The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist 4)

I would die, Lilly, I would die.

Die, then, in me.

FIVE

I am uncontained.

There is no place where I am not.

I am a circle and a circle is perfect.

I am the primordial egg at the moment the chrysalis breaks.

I am the amber eye looking at you and I am you looking back at me.

I am das Ungeheuer. Turn around.

I am salvation. I am contagion. I am perfection.

Like the beast its skin, I have sloughed off the human coil. There is no limit to me and so there is no you.

This is the secret I keep:

I am das Ungeheuer.

Turn around.

The world boils. The angry red sun fills half the sky. Blood-colored light crashes into the cracked earth, the dead earth, the desert earth, the greenless scorched broken earth.

No living thing, but I remain, unbroken, purified darkness. I am the darkness and I am perfect.

What would you? Would you die?

Turn around. I am there, one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. I am always there. I am the faceless thing you cannot name, the nameless thing you cannot face.

I am your abhorrent desire, the arms that embrace you, the womb you flee.

Do you begin to see? Do you start to understand? I will strip your skin with my teeth. I will drain your blood by pinpricks. I will grind your bones to dust with a pebble. I will pluck you apart one atom at a time.

Why do you pretend? You know what I am. Why do you not turn around?

The world will end in bloody light on broken ground, but I will go on and on, everlasting chrysalis forever splitting open.

Everything is a circle and a circle is perfect.

And these are the secrets.

Turn around.

Canto 3

ONE

The ocean is dark and still, the sky starless; there is no horizon.

A shaft of light violates the void, a sword thrust into the darkness’s heart that swivels my way, etching into my eye the afterimage of a colossus bestriding the harbor. A hundred feet tall, impregnable as a fortress, older than the foundations of the earth.

There is no darkness too deep, no storm too violent, no earthquake nor floodwater nor fire that the colossus cannot endure. It has bestridden the harbor for ten thousand years and will for ten thousand more.

The light draws close; the dark recedes. I feel the ship lolling in the gentle waves, drawn into the light.

And leaning over me, the colossus.

“Yes, it is Warthrop. Yes, you are back in our rooms at the Plaza. Yes, it is late—later than you may imagine. Nearly three o’clock in the morning, the devil’s hour, if you place faith in such things. This is the eleventh day of your impromptu holiday in the land of the Lotophagi. You are dehydrated and very hungry—or you will be once the nausea subsides. Not to worry; I’ve ordered up a full platter once the kitchen opens.”

“Eleven days?” I had trouble forming the words. My tongue felt as large as a sausage.

“Not the longest stretch anyone’s spent in an opium den.” He lowered himself wearily into the chair by the bed. He looked terrible. Unshaven, hollow-cheeked, his eyes red from lack of sleep, cupped in charcoal gray. He poured himself a cup of tea that had long since gone cold.

“How did you find me?”

He shrugged. “It was no complicated matter. Nothing that a dozen or so monstrumologists and half the New York City police department couldn’t resolve.” He sipped his tea, dark eyes sparkling above the rim of his cup. “My greatest concern now is avoiding another crisis: between the loss of T. cerrejonensis and you, I have used up all the favors owed to me.”

“I was not lost,” I said.

“I beg to differ. In fact, I am still not certain if you have been found.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“I didn’t ask for one.”

“I owe you nothing.”

He nodded. I was surprised. He said, “But I owe you something. An apology. You are quite correct, Will. You did not ask for . . .” He searched for the word. He waved his hand vaguely. “This. But here you are and here I am. Troy is in ashes and somehow you must find your way home, though I am not certain where I stand in the conceit—am I the mainmast to which you tie yourself or am I the faithful Penelope?”

I turned my head away. “You’re not Penelope.”

He laughed gently. “Well, good. I thought you were going to say I was the Cyclops.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“There is a bucket there beside the bed.”

I closed my eyes. The feeling passed. “Your analogy is flawed,” I pointed out to him. “I have no home to return to.”

He did not argue. “Of course, you are always welcome to stay with me.”

“Why would I do that? I am a burden, a hindrance. Everything was perfect until I came along, down to this latest instance.”

“Well, I shan’t pretend it has been the most congenial of arrangements. Ha! Besides tearing the city apart looking for the lost sheep, I have had to bury my surrogate father and make peace with certain elements of the criminal underworld.”

I looked at him. “And did you? Make peace?”

He set down the cup and rubbed his eyes, so hard his knuckles turned white. “Let us say the truce talks are still ongoing.”

“What is their price?” Then I answered my question: “Me. I am the price, aren’t I?”

He dragged his fingers over his cheeks, tugging down the lower lids. “The killer of their padrone and the padrone’s bodyguard are the price—but Mr. Faulk has vanished into the blue.”

