The Isle of Blood

But not quite enough; I knew what he meant. More than once he had seized my hand at his bedside, staring beseechingly at me with those dark backlit eyes nearly mad with desperation and sorrow, begging me to never forget, to bear his memory past the grave. You are all I have, Will Henry. Who else will remember me when I am gone? I will sink into oblivion, and the earth shall not note or care at my passing!

“Very well. Another case, then. That matter in Campeche, at Calakmul…”

“What is this, Will Henry?” He glared at me over the magazine. “Can’t you see I am trying to relax?”

“Holmes has his Watson.”

“Holmes is a fictional character,” he pointed out.

“But he is based on someone real.”

“Ah.” He was smiling slyly at me. “William James Henry, do you have literary ambitions? I am astounded.”

“That I might have literary ambitions?”

“That you have any ambition at all.”

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I do.”

“And all this time I had allowed myself to hope you might follow in my footsteps as a student of aberrant biology.”

“Why couldn’t I be both?” I asked. “Doyle is a physician.”

“Was,” he corrected me. “And not a very successful one at that.” He laid down the magazine. I had at last gotten his full attention. “I will confess the idea intrigues me, and I would have no objection to your trying your hand at it, but I retain the right to review anything you set to paper. Beyond my own reputation, I have the legacy of my profession to protect.”

“Of course,” I said eagerly. “I wouldn’t dream of publishing anything without obtaining your approval first.”

“But nothing of our difficulties in the Adirondacks.”

“I was actually thinking of that case from a few years ago—the incident in Socotra.”

His face darkened. His eyes burned. He leveled a finger at my face and said, “Absolutely not. Do you understand? Under no circumstances are you ever to do such a thing. The temerity, Will Henry, to even suggest it!”

“But why, Dr. Warthrop?” I asked, taken aback by the ferocity of his reaction.

“You know very well the answer to that question. Oh, I should have guessed it. I should have known!” He rose from his chair, shaking with the force of his passion. “I see it now, the true fount of your ambition, Mr. Henry! You would not immortalize but humiliate and degrade!”

“Dr. Warthrop, I would do nothing of the kind—”

“Then, I ask you, of all the cases we have investigated, why did you choose the one that casts me in the worst possible light? Ha! See, I have caught you. There is only one reasonable answer to that question. Revenge!”

I could not hide my astonishment at his accusation. “Revenge? Revenge for what?”

“For your perceived mistreatment, of course.”

“Why do you think I have been mistreated?”

“Oh, that is very clever of you, Will Henry—parsing my words to mask your perfidy. I did not confess to mistreating you; I pointed out your perception

of mistreatment.”

“Very well,” I said. There were very few arguments anyone could win with him. In fact, I had never won any. “You pick the case.”

“I don’t wish to pick the case! The entire idea was yours to begin with. But you’ve shown your hand in this, and rest assured I will disavow anything you dare to publish under the guise of preserving my legacy. Holmes had his Watson, indeed! And Caesar had his Brutus, didn’t he?”

“I would never do anything to betray you,” I said evenly. “I suggested Socotra because I thought—”

“No!” he cried, taking a step toward me. I flinched as if expecting a blow, though in all our years together he had never struck me. “I forbid it! I have labored too long and too hard to banish the memory of that accursed place from my mind. You are never to speak that name again in my presence, do you understand? Never again!”

“As you wish, Doctor,” I said. “I shall never speak of it again.”

And I didn’t. I dropped the matter and never brought it up again until now. It would be extremely difficult—no, impossible—to immortalize someone who denied the very facts reported. Years passed, and as his powers waned with them, my duties expanded to include the composition of his papers and letters. I took no credit for my efforts and received none from the monstrumologist. He ferociously edited my work, striking out anything that, in his opinion, smacked of poetic indulgence. In science, he told me, there is no room for romantic discourse or ruminations upon the nature of evil. That he himself was a poet in his youth drenched the exercise in irony and pathos.