The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist, #4)

by Rick Yancey

I will be honest: When I finished the last folio, the only word that fit my reaction was “loathing.” The second thing I felt was betrayal. Will Henry had betrayed me. He had been playing me for a fool. Or had he? There had been signs and warnings, hints here and there. After living with the first ten folios for so long, how could I not have seen where Will’s journey was taking him—taking me? Deep inside, I think I knew early on what lay at the end of his long descent. He had written: I understand you may wish to turn away. And you can, if you wish. That is your blessing.

She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all.

But there is no beginning nor ending nor anything in between Beginnings are endings And all endings are the same. Time is a line But we are circles.

You have no claim to him, Pellinore. And who else might, Robert? His father died in service to me. It is my debt. I did not ask for it, but I shall repay it or perish in the attempt.

But what shall you do with him, Pellinore? He is only a boy, hardly suited for your work—or whatever you call it. I shall make him suited.

Well, I don’t require genius of you. I require but one thing, now and always: unquestioning, unhesitating, unwavering loyalty.

“Is it there? Do I have it too?” Worms spilling from my father’s bleeding eyes, boiling from his bleeding boils. “No. And yes. Would you like to see?” No. And yes.

“Hello, Lilly. Spare a single dance for an old friend?” “Don’t you see she’d rather with someone who actually can? Why don’t you crack open another oyster and leave the dancing to real gentlemen?” “Quite so.” I smiled. And then I smashed my right forearm into his Adam’s apple. He dropped straight down, clutching his throat. I finished the job with a quick downward jab to his temple. Hit a man hard enough in that spot and you can kill him. He crumpled into a ball at my feet. He might have been dead; I did not know or care. I seized Lilly’s wrist as all around us the fists began to fly.

I waved my hand. The gesture came from the monstrumologist; the disdain was wholly my own.

She was teasing me, of course, but I did not miss the hint of fear in her voice, the tiny quiver of uncertainty, the delicious thrill of confronting the unknown. We were kindred spirits in that: What repelled attracted; what terrified compelled.

“I’m not one for revenge,” I murmured in return. “It isn’t in my nature.” “I wonder what Dr. John Kearns would say to that.”

I wanted it to be a surprise, but I am your faithful servant, Miss Bates—as I am his—as I am everyone’s, something I’ve proven time and again, even in Kearns’s death.

“What is it?” Breathless. Scarlet-cheeked. Rising to the balls of her feet. Never more lovely than in that moment. She knew, like me—and like you—the terrible longing, the hopeless revulsion, the pull of the faceless, nameless thing, the thing I call das Ungeheuer. The thing we desire and deny. The thing that is you and not-you. The thing that was before you were and will be long after you are gone. I held out my hand. “Come and see.”

“Here, I have something for you. It’s your father’s work apron, a bit battle stained, as you can see. . . . Hmm. Careful now or you’ll trip over it. Well. You’ll grow into it.”

“What else do you like? Do you hunt?” “No, sir.” “Why not?” “Father keeps promising he will take me . . .” I paused, slamming head-on into another promise that would never be kept. Warthrop’s eyes bored into mine, glittering with that strange, unnerving, backlit glow. He’d wondered if I was sick, but he was the one who looked sick: dark circles beneath his eyes, hollow-cheeked and unshaven. “Why do you cry, Will Henry? Do you think your tears will bring them back?” They coursed down my cheeks, empty stygian vessels, useless. It took everything in me not to throw my body across his and beg for comfort. Beg for it! The simplest of human gestures. I did not understand him then. I do not understand him still.

“You must harden yourself,” he told me sternly. “Monstrumology is not butterfly collecting. If you are to stay with me, you must become accustomed to such things. And worse.” “Am I to stay with you, sir?” His gaze cut down to my bones. I wanted to look away; I could not look away. “What is your desire?” My bottom lip quivered. “I have nowhere else to go.” “Do not pity yourself, Will Henry,” he said, the man whose own self-pity rose to operatic heights. “There is no room in science for pity or grief or any sentimental thing.” And the child answered, “I’m not a scientist.” To which the man replied, “And I am not a nursemaid. What do you desire?”

For bitterness does not envy pleasure. Bitterness finds pleasure in the spot from which bitterness springs. Younger than I when he lost his mother, banished by a cold and unforgiving father, the monstrumologist understood what I had lost. He had lost it too. In me, himself. And in himself, me. Time is a line But we are circles.

