Warthrop had been right. It was a beautiful day, chilly but cloudless, the bright morning sun etching sharp shadows and chiseling the buildings into exquisite relief. As we rattled south within sight of the choppy waters of the East River, I glanced at the doctor, wondering if I should risk asking him again what had happened—though I was certain it could be only one thing: John Chanler was dead.
Our carriage drew up before a block-length structure on the banks of the river—Bellevue, the nation’s oldest public hospital. We followed Sergeant Connolly through a side door, up the dimly lit stairs to the fourth floor, and then down a long, narrow corridor whose walls had been painted a ghastly institutional pale green. Connolly knocked once upon the door at the terminus of this depressing passageway.
We were admitted at once by another uniformed officer who, with Connolly, stood at rigid attention by the door throughout the tense scene that followed.
The room was icy cold; the autumnal wind whistled through the broken window over the bed. A knot of plainclothes detectives were gathered around the foot of it, watching two of their colleagues crouching over something on the floor. One of the men—an imposing figure with an impressive chest and an equally impressive mustache—turned when we entered. He scowled, his full lips clamped tightly around an unlit cigar.
“Warthrop. Good. Thank you for coming,” he said in a thick Irish brogue. His gratitude was expressed gruffly, a formality to be promptly dispensed with.
“Chief Inspector Byrnes,” the doctor returned tightly.
“But what’s this?” asked Byrnes, glowering at me. “Who is this child and why is he here?”
“He is not a child; he is my assistant,” returned the monstrumologist.
I was a child, of course, in most men’s eyes, but the doctor saw things differently from most men.
Byrnes grunted noncommittally, studying me from beneath his bushy eyebrows, the right side of his prodigious mustache twitching. Then he shrugged.
“He’s over here,” the chief detective of the Metropolitan Police said. “Watch your step; it’s slippery.”
The men at the foot of the bed moved aside, like a human curtain pulling back. Lying on his back in a pool of coagulating blood was Augustin Skala—or what was left of him. I might not have recognized him if not for the size of the man and the tattered peacoat, for Augustin Skala had no face and no eyes. The empty sockets sought out the blank canvas of the off-white ceiling tiles.
His shirt had been torn open, exposing his hairy torso, in the middle of which yawned a hole the size of a pie plate. Protruding from the hole’s jagged lip was a portion of his dislodged heart, partially ripped from its moorings and missing large bite-size chunks.
It was the heart that drew Warthrop’s attention. He knelt beside the body, heedless of the tacky blood, to examine it.
“The nurse found him around seven o’clock this morning,” said Byrnes.
“Where have you taken Chanler?” the doctor asked, not turning from his task.
“I haven’t taken him anywhere. Dr. Chanler is gone.”
“Gone?” Warthrop looked up at him sharply. “What do you mean—gone where?”
“I was hoping you could help with the answer to that question.”
The door flew open, and von Helrung hurried into the room, his wide face flushed, hair flying willy-nilly around his square head.
“Pellinore! Thank God, you are here. Oh, this is terrible. Terrible!”
The doctor rose, his pants now soaked in Skala’s blood. “Von Helrung, where is John?”
“Dr. Chanler has disappeared,” said Byrnes before von Helrung could answer. He nodded toward the shattered window. “We think through there.”
Warthrop stepped over to the window and looked down four stories to the ground below. “Impossible,” he murmured.
“The door was locked from the inside,” Byrnes rumbled. “Chanler is gone. There is no other explanation.”
“The laws of nature demand another, Inspector,” snapped the doctor. “Unless you propose that he sprouted wings and flew away.”
Byrnes glanced at von Helrung, and then curtly told his men to wait outside, leaving the four of us alone with the remains of Augustin Skala.
“Dr. von Helrung has informed me of the particulars of Dr. Chanler’s case.”
Warthrop threw up his hands and said, “John Chanler is suffering from the mental and physical effects of a particular dementia, Inspector, called the Wendigo Psychosis. It has a well-documented history in the literature—”
“Yes, he mentioned this Wendigo business.”
“It is finished,” von Helrung put in gravely. “He has gone fully to Outiko now.”
Warthrop groaned. “Inspector, I beg you not to listen to this man. I appeal to your reason. What man—much less a man in John Chanler’s condition—could withstand a fall from a four-story window without suffering such injuries as to make escape impossible?”
“I’m not a doctor. All I know is that he’s missing and that window was the only way out.”
“He rides the high wind now,” pronounced von Helrung.
“Shut up!” cried Warthrop, jabbing his index finger in the older man’s face. “You may have enlisted Byrnes in this madness, but I will have no part of it.” He turned to Byrnes. “I wish to speak with the nurse.”
“She has gone home for the day,” answered Byrnes. “She is quite shaken, as you might imagine.”
“He must have walked out. . . .”
“Then he made himself invisible,” countered the chief inspector. “There’s always a nurse on this floor, and doctors and orderlies going about besides. He would have been seen.”
“There have been some eyewitness accounts of—,” von Helrung began.
“Not . . . another . . . word,” Warthrop growled at his old master. He turned back to Byrnes. “Very well. I will allow for the moment that he somehow managed to endure the fall without losing the ability to ambulate. I assume you have men searching for him; he could not have gotten far in his condition.”
A man came into the room at that moment—around von Helrung’s age but taller and more athletic of build, well-dressed in a tailcoat and top hat, with piercing eyes and a thrust-forward chin.
“Warthrop!” he cried, marching straight to the doctor and striking him with the back of his hand.