I turned away again. He went on: “One thing in our favor is that Competello’s untimely demise has created a vacuum inside their ranks—they are as much concerned with who seizes control as with balancing the scales of justice. It buys some time, at any rate.”

“Time to do what?”

“My vote will be to move our Society’s headquarters to another city—preferably to another continent. Vienna, perhaps. Or Venice.” He grew wistful. “I have always been fond of Venice.”

“There are no more Camorristi in Italy?”

He held up his hands. Did it matter?

I said, “Mr. Faulk did not kill Francesco Competello.”

“That is something that will never leave this room,” he answered.

“Too many secrets,” I murmured.

“What did you say?”

I cleared my throat. It felt as if I’d swallowed a hot coal; the flesh was raw. “You should have told me. If you had, his nephews would be alive and so would he.”

His face had drained of what little color it had. He studied me for a long moment, motionless, expressionless.

“Who would I have confided in?” I asked. I was becoming annoyed. “I have no friends. No family. The grocer or the baker? You know me better. Lilly? Is that it? You were afraid I would tell Lilly? Why would I tell her? She is nothing to me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He forced a smile, the tight-lipped, painful, perfectly Warthropian one. “Opium can be quite pleasant, I understand, but it can also produce hallucinations and paranoid delusions.”

I watched him pour another cup of cold tea. No one else on earth would notice the slight quiver at the ends of his fingers, but I noticed.

“The last of its kind,” I said. “More valuable than a king’s ransom. What might be done with it? You cannot kill it. It goes against everything you believe in. But you can’t keep it secret, either. It very well may be your last, best chance at glory, the immortality you crave because it’s the only sort of immortality you believe in. So you are faced with an impossible choice: kill it, or hide it away somewhere and sacrifice all personal glory.”

He was shaking his head, impassively studying my face. “That is a false choice.”

“Exactly! And you found your way out of it. You had to have an accomplice—well, two. I’m fairly certain you needed Meister Abram on this end, to arrange the Italian guards and the Irish thieves. I don’t think he was Maeterlinck’s ‘client.’ I think that was another monstrumologist—probably Acosta- Rojas.”

“Him? Why him?” Studying me.

“He’s from T. cerrejonensis’s stomping grounds. He even may have been the one who found the nest.”

He crossed his long legs, folded his hands around his upraised knee, and tilted back his chin. I was reminded of Competello the moment before I shot him.

“Right before I shot him, Francesco told me he had kept his promises. That struck me as odd. What promises was he talking about?”

“The one promise to provide security before the congress and the second to help us locate what had been stolen from us.”

“That’s what I would have assumed, too, if a few hours before you had not said, ‘Everything was perfect, down to this latest instance.’ How could anything in this latest instance be characterized as perfect? Everything went wrong practically from the beginning. Unless there was no theft, no lost treasure, and Competello’s promise was to deliver up to you manufactured evidence of the creature’s demise, to convince the world that it was dead.”

He was rocking back and forth in the chair; his body moved, but his eyes remained locked on mine. “I believe you saw what was in that box with your own eyes.”

I smiled. “There is no measurable difference, at this stage in its development, between T. cerrejonensis and a common constrictor. Or so you’ve told me. That is how you planned to have your cake and eat it too. Who in all of monstrumology would question the word of the first among equals, the great Pellinore Warthrop? And besides, it wouldn’t be a complete fraud. The creature does exist, after all.”

“Hmm. Isn’t it more likely that Competello is the fraud? That he sacrificed some poor animal so he might pursue the prize without fear of some meddling scientist?”

If I’d had the strength, I would have leapt from the bed and choked the life out of him. The galling arrogance of the man!

“It was you! I shouted. “It was you from the beginning! You—or someone you knew—who hired the broker to bring the egg to New Jerusalem. It was you who scraped the dregs of Five Points for the poor suckers to ‘steal’ it for you, and you who conscripted Competello’s men to witness the so-called crime! You didn’t go to Elizabeth Street to ask him to help find what you had lost—you never lost it! You went to make sure he was still going to keep the second part of the bargain. And for your trouble you were kidnapped and held hostage, until I butted my head in and ruined your perfect plan.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. I was winded, out of breath and out of patience. And he had said I had betrayed him!

“Well,” he said at last. “That is very interesting, Will Henry. And quite ludicrous.”

“Where is it, Warthrop? Back in the Monstrumarium? That’s my guess. Safest place, at least while you’re here. Gives you time to make arrangements for a more permanent home for it.”

“Your theory of the case is entertaining, but terribly flawed. I was shot in the leg by my own coconspirator? Why would he do that?”