The Monstrumologist

I arrived in town hatless but happy. For a few precious minutes, at least, I was free of all things monstrumological. Particularly trying had been the last two days. Had it been only two days since the old grave-robber had appeared at our door with his ghastly burden? It seemed like two times twenty. Hurrying along the cobblestone streets of New Jerusalem’s bustling center, breathing deep the crisp, clean air of early spring, I thought, for a fleeting moment, as I’d thought more than once since I had come to live with him (as anyone in my position might think), of escape.

The doctor had not thrown bars over the windows; he did not lock me inside my little alcove like a caged bird by night, or shackle me to a post by day. Indeed, when not in need of my “indispensable” services, he hardly took notice of me at all. If I fled while he wallowed in the malaise of one of his melancholic spells, a month might pass before he realized I was gone. Like the afflicted slave laboring in the cotton fields of the old South, I did not worry about where I would go or how I would get there or what I would do once there. Those concerns seemed but trivialities. The point of freedom, after all, is freedom itself.

Often over the years I have asked myself why I never ran away. What bound me to him beyond the inertia to which all humans are susceptible? I was not bound by blood. Not by oath. Not by law. Yet every time the thought of flight flittered across my consciousness, it disappeared as ephemerally as a will-o’-the-wisp, an ignis fatuus, an elusive glow over the marshland of my psyche. To leave him was not unthinkable-I confess I thought of it often-but to be away from him was. Was it fear that kept me by his side, fear of the unknown, fear of being adrift and alone, fear that I might meet a fate far more frightening than service to a monstrumologist? Was it that an unpleasant “known” is preferable to any unpredictable “unknown”?

Perhaps that was part of it; perhaps it was fear in part, but not in whole. For the first eleven years of my life I had witnessed the esteem-nay, the profound and consummate awe-with which my beloved father had regarded him. Long before I met Pellinore Warthrop in person, I had encountered him countless times in my mind, a towering genius to whom my family owed everything, a looming presence under whose long shadow we dwelled. Dr. Warthrop is a great man engaged in great business, and I shall never turn my back upon him… It is no exaggeration to say that my father loved him with an affection that bordered on idolatrous worship, just as it is no overstatement that this same love would lead him to make the ultimate sacrifice: My father died for Pellinore Warthrop. His love for the doctor cost my father his life.

Perhaps, then, it was love that stayed me. Not love for the doctor, of course, but love for my father. By remaining I honored his memory. Leaving would have invalidated his most cherished belief, the one thing that had made service to the monstrumologist-and the terrible cost of that service-bearable: the idea that Warthrop was engaged in “great business” and to be his assistant meant you, too, were part of that greatness; that, indeed, without you his “business” could not even have approached that exalted level. Ru

“Why, bless me, look here who this is!” cried Flanagan, rushing toward the door upon the tinkling of the bell. “Missus, come see what the wind’s blown in!”

“I’m busy, Mr. Flanagan!” called his wife querulously from the back room. “Who is it?”

The apple-cheeked purveyor of, among other fruits and vegetables, apples, dropped his hands upon my shoulders and peered with sparkling green eyes into my upturned face. He smelled of ci

“Little Will Henry!” he called over his shoulder. “Sweet Mother Mary, I don’t think I’ve seen you in a month,” he directed to me, his cherubic features glowing with pleasure. “How have you been, m’boy?”

“Who?” Mrs. Flanagan bellowed from the back.

Flanagan winked at me and turned to shout, “The master of 425 Harrington Lane!”

“ Harrington Lane!” she shouted back, and at once appeared in the doorway, a heavy carving knife in her huge red-knuckled hand. Mrs. Flanagan was easily twice the size of her husband and three times as stentorophonic. When she spoke, the very windows rattled in their frames.

“Oh, Mr. Flanagan!” she boomed when she saw me. “It’s only Will Henry.”

“Only Will Henry. Listen to you, Missus.” He smiled at me. “Don’t listen to her.”

“No, sir,” I responded automatically. Thinking this might offend his knife-wielding Amazonian mate, I quickly appended, “Hello, Mrs. Flanagan; how are you, ma’am?”

“I would be much better without these constant interruptions,” she roared. “My husband, whom my sainted mother warned me not to marry, thinks I’ve nothing better to do than be the brunt of his silly jokes and ridiculous riddles all day.”

“She’s in a bad mood,” whispered the grocer.

“I’m always in a bad mood!” she shouted back.

“Has been since the potato famine of ’48,” whispered Flanagan.

“I heard that!”

“Forty years, Will Henry. Forty years,” said he with a theatrical sigh. “But I love her. I love you, Missus!” he called.

“Oh, stop it. I can hear every word you say, y’know! Will Henry, you’ve lost weight, haven’t you? Be honest, now.”

“No, Mrs. Flanagan,” I said. “I’ve just grown a bit.”

“That’s it, Missus,” interjected Flanagan. “It isn’t lost; it’s just redistributed, eh? Right!”

“Oh, nonsense,” she rumbled. “These eyes aren’t that bad yet! Look at him, Mr. Flanagan. Look at his hollow cheeks and bulging forehead. Why, his wrists are no wider round than a chicken’s neck. Talk of famine! There’s one going on right now in that horrible house on Harrington Lane.”

“More than just famine, if the tales I hear have but a smidgen of truth to them,” ventured Flanagan with an elevation of an elfish eyebrow. “Eh, Will Henry? You know the stories we hear: mysterious comings and goings, packages delivered in the dark, midnight callers and the sudden, long absences of your master-you know, don’t you?”

“The doctor doesn’t discuss his work with me,” I said carefully, remembering his counsel: Some falsehoods are borne of necessity, not foolishness.

“The doctor, aye. But what exactly is he a doctor of?” barked Mrs. Flanagan, eerily echoing Erasmus Gray.

And I echoed the same feeble reply, “Philosophy, ma’am.”

“He’s a deep thinker.” Mr. Flanagan nodded gravely. “And God knows we need all of those we can get!”

“He’s a queer man with queerer habits,” she countered, shaking her blade at him. “As was his father and his father’s father. All the Warthrops were queer.”

“I rather liked his father,” said her husband. “Much more-oh, what is the word?-personable than Pellinore. Very friendly, though in a regal kind of way. Reserved, to be sure, and a bit-oh, what do I need?-aloof, but not in any haughty or lordly way. A man of culture and breeding. From good stock, you could say.”

“Yes, husband, you could say whatever you like, and usually do, but Alistair Warthrop was no different from any of the other Warthrops. Miserly, stuck-up, and standoffish is what he was, a friend to no one save the unsavory transients who oft darkened his door.”

“Gossip, Missus,” insisted Flanagan. “Gossip and idle rumor.”

“He was a sympathizer. That much isn’t gossip.”

“Don’t listen to her, Will,” he cautioned me. “She loves to go on.”

“I heard that! My ears work as well as my eyes, Mr. Flanagan.”

“I don’t care whether ye heard or not!” he yelled back.

Nervous now in the presence of this escalating domestic brawl, I grabbed an apple from the bin beside me. Perhaps if I selected my purchases, the fight might dissipate under the onslaught of commerce.