EIGHT
“I Am a Scientist”

Dawn had broken by the time I finally stumbled off to bed. I stripped out of my clothes and crawled beneath the covers, but the hours of sleep I snatched were scant, and teemed with vivid visions of voracious vermin: worms and maggots and the sightless, nameless, colorless creatures that dwell in the dark beneath rocks and wet, rotting logs. I woke feeling more exhausted than when I’d first lain down, with a sour taste upon my tongue and the dead weight of dread in my heart. Above me the midmorning sky was a cloudless, brilliant blue, a joyful spring mockery of my morbid mood. Try as I might, I could not shake the feeling that something terrible lurked just over the horizon. I resolved not to mention my foreboding to the doctor; he would dismiss it with a laugh, followed by a lecture on superstition as echo of our primitive past, when premonitions were efficacious responses to an environment populated by predators only too happy to oblige our apprehensions.

I shuffled downstairs to the kitchen, groggily noting the basement door ajar and the lights on below. I set the water on for tea and leaned against the countertop, wrestling the twin demons of extreme physical and mental fatigue. I may be forgiven by those empathetic souls who, having trod upon a parallel path, may remember how their very thoughts seemed foreign and their bodies commandeered. They will understand how the sharp rapping on the door did not at first grab my attention, as I wavered by the stove, waiting for the water to boil. They will find it not surprising at all the little cry that escaped my lips a moment later, not from the harsh knocking a few feet away but from the doctor’s bellowing from the basement beneath me.

“Will Henry! Answer the door! Answer the door!”

“Yes, sir!” I returned. “Right away, sir!”

I threw open the door. A tall, thin figure slouched upon the stoop, his head enshrouded in the cloud of sweet-smelling smoke ascending leisurely from his meerschaum pipe, his fragile frame propped precariously upon a cane. The morning sun glinting off the lenses of his pince-nez spectacles, combined with the nearly perfect oval of his face and the bushiness of his mustache, produced a distinctly owlish appearance.

“Ah, so it’s Will Henry, then. Good, good!” Constable Morgan cried in a soft voice, traversing over the transom in a trembling trespass. “Where is Warthrop? I must speak to him!”

The doctor appeared in the basement doorway, his face devoid of expression. The unexpected appearance of the town’s chief law enforcement officer seemed not to faze him in the least.

“What is it, Robert?” the doctor asked in a quiet, level tone. His complete calm played counterpoint to the constable’s obvious agitation.

“An abomination!” the constable replied. Spittle flew from his lips and clung to the hairs of his mustache. “That’s what it is. Horrible! Totally outside the range of my experience.”

“Though not, you presume, outside mine.”

The constable nodded with a jerk of his head.

“Something has happened,” he said breathlessly. “You must come at once.”

Within moments we were inside the constable’s carriage, dashing pell-mell through the narrow cobblestone streets of New Jerusalem. The two men raised their voices to be heard over the clatter of wheels and the thunder of hooves and the whistling wind streaming through the open windows.

The constable, whose purpose no doubt had been to wrest answers from the doctor concerning the troublesome imponderables of the morning’s gruesome discovery, forthwith found himself, as so many who confronted him with similar intent, the object of the intended interrogation. He was pressed, prodded, and pummeled in the flood of the doctor’s keen inquisitorial powers. As one having suffered through similar inundations, I was not unsympathetic to the confounding of the constable’s purpose. The questions came rapidly, barked in a hammering rhythm.

The doctor: “When was the crime reported?”

The constable: “This morning, shortly after dawn.”

“Witnesses?”

“Yes. One—the sole survivor. Until I saw the scene with my own eyes, I thought, as any reasonable man would, he was not only witness but must also be perpetrator. His tale was so outlandish it had to be a lie.”

“You arrested him?”

The constable nodded, nervously tapping the tip of his cane upon the boards between his boots. Pressed against him, I could not fail to detect the sickening odor rising like a pall from his clothing, the by now too-familiar smell of death, which the smoldering bowl of his pipe could not completely camouflage.

“And hold him still,” said the constable. “For his protection, Warthrop, not for our prosecution. Once I examined the scene … No human being is capable of so foul a crime. And I fear what he saw has completely broken his reason.”

“What did he see?”

“That tale I’ll leave to him, but what I saw in that house corroborates his story. It is … beyond words, Warthrop, beyond words!”

The doctor said naught. He turned away to face the landscape, awash in the golden light of spring, rolling green hills and lush meadows bursting with blooms. They’ve discovered the old man—or what remains of him—and the girl—or what remains of her, I thought, and wondered if the doctor was thinking the same. He is taking us back to the cemetery.

