The Isle of Blood

And then I heard, very distinctly, a ripping sound and a loud crunch, the way the leg bone of a chicken sounds when you rip it from the carcass. Something—well, more than one thing—was sobbing, a horrible, snuffling, hiccupping kind of wail—the tears of damnation, the bitter despair of the pit, and I knew that they were eating her, tearing her to pieces and stuffing the dripping offal into their mouths, gnashing with fury, chomping with such desperate hunger that more than one had already chewed their own tongues in half. And from his mountain throne Typhoeus magnificum, the magnificent father, looked down upon his children, and smiled.

Kearns cried down from his post, giving the waited for signal. I heard only six shots, two from Kearns’s rifle, the rest from Warthrop’s revolver, but their echoes scampered and skittered along the pass, chasing one another down to the bottom. I cried out softly when a large shadow flitted across the opening, and then I realized it was Awaale, running toward the site of the slaughter. I stood up and went outside. I felt no fear now, only the familiar, sickening curiosity to see what should not be seen, what most would not want to see, but what I had

to see.

There were four bodies where before there had been one, all of them draped over one another in a confusing jumble of limbs. I had to step over a rivulet of blood worming its way down the slope.

“Very nice work, Warthrop,” John Kearns was saying. “Four to my two. I’d no idea you were such a fine shot.”

“But how can this be?” Awaale said, his voice shaking with revulsion and wonder. “This woman is very old, yet she is heavy with child.”

“It isn’t a child she’s heavy with,” said Kearns with a smile. “Stand back, gentlemen, and I will show you.”

He pulled a bowie knife from his boot and bent over the old woman, who lay curled on her side, blood pooling beneath her mat of steel gray hair.Kearns did not stab her. He made a quick, shallow incision in her abdomen and then hopped back. The cut pulsed once, and then her stomach blew open with a loud pop! spewing a fine, clear mist and a foul-smelling soup of watery blood and atrophied entrails. Kearns laughed heartily and said, “You see? She isn’t pregnant. She’s just got a terrible case of the winds!”

Awaale turned away in disgust, but Warthrop seemed fascinated by the phenomenon, comparing it to the cases of beached whales whose decomposing bodies fill up with gases produced by certain bacteria in their guts, causing them to literally explode. It explained the blasted-open stomachs and bloody walls and ceiling of the death house in Gishub.

“Either some substance contained in the pwdre ser

or the body’s reaction to the exposure…,” Warthrop mused.

“I thought you’d like it. Remember the Russian I told you about with the obsession with shiny shoes? Happened to him. Hosed down two men while Sidorov was examining him.”

The doctor nodded absently. “I don’t see your Minotaur.”

“No.” Kearns sighed. “He escapes my clutches once again. But I’m not finished with him yet. Before this is over, I shall have his head mounted on my study wall, I can assure you of that!”

There followed a lengthy debate between the monstrumolo-gist and Kearns about what we should do next. We were all exhausted and desperately in need of sleep, but Kearns insisted we should quit the scene immediately. He knew of at least one more troop of “rotters” in the general vicinity, and he worried our luck—or our ammunition—might run out. Warthrop reminded Kearns that he had called it “the perfect spot,” and the monstrumologist said it was better to lay a trap than risk an ambush.

“There is a cave higher up, about a mile from here,” Kearns allowed. “I suppose we could make for that. But it’s really best to keep their hours—sleep during the day and hunt at night.”

“I understand,” Warthrop said. “But we won’t make much of the latter if we don’t get some of the former! Here, Will Henry, I’ll take the child now. Fetch our pack and my instrument case. Kearns and I will take the lead; Will Henry and Awaale in the rear. Quietly now, and quickly.”

And that is how we proceeded deeper into the heart of the mountains. The way was not easy, littered with rocks—some as large as a brougham carriage—riven with deep fissures, at times so narrow we were forced to turn sideways and shuffle with our backs against the sheer cliff face while our toes dangled over the crumbly edge a thousand feet above the jagged ground. The air grew thin and cold. The wind pressed down from above and bit harshly at our cheeks. I felt my face grow numb.

“There is an old saying in my country, walaalo,” Awaale said at one point. “‘Do not walk into the snake pit with your eyes open.’ I used to puzzle over that proverb. No more!” He laughed softly. “Do you think this viper Kearns may have been sent by God?”

The notion was so absurd, I laughed in spite of myself. “What are you talking about?” I asked.