He spat through his teeth, “You have failed me, Will Henry.” He turned his back on me and strode across the room, kicking aside the piles of debris as he went. “And worse. You have betrayed me.” He turned back to face me, shouting in the gloom, “And for what? To play the amateur detective, to satisfy your own insatiable curiosity, to humiliate me by participating in the same gossip and backstabbing that drove my father into seclusion and ultimately to his grave a broken and bitter man. You have put me in an untenable position, Master Henry, for now I know your loyalty extends only as far as the bounds of your selfishness, and blind, total, unquestioning loyalty is the one indispensable quality I demand of you. No one asked that I take you into my home or share with you my work. Not even fealty to your father demanded that. But I did it, and this is my reward!… What? Did that make you angry? Have I offended you? Speak!”
“I didn’t ask to come here!”
“And I didn’t ask for the opportunity!”
“There wouldn’t have been one if not for you.”
He stepped toward me. In the gloaming I could not see his face. A shadow was between us.
“Your father understood the risk,” he said softly.
“My mother didn’t! I didn’t!”
“What would you have me do, Will Henry? Raise them bodily from the grave?”
“I hate it here,” I shouted at the shadow of the monstrumologist, my mentor-and my tormentor. “I hate it here and I hate you for bringing me here and I hate you.”
I fled down the hall, flew up the stairs, and raced up the ladder to my little alcove, slamming the door down behind me. I threw myself across the bed and buried my face into the pillow, screaming at the top of my lungs, my being over-flowing with rage and grief and shame. Yes, shame, for he was all I had, and I had failed him. The doctor had his work; I had him; and to each what we had was all.
Above me clouds scuddled across the blue vitriol of the April sky, and the sun slumped toward the horizon, painting the clouds’ soft bellies golden. When my tears were spent, I rolled onto my back and watched the light seep from the world. My body ached for food and rest, my soul for a more permanent respite. I might eat and I might sleep, but what might I do to ease this crushing loneliness, this inconsolable sorrow, this incurable dread? Like Erasmus Gray hip-deep in the grave, locked in the monster’s inescapable grip, or Hezekiah Varner dying in the fermenting stew of his own flesh, had I passed the point of salvation, had all hope already died in the fire that had devoured my parents, as the Anthropophagi had devoured Erasmus, as the maggots Hezekiah? Death had brought an end to their misery. Would nothing but a visitation from that same dark angel bring an end to mine?
I waited for sleep, that gentle mockery of death, to take me. I longed for its effacing grace. But its peace eluded me, and I rose from the bed, my head pounding from the salty torrent of my tears and the ache deep in my stomach. I eased open the trapdoor and tiptoed down the ladder. I made straight for the kitchen, where I found the basement door closed. I had no doubt he was down there; it was, like my little alcove, his refuge of choice. Working as quickly and quietly as I could, I set the pot on to boil and prepared a repast worthy of my ravening appetite, featuring two fine lamb chops courtesy of Noonan the butcher. I cleaned my plate with the same rapidity with which I filled it, for a finer meal I had never had, made all the more delectable by virtue of my having cooked it, though the mouthfuls lingered barely long enough upon the tongue for me to taste them.
As I sopped up the juice of the lamb with a chunk of fresh bread, courtesy of Tanner the baker, the basement door opened and the doctor appeared.
“You cooked something,” he said.
“Yes,” I answered, deliberately omitting the honorific.
“What did you cook?”
“Lamb.”
“Lamb?”
“Yes.”
“Chops?”
I nodded. “And some fresh peas and carrots.”
I carried my plate to the sink. I could feel him watching me as I washed up. I put my cup and plate on the rack to dry and turned around. He had not moved from the basement doorway.
“Do you need me for anything?” I asked.
“I don’t… No, I do not,” he replied.
“I’ll be in my room, then.”
He said nothing as I walked past him, until I reached the bottom of the stairs, when he stepped around the corner and called from the end of the hall, “Will Henry!”
“Yes?”
He hesitated, and then said in a resigned tone, “Sleep well, Will Henry.”
Much later, with the same uncanny ability he had demonstrated in the past to disturb me at the very moment when, after hours of tossing and turning, I was just drifting off to sleep, the doctor began to call for me, his voice high-pitched and ethereal as it penetrated my little sanctuary.
“Will Henry! Will Henreeeee!”
Groggy from the brief sip of sleep’s sweet sapor, I slid out of bed with an acquiescent sigh. I knew that tone; I had heard it many times before. I crawled down the ladder to the second floor.
“Will Henry! Will Henreeeee!”
I found him in his room, lying on top of the bedcovers fully clothed. He spied my silhouette in the doorway and bade me enter with an impatient snap of his wrist. Still smarting from our row, I did not come to his bedside; I took a single step into the room and stopped.
“Will Henry, what are you doing?” he demanded.
“You called for me.”
“Not now, Will Henry. What were you doing out there?” He waved his hand toward the hallway to demonstrate out there.
“I was in my room, sir.”
“No, no. I distinctly heard you bumping about in the kitchen.”
“I was in my room,” I repeated. “Perhaps you heard a mouse.”
“A mouse clattering pots and pans? Tell me the truth, Will Henry. You were cooking something.”
“I am telling the truth. I was in my room.”
“You’re suggesting I’m hallucinating.”
“No, sir.”
“I know what I heard.”
“I’ll go downstairs and check, sir.”
“No! No, stay here. It must have been my imagination. I may have been asleep; I don’t know.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Is that all, sir?”
“I am not used to it, as you know.”