“To show her . . . ?” He clearly didn’t believe me.
“She has a certain . . . fascination for such things.”
“And you? Where do your fascinations lie?”
I knew what he meant. “I thought we had exhausted this topic at the dance.”
“At which point you proceeded to break her dance partner’s jaw.” For some reason he found my remark amusing. “Anyway, the topic, as I understand it, is nearly inexhaustible.”
“You exhausted it,” I reminded him.
“After it drove me into the Danube.”
I might have told him it wasn’t love that hurled him over that bridge in Vienna—or at least not love for another person. Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune’s slings and arrows.
“Well, it was a propitious arrival into the monstrumological pit,” Warthrop observed dryly. “In the nick of time and yet too late! Not unlike my friend pulling me from the water before the current carried me down.”
“ ‘ ’Tis better to have loved and lost . . .’ ”
His temper flared. “And now you are quoting poetry to me?” he demanded, the failed poet. “What is the purpose—to mock me? Who is more pitiful, Will Henry, the man who loved and lost or his companion, who must never allow himself to love at all?”
I turned away, fists clenching spasmodically in my lap. “Go to hell,” I muttered.
“You may comfort yourself that is better to love and lose in the end, but don’t forget that even the most chaste of kisses carries an unacceptable risk to your beloved. No one knows how Biminius arawakus is transmitted from host to host. Your passion carries the seeds of damnation, not deliverance.”
“Don’t preach to me about damnation!” I cried. “I know its face better than anyone—and certainly better than you!”
And now he quoted from the Satyricon to one-up me—and, I think, to mock me: “ ‘And then, there’s the Sibyl: With my own eyes I saw her, at Cumae, hanging up in a jar, and whenever the boys would say to her, “Sibyl, Sibyl, what would you?” she would answer, “I would die.” ’ ”
The boy in the tattered hat and the man in the dingy coat and the thing hanging in the jar.
Scratch, scratch.
I kept my face away from him, but he had turned to speak earnestly to me, close enough that I felt his breath upon my neck.
“Ignore all other advice I give you, Will, but engrave this upon the avenues of your heart: You cannot choose not to fall in love, but you can choose for the sake of love to let love go. Let it go. Resolve never to see this girl again, her or anyone, for the gods are not wise, and nature herself abhors perfection.”
I laughed bitterly. “When I was a boy, I mistook these opaque pronouncements of yours as impenetrable profundities. Now I’m beginning to think that you’re merely full of shit.”
I tensed, preparing for the explosion. None came. Instead, the monstrumologist laughed.
Back in our rooms, the doctor washed off the dried blood and Monstrumarial grit, changed his clothes, and then ordered up a hearty breakfast, which he did not touch but left to the prodigious appetite of his teenage companion: I was famished.
“I would suggest getting some sleep if you can,” he advised me. “You’ve a long night ahead of you.”
“You should rest too,” I said, falling into the old habit of his minder. “Your wound . . .”
“It’s fairly clean as gunshot wounds go,” he carelessly replied. “And I didn’t lose much blood, thanks to the ministrations of your paramour.”
“She isn’t my paramour.”
“Well, whatever she is.”
“She annoys the hell out of me.”
“So you’ve said more than once. And what is this with the expletives lately? Cursing is the crutch of an unimaginative mind.”
“I like that,” I said. “One day I intend to gather all your pithy sayings into a volume for mass consumption: The Wit and Wisdom of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, Scientist, Poet, Philosopher.”
His eyes lit up. He thought I was serious. Perhaps he’d already forgotten my shitty remark in the taxi. “Wouldn’t that be extraordinary! You flatter me, Mr. Henry.”
He left after refusing to tell me where he was going. The less I knew the better, he said cryptically. As most of his explanations tended toward the cryptic, I did not think much of it at the time. I was consumed with the consumption of my breakfast, very tired, and a little on edge thinking about the grisly work that lay ahead. Looking back, I should have recognized that his secretiveness did not bode well; it never did.
FOUR
And the Sibyl would answer, “I would die.”
The thing suspended in the jar, scratch, scratch.
Soft as a fly’s wing thrumming the empty air.
And we the dried-out husks, one rattling inside the gray carapace of the old house and the other outside in the gray, sterile air, rattling inside the carapace of his own skin.
I collapsed upon the stoop, as exhausted as the day folding into night, my hands singing with pain, rubbed raw by the digging; I was not used to manual labor.
You must harden yourself . . . . You must become accustomed to such things.
Impossible to say how the woman named Beatrice had died. No soft tissue remained, and there were no telling injuries to the remnants of her bones except the marks from the saw where he had dismembered the body. He might have killed her, though if he had, then the Warthrop I had known since childhood was indeed no more. That Warthrop was cruel when he should have been kind and kind when cruelty was called for.
“It is my fault,” I whispered to the bones beneath my feet. “I should have known when I left him that he would fall off the edge of the goddamned world.”
Daylight dwindled, but I remained on the stoop. I resisted the instinct to rush inside and confront him. He was a stranger to me, the man who had been my sole companion for nearly twenty years, the man whose moods I had been able to read like an ancient mystic decoding the bloody entrails of the sacrificial lamb. I honestly did not know how he would react.
I drew my coat tightly across my chest. Ashes swirled in the gray air. A thought flittered across the broken landscape:
It would be better if he were dead.
A mewling cry rose from deep in my throat, and I remembered the lambs, dark-eyed, white-faced, bleating in the gloom.