the concrete wall. The atmosphere was cool and musty. Our breaths pooled in the lamplight.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Quiet, Will!” she said, raising her voice slightly. “Or you’ll wake up Adolphus.”
“Who is Adolphus?” Immediately I was convinced that the dungeon was guarded by some gargantuan man-eating creature.
“Hush! Just follow me and be quiet.”
Adolphus, as it turned out, was not in the Lower Monstrumarium that day. His business rarely brought him down there, for he wasn’t a monstrumologist and didn’t consider himself a zookeeper. He was, rather, the curator of the Monstrumarium proper.
Adolphus Ainsworth was a very old man who walked with a cane, the head of which was fashioned from the skull of the extinct Ocelli carpendi, a nocturnal predator about the size of a capuchin monkey, possessing six-inch razor-sharp fangs protruding from its upper jaw and a partiality for the human eyeball (if that of other primates was not available), particularly the eyes of children, which the Ocelli would rip from their sockets while they slept. Adolphus had named the skull Oedipus and thought himself quite clever, despite the inconvenient detail that Oedipus had plucked out his own eyes.