The Monstrumologist

“You know what this is,” my mother said.

“It could be the shingles,” the doctor said.

“But it isn’t,” she insisted. “You know it isn’t. Please, Dr. Warthrop, tell me what’s wrong with my husband.”

“I ca

“Will he live?”

“I think so. Perhaps for a very long time,” he added enigmatically. “For now you might try hot compresses, as hot as he can bear. If anything should change, for better or worse, send your boy over immediately. I’ll want to see him.”

The prescribed treatment did bring temporary respite from the pain. Mother would drop strips of linen into a pot of boiling water, pluck them out with a pair of tongs, and place the steaming cloth over his sores. But once they began to cool in the slightest, the pain would return, accompanied now by an unforgiving, maddening itch.

It was a dreary chore, exhausting for my mother, who trudged from stove to bedside and back again, hour after hour, throughout the day and long into the night, the duty falling to me when finally she could stand it no longer and collapsed into my bed for a few fitful minutes of sleep. My own anxiety, unsustainably acute in the early stages of the illness, resolved itself into a persistent, nagging ache, an undercurrent of care ru

The fall came during one of those midnight respites of my mother’s, after she had retreated to my room to snatch a few minutes of sleep. I had ducked outside to the wood bin to grab another rick for the stove, and stepped back into the kitchen to discover my father out of bed for the first time in days. He had lost twenty pounds since the onset of his illness and seemed wraithlike in his loose nightshirt, with his spindly legs exposed and his pale flesh shining in the lamplight. He was standing unsteadily by the stove, an expression of profound befuddlement in his sunken eyes. He started when I softly called his name, turned his skeletal face in my direction, and hissed softly, “It burns. It burns.” He stretched one of his emaciated arms toward me, saying, “They won’t leave me in peace. Look!” Then, while I watched in mute horror, he ran his fingernail over one of the boils clustered on his forearm, breaking open the swollen white center. A squirming, stringy mass of colorless worms gushed from the wound, each no thicker around than a human hair. “Even my tongue,” he moaned. “When I talk, the sores burst open and I swallow them.” My father began to weep, and his tears were flecked with blood and swam with worms.

Repulsed and dismayed, I remained rooted to the spot.I had no context in which to understand his suffering, and no power to alleviate it. I did not know then what ma

“Kill them,” my father muttered next, not an imperative directed toward me but a conclusion reached in his own fevered mind. “Kill them.”

Before I could react, he flung open the stove’s door and with his bare hand reached into its white-hot belly, pulled out a piece of smoldering wood, and pressed the tip of the burning brand against the self-inflicted wound on his arm.

He threw back his head and unleashed an unearthly scream, but a madness greater than the pain guided his hand. The flames licked at the sleeve of his nightshirt, the fabric caught fire, and in a matter of seconds my father was engulfed in a fiery shroud of flame. His searing flesh ripped open, like faults in the earth splitting apart in an earthquake. Curiously bloodless cracks raced from boil to boil, and out of these fissures poured the creatures infesting him. They cascaded from his weeping eyes; they gushed from his nose; they streamed from his ears; they flooded from his open mouth. He fell back against the sink, and the ravenous fire leapt to the curtains.

I screamed for my mother as smoke and the stench of burning flesh filled the little room. She rushed into the kitchen carrying one of my blankets, which she proceeded to slap at my father’s writhing form, all the while screaming hysterically for me to run. By now the flames had crawled up the wall to caress the ceiling timbers. The smoke was chokingly thick, and I flung open the door behind me to allow it to escape, but allowing instead a fresh influx of air for the greedy lungs of the fire. Through the opaque screen of smoke and spi

Standing before the seething pile of the immolated Anthropophagi, no more than a five-minute walk from their graves, I shuddered at the long-slumbering memory of that night. What happened? Malachi had asked me, and I had answered, I ran.

And my confession had been true: I did run, and I have been ru

You have heard it said that time heals all wounds, but I have found no succor in its inexorable march, no relief from the crushing burden of my loss. My mother calls my name in the final fiery consummation, victim of a no less ravenous monster than the Anthropophagi. Skewered in its scorching jaws, she cries out to me, Will! Will! Will, where are you?

And I answer: I am here, Mother. I am here, an old man whose body time in its mercy has ground down, whose memory time in its cruelty has left pristine.

I escaped; I am bound.

I ran; I remain.

TWELVE.“The Devil’s Manger”

To the bone-weary men gathered round him, against the backdrop of blackened carcasses, with the rain thrumming a subtle timpani, of final descents and dead reckonings, the monstrumologist spoke.

“Our work is not yet done. There is one who has gone into hiding, taking with her the most vulnerable members of her brood. She will defend them to her last breath with a ferocity far exceeding any you witnessed here tonight. She is their mother, the Eve of her clan, and its unrivaled ruler, the most cu

“Then let her wait, I say!” interjected the constable. “We’ll seal her off and starve her out. There’s no need to go after her.”

Warthrop shook his head. “There must be dozens of hidden apertures to their dens. Finding them all would be a hopeless task. Miss one, and our efforts would be for naught.”

“We’ll set round-the-clock patrols,” persisted Morgan. “Sooner or later she must come out, and when she does-”

“She will kill again,” finished Warthrop for him. “Those are the odds, Robert. Are you willing to accept them? Now is the time to hunt her down, when she is at her most vulnerable, her full attention focused on protecting her young. We shall have no finer opportunity, no better chance than now, tonight, before she deems it safe to venture above and perhaps move them to another territory entirely. If that should happen, we are doomed to repeat the Maori Protocol all over again.”