I was surprised when the driver swung upon a little lane that branched from the Old Hill Cemetery Road, taking us past the boneyard—though its western wall remained in sight—slowing our pace as the lane narrowed and the ground rose before us. The maturing sun was warm and the breeze gentle through the open window. Slight as it was, it bore away the sickly stench emanating from my other side. I could smell honeysuckle. Relieved, I breathed in deep.

The respite was short lived. The driver drew rein at the top of the hill. Warthrop leaped from the cab before we could come to a complete stop. More from a sense of duty (my services were, after all, indispensable to him) than eagerness to face what the constable had called an “abomination,” I trotted a few feet behind. Before us, at the apex of the hill, were a church and, a stone’s throw away, its rectory made of stone and a gable roof, the flower beds bursting with spring bulbs in riots of white, pink, indigo, and gold, as quaint—and ominous—as the house in which poor Hansel and Gretel were nearly roasted alive. At its door two men stood, rifles cradled in their arms. They stiffened upon our approach, their fingers caressing the triggers of their weapons, until they spied the constable struggling up the path behind us. Their demeanor changed again, however, upon recognizing the doctor; dark looks of distrust and fear darkened their faces: Warthrop was not a popular man in New Jerusalem. In another age I’ve no doubt he would have been accused of consorting with the devil and been burned alive.

“Thank God it isn’t Sunday!” gasped Morgan, arriving winded from his hike. “The good reverend’s flock would be hard pressed for evidence of the Lord’s loving providence upon this unholy day.”

Behind his spectacles his eyes, in all ways owlish save one, for they lacked the ethereal serenity of those audacious avian hunters, fell upon my face, and he said, “Though no doubt in his travels Warthrop has seen worse, you are but a child, Will Henry, unaccustomed to such things. You should not go in with us.”

“He most certainly will go in with us,” the doctor said impatiently.

“But why?” demanded the constable. “What purpose could it possibly serve?”

“He is my assistant,” rejoined Warthrop. “He must become accustomed to ‘such things.”’

The constable knew the doctor too well to press the argument further. After heaving a heavy sigh and drawing one last time upon the beneficent balm of its bowl, he removed the pipe from his mouth, handed it to one of the nervous deputies, pulled his kerchief from his pocket, and then pressed it against his nose and mouth.

My presence must still have troubled him; he looked down upon my upraised face a moment longer before saying softly, his words muffled behind the cloth, “There are no words, Will Henry. No words!”

He threw open the door over which a sign had been hung, the words etched upon it an ironic preface to the char-nel house within: THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD.

A body lay facedown six feet from the doorway, both arms outstretched, clad in the bloody remnants of his nightshirt. Gone were both his legs. Missing too were five of his fingers, two from the left hand, three from the right. His head lay upon one arm nearly perpendicular to his body, for his neck had been partially ripped from his shoulders, exposing his spinal column, the serpentine tendrils of major blood vessels, and the stringy tendons of the connecting tissue. The back of his head had been smashed in and his brains scooped out, the pulpy remains ringing the wound like grayish curd on the lip of a shattered bowl. During the necropsy, the doctor had informed me, in that dreary, lecturing tone, of Anthropophagi’s singular fondness for the noblest of organs, that apogee of nature’s design, the human brain.

The room stank of blood, and hanging in the air was the same nauseating stench of rotten fruit I had smelled in the cemetery. The odors did not so much war with each other as mix into a stomach-churning atmosphere that burned the nostrils and set the eyes on fire. No wonder the constable had covered his orifices on the outset of our expedition.

Morgan and I lingered in the open doorway, hesitating, as it were, between the worlds of light and dark, but Warthrop suffered no such disinclination: Rushing to the body, leaving footprints in the tacky blood that pooled round all sides like a shallow moat, he squatted near the head and bent close to examine the gaping wound. He touched it. He rubbed bits of cerebral matter between his thumb and finger.

He remained still for a moment, forearms resting upon his splayed knees, taking in the remains before him. He bent low, barely maintaining his balance, to study the victim’s face, or what was left of it.

“This is Stinnet?” he asked.

“It is the reverend,” Morgan confirmed.

“And the others? Where is the rest of the family?”

“Two in the parlor: his wife and youngest child, Sarah, I believe. Another child in the hall. A fourth in one of the bedrooms.”

“And the child who escaped. That leaves one unaccounted for.”

“No, Warthrop. That one is here.”

“Where?”

“He is all around you,” replied the constable, in a voice thick with revulsion and pity.

And so he was. The reverend, whose body remained more or less intact, had captured our attention as the locus of the slaughter, but all around it, like shards thrown from a grisly centrifuge, upon the walls and floorboards and even the ceiling above our heads, were fragments and scraps of human flesh, unrecognizable effluvia cemented by blood to nearly every surface: tufts of hair, bits of entrails, splinters of bone, shavings of muscle. In some places the walls were so saturated they literally wept with his blood. It was as if the child had been shoved into a grinder and then spewed out in every direction. Lying but a few inches from the doctor’s right shoe was the severed foot of the boy, the only recognizable portion left extant by the marauding Anthropophagi.

