“See ush, Will? Thish is the faysh of love.”
I whipped my head from its grasp; its nails tore open the soft flesh beneath my chin. I heard it sucking my blood from its fingers.
“You have promish, Will. Good, good apprentish. We think we’ll make you ours. Would you like to be our apprentish? Such a good start with that baby . . .”
Something was tugging on my shirtfront. I felt a button pop loose, then another, and then the cold of steel against my bare skin—or was it steel? Did the beast press a knife into the scar that had been made by its teeth in the wilderness, or was it its nails, grown as sharp as a hawk’s talon? I could not bring myself to look.
“Ish so indesh-sker-ibal,” it whimpered. “You wayshful lil’ shit, you threw it away, our gift. You don’t know. But ish delyshful. You bite it when ish still beating, and it pumpsh the blood, woosh, woosh, into your mouth. . . .”
I could feel the skin parting, the warm trickle of blood, and then a fingertip worming its way into the wound. My heart thundered inches away from its probing digit.
“Indesh-sker-ibal . . . ,” it blubbered hungrily into my ear. “Like sucking on your per-esh-sish muf-ther’s teat—”
It stopped. Its breath huffed in my ear. Its body became stock still. It had heard him calling to me: “Will Henry! Will Henreeeee!”
It was the doctor.
The beast flung me away as if I weighed no more than a ragdoll, and it fled the chamber with inconceivable speed. I slammed into a wall and crumpled to the floor, where I lay for a moment, too stunned from the force of the impact to move. I sobbed aloud, unable to speak above a tiny choking whisper.
“Dr. . . . Dr. Warthrop . . . it’s coming. . . . It’s coming.”
I crawled across the floor, groping blindly in the dark. I found a wall and used it to push myself up. I stumbled forward, but it was as if the tenebrous air pushed back; I moved with all the speed of a bather wading in heavy surf. A feeble glow had appeared before me, enough that I could see the outline of the chamber doorway. I lunged through it. I found myself in a narrow hall. Lining the walls were stacks of boxes and wooden crates embossed with the words “SASM—New York.”
It had carried me to the spiritual home of Warthrop’s mistress. It had brought me to the Monstrumarium.
The glow came from the lamps of my would-be rescuers, beacons that beckoned me out of the darkness, and now I ran, if a lurching stagger could be called that, careening off the slick walls and slamming into the listing towers of boxes, which toppled to the floor behind me. I could raise my voice only to the level of a hoarse whisper. “It’s coming. . . . It’s coming. . . .”
My toe caught on the edge of a crate. I pitched forward, meeting the concrete with my forehead. The ground seemed to open up beneath me and I was falling, falling, crying his name, or perhaps only screaming it in my head.
It’s coming. It’s coming!
I felt someone’s hand upon my shoulder. Brilliant light brighter than a thousand suns rushed up to blind me, and I wasn’t falling anymore. The doctor was pulling me up.
He gathered me into his arms and whispered my name fiercely. I tried to warn him. I tried. I knew the words. I heard them in my head. It’s coming. But the ability to speak was lost.
“Where is he, Will Henry? Where is John?”
When I didn’t answer, he raised his head and called out, “Here! I have found him! Over here!”
He turned back to me. “Is he here, Will Henry? Is John here?”
I looked over his shoulder and saw, through the face of his beloved, the yellow eye looking back down at me. The beast towered behind the doctor; the top of its head brushed the ceiling. Like an angry child flinging a broken toy, it reached down with its enormous claw, seized my master by the nape of the neck, and hurled him down the corridor.
Warthrop landed on his back with a startled grunt. He brought up his revolver, but did not fire. As to why he didn’t, I can only conjecture. Out of the wilderness he had borne his friend; through unimaginable suffering and sacrifice he had carried John Chanler home. How could he now end that life he had given so much to save? Would not pulling that trigger negate everything the doctor believed in? Indeed, would it not prove von Helrung correct in the most fundamental sense—prove that love itself is the beast that devours all mankind?
The blackened wreckage that was John Chanler smacked the gun from the doctor’s hand with such velocity that the act painted an afterimage upon my eyes. It yanked him close so that he might see clearly what both Muriel and John had given him and what he had given them in return. This is the face of love.
Then it pressed their mouths to his.
In the next second I was upon it, the silver-plated knife in my hand. I thrust the blade to the hilt into the thin neck. The beast shrugged me off its back as easily as a man flicks off a bit of lint from his coat. The doctor thrashed beneath it; one ebony claw was clamped over the doctor’s nose and eyes while it pressed its mouth tightly against the doctor’s mouth. The beast was smothering him with its kiss.
I leapt again onto the thing’s back, von Helrung’s words echoing in my ears: Silver—by bullet or knife—to the heart. Only the heart!
I swung my arms around in a ludicrous parody of its earlier embrace of me, and plunged the silver blade again and again into its heaving chest.
Its skeletal form jerked; behind Muriel’s lips the bloody mouth came open in an animal squeal of pain. The beast rose, throwing me free, and then fell away. It rose again, collapsed, and curled into a mewling fetal ball.
Welling with pain and yearning, the yellow eyes sought out mine. I brought the blade high over my head, and beneath the human mask something inside the beast remembered, and John Chanler smiled. His heart rose up to meet the orgasmic thrust.
“God damn it!” The doctor’s voice thundered in my ears. “God damn it, why?”
He shoved me aside and gathered his attacker into his lap, and now the thing appeared pitifully small and frail, nothing like the giant wraith of just a moment before. With one hand the monstrumologist compressed the wound; the blood, as black as tar in the weak light, pulsed between his fingers with each beat of the dying man’s heart. Then Warthrop gently peeled off the overlaid face of the one they both had loved, and stared into the unseeing eyes of the one he thought he had brought out of the desolation. But he hadn’t brought him out. The desolation was within him.
“No, no, no,” Pellinore Warthrop protested, the impotent human cry.
TWENTY-NINE
“The Gift Was Mine to Give”
On the last Friday of the colloquium, my master rose from his chair, the chamber became still, and a hundred of his colleagues leaned forward in their seats, waiting with bated breath to hear his reply to von Helrung, upon which the future of their discipline hung in the balance. If he should fail, monstrumology would be doomed. It would never be accepted as a legitimate line of inquiry; its practitioners would henceforward and forever be perceived as laughingstocks, eccentric pseudoscientists on the fringes of “real” science.
Von Helrung had presented a compelling case, reworking his original paper to incorporate his star witness, the “indispensable proof,” as he called it—one William James Henry, special assistant to the chief spokesman for the opposing side!
I had expected the doctor’s presentation to be as awkward as his practice of it had been, tortured in its logic, inconsistent in its arguments—and I was not disappointed. It was painful to listen to, but everyone listened politely. The real show was to follow, the question and answer period, during which Warthrop would have to yield the floor.