The Isle of Blood (12 page)

“Afterward I told his widow, ‘Your husband is dead, but at least he died laughing.’ I think she took some comfort in that. It is the second-best way to die, Will Henry.” He did not say what the best way was.

“At any rate, your father pulled me from harm’s way. I would have stood my ground, if only to avenge Hilal’s death, but I’d been badly wounded in the thigh and was losing a great deal of blood. James threw me over the saddle of his pony and rode all night to the nearest village. Rode that horse until it collapsed, and then carried me the rest of the way.”

I want to go, Father. Will you take me there, to the Isle of Bliss?

It’s a very, very long way from here, Will
.

I don’t care. We’ll find a ship of a thousand sails to carry us there
.

Oh, now, those ships are very difficult to come by.

You found one
.

Yes, I did. I did find that ship
.

“I was laid up for two weeks—the wound had become infected—slipping in and out of delirium, and all the while your father was by my side. At one point, though, I saw Hilal sitting besidee, dimly, as if through a veil or mist, and I knew to the marrow of my bones that I had come to the lip of the stage, as it were. I was not surprised to see him sitting there, and I was not in the least afraid. I was actually happy to see him. He asked me what I wanted. ‘What do you want, Sheikh Pellinore Warthrop? Ask and it will be done.’

“And of all the things I might have asked, I asked him to tell me a joke. And he did, and the devil of it is, I can’t recall it now. It still bothers me. It was a very funny joke. My difficulty is that I have no memory for jokes. My mind does not tend in that direction.”

He was playing with the knot around his wrist. His wan smile faded, and suddenly he was angry—intensely angry.

“It is… unacceptable.
Intolerable
. I will not tolerate it, do you understand? You are forbidden to die. You did not will your parents’ death; you did not ask to come here—it is not your debt; you should not have to pay.”

Here, here, now. Do not cry. You’re still very young. You’ll have years and years to find it. Until then I shall be the ship of a thousand sails. Climb aboard me back, me matey, and I shall bear thee to that fabled isle!

“I will not suffer you to die,” he said fiercely. “Your father died because of me, and I cannot afford your death too. The debt will crush me. If you go down, Will Henry, you will drag me down with you.” Tugging on the rope.

I see it, Father! The Isle of Bliss. It burns like the sun in the black water
.

“Enough!” he cried. “I forbid you to leave me. Now snap to, get up, stop this foolishness. I have saved you. So snap
to
, you stupid, stupid boy.”

He brought back the hand connected to mine and slapped me hard across the cheek.

“Snap to, Will Henry!”
Smack!
“Snap to, Will Henry!”
Smack!
“Snap to, Will Henry!”
Smack, smack, smack!

“Would you live?” he shouted. “Then, choose to live.
Choose
to live!”

Gasping, he fell back toward the chair; the rope connecting us yanked on his arm. Roaring his frustration, he pulled his wrist free of the knot and flung the rope onto my body.

He was spent. All fear, all anger, all guilt, all shame, all pride—gone. He felt nothing; he was empty. Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.

I say this, because next the monstrumologist said this:

“Please, do not leave me, Will Henry. I would not survive it. You were nearly right. What Mr. Kendall was, I am always on the brink of becoming. And you—I do not pretend to understand how or even
why—
but you pull me back from the precipice. You are the one.… You are the one thing that keeps me human.”

You are the one thing that keeps me human
.

In the months that followed—well,
years
to be completely accurate—the monstrumologist never wavered in his disavowal of saying those words. I must have been delirious; he never said anything like it; or, my favorite, he said something entirely different and I misheard him. This was more like the Pellinore Warthrop I had come to know, and somehow I preferred the familiar version. It was predictable and therefore comforting. My mother, as devout as any New England woman of Puritan stock, loved to speak of the days “when the lion lies down with the lamb.” Though I understand the theology behind it, the image does not bring me peace; it makes me feel sorry for the lion. It strips him of his essence, the fundamental part of his being. A lion that doesn’t behave as a lion is not a lion. It isn’t even the lion’s opposite. It’s a mockery of a lion.

And Pellinore Warthrop, like that lion—or its Creator!—is not mocked.

“I do not deny affirming what I have often said, Will Henry, and that is that,
in general
, your services have proven more indispensable than not. I have never pretended otherwise. I believe in acknowledging debts where debts are owed. One must take care, however, not to extrapolate anything… well,
excessive
from it, for lack of a better word.”

And then he would brusquely change the subject.

I forbid you to leave me
.

It seemed quite sudden to me, my acquiescence to his demand. One moment I could see myself and see him and see the room—and more, much more. I saw… everything. I saw our house on Harrington Lane; I saw our town of New Jerusalem; I saw New England. I saw oceans and continents and the earth spinning round the sun. I saw the moons of Jupiter and the Milky Way and the unfathomable depths of space. I saw the entire universe. I held it in the palm of my hand.

And the next moment I was in the bed, my head splitting, my left hand throbbing. And Warthrop was sound asleep in the chair beside me. I cleared my throat; my mouth was desert-dry.

He came awake at once, a wild look in his eyes, as if he were seeing a ghost.

“Will Henry?” he croaked.

“I’m thirsty,” I said.

He said nothing at first. He continued to stare until his stare unnerved me.

