The Monstrumologist

With narrowed eye Malachi returned, “This is very strange.”

“Oh, my dear chap, you should have been with me in Niger back in ’85. Now that was strange!”

“I find it strange too,” said the doctor. “Tell me, Kearns: How did Will Henry come to be down here and you up there?”

“Will Henry fell; I did not.”

“He fell?” echoed Warthrop. He turned to me. “Is this true, Will Henry?”

I shook my head. Lying was the worst kind of buffoonery. “No, sir, I was pushed.”

“Oh, ‘fell,’ ‘pushed’-it’s all a matter of semantics,” pooh-poohed Kearns. He watched, bemused, as Malachi brought the muzzle of his gun a foot from his chest. “Go on,” he urged the enraged orphan. “Pull the bloody trigger, you insufferably melodramatic, semi-suicidal, blubbering bugger. Do you honestly think I care if I live or die? But you may wish to include in your calculations the fact that our work is not finished. She is still out there somewhere in the dark, and not very far, I would guess. That said, sir, I would not presume to pass judgment upon the passage of your judgment. Fire at will, sir, and I shall die as I lived, with no regret!” He thrust his chest in Malachi’s direction defiantly and gri

“Why were you pushed, Will Henry?” asked the doctor, barely acknowledging the drama. He had long grown weary of Kearns ’s theatrics.

“He tricked me,” I said, lowering my voice and refusing to look in my betrayer’s direction. “I think he found this chamber and he knew they were down here, but he couldn’t get off a good shot, so he marked the spot and sent me straight to it. Finding me hurt, he thought the smell of blood might draw them out. When it didn’t, he-”

“In my own defense,” Kearns said, “I did give you a weapon and I didn’t just throw you to the wolves. That was me up there, you know, shooting at them. I don’t question the demands of circumstance; I simply obey them. Like Malachi here, abandoning his beloved sister when she needed him the most-”

“ Kearns, enough!” admonished the monstrumologist. “Or by God I shall shoot you.”

“Do you know why our race is doomed, Pellinore? Because it has fallen in love with the pleasant fiction that we are somehow above the very rules that we have determined govern everything else.”

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Malachi said with u

“I would gladly volunteer,” rejoined Kearns easily. “But the circumstances no longer, I think, demand it.” He grabbed the lamp from the doctor’s hand and strode away, his boots squishing in the muddy ground, the heels sinking a good half inch before popping free. When he reached the wall, he turned and gestured for us to join him.

He placed a finger to his lips, then pointed down. A small opening, about twice the width of my shoulders, lay at the base of the wall. He held the lamp close to its jagged mouth while we peered down its murky throat. The passage ran downward at a forty-five-degree angle from the chamber floor. With little jabs of his finger Kearns pointed out the footprints clustered around the wall and the shallow cuts and gouges caused by their nails along the first few feet of the tu

We withdrew to a safe distance, and Kearns said in a soft voice, “Two distinct sets-yes, Pellinore?” The doctor nodded, and Kearns went on. “A cub and a mature female. Two going in and none coming out again. Why she took one and left the others is a curiosity, but undeniably that is what she did. Perhaps these two”-he jerked his head toward the dead Anthropophagi-“wandered back up here for some reason, though the prints don’t substantiate that scenario. There are only two possibilities as I see it: It may lead to another, deeper chamber or it may be an escape route that eventually returns to the surface; there’s only way to find out. Agreed, Pellinore?”

The doctor nodded reluctantly. “Agreed.”

“And if they haven’t escaped to the surface, the ruckus up here will have alerted her to our proximity. She is, no doubt, expecting us.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Malachi, grimly gripping his gun. “I won’t disappoint her.”

“You are staying here,” said Kearns.

“I don’t take orders from you,” Malachi sneered.

“All right,” Kearns said mildly. “Take them from Pellinore if you wish. We need someone to stay here and guard the exit-and keep an eye on Will Henry, of course.”

“I didn’t come all this way to be a nursemaid!” cried Malachi. He appealed to Warthrop, “Please. It is my right.”

“Really? How do you mean?” interjected Kearns. “It wasn’t personal, you know. They were hungry and needed to eat. What do you do when you’re hungry?”

Warthrop laid a hand upon Malachi’s shoulder. “ Kearns must go; he is the expert tracker. And I must go, for if anyone has earned the “right,” it is I.” I remembered the haunting question posed in the basement as he considered her mate hanging before him. I wonder if she would be satisfied with his son. “Another must stay, in the event she somehow escapes and returns here. Would you have it be Will Henry? Look at him, Malachi; he’s just a boy.”

His startlingly blue eyes fell upon my face, and I turned away from the unbearable torment I saw within them.

“I can do it,” I offered. “I’ll guard the exit. Take Malachi with you.”

I was ignored, of course. Malachi watched glumly as the doctor and Kearns doubled-checked their ammunition and supplies. Kearns took two flares and several of the paper sacks used for trail marking from the doctor’s bag and dropped them into his, and examined their grenades to be certain they were in working order. The doctor took me aside and said, “There is something that feels wrong about this, Will Henry, though I can’t put my finger on it. She wouldn’t back herself into a corner-she is far too clever for that. Neither would she willingly abandon two of her young to our mercy. It is exceedingly curious. Keep a sharp eye and call out at once should you see or hear anything out of the ordinary.”

He squeezed my arm and added sternly, “And for God’s sake, don’t wander off this time! I expect you to be here when I return, Will Henry.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, trying my best to sound brave.

“Preferably alive.”

“I will try to be, sir.”

With heavy heart I watched him walk with Kearns to the narrow aperture. Something nagged at me. There was something I needed to ask him, something important, something I should remember but was forgetting.

“How long should we wait?” called Malachi.

“Wait for what?” Kearns asked.

“How long should we wait before coming after you?”

Kearns shook his head. “Don’t come after us.”

At the wall Kearns made a grand, sweeping gesture, extending the honor of going first to the monstrumologist. A moment later they were gone, the gentle glow of their lamp fading quickly as they slid out of sight in pursuit of the matriarch and the last of her brood.

Malachi did not speak for several moments. He walked over to the felled Anthropophagi and poked the one shot twice in the back with the muzzle of his rifle. “That’s mine there,” he said, pointing to the blackened hole in the middle of its back. “The second shot-the killing shot.”

“Then you saved my life,” I said.

“Do you think it works that way, Will? Now I have only five more for which to atone?”

“You couldn’t help them,” I offered. “You were trapped in your room. And you couldn’t help Elizabeth, either, not really. How could you have saved her, Malachi?”

He didn’t answer. “It feels like a dream,” he said instead, after a pensive pause. He was looking at the body lying at his feet. “Not this. My life before this, before them. You would think the opposite would be true. It’s very strange, Will.”

He told me what had happened after I’d last seen him in the passage co