The Monstrumologist (41 page)

That overriding compulsion now drove her toward the spot where I cowered, frozen in fear’s icy grip, wavering in
indecisive agony, for even in her injured state she moved with frightening speed and would catch me should I make a run for the passageway—which may or may not still have been open.

The space between us had shrunk by half when I regained my wits, pulled the doctor’s revolver from my belt, and took aim, remembering as I started to pull the trigger the thing that had nagged at me before, the thing I should have remembered but couldn’t: bullets. I had forgotten to ask the doctor for more bullets. There was but one left.

One bullet. One chance. A wild shot or one that missed a vital organ and it was over. I was bound by the bitter fruit of my own forgetfulness.

She gathered herself for the final, finishing leap. Her extant arm came up. Her mouth came open. Her good eye with merciless malevolence shone. I had to stop her before she made that leap, and I did, though not with a bullet. Instead I turned her mother’s love against her.

I flung myself beside the body of her young and jammed the gun against its lifeless side, screaming stupidly at the top of my lungs while praying that no animal instinct told her the child I threatened no longer lived. My feet slipped out from under me, and I landed with a startled grunt upon my backside, my left arm curled awkwardly around its headless shoulders. My desperate gambit had worked, however, for she did not jump but came to a complete and sudden halt. She snuffed the air.
She issued a low, gurgling call, like a cow in the pasture lowing for her calf.

She did not hesitate long, perhaps only a second or two, and then she renewed her charge, leading with the shoulder that held her remaining eye, closing down upon me until I could smell her putrid breath and see the rows of jagged three-inch teeth marching toward the back of her cavernous mouth.

Wait. Wait, Will Henry. Let her get close. You must let her get close! Closer. Closer. Ten feet. Five feet. Three. Two …

And when the beast was close enough that I could see my own reflection in its black, soulless orb, when all the world was her rotten stench and her snapping teeth and her slick, glistening, pallid skin, when I reached that instant wherein a hairsbreadth separates life from death, I smashed the muzzle against her groin and pulled the trigger.

On a May morning of that same year, a month to the day since the old grave-robber’s midnight visit that began the singular curiosity of the Anthropophagi affair, as the doctor had taken to calling it, I was bounding up the stairs in answer to his incessant summonses, ignored for too long (I did not appear upon the first shout, in other words) and now shaking the house at 425 Harrington Lane to its foundations.

“Will Henry! Will Hen
reeeee
!”

I found him in the lavatory, straight razor in hand, his half-shaven chin dotted in styptic, the water of his bowl a not unpleasant shade of pink.

“What are you doing?” he demanded upon my breathless entrance.

“You called me, sir.”

“No, Will Henry. What were you doing
before
I called you, and why did it take you so long to stop doing whatever it was that forbade you from coming in the first place?”

“I was cooking breakfast, sir.”

“Breakfast! What time is it?”

“Nearly nine o’clock, sir.”

“I detest shaving.” He held out the razor and sat upon the commode while I finished up his chin. “Is it finished?” he asked.

“There’s still the neck,” I answered.

“Not the shave, Will Henry. Breakfast.”

“Oh. No, sir, it isn’t.”

“No? Why not?”

“I had to stop.”

“What happened?”

“You called me, sir.”

“Are you being cheeky, Will Henry?”

“I don’t try to be.”

He grunted. I wiped the blade clean. His eyes followed my hand. “How is the arm, Will Henry? I’ve not taken a look at it lately.”

“Much better, sir. I noticed last night the scars seem to glow in the dark.”

“That is an optical illusion.”

“Yes, sir. That was my conclusion too.”

“What is for breakfast?”

“Potato pancakes and sausage.”

He grimaced. The razor raked down his throat. There was a rhythm to it: scrape, scrape, wipe … scrape, scrape, wipe. His eyes never left my face.

“Any mail today, Will Henry?”

“No, sir.”

“And no mail yesterday. That is unusual.”