“His name was Michael,” the constable said. “He was five.”

The doctor said nothing. In a slow circle he turned, hands upon hips, pirouetting to survey the carnage, his expression at once one of fascination and detachment, marveling at the sheer savageness of the attack yet removed from its arrant horror, heart divorced from mind, emotions from intellect, the quintessential scientist, set apart from the very race to which he belonged. Thus he stood, a living temple among ruins crushed in the literal sense of the word, and whatever he was thinking remained hidden within the hallowed halls of his conscious.

Growing impatient, perhaps, with the doctor’s disconcerting reticence in this time of utmost urgency, the constable stepped into the room and said, “Well? Would you like to see the others?”

The dreadful tour commenced. First the bedroom where the oldest children had slept. There were the remains of a girl whose name, the constable informed us, was Elizabeth, ripped to shreds like her brother, though her gutted torso was intact, lying upon the remnants of the shattered windowpane. The lace curtains, freckled with her blood, fluttered in the beneficent breeze and, past the jagged glass that still clung to the window’s frame, I could see the pleasant meadow of spring grass shimmering in the morning sun.

“The point of entry?” mused Morgan.

“Perhaps,” answered the doctor, bending to examine the frame and the shards of glass clustered beneath it. “Though I do not think so. The improvised exit of our witness is my guess.”

Next, Morgan led us down the hall, where, upon turning a corner, we found the fourth victim, similarly dismembered and disemboweled, skull crushed and hollowed out, bits and pieces of the vital organs strewn upon the floor and cemented by gore to the walls. And here in this hallway, on the bloody floorboards, we discovered the first evidence of the Anthropophagi’s presence: impressions of their passing left in the congealing blood of their prey. The doctor gave an exultant cry at the sight of these footprints, fell to his hands and knees, and spent several excited seconds surveying the find.

“Eight to ten, at the least,” muttered Warthrop. “Females, though this and this may be a juvenile male.”

“Females? Females, you say? With prints larger than a full-grown man’s?”

“A mature female measures seven feet from sole to shoulder.”

“A mature female what, Warthrop?”

The doctor hesitated for half a breath and said, “A hominid species of carnivores called Anthropophagi.”

“Anthro… popi …”

“Anthro-po-phagi,” corrected the doctor. “Pliny named them Blemmyae, but Anthropophagi is the accepted designation.”

“And where in heaven’s name did they come from?”

“They are native to Africa and certain islands off the coast of Madagascar,” answered the doctor carefully.

“That is a far cry from New England,” the constable observed dryly, and waited with narrowed eye for the doctor’s response.

“Robert, you have my word as a man of science and a gentleman that I had nothing to do with their appearance here,” said the doctor carefully.

“And you have my word, Warthrop, as a man of the law, it is my duty to discover who, if anyone, might be responsible for this massacre.”

“I am not responsible,” declared the doctor firmly. “I am as shocked as you by their presence here, and I shall get to the bottom of it, Robert, of that you have my word.”

Morgan nodded, but his tone was dubious. “It simply strikes me as exceedingly odd, Pellinore, that such monstrous creatures should appear in the very town where the country’s—if not the world’s—preeminent expert in these matters resides.”

Though spoken in the mildest of manners, the constable’s observation caused the doctor to stiffen and his eyes to flash with indignation.

“Are you calling me a liar, Robert?” he asked in a low, dangerous tone.

“My dear Warthrop,” replied Morgan, “we have known each other our entire lives. Though you are the most secretive man I have ever met and much of what you do remains a mystery to me, I have never known you to tell a deliberate falsehood. You tell me their presence here comes as a shock to you, and I believe you, but my faith does not change the fact that the coincidence is exceedingly odd.”

“That particular irony has not been lost on me, Robert,” admitted my master. “One might say oddities are my business, and this case has more than its fair share of them.” Then he added quickly, before the constable could press the matter further, “Let’s see the others.”

We returned down the hall toward the front of the rectory. Here, in the cozy parlor where doubtless the reverend’s family gathered round the piano for an evening of convivial song or lounged upon the overstuffed chairs and couches before a cheerful fire while the north wind howled, here we confronted the final, terrible scene: a headless corpse lay in a heap in the middle of the room, clutching the remains of an infant to her chest. Her dressing gown had been white, but was no longer, and lay pooled upon the floor where her legs should have been. One leg we discovered discarded partially shredded beneath the broken window that looked out upon the little lane leading to the house. The other was nowhere to be found—likewise her head, though the doctor had me hunt for it, crawling on my hands and knees to peer under the furniture. He examined the mother’s corpse while Morgan lingered in the doorway, his labored breath fluttering the corners of his makeshift mask.

