Gravois’s eyes grew misty. “Pellinore, words cannot express my grief. The loss, it is . . .”
“Inexplicable,” said the doctor. “And avoidable.”
“You must not blame yourself.”
“Who do you propose? I am open to suggestions.”
Von Helrung called the meeting to order and briefly, for him, welcomed Warthrop into their little band.
“Good to see you on your feet, Warthrop,” Pelt said. “I must admit I had my reservations until von Helrung told me you were joining our party.”
“You’ll be hiring an attorney, I suppose,” said Dobrogeanu. “I would. Demand a formal inquiry, force the city into bankruptcy, have that terrible man Byrnes arrested for assault and battery!”
“He is not so different from us,” my master replied cryptically.
“Yes, thank you, Pellinore,” said von Helrung quickly. “Now to the most recent development, which bears directly upon our task.”
He related to the astonished men the events of the night before. A lively discussion ensued. What did it mean? Was it, as the doctor vehemently maintained, merely a nightmare—a hallucination induced by khorkhoi venom and exacerbated by the day’s horrific events? Or was it, as von Helrung claimed with equal fervor, exactly what it appeared to be—an attempt by their quarry to snatch me? Torrance proposed the latter possibility should be put aside for now, suggesting that if we failed in locating the beast by any other means, we might turn its desire against it.
“Let it come to us,” he said.
“So your plan is to use the boy as bait,” said the doctor. “Because he has heard voices inside his head.”
“Only as the last, desperate measure,” Torrance replied, his face turning red. Warthrop clearly intimidated him.
“There is a flavor of desperation about it,” Warthrop returned.
“For myself,” intoned Pelt in his sonorous voice, “I am heartened by the news of this attack—if it was an attack; I do not say that it was, Pellinore—for it’s the only news that I’ve heard from last night. Have any of you seen the papers this morning? I’m happy to report there’s nothing that fits our subject’s modus operandi.”
Von Helrung waved his hand. “That means nothing. The city will suppress all that it can now to avoid panic and political embarrassment. I doubt a reporter can get within a hundred yards of police headquarters.”
“If any representative of the third estate can, though, it is Riis,” said Dobrogeanu.
“Speaking of Riis, where the devil is he?” wondered Torrance.
“It would be terrible, would it not,” Gravois said with a sparkle in his dark eyes, “if he, the one indispensable cog in our machine, should have fallen victim to the one we seek?”
“That is a horrible thought,” huffed Pelt.
“I am a monstrumologist,” returned Gravois easily. “It is my business to think horrible thoughts.”
Riis had survived the night, of course. He appeared near midmorning, when the discussion had petered out to an errant comment here and there with long pauses in between. The day, as if in spite, grew darker. The buildings across Fifth Avenue brooded in semidarkness; the snow, now half an inch deep, shone gray on the sidewalk. Von Helrung smoked two puffs from his Havana and then put it out. When the bell rang, he jumped from his chair, knocking over the ashtray and sending the extinguished stogie rolling across the Persian carpet. Gravois picked it up and slipped it into his pocket.
“Warthrop,” the Danish journalist said, shaking the doctor’s hand. “You look terrible.”
“It’s a pleasure to see you again too, Riis.”
“I meant no offense. If it’s any comfort, I have seen much worse coming out of Mulberry Street, the kind that is carted away in a hearse.”
“Thank you, Riis; I feel much better now.”
Riis smiled. That smile quickly faded. “Well, von Helrung, you had better break out your box of red pins. Your beast has been quite busy. There have been three, perhaps four, more,” he informed the monstrumologists. He pointed out the spots on the map, whereupon von Helrung stabbed it with his symbolically colored pins. “I say ‘perhaps’ because one is a disappearance, from the Bohemian quarter. No body has turned up, but the circumstances seemed to fit the disturbing criteria you described. Witnesses report a terrible smell, glimpses of a wraithlike figure with enormous glowing eyes, and, in one remarkable report from a none-too-reliable source, the appearance of a large gray wolf upon a nearby rooftop.”
“A wolf?” echoed Torrance.
“It is a shape-changer,” von Helrung said. “Fully supported by the literature.”
“Yes, catalogued under fiction,” Warthrop responded contemptuously.
Riis shrugged. “The others are clearly the work of our man—or whatever it is. Remains—and I do mean remains—were discovered high above the street. Two upon tenement roofs, the third impaled upon a stovepipe above a restaurant there”—he nodded toward the pin—“in Chinatown. That one is particularly striking, I thought, if for no other reason but the sheer force it would take to drive such an object through a human body.”
I glanced at the doctor. Was he thinking the same thing as I? Did he see in his mind’s eye, as I did, the jagged trunk of a shattered tree rising from Pierre Larose’s desecrated corpse?
“All were missing their eyes and the skin on their faces,” Riis continued. “It had been stripped from the underlying musculature with surgical precision. All were found nude.” He swallowed, for the first time a bit overcome. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his brow.
“And all three were young. The oldest was the only son of a Chinaman who immigrated here last August. The boy was fifteen and quite small for his age.”
“The weakest,” murmured von Helrung. “The most vulnerable.”
“The youngest was found at Mulberry Bend, only a few blocks from my office. A girl. She was seven. She suffered by far the worst mutilations. I will spare you the details.”
No one spoke for a moment. Then von Helrung asked softly, “Their hearts.”
“Yes, yes,” Riis nodded. “Ripped from their chests—and when I say ‘ripped,’ I do mean ripped. Flesh flayed open, ribs snapped in two, and the hearts themselves . . .”