The Monstrumologist

We loaded the box beside the crates, alternately goaded and cautioned by Kearns: “Load it up, load it up, boys!… Not so rough with it; gently! Gently!” Kearns inspected our packing, nodded briskly, and then craned his neck to study the sky. “Let’s hope these clouds clear out, Pellinore. There’s an indispensable full moon tonight.”

The doctor and Kearns rode with O’Brien in the truck; Malachi and I followed on horseback, he astride the doctor’s stallion and I on my little mare. With each inexorable step toward the locus of his family’s slaughter, Malachi grew more withdrawn, his eyes assuming that eerie, faraway stare with which he’d first greeted me in the sanctuary of his father’s church. Did he know it then, in the subterranean recesses of his soul, the fate that awaited him at the fall of night, in that black, lightless chasm beneath the land of the dead? Did he know, deep in his marrow where wordless verity dwells, what the roll of the bones had presaged, and that he now rode upon that dark road to which Kearns had alluded? If so, he did not turn aside. With his head up, his eyes forward, and his back straight, Malachi Sti

It was near noon when we rendezvoused with Morgan and his men at the Sti

“It isn’t a voyeuristic exercise, Warthrop,” said Kearns. “Well, not entirely. There may be something you missed that might prove helpful.”

“As in?” asked the doctor.

Kearns turned to Morgan, whose drawn features and reddened eyes bespoke of his quality of rest the night before. “Constable, it’s your crime scene. May I enter, please?”

“If you feel it’s absolutely necessary,” answered Morgan testily. “I’ve agreed to defer to your judgment, haven’t I?”

Kearns tipped his hat, winked, and disappeared inside the house. The constable turned to Warthrop and growled under his breath, “If you did not vouch for this man, Warthrop, I would take him for a charlatan. He seems altogether too cheerful for such grim business.”

“It’s the joy of a man perfectly suited for his work,” replied the doctor.

Morgan ordered O’Brien to wait by the door for Kearns, while we joined his deputies inside the church. He had chosen six men for the hunt. They sat on the first pew, the same bench where Malachi had cowered the day before, their rifles at their sides, with expressions stern and stares unflinching, as Morgan introduced the monstrumologist.

“This is Dr. Warthrop, for those of you who don’t know him-or of him. He is… an authority in these matters.”

The doctor nodded gravely to the men, but none spoke and none returned his sober greeting. We waited in gloomy silence for Kearns to complete his gruesome inspection. One of the men picked up his rifle and commenced disassembling it; when he was satisfied with its condition, he methodically put it back together. Beside me Malachi did not stir or speak, but stared at the cross hung high. At one point Morgan glanced our way and whispered to Warthrop, “Surely you don’t mean to bring those boys along?” The doctor shook his head and whispered something back that I could not hear.

A half hour later the doors flew open and Kearns strode down the aisle with O’Brien in his wake, pulled along like flotsam in his powerful current. He walked past us without acknowledging our presence, to the front of the sanctuary, where he stood for a moment, his back to our little congregation, contemplating the cross, or so one who did not know him well might think. Morgan endured it as long as he could, then rose from his seat and bellowed, his voice echoing in the cavernous space, “Well? What are you waiting for?”

Kearns crossed his arms over his chest and bowed his head. Another moment he took before turning, and when he did, a small smile he wore, as if he were enjoying some private joke.

“Well, it’s Anthropophagi, no doubt of that,” he said.

“There was never any doubt of that,” snapped Warthrop. “Let’s get on with it, Kearns.”

“My name is Cory.”

“All right,” muttered Morgan. “I’ve had enough.” He turned to the sharpshooters in the first pew. “Dr. Warthrop has engaged the services of this… person who purports to have experience-”

“ Extensive experience,” Kearns corrected him.

“-at killing these things. I would tell you his name, but at this point I’m not sure even he knows what it is, if he has one at all.”

“To the contrary, there are more than I care to count.” He smiled, but his winsome grin would be short-lived. “Thank you, Constable, for the warm introduction and the ringing endorsement. I shall endeavor to live up to it.”

He swung his eyes, which appeared as black as midnight in the ethereal, splintered light of the church, toward the men before him. He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a dark gray concave object about the size of a half-dollar. “Can any of you tell me what this is? Pellinore, you’re not allowed to answer… No? No one? Then I shall give you a hint: I found it inside the good reverend’s house just now. Nothing, not even a guess? Very well. This, gentlemen, is a fragment of temporal bone, from an adult human male approximately forty to forty-five years of age. For those of you whose knowledge of anatomy is a bit rusty, the temporal bone is part of your skull, and not incidentally the hardest bone in your body. Despite its appearance, the large egg-shaped hole you see here in the middle”- Kearns held it up to his eye, looking at his rapt audience as if through a peephole-“was not neatly drilled by a surgical tool, but punched by the tooth of a creature whose bite force exceeds two thousands pounds. This is what happens when a ton of pressure is applied to our strongest bone, gentlemen. You can imagine what happens when it’s applied to the softer portions of our anatomy.” He slipped the piece of skull back into his pocket. “The evolutionary reason for their tremendous bite is that the Anthropophagi lack molars. Two rows of smaller teeth ring the outside of the larger, central teeth. Those first rows are for snaring and grasping; the remainder, of which there are approximately three thousand, are for slicing and slashing. In short, they do not chew their food; they swallow it whole.

“And we, gentlemen, like the eucalyptus leaves of the gentle koala, make up the entirety of their diet. They are, quite literally, born to eat us. Naturally that fact has created some tension between our species. They need to feed; we would prefer that they not. The advent of civilization and its fruits-the spear and the gun, for example-tipped the scales in our favor, forcing them into hiding and forcing upon them another adaptation of which the brutal assault yesterday is a prime example: The Anthropophagi are fiercely territorial and will defend their homestead down to the last little snappy-toothed toddler. In other words, gentlemen, the ruthlessness with which they hunt is exceeded only by the sheer savagery with which they protect their territory.

“And that is precisely where we shall meet them tonight-not on our ground, but on theirs. The time will be of our choosing, but not the place. We shall take the fight to them, and they will give us the fight we ask for.

“And when that happens, gentlemen, you may expect something akin to a two-year-old’s temper tantrum, albeit a tantrum thrown by a creature topping seven feet and weighing approximately two hundred fifty pounds, with three thousand razor-sharp teeth embedded in the middle of its chest.”

Kearns smiled, his su