“Warthrop,” I said. “What the devil are you doing?” His mouth came open, and he said, “Looking at him.” And then he fell. I carried him upstairs, across a sea of dust so thick it eddied and swirled in my wake. The monstrumologist seemed to weigh no more than an eleven-year-old boy.

“Are you asleep?” I said aloud. My voice hung like fog in the deadened air. He made no reply. “Go to hell,” I said. “You probably put Morgan up to writing that letter. What would you have me do, Warthrop? There is nothing here for me. Nothing for you, either, but that isn’t my responsibility anymore. Well, it never was. I was a child; what choice did I have? You could have beaten me every day and locked me in a closet at night; I still would have stayed.” I shrugged out of my overcoat, bundled it in my lap. Shivered. Put the coat back on. My breath congealed in the icy air. “What do I owe you? Nothing. Whatever I owe, I’ve repaid the debt a hundredfold. I did not ask for this. I did not ask for your . . . unintended cruelties.” He does not look old in the preternatural gloom. He looks like a child. A child who has been starved, a child who has seen things no child should ever see. I don’t think I would have been shocked to see him clutching a tattered hat two sizes too small for him. “But here I am. In this same damnable chair. ‘Snap to, Will Henry!’ And here I am, indispensable as always. ‘Yes, Dr. Warthrop. Right away, Dr. Warthrop!’ God damn you, anyway.”

Turn toward the basement door, through which I must pass to inspect the furnace, though the basement is the last place I wish to go. The basement is where I lost the last of my childhood—and left a part of it. He kept it all those years, the finger he chopped off with a butcher knife, floating in a jar of formaldehyde. You kept it? Well, I didn’t want to just throw it out with the trash. He did it to save my life. Another unintentional cruelty.

“I won’t come here again,” I tell him. “This is the last time. You’ve made the bed; sleep in it. And before you judge me, consider that in all the history of the world, no maker has ever despised his own creation.” “What of Satan?” A hair-thin whisper from the bed. So he is awake. I suspected as much. “Satan was the destroyer,” I answer. “He created nothing.” “I am speaking of his creator. The all-loving one who imprisoned him in ice in the lowermost circle of the pit. Satan was his, too: ‘If he was once as beautiful as he is ugly now . . .’ ” “Oh, what is it this time, Warthrop?” I moan. “What are you dying from today?” The thin lips draw back in a leering grin. My stomach turns at the sight. “Oh, the usual thing, Will Henry. The usual thing.”

“Why do you cry, Warthrop?” I asked in a harsh voice. “Do you think your tears will bring me back?” And the thing in me, unwinding. His gift to me, his curse. “What do you desire? Will Henry is gone; he is no more. You must harden yourself to that fact.” His lips drew back. It was not a smile; it was a mockery of a smile. “I have. Why haven’t you?” We regarded each other across the vast space that separated us. Himself in me. And me in him. In the gloom, he might have passed as a victim of one of his horrid specimens—the death-leer grin, the wide, unblinking eyes, the pale, wasted flesh. In a sense perhaps he was. Please, do not leave me, he had begged me once. You are the one thing that keeps me human.

I went into the bathroom. In the mirror I saw a boy in a man’s mask, wearing a fashionable suit, hair neatly trimmed, beard neatly shaved. Only the eyes gave him away: They were still his eyes, the boy Will Henry’s, regarding the world as if in mid-flinch, waiting for the whatever-it-was to jump from the shadows. Eyes that had seen too much too soon and for too long, unable to look away. Look away, the man whispers to the boy in the mask. Look away.

“Apprentice?” I laughed. “I’m no apprentice and never was.” “Oh? If you’re not, then what are you?” I looked deeply into her eyes, the blue so dark and so richly depthless in the flimsy light. “I am the infinite nothing out of which everything flows.” She laughed and nervously rubbed her bare arms. “You’re drunk.” “Too esoteric? Very well, how about this? I am the answer to humanity’s unspoken prayer: the sanest person alive, for nothing human taints my sight. The wholly objective narrator of the story.” She became very serious and said in a level voice, “What is inside the Locked Room, Will?” “The end of the long road, Lilly. The terminus of the journey—for those who have the eyes to see.”

“I trust the boy with my very life—he can be trusted in this.”

I sat on the divan across from them and did the thing I did best, the tactic I had adopted since coming to live with him, out of self-preservation: blending into the woodwork. In a few moments I don’t think either of them remembered I was there.

He was furious, but his guest had no inkling of it. The more emotional Warthrop became, the less emotion he revealed.

