The Monstrumologist

My fortitude gave way. I was but a boy, you’ll recall; a boy who had been in his share of tight spots and dire straits, to be sure, a boy who had seen things that would make a grown man blanch, but still a boy, still but a child. I slid down the wall and rested my forehead against my upraised knees. I closed my eyes and prayed. My father had not been a particularly religious man; aspects of the divine he had entrusted to my mother’s care. She had prayed with me every night and had taken me to church every Sunday, to instill a bit of piety in me, but I had inherited my father’s indifference to religion and had gone through the motions of devotion without much conviction. A prayer was mere words repeated by rote. When I arrived at the doctor’s house, of course, all churchgoing and prayer had come to an abrupt halt, and I did not pine over the loss.

But now I prayed. I prayed until I ran out of words, and then I prayed with my entire being, a prayer not composed of words but out of the profound, wordless longing of my soul.

It was while I was thus employed, my eyes clenched tightly shut, rocking back and forth in rhythm to the roiling of my harrowed mind, that a voice spoke out of the darkness. It was not, as I first assumed in my distress, the voice of the one to whom we pray. A million miles from it!

“Well, well. What have we here?”

I raised my head and shielded my smarting eyes against the light in his hand. As bright as a thousand suns, it blinded me. He took my elbow and helped me to my feet.

“The little lost lamb is found,” whispered Kearns.

As it happened, I had succumbed to despair but a dozen yards from deliverance, a co

“You’re a lucky assistant-apprentice monstrumologist, Will,” he informed me with his characteristic playfulness. “I almost shot you.”

“Where are the others?” I asked.

“There are two main arteries leading from their nesting chamber; Malachi and Warthrop took one, and I took the other, the same you took, obviously, but what has happened to your arm?”

I related my adventures since my precipitous fall into the heart of their lair. Kearns expressed admiration for my pluck in dispatching the wounded juvenile. He seemed surprised by my grace under pressure.

“Splendid. Absolutely splendid! Bloody good work, Will! Pellinore will be overjoyed. He was quite beside himself when you didn’t come back. Positively frantic. I’d never seen a man wield a shovel like that. Digging in another direction, he would have reached China in an hour! But here, let’s have a look at that arm.”

He unwrapped the makeshift bandage. Tacky with blood, the last bit of fabric stuck to my arm, and I winced from the pain. The bites still oozed blood. He draped the bloody shirt over my shoulder and said, “Best to let it breathe a bit, Will. We don’t want to risk an infection.”

With a hand on the small of my back, he urged me to the entrance of the tu

“What is that?” I asked.

“Crumbs, Will Henry, marking the way home!”

It was the contents of the small paper packets he had packed into their canvas bags, a phosphorescent powder that shone like a tiny beacon in the lamplight.

“You’ll find one every twenty yards or so,” he instructed. “Keep to the path. Don’t turn back. If somehow you get lost, backtrack until you pick it up again. Here, take the lamp.”

“You’re not coming with me?” My heart began to flutter.

“I’ve monsters to hunt, remember?”

“But you’ll need the lamp.”

“Don’t worry about me. I have the flares in a pinch. Oh, and I believe you dropped this.”

It was the doctor’s revolver. He pressed it into my hand. “Don’t fire until you see the black of their eyes.” His gray eyes danced merrily at the joke. “Around seven hundred steps in all, Will.”

“Steps, sir?”

“Perhaps a bit more for you; your legs aren’t quite as long as mine. About four hundred steps, then turn right into the main passage. Don’t miss the turn-very important! The way tends downward for a bit, but don’t despair. It will start to go up again. When you get back up to the top, tell the constable I miss him terribly. That button nose. That winsome smile. If we haven’t come up in two hours, have him and his men come down. These beasties have been busy digging in the dark and we may need the other men’s help. Good luck to you, junior monstrumologist. Good luck and God bless!”

With that he turned on his heel and evaporated like a ghost from the lamplight, his footfalls fading fast. He did not seem fazed journeying on in without a light. Indeed, he gave the impression that the prospect delighted him: John Kearns was a man at home in the dark.

How quickly can despair turn to joy! My spirits were brighter than the little light aloft in my hand, my heart higher; I could already smell freedom’s sweet fragrance, taste its ambrosial flavor. In the ecstasy attending this answered prayer for deliverance, I forgot to count my steps, remembering too late for counting to do any good, but it hardly seemed important. The trail was well-marked with the glowing powder.

I reached the turn Kearns had marked, the tu

The tu

Upon the hundredth step I heard something make a sound behind me-or I thought it was behind me. In those cramped confines it was hard to tell. I stopped. I held my breath. Nothing. Just the falling of dirt and pebbles dislodged by my passing, I surmised, nothing more. I started forward again and resumed the count.

Seventy steps later I heard it again, definitely coming from behind me and almost certainly a portion of the tu

However had Kearns managed this operose conduit? A grown man would have been forced to crawl, and, if crawling, how had he calculated his steps, when walking was impossible? Forget a grown man-how could a seven-foot-tall hulk of a monster do it without slithering snakelike upon its tooth-encrusted belly? As the walls tightened around me, doubt and fear followed in kind. Surely this could not be the main thoroughfare back to the nesting chamber. I must have misunderstood him or taken a wrong turn… but the way had been marked, was still marked, though the space between the glimmering sprays had lengthened to far more than twenty feet. And the tu