The Isle of Blood

I would, and I will! Father says he will take me with him one day, when I’m old enough.

Gripping my hand tightly. And, in the distance, the growl and huff of the locomotive.

You will never be old enough for that, William James Henry.

One day he will take me. He promised he would. One day I will see places other people only dream about.

The train is a living thing; it screeches angrily, complaining of the rails. Black smoke blows grumpily from its stack. The train glares contemptuously at the crowd, the self-important conductor, the porters in their neat white jackets. And it is huge, throbbing with power and restrained rage. It is a huffing, growling, enraged monster, and the boy is thrilled. What boy wouldn’t be?

Look now, Willy. Look for your father. Let’s see who will be the first to spot him.

I see him! I see him! There he is!

No, that isn’t him

.

Yes, it—Oh, no, it isn’t.

Keep looking.

There! There he is! Father! Father!

He has lost weight; his dusty clothes, rumpled from travel, hang loosely on his lean frame. He hasn’t shaven in weeks and his eyes are weary, but he is my father. I would know him anywhere.

And here he is! Here is my Will. Come here to me, boy!

I soar a thousand feet into the air; the arms that lift me are thin but strong, and his face turns beneath me, and then my face is pressing into his neck, and it is his smell beneath the grime of the rails.

Father! What did you bring me, Father?

Bring you! Why do you suppose I brought you anything?

Laughing, and his teeth are very bright in his stubbly face. He starts to set me down so he may embrace his wife.

No! Carry me, Father.

Willy, your father is tired.

Carry me, Father!

It’s all right, Mary. I shall carry him.

And the shrill, startling shriek of the monster, the last angry blast of its breath, and I am home at last, in my father’s arms.

Warthrop lifted me from the floor, grimacing from the effort of holding me as far from his body as possible.

“Hold your hands up, Will Henry. And hold them still!”

He carried me into the kitchen. The washtub sat on the floor by the stove, half-filled with steaming hot water. I saw the teakettle on the stove, and I realized, with an odd pang of sadness, that it was the kettle I’d heard whistling, not a train. My mother and father were gone again, swallowed by the gray mist.

The monstrumologist placed me on the floor before the tub and then sat behind me, pressing his body close. He reached around and grasped my arms firmly, just below the elbows.

“This is going to burn, Will Henry.”

He leaned forward, forcing me toward the steaming surface, and then plunged my bloody hands into the solution, a mixture of hot water and carbolic acid.

I found my voice then.

I screamed; I kicked; I thrashed; I pushed back hard against him, but the monstrumologist did not yield. Through my tears I saw the crimson fog of Kendall’s blood violate the clear solution, spreading out in serpentine tendrils, until I could no longer see my hands.

The doctor pressed his lips against my ear and whispered fiercely, “Would you live? Then hold! Hold!”

Black stars bloomed in my vision, went supernovae, flickered, and died. When I could bear it no longer, at the precise moment when I teetered upon the edge of unconsciousness, the monstrumologist pulled out my hands. The skin had turned a bright, sunburned red. He held them up, turning them this way and that, and then his body stiffened against mine. He gasped.

“Will Henry, what is this?”

He pointed at a small abrasion on the middle knuckle of my left index finger. Fresh blood welled in its center. When I didn’t answer immediately, he gave me a little shake.

“What is this? Did he bite you? Is it a scratch? Will Henry!”

“I—I don’t know! I fell down the stairs.… I don’t think he did.”

“Think, Will Henry! Think!”

“I don’t know, Dr. Warthrop!”

He stood up, and I fell backward, too weak to rise, too frightened to say any more. I looked into his face and saw a man squeezed tight in the crushing embrace of indecision, caught between two unacceptable courses.

“I don’t know enough. God forgive me, I don’t know enough!”