“You should have brought it, Maeterlinck,” I murmured. It took every ounce of my willpower not to touch the egg, to feel the warmth of its life beneath my hand. “If he had seen it, he would have lost all self-control and forgotten to be stingy.” I closed the lid carefully. “Some men lust for gold, others for power. The monstrumologist is that rare man who covets what others would destroy. But it is not too late. I think we can come to an agreement, you and I.”

“What have you done?” he whispered hoarsely. “What in heaven’s name have you done?” “Nothing at all in heaven’s name,” I replied, and then I watched him fall.

Where did I fail? You didn’t fail me, sir. You succeeded past all expectations. The wisest teacher desires to be surpassed by his student, and I have surpassed you: My lamp burns brighter than yours; it allows not the remotest corner a smidgen of dark; I see clear to the bottom of the well. And what I see is all there is and nothing more. There is no room in science for any sentimental thing.

I picked up the syringe filled with amber-colored liquid and rolled it between my hands, five fingers on one, four on the other. The missing finger floated in a jar of preserving solution in the doctor’s basement. He’d chopped it off that I might live. I was indispensable to him, you see. I was the one thing that kept him human.

Dr. John Kearns, Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel. “If you leave tonight, you might have just enough time,” I went on. “He is a close friend of the doctor’s, a doctor himself as a matter of fact, Warthrop’s spiritual twin and polar opposite, a man who has seen to the bottom of the well, if you follow my meaning. He will give you the antidote if you give him the name: tipota. Do not forget.” I stepped back, scooping up the derringer from the nightstand. And his mouth came open, and he said, “You’re mad.” “To the contrary,” I answered. “I am the sanest person alive.”

He reached for me without thinking, the natural instinct, the human affliction. I stared down at him from the upper atmosphere, Maeterlinck a miniscule speck writhing at my feet, so far beneath me that no feature was distinct, so close I could see down to the marrow of his bones. I could have killed him. It was within my power. But I stayed my hand, and so am I not merciful?

“Again, then what sort of god is this? His love is either infinite or it is not. If it is, there can be no crime beyond forgiveness. If not, we should pick a more honest god!”

“You? You are the most even-tempered man I have ever met. It’s as you’ve always told me, sir: A man must control his passions lest they control him.” Or, in the alternative, he might choose to have none at all and thereby escape the struggle entirely.

And as for Maeterlinck: I never heard from him again. I can only assume he fled to London seeking a dead man who’d been left for carrion on an island six thousand miles away. Finding neither the man nor the antidote, since neither existed, he must have thought himself doomed, until the dire moment he thought must be coming never materialized. From time to time, I wonder if his heart was filled with rage or joy—rage for having been tricked in so cruel a manner, joy for having survived when death was all but certain. Perhaps neither, perhaps both; what did it matter? It certainly didn’t matter to me. He received the priceless gift, and I the prize beyond price.

But a man must control his passions lest they control him—if he has them. And that is the rub, the central question, the paramount if.

And the boy, with the tattered hat to keep his head warm in the icy basement, presses the ropy bundle to his chest, shuffling across the floor slick with blood. The slithering and slipping of the cargo in his arms, the offal smearing his shirtfront, and the smell that assaults him. And the antiseptic clink and clatter of sharp instruments, and the man in the white coat with its copper-colored stains leaning over the metal necropsy table, and the boy’s numb fingers wet with effluvia, and the tears of protest that run down his cheeks and the hunger in his belly and the light-headedness of finding himself in this place where no pies cool on racks and no woman sings over a warm fire, just the man and his gore-encrusted nails and the peculiar crunch of the shears snapping through cartilage and bone and the strangely hypnotic beauty of a corpse flayed wide, its organs like exotic creatures of the lightless deep, the surreal humming of the man as he works, fingers digging deep, black eyes burning, forearms bulging, the taut muscles of his neck and the clenched jaw, and the eyes, the eyes burning.

I need you here, Will Henry. Here: by his side. Here: in this cold place where not a molecule of air moves. Here: the boy in the tattered hat smelling of smoke and the blood sticky on his bare hands and the thing opened up before him like a spring flower straining toward the sun.

It was overwhelming for the boy in the tattered hat: He had never been in the presence of genius; he did not know how to behave or think or speak or any human thing; and so he was forced to look to the man in the stained white coat to guide him, to tell him how to behave and think and speak. He was the bloody corpse beneath the bright lamp splayed open, straining toward the sun.

A human being. He is speaking of a human being, a boy around my age was the report, and all that is left is a tooth—the rest now part of the beast or in a pile of its shit. Waste, waste. And the boy in the tattered hat, in the tattered hat, in the tattered hat.

