The Monstrumologist

We could hear Dr. Warthrop in the trees fifty yards away, stomping through the underbrush and the detritus of fallen leaves from the previous autumn, the sound punctuated now and then by soft, incoherent cries of consternation, the first of which caused Erasmus Gray to raise his head in alarm, thinking, no doubt, that the doctor had found-or had been found by-a living specimen of the species hanging in our basement. But they were not cries of panic or fear, I assured the old man; they were the ejaculations of a miner, his pan coming up empty yet again.

Presently the doctor returned and flopped down next to our deepening hole in utter dejection, stabbing the end of the torch into the mound of dirt beside it. He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his long arms around them, staring glumly at our upraised sweat-streaked faces with the expression of a man who has suffered some irreplaceable loss.

“Well? Did ye find anything, Doctor?” asked Erasmus Gray.

“Nothing!” snapped the doctor.

Erasmus Gray was obviously relieved, and the doctor, just as obviously, was not.

“It defies all logic,” the doctor said to no one in particular. “It flies in the face of reason. They are not phantoms or shape-shifters. They ca

His eyes fell upon our upturned faces. He stared down at us; we stared up at him; and no one spoke for a moment.

“Well, what in God’s name are you doing? Dig. Dig!”

He rose and, in his frustration, hurled the stake toward the line of trees, where the deep shadows swallowed it with a muted rattling hiccup of broken branch and fallen leaves.

From the small rutted path behind us came a huffing and a snorting, and all heads swiveled to follow the sound. The old horse, with flaring nostril and rolling eye, stamped its forelegs and gave a low-pitched whi

“What is it, ol’ Bess?” Erasmus Gray called softly. “What’s the matter, girl?”

The beast dropped its head, stretched forth its thin neck, and pawed at the hard ground. The ancient cart creaked and the rickety wheels rasped. I glanced up at the doctor, who was staring at the horse, arms hanging loosely at his sides, his entire being focused on the animal’s distress.

“Something’s spooked her,” said Erasmus Gray.

“Quiet!” breathed the doctor. He slowly pivoted on his heel, sca

And then, on the heels of that ghastly silence, from the trees came the hissing.

Low-pitched. Rhythmical. Faint. Not from one particular spot, but from many. Were they echoes-or replies? Not continuous, but sporadic: hiss… pause… hiss… pause… hissssss…

The doctor turned his head, looking over his shoulder at me. “Will Henry,” he whispered. “Did you remember to fill the flash pots with gunpowder?”

“Yes, sir,” I whispered back.

“Fetch them at once. Quietly, Will Henry,” he calmly cautioned as I heaved myself out of the hole. He dropped his hand into the pocket of his coat where he had dropped the revolver.

“I left my rifle in the cart,” Erasmus said. “I’ll get the pots. The boy should-”

“No! Stay where you are! Go, Will Henry. Bring as many as you can carry.”

“And my rifle if you can manage it, Will!” quavered Erasmus. I heard him whispering urgently to the doctor, “We shouldn’t stay, any of us! We’ll come back when it’s light to return her. “’Tis madness in the devil’s own dark to-”

The doctor curtly cut short his plea. I could not make out the words, but I was certain of the gist of his reply. In light of subsequent events, his stubborn refusal to obey the command of our most basic of instincts, which he characterized as “the enemy,” exacted a terrible price. There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.

I dumped the contents of the sack into the bed of the cart and then packed the pots-four tin cylinders roughly the size of coffee cans filled with gunpowder-back into the sack. Bess turned her head in my direction and gave a loud whi

The hissing had stopped. Now there was silence broken only by the old horse’s snorts of fear. If she bolted, what would be our recourse? If they attacked, if we had fewer bullets than beasts, how could we outrun a monster that could leap forty feet in a single bound?

The minutes ticked by. The night was quiet. At last Erasmus called softly from his refuge, “They’ve gone, thank God. And so should we, Doctor. We’ll come back in daylight. I’d rather risk discovery by men than-”

“Quiet, you old fool!” whispered the doctor. “A pot, Will Henry.”

I drew a cylinder from the sack and pressed it into his left hand. (His right held the gun.) He touched the fuse to the fire of the torch and with one graceful motion hurled the pot into the trees. It exploded with a white-hot blinding burst of light, like the flash of a photographer’s camera. Behind us Bess jerked against her harness, and below us Erasmus Gray gave a startled cry. I saw nothing in the explosive’s light. It passed in an instant, leaving the afterimage of the trees impressed upon my eyes, but nothing else, no seven-foot-tall hulking forms with rows of glittering teeth in their chests.

“Most curious,” the doctor said. “Hand me another, Will Henry.”

“They’ve moved off, I tell ye.” Erasmus Gray’s fear had, as fear often does, metastasized into anger. “If they was even here to begin with. Ye hear strange things in the graveyard at night. Take it from me; I’ve come here often enough! Now, you can stay if ye wish, Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, but me and my horse’re leaving. I told ye we shouldn’t’ve come tonight, and I told ye we shouldn’t’ve brought this child. Now I’m leaving, and if you want a ride back to town, you’ll come with me.”

He laid his rifle at our feet and started to scramble out of the hole.

But Erasmus Gray never got out of that hole.

A massive claw, easily twice the size of a human hand, with a two-inch gray razor-sharp barb on the end of each corpse white digit, burst through the dirt between his feet, followed by the bald muscular arm, flecked with black soil and white stone. And then, like some nightmarish leviathan rising from the deep, the broad shoulders broke the undulating earth, those terrible unblinking black eyes glittering in the glancing glow of the torch, the yawning maw stuffed with three-inch fangs in the middle of the creature’s triangular torso snapping as a shark’s when excited by the scent of blood in the water. The claw wrapped around the old man’s upper thigh; the barbs sunk into his leg. Erasmus flung out his arm in our direction, mouth agape in a high-pitched scream of horror and pain, and to this day that haunts me, the old man’s wide-open orifice revealing its pitiful contingent of teeth, an absurd impersonation of the monstrous mouth between his kicking legs.