“Both shoulders have been dislocated,” the doctor said. He ran his hands down the woman’s arms, deft fingers pressing into her still-pliant flesh. “The right humerus has been broken.” Now to the fingers locked around the tiny body. “Five fingers broken, two on the right hand, three on the left.”

He tried to pry the baby from her hands, his jaw clenching with the effort. Thwarted by the stubborn will of rigor mortis, he relented and examined the baby without removing it from the frozen arms of her mother.

“Multiple puncture wounds and lacerations,” he said. “But the body is intact. The baby bled to death or her lungs were crushed. Or she was smothered by her mother’s breast. A cruel irony should that be the case.

“How strong is the maternal instinct, Will Henry! Though they tore her shoulders from the sockets and broke the very bones that held it, she did not surrender her child. She held firm. Though they broke her arms and tore off her head, still she held firm. Held firm! Even when she became a cruel imitation of the things that devoured her brood, she held firm! It is a wonder and a marvel.”

“You’ll forgive me, Warthrop, if I do not consider what happened here in any way marvelous,” said the constable with disgust.

“You mistake me,” rejoined Warthrop. “And you judge prematurely things unknown to you. Do we judge the wolf or the lion? Do we blame the savage crocodile for obeying the imperatives of nature’s design?”

As he spoke, the doctor considered the bloody pietà at his feet, his attitude now wholly introspective and remote, his face an inscrutable, emotionless mask. What tempests, if any, raged hidden beneath the surface of that icy facade? Did the macabre tableau remind him of the words spoken only hours before? The unfortunate Mr. Gray should keep them satisfied, at least for another day or two. Words spoken with the characteristic self-assurance that often was mistaken for arrogance—or would it not be a mistake to call it that? I would be less than honest if I said I understood this man to whom I owe so much, this man who took the homeless, orphaned boy I was and sculpted him into the man I became. How oft do they rescue or ruin us, through whimsy or design or a combination of both, the adults to whom we entrust our care! The truth I confess is that I understand him not. Even with the gift of much time and the perspective it grants us, I still do not understand Dr. Pellinore Xavier Warthrop. Did he honestly accept the premise that he was blameless for this horrific slaughter of six innocents? What convolutions and contortions of logic did he employ to ignore the symbolic significance of the Stinnets’ blood upon his hands? Or did he look upon the facts, with the same pitiless stare that Eliza Bunton had received, to reach the conclusion obvious to even a twelve-year-old boy? Each possibility was as likely as the other, and neither discernable by his stoic expression. He betrayed nothing, regarding in silence the headless mother and the babe broken against her breast, the two curled at his feet like discarded offerings to a bloodthirsty god.

“Where is the witness?” he asked.

We paused in the yard to clear our lungs of death’s foul miasma and for the constable to refill his pipe. His face was flushed, and the fingers holding the match quivered as he lowered the flame to the alabaster bowl.

“I must confess to you, Warthrop, this is wholly outside the range of my experience.”

Morgan’s gaze strayed to the words etched over the rectory door. The Lord is my shepherd. He did not appear comforted. Indeed, he seemed shaken to his spiritual marrow. As the town constable he had witnessed more than his fair share of man’s inhumanity to man, from petty thievery to malicious battery. None of it had prepared him, however, for this naked confrontation with gross injustice, this horrific reminder that despite all the honors with which we shower ourselves, we are, ultimately, fodder, mere meat for the inferior, soulless things of which I dreamt the night before, no less than us the Creator’s children. It could not have been pleasant, for a man of the constable’s limited experience and sensitive temperament, to be confronted with the Anthropophagi’s savage mockery of our human aspirations, our absurd grandiosities and ambitions, our ever-preening pride.

“He’s in the sanctuary,” he said. “This way.”

We followed him down the gravel path toward the little church that faced the lane leading to Old Hill Cemetery Road. Another guard was stationed there. Without a word he stepped aside to let us pass. The interior was cool and dark. The morning light streamed in broken beams through the stained glass of the windows, shafts of blue and green and red cutting through the dusty air. Our footfalls echoed upon the ancient boards. Two shadowy figures slouched in the front pew. Upon our approach, one rose, a rifle in his arms. The other did not move, did not so much as raise his head.

Lowering his voice, the constable informed the man with the rifle that the hearses would be arriving soon and he should wait outside to help with the removal of the victims. The man did not seem particularly pleased with the assignment, but acknowledged his orders with the briefest of nods before taking his leave.

The guard’s footfalls died away. We were alone with our witness. Slumped in the pew, arms folded over his chest, hands gripping tight the edges of the blanket wrapped around his bare torso, he was but a boy of fifteen or sixteen, I guessed, with dark hair and large, bright blue eyes that appeared all the larger owing to the narrowness of his face. Though he was seated, I discerned he was tall for his age; his legs seemed to stretch a mile before him.

