“I have never been better,” returned the doctor. “I can complain of nothing.”
“That’s more—or less—than I might say. I am soaked to the skin! Do you suppose I might have a cup of hot cider or tea before you toss me out the door? I did come a very long way to see you.”
“New York is not that far,” Warthrop replied. “Unless you came on foot.”
“Is that a no, then?” she asked.
“Saying no would be foolish on my part, wouldn’t it? No one says no to Muriel Barnes.”
“Chanler,” she corrected him.
“Of course. Thank you. I believe I remember who you are. Will Henry, show Mrs. Chanler”—he spat out the name—“to the parlor and put on a pot of tea. I’m sorry, Mrs. Chanler, but we’ve no cider. It isn’t in season.”
Returning from the kitchen with the serving tray a few minutes later, I paused outside the parlor, for within I could hear a vehement discussion in progress, the doctor’s voice high-pitched and tight, our guest’s quieter but no less urgent.
“Even if I accepted it on its face,” he was saying, “even if I believed such claptrap . . . no, even if it existed regardless of my belief . . . there are a dozen men to whom you could turn for help.”
“That may be,” she allowed. “But there is only one Pellinore Warthrop.”
“Flattery? I am astounded, Muriel.”
“A measure of my desperation, Pellinore. Believe me, if I thought anyone else could help me, I would not ask you.”
“Ever the diplomat.”
“Ever the realist—unlike you.”
“I am a scientist, and therefore an absolute realist.”
“I understand that you’re bitter—”
“To assume I am bitter proves your lack of understanding. It assumes I harbor some residuum of affection, which I assure you I do not.”
“Can you not put aside who asks for help and consider the one who needs it? You loved him once.”
“Whom I have loved is none of your business.”
“True. My business is with whom I love.”
“Then why don’t you find him yourself? Why have you come all this way to bother me with it?”
Straining forward in my eagerness to eavesdrop, I lost my balance and nearly dropped the tray, stumbling into the doorway like a drunkard, while the tea sloshed from the spout and the cups rattled in their saucers. I discovered the doctor standing by the fireplace. Muriel sat stiffly in the chair a few feet from him, a piece of stationery clutched in her hand.
The doctor clucked his disapproval at me, then stepped forward and snatched the letter from her hand. I placed the tray on the table beside her.
“Your tea, Mrs. Chanler,” I said.
“Thank you, Will,” she said.
“Yes, leave us,” the doctor said, his nose stuck in the letter.
“Is there anything else I can get for you, ma’am?” I asked. “We have some fresh scones—”
“Do not,” growled the doctor from behind the paper, “bring out the scones!”
He snorted and tossed the letter upon the floor. I snatched up the letter and, forgotten for a moment in the heat of their tête-à-tête, read it through.
Dear Missus John,
You forgive my English, its not goodly done. Got back to RP this morning came straightaway to post this. There is no good way to say this, I am sorry. Mister John—he gone. It called to him and the thing done carried him off. I tell Jack Fiddler and he will keep the lookout for him but its got him and even ol Jack Fiddler cant get him back now. I told him not to go, but it called him night and day, so’s he went. Mister John he rides the high wind now and the Mossmouth not going to let him go. I’m sorry, missus.
P. Larose
“Will Henry,” the doctor snapped. “What are you doing? Give me that!” He snatched the letter from my hand. “Who is Larose?” he asked Mrs. Chanler.
“Pierre Larose—John’s guide.”
“And this Jack Fiddler he mentions?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard the name before.”
“‘He rides the high wind now,’” the doctor read, “‘and the Mossmouth not going to let him go.’ I suppose not!” He laughed humorlessly. “I assume you’ve notified the proper authorities.”
“Yes, of course. The search party returned to Rat Portage two days ago. . . .” She shook her head, unable to go on.
“Then I fail to see how I can help,” said Warthrop. “Except to state my opinion that this is no matter for monstrumology. Whatever bore your husband away on the ‘high wind’ was no ‘Mossmouth,’ though I find the imagery oddly compelling. I’d never heard the sobriquet applied to a Lepto lurconis. It must be an invention of the good Monsieur Larose and not, I suspect, the only one. It would not be the first time a death in the wilderness has been attributed to the Wendigo.”
“You think he’s lying?”
“I think he is being false—intentionally or not, I cannot say. Lepto lurconis is a myth, Muriel, no more real than the tooth fairy—which is the strangest aspect of this whole affair. Why was John searching for something that does not exist?”
“He was . . . encouraged to go.”
“Ah.” The monstrumologist was nodding. “It was von Helrung, wasn’t it? Von Helrung told him to go—”
“He suggested it.”
“And being the good little lapdog that he is, John went.”
She stiffened. “I am wasting my time, aren’t I?” she asked.
“That is the issue, Muriel. How long has he been missing?”
“Almost three months.”
“Then, yes, you are wasting your time here. There is nothing I can do for you—or for John. Your husband is dead.”
Though tears shone in her eyes, she did not break. Though every fiber of her being bespoke her desperation, she held firm in the face of his bald assertion. Men might be the stronger sex, but women are made of much sterner stuff!
“I refuse to believe that.”
“Your faith is misplaced.”
“No, Pellinore, not my faith. My hope that the one man I thought I could turn to . . . whom John could turn to—”
Warthrop nodded. He turned his gaze from her lovely upturned face and spoke in that dry, lecturing manner I had often heard. “Once, in the Andes, at base camp on the slopes of Mount Chimborazo, I came face-to-face with a mature male Astomi, a creature with the disconcerting ability to scream at decibel levels loud enough to shatter the eardrum; I have seen men’s brains literally leaking from their ears after an encounter with one. He had stumbled upon our camp in the dead of night and was as surprised as I at our meeting. For a moment we just stared at each other, our faces no more than a foot apart. I had my revolver; he had his mouth; and at any time we both had the opportunity to use them. We held this way for several tense minutes, until finally I said to him, ‘Well, my friend, I will agree to hold my fire if you will agree to hold your tongue!’”