“Yes,” said Starr. A coughing fit doubled him over, and when he sat back, his face was the color of ripe strawberries. Spittle dotted his stubbly chin. Warthrop recoiled in disgust.
“And when the war ended…?”
“He offered to finance it himself,” Starr admitted. “He could not let it go.”
“Not let it go?” The doctor seemed aghast. “Not let what go?”
“He had grown rather fond of them, I think. Rather like his pets or children. I mean no offense, Warthrop. He was very possessive of them.”
“And you cared not where the money came from.”
“Warthrop,” replied Starr in a condescending tone. “Really. These…” He waved his mottled claw in the air, searching for the word. “Patients, so-called, they are the dregs of society. They come here because there is literally no place else for them to go. No family, or none that would claim them. All are insane-most criminally so, and those who are not have the intellectual capacity of a turnip root. They are human garbage, discarded by men, toxic to the general populace and to themselves, forgotten, unwanted, cruel, comical mockeries of all things that make us human. They could rot here or they could be sacrificed to the higher good.”
“With the added benefit that if they vanished, they would not be missed.”
Starr nodded, appearing relieved that the doctor understood. “They would not be missed,” he echoed.
“And you kept your end of the bargain,” prompted Warthrop, his jaw clenched. He would see the truth out whatever the cost. The coins glittered in the lamplight, part of that cost, but not the greatest to him. “Every month, until he died and the money stopped coming, you transported two or three victims to New Jerusalem.”
“No, no, no,” objected Starr. “Right in the essentials, Warthrop, wrong in the particulars. I never brought them over. I had a man for that job. And I didn’t stop sending them.”
Warthrop was flabbergasted. “What do you mean, you didn’t stop?”
“I mean just that, Warthrop. I didn’t stop.”
Beside me Kearns murmured, “That cannot be true.”
The doctor ran his hands through his hair. He collapsed into a chair and rested his elbows on his knees, speaking now to his shoes, “Why didn’t you stop?” he managed to ask.
“Your father begged me not to. He established a fund for their safekeeping. He was concerned the experiment had put him in an untenable position: If he cut off their food supply, they would simply look for it elsewhere. I happened to agree with him. The genie was out of the bottle, Pandora’s box had been opened; there really was no choice but to continue.”
“Otherwise real people might die,” suggested Kearns. He was nodding and smiling at the wicked old man, as if to say, We are simpatico, you and I.
“Yes! That’s it exactly.” Starr nodded eagerly. “So after he died, nothing changed. Once a month at the stroke of midnight I dispatched Peterson to the cemetery with a load.”
“A three-hour journey, putting feeding time at three a.m.,” said Kearns. “The witching hour.”
Warthrop was shaking his head. “Your story does not match the evidence of the case, Starr. An alpha male was discovered feeding upon a corpse; only Anthropophagi pushed to the edge of starvation would resort to that. They had recently dug their way to the surface: unnecessary if you were serving them fresh meat every month. And I do not think the sealing of the tunnel between the nesting and the feeding chambers was the result of any natural phenomenon. You say you never stopped, but you must have stopped.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” retorted Starr impatiently. “You indicated I must have stopped after your father died, and I said I did not, for he had left funds for my trouble and expense. That money ran out, Warthrop, in December of last year. Their last feeding was on Christmas Day.”
Kearns barked a laugh. “O holy night!”
“Then Peterson dynamited the tunnel, sealing off the abominations on the other side.”
“Peterson,” echoed Kearns.
“Yes, Peterson. I trust him completely; he’s been doing the job since the beginning.”
“What is his Christian name?”
“Jonathan. Why do you ask?”
Warthrop gave Kearns no chance to respond. “You assumed they would starve to death.”
“I thought it the wisest course. It was something your father and I discussed before his death. If it makes you feel any better, Warthrop, he did express morbid remorse from time to time; I don’t think the operation gave him any joy. More than once he mentioned to me the possibility of terminating the experiment-starving them, poisoning them, setting their pens ablaze. But at heart he was an optimist, I think.” Starr added, “He truly thought with enough time he could tame them.”
“Tame them?” asked Warthrop. “I thought the idea was to interbreed them.”
“Oh, he gave up on that after a few years,” said Starr with another wave of his splotchy talon. “Every potential mate I sent over they simply tore to pieces.”
Kearns laughed. “Not too different from human marriage!”
Warthrop was nodding, but not at Kearns ’s cynical observation. “That explains all of it, or nearly all. There was no reason to leave the safety of their man-made dens, until their food supply was cut off and hunger drove them to the surface. I had assumed the attack upon the Stinnets was a territorial response brought about by our trespass upon their domain…” The monstrumologist sighed, an exhalation of both relief and painful acknowledgment. “I was wrong. Wrong in my assumption and wrong in my response. But not all questions have been answered, Starr. Why did you let Varner live? Wouldn’t it have been safer to discard him in the pit with the other ‘garbage’?”
“Dear God, Warthrop, what do you take me for? I may be avaricious, but I am not completely corrupt.”
I thought of flies buzzing maddeningly upon a windowpane, of their repugnant progeny squirming in open sores, of boots filled with liquefying flesh. I am not completely corrupt.
“Oh, no,” agreed Kearns. He crossed the room to stand before the withered, wheezing old man. With great tenderness he said, “To the contrary, you are a humanitarian, Dr. Starr. Let no one tell you otherwise! An anthropological alchemist, turning lead into gold! The chains that bind most men do not bind you, and in this you and I are brothers, dear Jeremiah. We are the new men of a new and glorious age, free of lies and unbound by any ridiculous rectitude.”
He placed his hands on either side of Starr’s weathered pate, cupping his face while he bent low to purr into his oversize ear, “The only truth is the truth of the now. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ There is no morality, is there, Jeremiah, but the morality of the moment.”
And with that, John Kearns, student of human anatomy and hunter of monsters, with his bare hands gave his victim’s head a violent twist, snapping his neck, severing his spine cord, killing him instantly.
Then, brushing past a stunned and speechless Warthrop on his way out of the room, he said this, with no trace of irony: “He will not be missed.”
The doctor could barely contain his fury, though by all outward signs he appeared perfectly collected; but I knew him too well. He held his tongue until we had turned off the narrow lane to the house on Motley Hill, and then he turned on Kearns.
“It is murder, Kearns, plain and simple.”
“It was a mercy killing, Warthrop, simple and plain.”
“You’ve given me no choice.”
“One always has that, Pellinore. May I ask a question? What would happen should the old coot’s heart suddenly spring to life and he makes a deathbed confession to his crimes? Would you not like to continue your life’s work?… Sorry, that was two questions.”