“Malachi,” said the constable gently. “Malachi, this is Dr. Warthrop. He’s here to …” The constable paused, as if he were unsure what service the doctor could perform. “Well, help you.”

A moment passed. Malachi did not speak. His full lips moved soundlessly, as he stared, like some Eastern mystic, at a space beyond our mortal sphere, looking without but seeing within.

“I am not hurt,” he said finally, in barely a whisper.

“He isn’t that kind of doctor,” the constable said.

“I am a scientist,” said Warthrop.

Malachi’s strikingly blue eyes strayed to my face and remained fixed, unblinking, for a few agonizingly uncomfortable seconds.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“This is Will Henry,” answered the doctor. “He is my assistant.”

Though Malachi’s eyes remained on my face, he had ceased to see it. It was unmistakable, the transition from seeing to not-seeing, the fading of his focus, or, better put, the refocusing to something altogether different, something that only he could see. We warred for his attention with this thing unseen. I knew not what the others were thinking; for myself, I wondered at his condition. His psyche had clearly suffered horrific wounds, yet physically he had emerged unscathed from the ferocious attack. How could that be?

The doctor went to one knee before him. The movement did not distract the stricken lad; his sight remained fixed upon my features, and not so much as an eyelash twitched when Warthrop laid a hand upon his outstretched thigh. In a soft voice the doctor spoke his name, squeezing gently the flaccid muscle beneath his hand, as if calling him back from that faraway, inapproachable place.

“Malachi, can you tell me what happened?”

Again his lips moved and no sound emerged. His otherworldly stare unnerved me, but as one who stumbles upon a terrible accident, I could not tear my eyes away from the awful gravity of his gaze.

“Malachi!” the doctor called quietly, now shaking the limp leg. “I cannot help you unless you tell me—”

“Have you not been there?” cried Malachi. “Did you not see?”

“Yes, Malachi,” answered the doctor. “I saw everything.”

“Then, why do you ask me?”

“Because I would like to know what you saw.”

“What I saw.”

His eyes, large and blue and as depthless as the spinning maw of Charybdis, refused to release me from the riptide of their grip. He addressed the doctor, but he spoke to me:

“I saw the mouth of hell fly open and the spawn of Satan spew forth! That is what I saw!”

“Malachi, the creatures that killed your family are not of supernatural origin. They are predators belonging to this world, as mundane as the wolf or the lion, and we are, unfortunately, their prey.”

If he heard the doctor, he showed no sign. If he understood, he gave no admission. Beneath the blanket he shivered uncontrollably, though the air was still and the sanctuary warm. His mouth came open and he addressed me now: “Did you see?”

I hesitated. The doctor whispered sharply in my ear, “Answer, Will Henry!”

“Yes,” I blurted. “I saw.”

“I am not hurt,” repeated Malachi to me, as if he feared I had not heard him before. “I am unscathed.”

“A remarkable and extremely fortunate outcome of your ordeal,” observed the doctor. Again he was ignored. Snorting with frustration, Warthrop motioned for me to come closer. It appeared Malachi would speak, but only to me.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twelve.”

“That is my sister’s age. Elizabeth. Sarah, Michael, Matthew, and Elizabeth. I am the oldest. Have you any brothers and sisters, Will Henry?”

“No.”

“Will Henry is an orphan,” Dr. Warthrop said.

Malachi asked me, “What happened?”

“There was a fire,” I said.

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I ran.”

“I ran too.”

His expression did not change; the impassive visage remained; but a tear trailed down his hollow cheek. “Do you think God will forgive us, Will Henry?”

“I … I don’t know,” I replied honestly. Being only twelve, I was still a neophyte in the nuances of theology.

“That’s what Father always said,” Malachi whispered. “If we repent. If we but ask.”

His gaze wandered to the cross hanging on the wall behind me.

“I have been praying. I have been asking him to forgive me. But I hear nothing. I feel nothing!”

“Self-preservation is your first duty and inalienable right, Malachi,” said the doctor a bit impatiently. “You cannot be held accountable for exercising that right.”

“No, no,” murmured Morgan. “You miss the point, Warthrop.”

He lowered himself into the pew beside Malachi and wrapped his arm around his narrow shoulders.

“Perhaps you were spared for a reason, Malachi,” the constable said. “Have you thought of that? All things do happen for a reason… . Is this not the foundation of our faith? You are here—all of us—because we are but part of a plan prepared before the foundations of the earth. It is our humble duty to discern our role in that plan. I do not pretend to know what mine or anyone’s might be, but it could be you were spared so no more innocent lives might be lost. For if you had remained in that house, you surely would have perished with your family, and then who would have brought us warning? Your saving of your own life will save the lives of countless others.”

