“Additional osteophytic growths noted in the elbows, wrists, knuckles, knees, hips.… We’ll need to take some measurements of these, Will Henry.… Acute myositis throughout.…” He glanced down at my notes. “M-y-o, Will Henry, not m-i-o.… Myositis is the inflammation you see here in the skeletal, or voluntary, muscles. At this rate, in a few hours our Mr. Kendall will begin to resemble a circus strong man—a skinless one, I should say.”
He peered at Kendall’s right hand, then the left.
“Note the abnormal thickness and dark yellow color of the nails,” he said. He tapped one with his own gloved fingernail. “As hard as steel! The condition is called onychauxis.” Taking pity on me, he spelled it out.
He looked over at me, eyes shining with that unnerving backlit glow.
“A precise parallel to the stories in the literature, Will Henry,” he whispered. “He is… becoming. And it’s happening faster than I first assumed.”
“And you don’t think a hospital…”
“Even if I did think it, the nearest hospital is in Boston. It would be over before we got there.”
“He’s dying?”
Warthrop shook his head. What did that mean? Did it mean Kendall was dying? Or did it mean the monstrumolo-gist did not know for certain?
“Is there a cure for it?” I asked.
“Not according to my sources, which are not very reliable. There is, of course, the singular cure that ends all ailments.”
Only a monstrumologist, I thought, would characterize death as a cure for anything. I watched him pick up the syringe loaded with morphine and roll it back and forth in his open palm. It would ease the poor soul’s suffering; it might give him the smallest measure of peace. But the drug also might interfere with the progress of Kendall’s becoming and thus compromise Warthrop’s scientific inquiry.
It would, in short, desecrate the temple.
Without comment the monstrumologist laid down the syringe. He seemed to tower ten feet above the writhing form in the bed, and his shadow fell hard upon that pile of bones wrapped loosely in its sack of gossamer skin.
He told me to rest; he would hold vigil for a while.
“You look terrible,” he observed dispassionately. “You need to sleep. Probably should find yourself something to eat, too.”
I glanced toward the bed. “I’m not very hungry, sir.”
He nodded. It made sense to him. “Where is my revolver? You haven’t lost it, have you? Thank you, Will Henry. Now off to bed, but first I’ll need you to take care of this.”
He handed me a slip of paper, a note jotted down in his nearly illegible scrawl.
“A letter for Dr. von Helrung,” he explained. “You may want to recast it in your own hand first, Will Henry. Send it by express mail marked ‘personal’ and ‘confidential.’”
“Yes, sir.”
I started out. He called after me, “Straight there and back, and be quick if you want any sleep this day.”
He motioned toward the bed.
“It appears to be accelerating.”
The letter to the head of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology was brief and to the point:
‘PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL’
Von Helrung—
I have, under the most unusual of circumstances, come into possession of an authentic nidus ex magnificum, by way of Dr. Jack Kearns, whom I believe you’ve met. Expect me in New York within the week. In the interim direct our friends in London to make discrete inquiries into Kearns’s whereabouts. He is working—or did work—at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, and resided in the same district, in a flat on Dorset Street owned by a Mr. Wymond Kendall, Esq.
—Warthrop
I went straight to the post office, resisting all temptations along the way, Mr. Tanner’s shop in particular, where the fragrance of fresh scones hung warm in the bitter air. The wind was sharp upon my cheek, the day bright and bracingly cold, the snow faultlessly white—dazzlingly white, unblemished, pure. My heart ached for the snow.
I paused but once and then only for a moment. There, white upon white in the beneficent snow, my former schoolhouse, and children playing in the drifts. A battle raged for the highest ground, the defenders screeching, hurling down their hastily packed cannonade upon the heads of their attackers. A little ways off, a squadron of fallen angels had left its impression, and nearby a passable likeness of the headmaster, complete with cap and cape and walking stick.
And their cries were thin, their laughter high and hysterical in the biting wind.
There was a boy I recognized. He was shouting something from the top of the little hill, crouched behind the ramparts of the fort, taunting the assault force below, and I remembered him. The slightly pug nose. The shaggy blond hair. The splash of freckles across cheeks. I remembered everything about him, his high-pitched voice, the gap between his teeth, the color of his eyes, the way he smiled first with those eyes. You could see the smile coming a year before it arrived. I remembered where he lived, what his parents looked like. He had been a friend, but I could not remember his name. What was his name? He had been my friend, my best friend, and I could not remember his name.
The doctor was standing in the kitchen when I came in, eating an apple.
“You’re late,” he said. He did not sound angry, not his usual self at all. He said it casually, a knee-jerk response to my entering the room. “Did you stop somewhere?”
“No, sir. Straight to the post office and back.”
It struck me then, and with a heart in which fear and hope intertwined in an obscene embrace, I asked, “Is he dead?”
“No, but I had to eat something. Here, you should too.”
He tossed an apple at me and bade me follow him upstairs. I slipped the apple into my coat pocket; I had no appetite.
“The sclerosing bone dysplasia has exacerbated,” he called over his shoulder as he took the steps two at a time. “But his heart is as strong as a horse’s, his lungs are clear, his blood super-oxygenated. The edema of the muscular tissue continues unabated, and—” He stopped suddenly and whirled about, causing me to almost smack face-first into his chest. “This is the most remarkable thing, Will Henry. Although his dermis continues to deteriorate and slough off, he hasn’t lost more than a teacup’s worth of blood, mostly around the wrists and ankles, so I took the precaution of loosening the bindings a bit.”