“Yesterday was Sunday, sir, and the mail doesn’t run till ten.”

“Sunday! Are you sure of that?”

I nodded. Scrape, scrape, wipe.

“I don’t suppose you remembered to pick up a scone or two at the market.”

“I did, sir.”

He sighed with relief. “Good. I think I shall have one of those.”

“You can’t, sir.”

“And why can’t I? Now you
are
being cheeky, Will Henry. I am the master of this house; I suppose I can have anything I please.”

“You can’t because you ate the last one last night.”

“I did?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “Really? I don’t remember that. Are you certain?”

I told him I was, and wiped the lathery remnants from his face with a warm towel. He looked in the mirror and gave his reflection a cursory glance.

“A pity,” he mused. “A pity squared: first that I have none to eat and second that I can’t remember eating one to begin with! Where is my shirt, Will Henry?”

“I think I saw it on your wardrobe, sir.”

I trailed behind him into the bedroom. As he buttoned his shirt, I said, “I could run down there now, sir.”

“Run down where?”

“To the market, for some scones.”

He waved his hand, absently dismissal. “Oh, I’m not really hungry.”

“You should eat something, though.”

He sighed. “Must we plow that same tiresome row again, Will Henry? What are you doing now?”

“Nothing, sir.”

He started to say something, and then apparently changed his mind. “Anything in the papers today?”

I shook my head. One of my duties was to scan the dailies for tidbits that might interest him. Of late there seemed to be only one potentially hazardous matter that concerned him. “Nothing, sir.”

“Remarkable,” he said. “Not even in the
Globe
?”

I shook my head again. It had been more than a fortnight since he had reported the murder to the authorities, and to date only a brief notice and an obituary had appeared in Dedham’s weekly. The police, it appeared, were not taking seriously the doctor’s allegations of foul play.

“Damn him,” the monstrumologist muttered. I did not know if he referred to Dr. J. F. Starr, the victim, or to Dr. John Kearns, his killer.

Warthrop had promised justice for Hezekiah Varner and those other poor unfortunates suffering behind the heavy padlocked doors of Motley Hill. That promise was kept, though doubtlessly not in the way he had anticipated. Indeed, I do not think that promise was foremost in his mind the morning we arrived in Dedham, three days after the felling of the mother
Anthropophagus.
It wasn’t justice he sought; it was answers. Not equity, but exorcism.

“Charming,” Kearns commented upon our arrival at the decrepit sanatorium. He had insisted, before taking his leave of New England, on accompanying us. He, too, wanted to verify Warthrop’s revised theory of the case—or so he said. “I was committed once. Have I ever told you, Pellinore? Oh, yes, for three long years before I managed to effect my escape. I was all of seventeen. The entire abysmal episode was my dear mother’s doing, God rest her angelic soul.” He looked down at me and smiled. “She is catalogued with your employer’s Society, under
M
for ‘Monsters, Maternal.’ Four days after my return she fell down the stairs and broke her neck.”

“Why did she commit you?” I asked.

“I was
precocious.”

The erstwhile black-clad Mrs. Bratton showed little surprise at our unexpected appearance upon the sagging stoop. The doctor handed her his card and twenty dollars in gold, and presently we were escorted to the little parlor with its
odiferous atmosphere and tired trappings, where the ancient alienist huddled in his dressing gown beneath a threadbare blanket, shivering despite the robust fire dancing in the hearth.

There were few preliminary pleasantries. With a gleam in his charcoal eyes, Kearns introduced himself as Dr. John J.J. Schmidt of Whitechapel.

“And what is your area of expertise, Doctor?” inquired the old man.

“Anatomy,” answered Kearns.

Warthrop deposited two more coins upon the table by Starr’s elbow and immediately inaugurated the interrogation.

“Who were Slidell and Mason?” he asked.

“Madmen,” murmured Starr.

“Is that a formal diagnosis?” wondered Kearns.

