He said nothing for a long moment. Then he whispered, “You’re mad.”
And I replied, “I don’t know what that means. If you define madness as the opposite of sane, you are forced into providing a definition of sanity. Can you define it? Can you tell me what it is to be sane? Is it to hold no beliefs that are contrary to reality? That our thoughts and actions contain no absurd contractions? For example, the hypocrisy of believing that killing is the ultimate sin while we slaughter each other by the thousands? To believe in a just and loving God while suffering that is imaginable only to God goes on and on and on? If that is your criterion, then we are all mad—except those of us who make no claim to understand the difference. Perhaps there is no difference, except in our own heads. In other words, Isaacson, madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.”
I forced myself to stop; I was enjoying myself too much.
“I can’t be absolutely certain, Henry,” he said. “But I believe you’ve just proved my point.”
“How long have you been Sir Hiram’s apprentice, Isaacson?” I asked.
“Nine months. Why do you ask?”
“You haven’t been at it long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
I continued down the corridor. His voice scampered along the winding passageway, chasing me. “Henry! Long enough for what?” The metal bucket would be better, I thought. It was heavier. I pictured it smashing into the side of his head. Unrestrained. Ha!
He turned the corner after me and drew up short of the body sprawled before the Locked Room. Frantically, he dug into his coat pocket for a handkerchief. He pressed the starched white fabric against his face, gagging at the smell that hung in the still air like a noxious fog.
“Where is that man’s face?” he choked out, eyes cutting away, cutting back again: the urge to turn aside, the compulsion to look, the unspooling of the coiled thing, the nameless not-me, das Ungeheuer.
“All around you. I believe you are standing in some of it.”
He wasn’t. But my “observation” caused him to stumble backward, hand clamped tight against the handkerchief. I set down the bucket, leaned the mop against the wall, and went to the stack of empty crates on the other side of the door.
“Allow me to hazard a guess about your studies in the dark art of monstrumology, Isaacson. For the past nine months you have been ensconced in some musty library in Sir Hiram’s ancestral home, your nose buried in arcane texts and obscure treatises, far from the field or the laboratory.”
He nodded quickly. “How did you know?”
I was shoving crates around, looking for the proper size. I tossed the smaller ones aside; they smacked against the hard floor with a satisfying wallop.
“Well, this is unfortunate,” I told him. “There’s none quite large enough, and these are the only empties I know of. I’m sure there are larger ones somewhere down here, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to hunt half the night for them.” I looked over at him and said very deliberately, “We’ll have to size him to fit.”
“S-size him?”
“Adolphus keeps the instruments in his office. A long black case beneath the worktable against the right wall, going in.”
“A long black case . . . ?”
“Beneath the worktable—the right wall—as you face the desk. Well, Isaacson, what are you waiting for? Many hands make light work. Snap to!”
I was still chuckling to myself when he returned lugging the instrument case. He had tied the handkerchief around his face like a bandit. I motioned him to drop the case beside the body. He leaned against the wall; I could hear him breathing through his mouth, and the makeshift mask billowed with each shallow breath.
“The boxes are not long, but they’re fairly deep,” I said, throwing back the lid. It clanged against the floor, causing him to jump. “We can fold the arms if he isn’t too stiff, so just the legs, I think, which we’ll lay on top.”
“On top?”
“Of him.”
I pulled the saw from its compartment and ran the pad of my thumb along its serrated edge. Wickedly sharp. Next the shears, which I clicked open and shut several times. With each snick-snick Isaacson flinched.
“All right, Isaacson,” I said briskly. “Let’s get these trouser legs off.”
He didn’t move an inch. His face had turned the color of the handkerchief.
“Can you tell me the difference between a monstrumologist and a ghoul?” I asked. He shook his head soundlessly, wide-eyed, watching me cut away the trousers, exposing the pale leg beneath. “No?” I sighed. “I was hoping one day to find someone who could.”
I explained that it was a simple below-the-knee amputation as I forced the man’s heel back toward his rump, raising the knee several inches off the ground. “Both hands firmly around the ankle, Isaacson, so it doesn’t sway on me. The blade is very sharp, and I shall hold you responsible if I cut myself.”
The pale flesh parting like a mouth coming open and the bloody drool dripping and the protesting whine of bone when the blade bites. I don’t know what he was expecting, but when the leg came free in his hand, Isaacson gave a strangled cry and flung the limb away; it smacked into the wall with a sickening thunk. He scuttled a few feet on his hands and knees. His back arched, and I thought, There is only one smell on earth worse than death, and that’s vomit.
I rested for a moment, studying my blood-encrusted fingernails. Why hadn’t I thought to bring along some gloves?
“It isn’t going to work, you know,” I said quietly.
“What?” he gasped, wiping his mouth with the handkerchief. He eyed it with dismay: Now what would he do?
“It might have, if he had picked Rojas—or even von Helrung; the old man isn’t as quick as he used to be. But Pellinore Warthrop is the last one I would choose to hoodwink.”
“I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about, Henry.”
“Not that he couldn’t be hoodwinked—he has blind spots like any man—but the fact is Pellinore Warthrop is no ordinary man: He is the prince of aberrant biology, and you remember your Machiavelli, don’t you?”
“Oh, bugger off.” He waved his hanky in my direction. “You’ve gone daft.”