It seemed a prudent suggestion. The creature must have been more than six inches long. I had picked it up toward the tail end, and the little puckering mouth bobbed and weaved freely in the air. Carefully I reached with my left hand to grab it. How the thing sensed, without eyes or nostrils, my approach, I do not know, but sense it the khorkhoi did.
Faster than I could blink, it struck, more like a rattlesnake than a worm. (Only later would I discover it was indeed a member of the reptile family.) It coiled and then snapped whiplike directly at my face, the diminutive mouth expanding to twice its original size, revealing row upon row of tiny teeth marching backward into the lightless tunnel of its gullet. Instinctively my head snapped back, which saved my face but exposed my neck. The last thing I saw before it attached itself were the teeth emerging from the recesses of the yawning pit of its mouth.
I did not feel the bite at first. Instead, I felt an enormous pressure as, by means of its rubbery lips, it affixed itself with leechlike determination, and then there was the slap of its body against my chest, for it had pulled free from my hand. It coiled itself partway around my neck and immediately began to squeeze, cutting off my air as simultaneously something fire-hot scorched the spot beneath its anchored mouth. A khorkhoi, I would later learn, does not eat the flesh of its victims, nor does it, in the strictest sense, drink their blood. More like the spider, it uses its toxic saliva to liquefy the flesh of its prey; its teeth are vestigial relics from its evolutionary past. The choking behavior is used, like the web of the arachnid, to immobilize. It goes without saying that it is very difficult to defend oneself while unconscious.
Mad with panic, I clawed at the monster. Lilly recoiled in horror. Her little game had spun out of control, and now she seemed paralyzed by its denouement. I stumbled against the table . . . lost my balance . . . fell. Dark flowers blossomed in my field of vision.
She screamed, her cries coming to me as if from a great distance, and it was through the veil of that spinning, ever growing garden of raven blooms that I watched her run from the chamber, taking the light with her, leaving the darkness and the crazed residents of Unclassified 101 of the Lower Monstrumarium with me.
NINETEEN
“Whom Did I Betray?”
I was in that darkness for quite some time.
And when the darkness went away, the monstrumologist was with me.
“Are you awake now?” he asked.
I tried to speak. My effort was rewarded with searing pain, from my throat to my lungs, which felt as if a great stone had been laid upon them. At first my mind was completely blank; then I remembered where I was, and for that I was glad, because the pillow under my head was very soft—much softer than my pillow at Harrington Lane. The hotel bed was much larger than the one in the little loft—and for that I was glad too. There was even a warm rush of what I hesitate to call—but having no better word to describe it—pleasure, when his lean face swam into focus.
“Hello, sir,” I croaked.
“Tell me, Will Henry, do you think you are in a little trouble or a great deal of trouble?”
“A great deal, sir.”
“And you’re fortunate that your luck is not commensurate with the amount of trouble. By all accounts, you should be dead.”
“It would not be the first time, sir.”
I touched the thick bandage wrapped around my neck. That small touch, like my first attempt at speech, was rewarded with agonizing pain.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I managed to gasp.
“Why is it that every time I leave you to your own devices, you end up seriously injured? I am beginning to think I shall have to cart you around with me like an Indian babe in a papoose.”
“It wasn’t my idea, sir.”
“No? Miss Bates placed the khorkhoi around your neck?”
“No, sir, she didn’t touch it. I picked it up.”
“And can you tell me why in the world you would pick up a Mongolian Death Worm?”
“To . . . sex it, sir.”
“Dear Lord, Will Henry. Don’t you know khorkhoi are hermaphroditic? They are both male and female.”
“No, sir,” I choked out. “I didn’t know that.”
“By now I’m sure it’s occurred to you that the price of ignorance in monstrumology can be quite steep.”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“Ignorance could cost your life. Did you weigh that cost against the exigency of sexing the worm?” He did not wait for my answer. “I think not. Why did you do it, Will Henry? Why did you go somewhere you clearly had no business being?”
“Lilly . . .”
“Lilly! What—did she bop you over the head with a chair and carry you down to the Monstrumarium?”
“She said she wanted to show me something.”
“A word of advice, Will Henry. When a person of the female gender says she wants to show you something, run the other way. The odds are it is not something you wish to see.”
“Thank you, sir. I didn’t know that.”
He nodded gravely, but through my tears of pain, did I see his eyes dancing merrily in the lamplight?
“There is still much you do not,” he said. “About science—and more esoteric phenomena.”
“Esoteric phenomena?”
“Females. In this instance the same girl who brought you to the edge of death also yanked you back. If not for her quick thinking, your indispensable services would have been quite dispensed with. She ran straight to Professor Ainsworth and roused him, with no small amount of effort, and to his subsequent annoyance for missing his nap on account of two silly children playing where no child should ever play. It was Adolphus who saved your life, Will Henry, and to whom you owe all gratitude, which I suggest you express to him at your earliest convenience—at a safe distance, for I believe it is his intention to wrap his cane around your neck if you step foot in his dominion again.”
I nodded, and winced, for the motion caused a hot bolt of pain.
The doctor fished a cloth from the washbasin on the bed stand. He wrung out the excess water and began bathing me, starting with my sweating forehead and working his way down. He bent to the task with his usual level of intense concentration, as if there existed the absolute ideal of giving a recalcitrant apprentice a sponge bath, a precise procedure he was determined to follow to the letter.