I stumble straight back until the wall behind me halts my retreat.
Do you know how it kills you, Isaacson? You are fully aware of what’s happening as its jaw unhinges to accommodate you whole.
Back the way I came, careening from wall to wall while over my head the world is consumed.
Horrendous pressure that crushes your bones . . . and every inch of your body burns as if you’ve been dropped into a vat of acid.
There he lies; he has not moved. My hand drops into my pocket, for I still have the Camorrista’s switchblade knife. I will gut him. I will feed him his own stinking entrails. I will take his eyes first, then his tongue. I will force him to eat his own stupid, banal, wicked self.
But wait. He is not alone. Another bends over him, older, dark-haired, bearing a bulging burlap sack. This one looks up at my approach, startled, eyes wide with terror.
“William!” Acosta-Rojas cries. “We must escape, but how? Not above—we must find another way. Is there a sewage drain somewhere down here? That, I think, is our best—”
I ram my fist into his Adam’s apple. He topples backward, dropping the sack. The thing within it twists and rolls.
“Who was it?” I demand. “Was it you or was it Warthrop or was it both of you?”
He cannot answer. I may have shattered his windpipe. Tears of pain and terror stream down his face.
“It was his idea, wasn’t it?” I ask. “When you told him you’d captured it in Cerrejón. He wanted all credit—what did he offer you in return?”
He chokes out the answer, barely audible: “My life.”
I rock back on my heels as if he struck me. Flat, not round! Not a ball but a plate! And Mihos, the guardian of the horizon, has fallen over the edge.
Something in my expression makes him raise his hands defensively, like an obedient child lifting his arms for his nightshirt to be put on. So I oblige him: Enraged, I heave the writhing sack from the floor, upend it, and stuff it over his head. The twisting, rolling thing within strikes.
Acosta-Rojas screams; his exposed lower half jerks and immediately goes stiff. His cries are choked off as the beast coils itself nooselike around his neck. It will hold there until its prey is dead, for it has not reached its full maturity; it cannot swallow a man whole—yet.
I am not done. Dear God, what am I but man in microcosm? I flick open the switchblade—snick!—and return to Isaacson.
He is awake. His eyes widen at my approach. “Will . . . ?”
“Shh, don’t ask, Samuel,” I whisper. “There are some things to which there is no human answer.”
“I had no choice,” he whimpers. He raises his hands to me in supplication. “Please, Will. I only did as I was told!”
A terrific explosion above shakes the walls. The floor heaves. The ceiling cracks, sags; chunks of it rain down: The fire has found the gas lines. The jets wink out, plunging the Monstrumarium into utter darkness. Isaacson wails as if the world itself is ending. I thrust out my hand, the empty one, and seize him by the collar. I haul him upright. He squeals, expecting the coup de grâce.
“To hell with all of you,” I snarl into his ear. “To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me.”
The building over us is collapsing; the ceiling gives; we’ll be crushed beneath a thousand tons of concrete and marble. There is no way out but down—through the drain in the dissection room. Acosta-Rojas’s instinct was right, though his timing was bad. I fling Isaacson away and stumble over the broken floor, one arm draped protectively over my head, the other extended before me into darkness absolute. Fingers clutch at the back of my jacket: Isaacson, that mediocrity like all mediocrities, always finding a way to come out on top. It is not the meek who will inherit the earth.
Blind leading the blind, in the belly of the dying beast, its bones splitting and cracking and raining down upon our heads. And of all to whom I might have shown mercy, it is Samuel Isaacson whom I save that day.
The rest, monstrumologists all, perished upon that day.
Except one.
TWO
The earth spins round nearly seven thousand times, and now crumbs cling to blubbery lips and damp stringy hair hangs over pale forehead.
And the cold that grips and the hand that holds the knife scraping across dirt-encrusted nails, the monster-hunter, the teacher and the lesson, the cause and the effect, the ending of the circle that has no beginning.
And the locked door and the thing behind the locked door and the bones that steam in ash barrels and the lie we tell ourselves because the truth is too much for any human heart to bear.
There are no beginnings or endings or anything in between. Time the lie and we the circle and the infinite contained in the amber eye.
You know what is coming. Will you turn aside?
The end is there in the beginning.
Turn aside or come and see? Choose now, choose now.
I slapped the knife onto the kitchen table. Warthrop jerked in his chair and his eyes darted away from my face as I rose. He seemed to shrink before me, diminishing to a point infinitesimally small: he the earth and I the rocket ship blasting into the outer atmosphere. I strode to the basement door. He grabbed at my arm with a desperate cry. I yanked free. I did not know what was behind that door. Of course I knew what was behind that door:
I have found it, Will Henry. The thing itself.
I brought the heel of my boot against the ancient wood—it was thrice Warthrop’s age—and the door split apart with a satisfying crack, splintering straight down the middle, and behind me the monstrumologist gave an answering cry, as if I were breaking him in half. I ripped the door from its hinges with my bare hands. A putrid, nauseous stench washed over me, like the exhalation of God’s greatest failure locked in Judecca’s ice, the cloying reek of rotting flesh, the thing itself, he called it, the thing itself.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom below, the perpetual dark of the thing itself, and why had he raised the floor? And why had he painted it a shiny, obsidian black? But it was not paint and it was not the floor, for it moved. It flowed like the muddy sludge left over from a devastating flood. It undulated, black with flashes of brilliant iridescent green.
And then the head appeared, five feet across, flat at the top, for its ancient brain knew what the opening of the door meant, the toothless mouth stretching obscenely open, and seeing the glistening red gullet is like looking into the fiery abyss leading straight to hell, and I do not imagine that I can see myself reflected in its lidless amber eye. I fill it as its fifty-foot body fills the basement. The massive head, red mouth yawning open, rests upon the stairs, too old or too large to come any closer, or perhaps it cannot. Perhaps it has grown too large for its container. No. Not that. Trapped in its amber eye, I realize that the thing itself has lost the reason for its being. It is a shell, a hollow sack with no purpose but to continue one more meaningless day.