The Monstrumologist

And then I smelled it, a sickly sweet odor like rotten fruit, faintly at first, becoming stronger with each agonizing yard, a nauseating stench that burned my nose and lodged sourly in the back of my throat. I had smelled it before, in the cemetery on the night Erasmus Gray had died; it still clung upon my clothing from the embrace of the juvenile whose delirious slumber I had disturbed. It was the smell of the beast. It was the smell of them.

I ca

In the end the decision was made for me. A hand reached out of the darkness and tapped my shoulder. With a startled cry I pivoted round, the lamp slapping into the wall as I whirled. Its swaying light lit up in manic flashes his smudged face, the animated eyes and the small, ironic smirk.

“Why, Will Henry, wherever are you going?” he whispered. His breath smelled as sweet as licorice. “Didn’t I tell you to keep to the path and not turn back?”

“This isn’t the way back,” I breathed in reply.

“I had hoped to avoid it,” was his cryptic response. “The smell of blood should have drawn her out; I’m at a loss, frankly, why she didn’t come.”

He gently pulled the lamp from my hand and withdrew a flare from his bag. “Here, take this. Hold it at the base so you won’t burn your little hand. Don’t let go of it, whatever you do!” He touched the short fuse to the lamp’s flame. Smoke curled in the close space; the tu

He put his hand on my chest and said with mock sorrow, “I am so sorry, Mr. Henry, but there really is no choice. It is the morality of the moment.”

And with those parting words John Kearns shoved me as hard as he could.

My fall was swift, straight, and unstoppable. His crouching form rocketed away from me, dissolving into darkness as I skidded down the grease-slick trough, until a collision with a bend in the wall flipped me onto my back and I slid the remaining few feet digging my heels into the muck in a vain effort to slow my slide into the hole that awaited me at the bottom.

How wondrously strange to an observer below, should he have been standing inside the chamber into which now I fell, to see the virgin darkness, never blessed by light’s beneficent kiss, rent by the blinding ember of the flare clutched in my hand, descending like a falling star from heaven’s vault. I landed on my back, and the jolt of impact jerked the flare from my hand. For a moment I lay stu

I rolled onto my stomach, spat the blood from my mouth, and had barely gotten to my knees when it came at me with a sibilant screech, arms outstretched, black eyes rolling in its powerful shoulders, slavering mouth agape. I brought up the gun with a foot to spare and yanked the trigger. The young Anthropophagus fell at my feet, its body twisting in the stinking muck of the chamber floor. It was a lucky shot, but I had no time to rejoice or wonder at my good fortune, for its brother now barreled toward me from its hiding place. I fired twice, missing both times, shooting as I scrambled backward.

A bullet imploded into the ground scarred by my scurrying retreat, followed the next instant by the rifle’s report. It was Kearns, lying on his belly in the tu

My back hit the wall; I thumped down on my backside, legs spread wide; and shot twice more at the advancing form. Both shots went wild, but Kearns ’s next found its target, striking the beast in its right shoulder, driving its arm into the ground, yet hardly slowing its implacable approach. They possess the largest Achilles tendons known to primates, enabling them to leap astonishing distances, up to forty feet, the doctor had informed me in his characteristically matter-of-fact ma

Fortune spared me that awful decision: In midflight he stiffened, shoulders yanked back by the punch of the round landing between them. The second shot struck him in the middle of his back, and dropped him. He lay heaving and mewling at my feet, claws digging impotently in the dirt, before expiring his last breath, and death took him down.

I heard soft satisfied laughter above me and, coming from the far side of the chamber, where the light of the flare could not reach, a familiar voice calling my name.

“Will Henry, is that you?”

I nodded. I could make no other reply. It seemed like years since I had heard that voice, and more times than I could count it had u

“Yes, sir,” I called to the doctor. “It’s me.”

The monstrumologist rushed to my side. He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked deeply into my eyes, his own reflecting the intensity of his concern.

“Will Henry!” he cried softly. “Will Henry, why are you here?” He pulled me into his chest and whispered fiercely into my ear, “I told you that you are indispensable to me. Do you think I lied, Will Henry? I may be a fool and a terrible scientist, blinded by ambition and pride to the most obvious truths, but one thing I am not is a liar.”

He released me with these words and turned aside for a moment, as if embarrassed by his confession. Then he turned back and asked brusquely, “Now tell me, you silly, stupid boy, are you hurt?”

I lifted my arm, and he played the light of his lamp up and down the length of it. Over his shoulder, on the outer edge of the light’s reach (for the flare had finally fizzled out), I could see Malachi. He was staring not at our touching tableau but over our heads, toward the hole through which I had fallen.

The doctor carefully brushed the dirt and tiny, scratching pebbles from the wounds, bending low to examine them in the wavering light. “It’s a clean bite, and relatively shallow,” he pronounced. “A few stitches and you’ll be good as new, Will Henry, if a bit battle-scarred.”

“There is something up there,” Malachi called hoarsely, jabbing his finger toward the roof of the cave. “Above you!”

He swung the rifle to his shoulder and would have pulled the trigger, I’ve no doubt, if Kearns had not a

“And so all’s well that ends well!” he said heartily. “Or should I say all ends well very nearly near the end. Perhaps ‘so far so good’ would be better-but here you are, Pellinore, in the nick of time, thank goodness!”