“You told me once that you were indispensable to him,” she said softly. “Do you think you may have that backward?”
I became very still. “When you are leaving?” I asked.
“Soon.”
“When?”
“Sunday. On the Temptation. Why?”
“Perhaps I would like to say good-bye.”
“You could say that now.”
“What have I said to upset you, Lilly? Tell me.”
“It’s what you haven’t said.”
“Tell me what to say, and I will say it.”
She laughed. “You really are the perfect apprentice, aren’t you? Always anxious to be of service, ever eager to please. No wonder he binds you to him so. You are the water that holds the shape of his cup.”
Several hours later, the water in the shape of the human cup was descending the stairs to the Monstrumarium, alone.
“Come with me tonight,” I’d said before we parted.
“I have made plans,” she’d answered.
“Change them.”
“I have no desire to change them, Mr. Henry.”
“I am a forward-thinking person,” I assured her. “I believe in full sexual equality, the right to vote, free love, all of that.”
She grinned. “I wish you luck tonight, and in the hunt. Not that you need much—he is the greatest that ever was or will be. Something thrilling and tragic in that, when you think about it.”
“Yes. Thrillingly tragic. When will I see you again?”
“I shall be here till Sunday; I thought I told you that.”
“Tomorrow.”
“I can’t.”
“Saturday, then.”
“I shall have to check my calendar.”
Standing in the vestibule, hands clenched at my sides, blood roaring in my ears. And his voice: Even the most chaste of kisses carries an unacceptable risk.
“You aren’t going to kiss me again, are you?” she asked, lips slightly parted.
“I should,” I murmured in reply, edging closer to the lips slightly parted.
“Then why don’t you? Not enough wine or not enough blood?”
It burns, my father had said. It burns.
“There is something I must tell you,” I whispered, my lips a hair’s breadth from hers, close enough to feel the heat of them and to smell her warm, sweet breath.
“Does it have to do with free love?” she asked.
“In a very roundabout way,” I answered, the words sticking in my throat. I could see my parents dancing in the blue fire of her eyes. “There is something inside of me . . .”
“Yes?”
I could not go on. My thoughts would not hold still. It burns, it burns, and the worms that fell from his eyes and afraid of needles are you and what would you do, and Lilly, Lilly, do not suffer me to live past you, do not suffer me to see you suffer, and the thing in the jar and the thing in the thief his chest splitting open like the T. cerrejonensis shell splitting open and the unblinking amber eye, and the infestation this is my inheritance and each kiss the bullet, each kiss the dagger plunging home and I would die, I would die and never fall in love, Will Henry, never, never and the insubstantiality of water and she the cup, Lilly the vessel that bears the uncountable years, do not suffer do not suffer do not suffer.
“Good-bye, William James Henry.”
SIX
A burly figure stepped from the shadows pooled at the base of the stairs. He wisely spoke up before I blew his misshapen head off his shoulders.
“I say, put that gun away, old chum. It’s me, Isaacson.”
“What are you doing in the Monstrumarium?” I snapped. “I thought your master’s work here was done.”
He cocked his head inquisitively, like a crow eying a tasty bit of carrion. “I was told to meet you here.”
“By whom? And to what purpose?”
“Dr. von Helrung—to help in the disposal of the evidence.”
“I don’t need any help.”
“No? But many hands make light work.”
“Yes, and too many cooks spoil the broth. Next inanity, please.”
I brushed past him; he trailed behind. Stopped when I stopped at the storage closet for the bucket and mop. Stopped again at the sink while I stopped to fill the bucket.
“I can’t help but feel that we got off on the wrong foot, Will. I really had no idea you even knew Lilly—she never mentioned you, at any rate, in all the time we’ve spent together in London.”
“That’s odd. I’ve known her since we were children and we correspond regularly and she never mentioned you either.”
“Do you think we’re being played for fools?”
“I doubt it. Lilly likes a challenge.”
He remained several paces behind me as I trudged with bucket and mop to the Locked Room. I could have found it with my eyes closed: The stench of decay increased with every step.
“She’s a good girl, not like any other girl her age, in my experience. Fierce. Wouldn’t you say that’s the perfect word for her? Fierce?”
“She is brimming with ferocity.”
“Oh, she’s a capital girl, not anything like the girls from my country. So much more—how do I put it?—unrestrained.”
I stopped. He stopped. If I brought the mop handle round against his swollen jaw, the blow would more than merely drop him; it would shatter the bone, imbedding the shards in his cheek and gums, perhaps his tongue. Permanent disfigurement would not be unexpected, and the odds of a life-threatening infection would not be out of the question. I could say we’d been waylaid by more thieves or that I had struck him down in self-defense. In the shadowy outlands of the world in which we lived, few would question my story. Von Helrung had articulated it:
When I was younger, I often wondered if monstrumology brought out the darkness in men’s hearts or if it attracted men with hearts of darkness.
“What is it?” Isaacson whispered.
I shook my head and murmured, “Das Ungeheuer.”
“What?”
I turned back to him. His face was grotesque in the dim light, monstrous.
“Do you know how it kills you, Isaacson? Not the bite; that’s to paralyze you, to separate your brain from your muscles. You don’t lose consciousness, however. You are fully aware of what’s happening as its jaw unhinges to accommodate you whole. You die slowly by asphyxiation; you suffocate to death because there’s no oxygen in its gut. But you’re alive long enough to feel the horrendous pressure that crushes your bones; you feel your rib cage breaking apart and the contents of your stomach being forced up through the esophagus, filling your mouth; you choke on your own vomit, and every inch of your body burns as if you’ve been dropped into a vat of acid, which, in a sense, you have been. You could think of it that way: a forty-foot sack of causticity, the anti-womb of your conception.”