“But why me? Why am I spared? Why not Father? Or Mother? Or my sisters and brothers? Why me?”

“That is something no one can answer,” replied Morgan.

With a snort the doctor abandoned any pretense of compassion and spoke harshly to the tormented boy. “Your self-pity mocks your faith, Malachi Stinnet. And every minute you wallow in it is a minute lost. The greatest minds of medieval Europe argued how many angels could dance upon the head of a pin, while the plague took the lives of twenty million. Now is not the time to indulge in esoteric debate upon the whimsy of the gods! Tell me, did you love your family?”

“Of course I loved them!”

“Then exile your guilt and bury your grief. They are dead, and no amount of sorrow or regret will bring them back to you. I present you with a choice, Malachi Stinnet, the choice eventually faced by all: You may lie upon the shores of Babylon and weep, or you may take up arms against the foe! Your family was not beset by demons or felled by the wrath of a vengeful god. Your family was attacked and consumed by a species of predators that will attack again, as surely as the sun will set this day, and more will suffer the same fate as your family, unless you tell me, and tell me now, what you have seen.”

As he spoke these words, the doctor leaned closer, then closer still to the cowering Malachi, until, with both hands pushing against the pew on either side of him, Warthrop’s face came within inches of the boy’s, his eyes afire with the passion of his argument. They shared a common burden, though only Warthrop knew it, and so only Warthrop had the power to exorcize it. I knew it too, of course, and now, as an old man looking, as it were, through my twelve-year-old eyes, I can see the bitter irony of it, the strange and terrible symbolism: Upon his own spotless hands, Malachi perceived the blood of his kin, as the man whose hands were literally stained with it berated him to abandon all feelings of responsibility and remorse!

“I did not see everything,” came the choked reply. “I ran.”

“But you were inside the house when it began?”

“Yes. Of course. Where else would I be? I was asleep. We all were. There was a terrible crash. The sound of glass breaking as they came through the windows. The very walls shook with the violence of their invasion. I heard my mother cry out. A shadow appeared in my doorway, and the room was filled with a horrible stench that closed my throat. I could not breathe. The shadow filled the doorway … huge and headless … huffing and sniffing like a hog. I was paralyzed. Then the shadow in the doorway passed. It left; I know not why.

“The house was filled with screaming. Ours. Theirs. Elizabeth leaped into the bed. I could not move! I should have barricaded the door. I could have broken the window not two feet away and escaped. But I did nothing! I lay in the bed holding Elizabeth, my hand over her mouth lest her cries draw them to us, and through the doorway I could see them pass, headless shadows, with arms so long their knuckles nearly dragged on the ground. Before the door two of them fell into a scuffle, with angry grunts and mad hisses, snarling and snapping as they vied for the body of my brother. I knew it had to be Matthew; it was too large to be Michael.

“They tore him apart before my eyes. Ripped him to pieces and tossed his limbless torso down the hall, where I heard it smack the floor, and then the thudding and snarling grew louder as they swarmed around it. It was then I felt Elizabeth go limp against me. She had fainted.

“By now the screaming had all but ended, though I could still hear the beasts in the hall and at the front of the house, their snarls and hisses, their horrible grunts, and the crunching and cracking of bones. Still I could not move. What if they should hear me? They moved so quickly, even if I got to the window, I feared they would be upon me before I could open it … and what horror might be lying in wait outside? Were there more patrolling the yard? I strained to rise from the bed, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.”

He fell silent. His gaze had turned inward again. The constable had risen from the pew while he spoke, and walked with heavy tread to stand before one of the stained-glass windows, his face turned toward the scene of Christ as the good shepherd attending his flock.

“But of course you did rise,” prompted the doctor.

Malachi nodded slowly.

“You couldn’t get the window open,” urged Warthrop.

“Yes! How did you know?”

“So you broke it open.”

“I had no choice!”

“And the sound alerted them.”

“It must have, yes.”

“Yet still you did not flee, though freedom and safety lay but a few feet away.”

“I couldn’t leave her.”

“Back to the bed for her?”

“They were coming.”

“You heard them.”

“I pulled her into my arms. She was as lifeless as the dead. I stumbled toward the window, lost my grip, dropped her. I bent to pick her up. Then …”

“You saw it in the doorway.”

Malachi nodded again, rapidly now, his eyes wide in astonishment.

“How did you know?”

“Was it male or female, or could you tell?”

“Oh, for the love of God, Pellinore!” said the constable in consternation.

“Very well.” The doctor sighed. “You abandoned your sister and fled.”

“No! No, I would never!” cried Malachi. “I would not leave her to that … for that … I grabbed her arms and dragged her to the window …”

“It was too late,” murmured the doctor. “The thing was upon you.”

