The Isle of Blood

“Do you not? In the beginning man made God in his image, and God saw that it was good. You agreed with me about the child. Don’t deny it; I saw it in your eyes. Your eyes have come open, haven’t they? It’s why he keeps you with him, because you see in the dark places where he is afraid to look. So don’t ask me what is the magnificum. The question insults my intelligence.”

He knelt before me and held out his cupped hands.

“Come on, then; I’ll give you a boost. He is in a dark place and he needs you to be his eyes.”

I stepped into Kearns’s hands and he lifted me up and over the wall.

I was standing upon the rim of a vast cave whose roof and walls had given way after a millennium of rain and wind and earthquakes. Gigantic slabs of the collapsed chamber littered the ground. Interspersed among the boulders were the remains of stalagmites, polished to a glimmering finish by the monsoons, some worn down by the relentless wind to foot-high nubs, others rising to twice my height, their tips as sharp as their bases were wide. They reminded me of the bony spikes erupting from Mr. Kendall’s face.

I did not see the doctor. He was hidden in the swirling white. I saw the mountain’s glittering teeth and its broken bones, and then a few feet farther in I came across the first body, badly decayed and picked over by scavengers, its gut blown apart, the cavity like a great black yawning mouth. Half of its face had been stripped away, and in one empty eye socket a scorpion snuggly nestled. A gust of wind tugged at the remnants of the papery flesh that still clung to its bones, and a few pieces tore away, rocketing aloft, like hot ash in the superheated air of a fire.

Behind me I heard Kearns say, “This is his mouth. When Typhoeus’

s children sense the end has come, they drag their rotting, bloated bodies to this spot at the top of the world, where they explode—some after they’ve died, some before. I have seen the breathing corpses of his children blow apart with the force of a grenade.… And the winds come down. They scoop up the bloody viscera and carry it for miles until it falls as red rain from a clear, blue sky.”

He drew me forward, the curtain of mist pulled back, and I saw hundreds of bodies frozen in the agony of death, crumpled between the rocks, strewn around the shining, sharp columns, growing more numerous as we went, until it was nearly impossible not to step on them. We picked our way carefully through the magnificum’s bountiful harvest, and the thin air was heavy with the rich smell of rot rising from the threshing floor.

We came to a shallow indention in the earth, the remains of an ancient cavernous pond. Kearns pointed out the kneeling, bent-backed shapes of the still living scattered throughout the dry lake bed, each sitting beside a dead brethren, all worrying with something cradled in their laps. Kearns pressed a finger against his lips to signal for silence. He crouched down, motioned for me to follow suit, and proceeded to lead me along the shore of the sterile pit. He brought me close—but not too close—to a kneeling man whose face had been smashed apart by the horns of bone growing from his skull, whose black eyes lacked any white in them, whose mouth hung open to reveal a bewildering profusion of thornlike growths, and whose suppurating fingers picked and plucked with exquisite delicacy at the exquisitely delicate object resting between his legs. I did not know it then, but this human wreckage had once been a man named Anton Sidorov.

“These are his hands,” Kearns murmured into my ear. “The hands of the magnificum. It’s very curious to me; I don’t understand what compels them to build the

nidus, but they’ll work for days without rest, until the moment they succumb.”

The maker of the nidus was crying. From deep in his throat there issued a whimpering, an inarticulate, protesting whine, as if the irresistible force that drove him also repulsed him, and the tension between them—the him and not-him

—could break a world in half.

“Do you hear it, Will?” whispered Kearns excitedly. “That is the voice of the magnificum, the last sound at the end of the world.”

The once-Sidorov reached down to the desecrated body curled at his side and pulled its lifeless left hand to his chest. With an anguished sob the un-Sidorov snapped off the index finger. It pulled free from the corpse’s hand with a soft crunch. He bent down again to incorporate the digit into the “nest.”

The kneeling child of Typhoeus grunted sharply, his back arched, his mouth yawned open, and a viscous stream of clear fluid erupted from his mouth and poured onto his work. Not the rot of stars. Not the spit of monsters. Not pwdre ser but pwdre ddynoliaeth—the rot of humanity.