The Isle of Blood

I suppose we cannot help it. We are hunters all. We are, for lack of a better word, monstrumologists. Our prey varies depending on our age, sex, interests, energy. Some hunt the simplest or silliest of things—the latest electronic device or the next promotion or the best-looking boy or girl in school. Others hunt fame, power, wealth. Some nobler souls chase the divine or knowledge or the betterment of humankind. In the winter of 1889, I stalked a human being. You might be thinking I mean Dr. Pellinore Warthrop. I do not. That person was me.

Go on, open it! the curator said. He wanted you to see.

Every night the same dream. The Locked Room. The old man jangling keys. And the box. The box and the boy and the stuck lid and the unseen thing moving inside the box and the old man scolding, Thickheaded boy! You can’t open it because you’re asleep!

And the thickheaded boy starting awake, sweating under warm covers in a cold room, teetering on the edge of it, das Ungeheuer, the center not holding, the me unwound, only the not-me awake now, echoing the cry of a madman, “

Nullité! Nullité! Nullité! That is all it is! Nothing, nothing, nothing!”

Sometimes the woman down the hall heard him crying, and no matter the hour she rose from her bed and slipped on her robe and went down the hall to his room. She sat with him. “Hush now. Shhhh. It’s all right. It’s only a dream. Hush now. Shhh.” A mother’s refrain. She smelled of lilacs and rosewater, and sometimes he forgot and called her Mother. She did not correct him. “Hush now. Shhh. It’s only a dream.”

Or she would sing to him songs he’d never heard before, in languages he did not understand. Her voice was beautiful, a rich velvet curtain, a river over which the demons could not cross. He did not know a mortal voice could sound so heavenly.

“Do you mind my singing to you, William?”

“No, I don’t mind. I like the way it sounds.”

“When I was young girl around Lilly’s age, it was my great ambition to sing opera upon the professional stage.”

“Did you?”

“No, I never did.”

“Why not?”

“I married Mr. Bates.”

I was pursuing the one I had lost, the boy I was before I came to live with him. For a while—a vry long while—I thought I was hunting for the monstrumologist. He was, after all, the one who had dropped off the face of the earth.

I thought I saw him one night at the opera. Mrs. Bates took Lilly and me to a production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which had premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House the previous month.

“I hate the opera,” Lilly complained. “I don’t understand why Mother drags me to it.”

We were sitting in a private box high above the orchestra when I thought I spotted him in the crowd. I knew it was him. I did not question why the monstrumologist would be attending the opera—that did not matter. It was him. The doctor had come back! I started to stand; Lilly tugged me back into the chair.

“It’s Dr. Warthrop!” I whispered excitedly.

“Don’t be silly,” she whispered back. “And don’t say his name in front of Mother!”

I thought I saw him a second time, in Central Park, walking a Great Dane. When he drew close, I realized he was twenty years older and twenty pounds heavier.

Whenever I saw von Helrung, I asked the same question:

“Have you heard from the doctor?”

His answer on the seventeenth day was the same as his answer on the twenty-seventh:

“No, Will. Nothing yet.”

On the thirty-seventh day of my exile, after hearing those words again, No… nothing yet, I said to him, “Something is wrong. He should have written by now.”

“It could be that something is wrong—”

“Then, we must do something, Dr. von Helrung!”

“Or it could mean everything is very right. If Pellinore has picked up the trail of the magnificum

, he would not take the time to write two words. You have served the man; you know this to be true.”

I did. When the fever of the hunt was upon him, nothing could distract him from his goal. But I was troubled.

“You have friends in England,” I said. “Can’t you ask them if they know where he’s gone?”

“Of course I can—and I will, if circumstances dictate, but not yet. Pellinore would never forgive me if I allowed that particular cat out of the bag.”

I returned on a blustery afternoon in early April to ask a special favor.

“I want to work in the Monstrumarium.”

“You want to work in the Monstrumarium!” The old monstrumologist was frowning. “What did Emily say?”

“It doesn’t matter what she says. She isn’t my guardian and she isn’t my mother. I don’t need her permission to do anything.”

“My dear little Will, I suspect the sun itself needs her permission to shine. Why do you want to work in the Monstrumarium?”

“Because I’m tired of sitting in the library. I’ve read so much, it feels as if my eyes are bleeding.”

“You have been reading?”