“It moved so fast! In one leap it crossed the room, wrapped its claws around her ankle, and yanked her from me as easily as a man might a doll from a baby. It flung her upward, and Elizabeth’s head hit the ceiling with a sickening thud; I heard her skull shatter, and then her blood rained down upon my head—my sister’s blood upon my head!”

He lost all composure then, covering his face with his hands, his body wracked with heart-wrenching sobs.

The doctor endured it for a moment, but only for a moment.

“Describe it, Malachi,” he commanded. “What did it look like?”

“Seven feet … perhaps more. Long arms, powerful legs, as pale as a corpse, headless, but with eyes in its shoulders … or one eye, I should say. The other was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Just a … a hole where the eye should have been.”

The doctor glanced at me. There was no need to say it; we both were thinking it: Chance or destiny … that brought the blade in blindness thrust into the black eye of the accursed beast.

“You were not pursued,” said the doctor, turning back to Malachi.

“No. I threw myself through the broken window, suffering not so much as a scratch—not a scratch!—then I rode as fast as my horse would carry me to the constable’s house.”

Warthrop placed a hand stained with the family’s blood upon Malachi’s shuddering shoulder.

“Very good, Malachi,” he said. “You have done well.”

“In what way?” cried Malachi. “In what way?”

The doctor bade me remain in the pew with Malachi while he and Morgan withdrew to debate the best course of action, or so I assumed based on the heated snippets I happened to overhear.

From the constable: “… aggressive and immediate … every able-bodied man in New Jerusalem …”

And the doctor: “… unnecessary and imprudent … certain to cause a panic …”

Malachi regained his composure during their fervent deliberations, his sobs drying to a trickle of tremulous tears, his fear-borne palsy quieting to an occasional quiver, like the small aftershocks of a violent earthquake.

“What a strange man,” said Malachi, meaning the doctor.

“He is not strange,” I responded, a bit defensively. “His … calling is strange, that’s all.”

“What is his calling?”

“He is a monstrumologist.”

“He hunts monsters?”

“He doesn’t like them called that.”

“Then why does he call himself a monstrumologist?”

“He didn’t pick the name.”

“I never knew there were such people.”

“There aren’t many of them,” I said. “His father was one, and I know there is a Monstrumologist Society, but I don’t think it has many members.”

“Not very difficult to imagine why!” he exclaimed.

On the other side of the sanctuary the argument rose and fell like superheated magma bubbling to the surface of a volcanic lake.

Morgan: “… evacuate! Evacuate at once! Evacuate everyone!”

Warthrop: “… stupid, Robert, stupid and reckless! The mayhem borne of that intelligence would far exceed the benefits. This can be contained … controlled… . It is not too late …”

“I never believed in monsters,” Malachi said.

Again his gaze turned inward, and I knew with the genius of a child’s intuition that he had lost his grip on the moment and had fallen as swiftly as Icarus down to the bright, bloody memory of that night, where his family now dwelled, like the tortured souls of Dante’s dream writhing in eternal torment, forever devoured but never consumed, their death throes replayed endlessly while he, Malachi, lay paralyzed with dread, helpless to halt the slaughter, his dear sister fainted by his side, the one who had sought salvation from him, the one and only one he had had any chance of rescuing, but whom even a brother’s love could not save.

The tête-à-tête beneath the fractured light of the stained glass was nearing its crescendo. The doctor punctuated each point with a poke of his finger into the constable’s chest, his strident voice echoing in the cavernous confines of the church: “No evacuations! No hunting parties! I am the expert here. I am the one—the only one—qualified to make the decisions in this case!”

Morgan’s measured response came quietly yet insistently, in the manner of a parent to a recalcitrant child—or the manner of a frightened object of a madman’s attention. “Warthrop, if I had the slightest doubt as to your expertise, I would not have brought you here this morning. You may understand this foul phenomenon better than any man alive; you are, by the nature of your peculiar pursuits, obligated to understand them, even as I am obligated, by virtue of my duty, to protect the lives and property of the citizens of this town. And that duty compels me to act with alacrity and without delay.”

The doctor mustered every ounce of his forbearance and spoke through gritted teeth, “I assure you, Robert—indeed, I am prepared to stake my reputation upon it—they will not attack again today, tonight, or for many nights to come.”

“You cannot assume that.”

“Of course I may assume that! The weight of three thousand years of direct evidence supports it. You offend me, Robert.”

“That is not my intent, Pellinore.”

“Then why in one breath do you acknowledge my expertise and in the next inform me you intend to ignore it? You bring me here to seek my counsel, then rebuff it out of hand. You claim you want to avoid a panic while you make decisions based upon your own!”

“Granted,” allowed Morgan, “but in this instance panic might be the most beneficent response!”

The doctor’s visage blushed scarlet and he righted himself to stand with his back ramrod straight, his hands clenched into fists, knuckles as white as bleached bone.