“Well, then, Will Henry, I shall fetch you a drink of water.”

After I drank some water and sipped some lukewarm broth, he placed the tray on the bedside table (the gun was gone, as were the ropes) and said he needed to change the dressing on my injury.

“You don’t have to look—unless you’d like to. It’s a clean cut, a really extraordinary amputation considering the circumstances.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Dr. Warthrop…#8221;

“Of course. You’ll be happy to know there’s no sign of infection. The operation was not performed under the most sanitary of conditions, as you know. I expect a full recovery.”

“It doesn’t feel like it’s gone.”

“That’s common.”

“What’s common?”

“Hmmm.” Examining his handiwork. “Yes, it’s healing up quite nicely. We are extremely fortunate it is your left index finger, Will Henry.”

“We are?”

“You’re right-handed, are you not?”

“Yes, sir. I suppose that is fortunate.”

“Well, I’m not saying you should feel
grateful
.”

“But I do feel grateful, Dr. Warthrop. You saved my life.”

He finished putting on the fresh bandage in silence. He seemed troubled by the remark. Then he said, “I would like to think so. The plain truth is that it may have been for nothing. You don’t know if Mr. Kendall was the author of your injury, and I do not know what, if anything, might have happened if he were. When faced with the unknown, it’s best to take the most conservative approach. That’s all well and good as theories go, but the end result is that I took a butcher knife and chopped off your finger.”

He gave my knee an awkward pat and stood up, wincing, pressing his hands into the small of his back.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must have a bath and a change of clothes. Don’t try to get up yet. Use the bedpan if you need to void your bladder or relieve your bowels. What are you smiling about?” he asked crossly. “Did you think I would allow you to wallow in your own excrement?”

“No, sir.”

“I fail to see what is humorous about a bedpan.”

“Nothing, sir. It’s the idea of you emptying one.”

He stiffened and said with great dignity, “I am a natural scientist. We are accustomed to dealing with shit.”

He returned at the setting of the sun, asked how I was faring, and informed me it would not be a bad thing if I tried to get out of bed.

“You will be dizzy and sore, but the sooner you become ambulatory the better. We’ve much to do before we leave for New York.”

“What is there to do, Dr. Warthrop?” I assumed he meant the packing, a chore that always fell to me.

“I would have done it already, but I didn’t want to leave… I thought it best, when you regained consciousness… Well, I could not be two places at once,” he finished impatiently.

I was
, I nearly told him. I bit back the words. He would scoff at the notion of my disembodied spirit observing him from the ceiling.

“You would have done what already?”

“Mr. Kendall, Will Henry. We must…” He paused as if searching for the right word. “Resolve this issue of Mr. Kendall.”

We must resolve this issue of Mr. Kendall
.

By this the monstrumologist did not mean notifying the family of his demise or making arrangements for returning the body to its native England for burial.

I don’t know why I would think for an instant that it did. How would one go about explaining to his loved ones—or to the British authorities, for that matter—a badly decomposed corpse with a fresh gunshot wound to the head? There was also the sticky matter of the potential virulence of the contagion. As Warthrop put it, “It could be the spark that lights a conflagration that would make the plague seem like a campfire in comparison.”

No, we spent the entirety of that first evening of my recovery in the basement laboratory, dismembering Wymond Kendall.

The monstrumologist wanted samples of every major organ, including the brain (he was very excited to have a look at Mr. Kendall’s brain), which he removed in toto after sawing off the top of his head. I was forced to hold it—an awkward proposition given the thick bandages on my left hand—while the doctor severed the medulla. I had never held a human brain before. Its delicacy surprised me; I thought it would be much heavier.

“The average human brain weighs approximately three pounds, Will Henry,” the doctor said in response to my startled expression. “Compare that to the total weight of our skin, around six pounds, and you have a fact that is as compelling as it is unnerving.”

He took the three-pound seat of Kendall’s consciousness from me and said, “Observe the frontal lobe, Will Henry. The sulci—these deep crevices you see covering the rest of the brain—have all disappeared. The thinking part of his brain is as smooth as a billiard ball.”

I asked him what that meant.

“Well, we may assume it is not a congenital defect, though he did not strike me as all that bright—more gyri than sulci—Sorry, a bit of anatomical tomfoolery there. We may assume it is a manifestation of the toxin. This aligns perfectly with the literature, which claims the victim, in the final stages, becomes little more than a beast, incapable of reason but fully capable of a murderous, cannibalistic rage. Certain indigenous tribes of the Lakshadweep Islands report whole villages wiped out by a single exposure to the
pwdre ser
, until the last man standing literally eats himself to death.”

The doctor laughed dryly, absently caressing the smooth tissue of Kendall’s brain, and added, “I mean he eats
himself
to death. When everyone else is dead or has run off, he turns upon himself and feeds from his own body, until he has either bled to death or contracted an infection. Well, you’ve seen the contents of Mr. Kendall’s stomach; I don’t believe he swallowed his tongue by accident.”

He directed me to fill a large specimen jar with formaldehyde, into which he then carefully lowered the brain. As I was heaving the jar onto the shf, my eye was drawn to a nearby container, one I had not seen before. It took a moment for me to recognize what floated inside the amber fluid.