The Monstrumologist

“Count them, Warthrop. You, too, Will. We’ll compare our numbers.”

I counted twenty-eight bullet-ridden, shrapnel-torn corpses. The doctor concurred; he had counted the same.

“My number as well,” agreed Kearns.

“There’s one more, sir,” I said.

“Under the platform.” “Under the platform?” asked Kearns, startled.

“I killed it.”

“ You killed it?”

“I shot it, and then I stabbed out its eyes, and then I stabbed out its brain.”

“Stabbed out its brain!” cried Kearns with a laugh. “Well done, Mr. Assistant-Apprentice Monstrumologist! Very well done indeed! Warthrop, award this boy the Society’s highest honor for bravery!”

His smile faded, and his gray eyes seemed to darken.

“That makes twenty-nine. Assume three, perhaps four immature juveniles tucked away someplace safe, and we are at thirty-two or thirty-three.”

“About what we estimated,” said Warthrop.

“Yes, except…,” began Kearns in a rare moment of gravitas. “We’ll fetch a light to make sure, but I can’t find a female fitting her description. Warthrop, the matriarch is not here.”

Morgan had regained some of his composure when he joined us among the steaming carcasses. Strained to its breaking point by the events of the previous two days, there was not much of his composure remaining for him to regain, but enough for him to reassert-or attempt to, at least-a measure of his authority. His tone with Kearns was stern and uncompromising.

“You are under arrest, sir.”

“On what charge?” asked Kearns, blinking coquettishly.

“Murder!”

“She is alive, Robert,” Warthrop said. “At least, she was when she left.”

“Attempted murder! Kidnapping! Reckless endangerment! And… and…”

“Hunting headless monsters out of season,” offered Kearns helpfully.

Morgan turned to the doctor. “Warthrop, I deferred to your judgment in this matter. I relied upon your expert opinion!”

“Well,” said Kearns. “The bloody beasts are dead, aren’t they?”

“I would suggest you save the self-serving statements for the trial, Mr. Kearns.”

“Doctor,” corrected Kearns.

“Dr. Kearns.”

“Cory.”

“ Kearns, Cory, I don’t care! Pellinore, did you know what he intended? Did you know beforehand what was in that box?”

“I wouldn’t answer that if I were you, Warthrop,” said Kearns. “I know an excellent attorney in Washington. I’ll give you his name, if you like.”

“No,” the doctor said to Morgan. “I did not know, but I suspected.”

“I am no more responsible for their diet than I am for them being here,” Kearns said reasonably. “But I understand, Constable. This is the thanks I get. You are a man of the law and I am a man of…” He let the thought die unfinished. “You hired me to do a job and made certain promises contingent upon my completion of it. I only ask that you allow me to finish it before you renege on our contract.”

“We had no contract!” snarled Morgan, and then stopped himself, the import of Kearns ’s words sinking in. “What do you mean, “finish it”?”

“There is a strong possibility there are more,” said Warthrop carefully.

“More? How many more? Where?” Morgan cast his eyes wildly about, as if expecting another swarm of Anthropophagi to leap at us out of the dark.

“That’s something we won’t know until we get there,” Kearns answered.

“Until we get where?”

“Home sweet home, Constable. Be it ever so humble.”

He declined to elaborate; instead he summoned the stalwart volunteers, thanked them for their valiant performance under truly extraordinary circumstances, compared them to Wellington ’s troops at the Battle of Waterloo, and bade them pile up the bodies for disposal. Malachi and I lent our hands to the grisly chore, dragging the body of the young male from beneath the platform to throw onto the pyre. Next the macabre mound was soaked with a half barrel of the oily accelerant reserved for the purpose.

Before striking the match, Kearns said, “Requiescat in pace.” He flung the match into the center of the pile. Flames leapt into the night sky, and soon our nostrils burned with the odor of searing flesh, a smell that was not unfamiliar to me. My eyes began to water, not so much from the smoke and smell, but from a memory more vivid at that moment than either.

A hand fell upon my shoulder. It was Malachi, in whose bright blue eyes I could see the flickering flames reflected. A tear coursed down his wounded cheek. The fire was seductively warm, but his anguish was as cold as the graves that surrounded us.

Poor Malachi! What did he think watching those murderous monsters burn, if not of his family, of Michael and his father, of his mother clutching her babe in her broken arms, of his darling sister Elizabeth, who had turned to him as savior and met instead her own demise? Did he feel relief? In his mind, had justice been done? I am dead too… Inside there is nothing, he had said to me, and I wondered if he still felt that way, if this conflagration of mangled limbs and tumbled torsos did anything to resurrect his expired spirit.

My empathy toward his suffering was acute, for he and I were fellow sojourners in the forbidding kingdom wherein all roads led to that singular nullity of fathomless grief and immeasurable guilt. We were no strangers to that barren clime, that merciless landscape in which no oasis existed to slake our ravening thirst. What meritorious draft, what magical elixir offered by the art of men or gods had the power to relieve our agony? A year had passed since I had lost my parents; still, the memory and its attendant lords of anguish and rage reigned in the desert sovereignty of my soul, as if no time had expired since that night our house burned to its foundations. Verily, nigh eighty years later, they still smolder in the ruins: the blackened, twisted corpses of my parents. I hear their cries as clearly now as I hear this pen scratch upon the page, or the hum of the fan upon my desk, or the call of the bobwhite outside my window. I see my father in the final moments of his life with the same clarity I see that calendar hanging there on the wall, marking the march of my days, or the sunlight shimmering upon the lawn, where the dragon-flies hover and the butterflies dance.

For nearly a week he had lain in bed, wracked by a virulent fever that had swelled and receded like the tides. One moment he was burning hot; the next brought teeth-chattering chills that no amount of blankets piled high upon him could remedy. Nothing would stay in his stomach, and on the third day of his confinement bright red half-dollar-size spots began to appear all over his body. My mother, ignoring his protests (“It’s just a bit of fever, that’s all”), summoned the family doctor, who diagnosed a case of the shingles and predicted a full recovery. Mother was not convinced: He had recently returned home, having accompanied Warthrop on one of his expeditions to parts unknown, and she suspected he had contracted some rare tropical disease.

Father’s hair began to fall out by the fistful; even his beard and his eyelashes dropped like autumnal leaves after the first frost. Alarmed, my mother sent for Warthrop. By this point the rashes had become inflamed dime-size boils with milky white centers, painful to the touch; the lightest brush of his nightshirt against one would send Father into paroxysms of agony. It forced him to lie perfectly still on top of the covers, in helpless captivity to the pain. He could not eat. He could not sleep. He had fallen into a kind of twilight delirium by the time Warthrop arrived, seemed not to recognize him, and was incapable of answering the doctor’s inquiries upon his condition.

The doctor examined the festering sores and drew a sample of Father’s blood. He shone a light into his eyes and down his throat and collected some of his hair, strands fallen on the pillow and one or two plucked from his balding scalp. He questioned us about the progress of his illness, and pressed us about our own health. He took our temperatures, shone his light into our eyes, and took samples of our blood as well.