“Very well. You reject my opinion. It is a perilous choice, Robert, but of course that too is an opinion. Your duty, as you say, compels you, and therefore the consequences of your compulsion rest solely upon your shoulders. But when that compulsion undoes you, even at the cost of your very life and the lives of your men, I do not expect the judgment to fall upon me. I shan’t be held responsible. My hands are clean.”

Of course they were not, far from it! Both literally and figuratively, the blood of the Anthropophagi’s victims was upon his hands. The old grave-robber’s, the entire Stinnet clan’s, he was soaked through and through with it.

“Come, Will Henry!” cried the doctor. “Our service here was sought but not accepted! Good day, Constable, and good luck to you, sir. If you need me, you know where you may find me.”

He strode down the center aisle to the doors, calling in a voice that boomed against the weathered boards, “Will Henry! Snap to!”

I rose from the pew, and when I did, Malachi sat upright and reached for me, his fingers finding my wrist and pulling me back.

“Where are you going?” he demanded. His expression was desperate.

I nodded toward the doctor. “With him.”

“Will Henreee!” shouted the doctor.

“May I come with you?” Malachi asked.

The constable had appeared before us. “Fear not, Malachi. You will be staying with me until a more permanent arrangement can be …” He searched for the word, and then with a shrug said, “Arranged.”

At the door I turned to find the tableau unaltered: Malachi and Morgan against the backdrop of the cross, one slumped in the foremost pew, the other standing, his hand resting upon the boy’s shoulder.

Outside, the doctor breathed deep the warm spring air, as a man might take a draft of laudanum to steady his jangled nerves, then, ignoring the two men stationed at the rectory door whose demeanors darkened upon his appearance, he strode straight to the constable’s carriage, where the driver loitered, spinning the chamber of his revolver in an attitude of studied boredom.

“Harrington Lane!” the doctor snapped at him, throwing open the carriage door and heaving himself inside. He snapped his fingers impatiently at me, and I clambered in beside him.

We pulled off the narrow lane once to allow three black hearses to pass. We halted a second time for a cart bearing several men with rifles and a pack of hunting dogs, the excited animals barking and straining against their tethers, the attitude of their subdued handlers playing counterpoint to their agitation. The doctor shook his head and muttered derisively under his breath. Through gritted teeth he growled, “I know what you’re thinking, Will Henry, but even the tenets of the victims’ faith hold a mistake to be no sin. A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst! It is a false argument to assert that simply because we do not see fairies dancing upon the lawn proves naught as to their existence. Evidence begets theory, and theory evolves as new evidence emerges. Three thousand years of research, direct eyewitness accounts, serious scientific inquiry—was I to abandon all of it upon the doorstep of speculation and doubt? In all crises are we to demand reason’s abdication or, worse, champion the coup of our baser instincts? Are we men, or anxious gazelles? An impartial examination of the facts would lead any reasonable man to conclude that I am blameless, that I reacted with prudence and forbearance in the case, and indeed a lesser man might have squandered his energies pursuing those fairies on the lawn, which no one can see!”

He pounded his crimson fist upon his thigh. “So put aside your juvenile judgments, William James Henry. I am no more accountable for this tragedy than the boy who witnessed it. Less so—yes!—if one applies the same cruel criteria to my actions!”

I did not reply to this passionate outburst, for it was not so much directed at me as the peculiar demons that plagued his conscience; I was but a witness to the exorcism. I was keenly aware, as he must surely have been, of the sickening odor rising from our clothing, the toxic tincture of death clinging to our skin and hair, the tart taste of it tingling on our tongues.

Upon our return to Harrington Lane, the doctor descended to the basement, where he stood, motionless, before the suspended corpse of the male Anthropophagus. Was this immobility a mere illusion? Below the surface of this calm facade did a cyclone rage? I suspect, like the whole and wholesome sunlight splintered by the shards of colored glass inside the little church, Warthrop’s psyche had been split, and though now far away, a part of him was still present at the morning’s holocaust, kneeling, as it were, before the hollowed-out skull of the good reverend Stinnet. I could hear him muttering variations of the argument couched in the coach, like a composer struggling with a difficult bridge, seeking to impose melodic balance to the discordant chords of his recalcitrant remorse.

His muttering petered out. For several minutes he did not speak; he did not move. Statue-still he stood, the maelstrom within as well-veiled as the winds of a hurricane seen from space.

“It is she,” he said finally, in a tone tinged with wonder. “The matriarch blinded by Varner. By some malevolent twist of fate, she has come here, Will Henry. It is almost as if …” He hesitated to give voice to the proposition. It ran counter to everything he believed. “As if she has come looking for him.”

I did not ask to whom he referred. I did not need to ask; I knew.

“I wonder,” he said pensively, addressing the monster hung before him upon the hook, “if she would be satisfied with his son.”