He must have heard them that night: the howls and shrieks of the boy’s soul tearing in half, the cry of damnation’s desire, the rage against the beast that had refused to consume him. The beast that had left behind the black, smoldering casings of his parents—for what it did not use for fuel, it shat out as dust and ash. He must have heard. Every board and window and shingle and nail must have rattled with the force of his anger and grief. The man must have heard—and he did nothing. In fact, in those early days, the more I cried—always alone in my little attic room—the harsher, colder, and more merciless he became. Perhaps he told himself it was for my own good, and after all this was at a time when children were not coddled. Perhaps his harshness was meant to make me harsh, his coldness to make me cold, his mercilessness to make me merciless. It was the best and only answer to the brutal question as he understood it: What sort of god is this? But now I don’t think he was being harsh or cold or merciless. He was not the harsh, cold, merciless one. Now I think he heard my screams and remembered another boy, a boy from long ago, consigned to that same attic space away from the beating heart of the house, the lonely boy whose mother had died and whose father blamed him for it. The terrified boy who watched his father fade from him while remaining all the while in his sight, a majestic ship disappearing over the endless horizon, the boy alone and sick and sick in his lonelines...

The fire was warm, the chairs comfortable, the carpet lush, the waiters obsequiously attentive. Warthrop had his tea and scones, von Helrung his sherry and cigar, and I my Coca-Cola and cookies. It was like the old days, except I was no longer a boy and von Helrung no longer old, but tending toward ancient. Hair thinner, face paler, stubby fingers not quite as steady. But his eyes still gleamed bird bright, and he had lost none of his acumen—or his humanity. The same could not be said of me. He’s going to die soon, I decided as I sat silently listening to their conversation. He won’t live out the year. When he spoke or took the smallest breath, you could hear the death rattle deep in his barrel chest. I could feel it when he wrapped his short arms around my waist and pressed his snowy white mane against me: the life force fading, the heat leaching through his vest like the earth’s heat fading into the desert sunset.

“You know I have no appetite when I’m working,” he said. “Now, a good, strong cup of some Darjeeling, that is something altogether different! I never could replicate your cup, Will, try as I might. Never tasted the same after you left.”

“I don’t suppose you’d mind picking up a scone or two. . . .” “I will get you some scones.” I sat in the chair. For some reason I was out of breath. “They never tasted the same either,” he said. “One wonders how that could be.” “Stop that,” I said sharply. “Don’t be childish.”

“God damn you anyway, Pellinore Warthrop! The days of your puerile attempts to manipulate and control me are over. So save the melodramatic sniveling for someone else.” His shoulders heaved. “There is no one else.” “That is your choice, not mine.” “You chose to leave me!” he shouted up into my face. “You gave me no choice!”

He stumbled backward, bending over, clutching at his privates, and then he vomited up a stew of bile and blood and black, curdled blobs of his own gut—the monster’s poison had already necrotized a part of his stomach. His other organs, I knew, were dying as well. That is how the poison kills you: You die from the inside out. Depending on the amount of toxin, the process can take anywhere from minutes to several days.

You must harden yourself. If you are to stay with me, you must become accustomed to such things. Must I, Warthrop? Must I become accustomed to “such things”? And if I had failed—if you had failed to make me accustomed to them—what then? Would there have been room then for sentimentality, for the absurdities of love and pity and hope and every other human thing? But you didn’t fail; you succeeded beyond your wildest expectations, and I, William James Henry, am your crowning achievement, the most aberrant of aberrant life forms, without love without pity without hope, harsh cold merciless leviathan of the lightless heatless deep.

I cannot say to you, This is where it began. A circle has no starting point. There are the secrets I have kept. He encircles me. There is no beginning or end, and time is the lie the mirror tells us. These are the secrets. The child in the tattered hat and the boy in the labyrinth and the man beside the ash barrel circle without beginning, without end. It is hard, he told me once, hard to think about those things we do not think about.

“I should very much like to kiss you now.” “That is a lie.” Still smiling. And I, now frowning: “Why would someone lie about that?” “If you really wanted to kiss me, you would have kissed me, not—” I kissed her. Dear Will, I pray this finds you well. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. “Will,” she whispered. “I should very much like for you to kiss me again.” And I did, and the thing turned upon itself inside the burlap, and scratch, scratch against the heavy glass and you must harden yourself to such things and there was no room for love or pity or any other silly human thing and never fall in love, never. In the snarl of winding passageways and dusty rooms and shelves overflowing with dead nightmarish things and I find it beautiful—more splendid than a meadow in springtime.