“No, but I assure you, Dr. Schmidt, madness is
my
area of expertise.”

“They were agents of the Confederacy?” pressed the doctor.

“They never claimed to be, Warthrop, at least not to me, but I met them only once, and that briefly. Certainly they were fanatical over ‘the cause,’ as they called it, the most dangerous kind of fanatics too: fanatics with fabulous sums at their disposal.”

“My father introduced you,” said the doctor. It was not a question.

The old man nodded, and even that small gesture propelled him into a coughing jag that lasted at least two minutes, at the end of which he produced the same disgusting scrap of cloth and spat into it. Beside me Kearns chuckled, as if something about the ritual delighted him.

“And who did my father say they were?”

“Philanthropists.”

Kearns stifled a guffaw. The doctor shot him a look and turned back to Starr. “Philanthropists?”

“Interested—
keenly
interested, in their words—in the advancement of the science of eugenics.”

“Fanatical philanthropists,” ventured Kearns, still chuckling.

“My father,” said Warthrop. “He enlisted their aid in an experiment.”

Starr nodded. “As I understood it, it involved the merger of the two species.”

“Oh, dear God!” Kearns ejaculated with mock horror.

Warthrop’s revulsion was not feigned, however. “
Anthropophagi
with
Homo sapiens
? To what possible purpose?”

“The obvious one, Pellinore,” said Kearns. “A killing machine with an intellect on par with its bloodthirstiness. The ultimate predator. The bestial equivalent to Nietzsche’s
Übermensch.”

“I don’t think he looked at it that way, Dr. Schmidt,” said Starr. “
They
might have, Mason and Slidell, but not Warthrop. ‘It may be in our power to give a soul to the
soulless,’ he told me in private. ‘Mercy to the merciless. Humanity to the inhuman.”’

“And you agreed,” said Warthrop.

“Not at first. I rebuffed the offer outright. I had no desire to play God.”

“But you changed your mind. Why?”

Starr stayed silent. His chest rattled in counterpoint to his tortured breath. Warthrop added two more coins to the stack.

“How do you know I changed it?” the geezer croaked.

“You shut up Varner for them. Convinced the court he was insane and locked him away lest anyone ever believe his tale.”

“Varner was mad as a hatter.”

“And you agreed to the second part of the bargain.”

Starr wet his purplish lips. “There was no other part,” he insisted. “What is this about, Warthrop? What do you want from me? I am an old man, a
dying
old man, I might add. Why have you come here to badger me about the past?”

Warthrop whirled and, seizing my wounded arm, shoved it under the agitated alienist’s nose.

“Because it isn’t the past,” he growled. He released me and leaned into the old man’s face. “You ask what I want. I will answer with the same question: What is it that
you
want, Jeremiah Starr? You have my word as a gentleman I will tell no one what transpires between us this day. You shall not
spend the remainder of your miserable little life in prison or end it upon the gallows, though the blood of your countless victims calls to heaven for it! I know most and suspect I know the rest, but I wish to hear it, and there is no one left alive to confess to it but you. You have my word; what else?”

Starr refused to answer, but his greed betrayed him: His rheumy gaze flickered for an instant to the stack of coins at his elbow. Warthrop opened his purse and dumped the entire contents onto the table. The coins clattered, cascaded to the worn carpet. One landed heads-up on top of the old man’s throw.

“There!” Warthrop cried. “All I have with me. Tomorrow I’ll give you ten times that, only answer the question so the matter can be put to rest once and for all… . The creatures in my father’s care needed two things to survive during the course of this ‘experiment’ in eugenics, whatever its true purpose: a safe haven, which no doubt Mason and Slidell funded, and food. Yes? They built the subterranean enclosure and you supplied the meals. Yes? Say ‘yes,’ you damnable monster.”

“Yes,” said Starr. A coughing fit doubled him over, and when he sat back, his face was the color of ripe strawberries. Spittle dotted his stubbly chin. Warthrop recoiled in disgust.