The Isle of Blood

“Penelope!” My cheeks grew hotter, albeit for an entirely different reason.

“Pining away in your bridal chamber, waiting for Odysseus to return from the war.”

“Do you enjoy being mean, Lilly, or is it something you can’t help, like a nervous tic?”

“You shouldn’t talk to me that way, William,” she said, laughing. “I’m to be your big sister soon.”

“Not if the doctor has anything to say about it.”

“I would think your doctor would be relieved. I was not around him much, but I got the feeling he didn’t like you.”

She had gone too far, and knew it. “That was cruel,” she said. “I’m sorry, Will. I—I don’t know what comes over me sometimes.”

“No,” I said with a wave of my wounded hand. “It’s your move, Lilly.”

She moved her knight, exposing her queen to my pawn. A pawn! I glanced up at her. Speckles of sunlight shimmered in her dark hair, a strand of which had come loose from her hat and fluttered, a fitful black streamer, in the soft springtime wind.

“Why do you think you haven’t heard from him, Will?” she asked. The quality of her voice had changed, was as soft as the wind now.

“I think something terrible has happened,” I confessed.

We stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, and then I was up from the bench and trotting across the park, and the world had gone watery gray, bleached of its springtime vibrancy. She caught up to me before I reached the exit at Fifth Avenue, and pulled me round to face her.

“Then, you must do something,” she said angrily. “Not think about how frightened you are or lonely you are or whatever it is you think you are. Do you really think something terrible has happened? Because if I thought something terrible had happened to someone I loved, I would not mope around thinking about it. I would be on the next boat to Europe. And if I had no money for a ticket, I would stow away, and if I couldn’t stow away, I would swim there.”

“I don’t love him. I hate him. I hate Pellinore Warthrop more than I hate anything. More than I hate you. You don’t know, Lilly. You don’t know what it’s been like, living there in that house, and what happens in that house and what happens because I live in that house.…”

“Like this?” She gathered my left hand into hers.

“Yes, like that. And that isn’t all, not everything.”

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“What? No, he doesn’t beat me. He… he doesn’t see me. Days go by, weeks sometimes… and then I can’t escape him; I can’t get away. As if he’s taken a rope and tied us together with it. And it’s him and me and the rope, and there is no undoing it. That’s the thing you don’t understand, that your mother doesn’t understand, that no one understands. He is thousands of miles away—maybe even dead—and it doesn’t matter. He’s right here, right here.” I slapped my open palm hard against my forehead. “And there’s no getting away. It’s too tight, too tight.”

My knees gave way. She threw her arms around me and held me up. She kept me from falling.

“Then, don’t try, Will,” she whispered into my ear. “Don’t try to get away.”

“You don’t understand, Lilly.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t. But I am not the one who has to.”

I had discovered it during one of my recent forays into the formidable library of the Monstrumologist Society, a slim volume covered in a fine sheen of dust, some of its pages still uncut, its spine creaseless. Apparently no one had bothered to read it since its publication in 1871. What drew my eye to that little book, out of the sixteen thousand others surrounding it, I do not know. But I remember distinctly the small jolt of recognition when I opened to the title page and saw the author’s name. It was like turning the corner in a crowded city and bumping into a long-lost friend you’d given up hope of ever seeing again.

It was late in the day when I found it—no time to read it before the library closed—and there was a strict no-lending policy toward nonmembers. So I filched it. Tucked it under the back of my coat and walked out, right past Mr. Vestergaard, the head librarian, whom most monstrumologists called (behind his back) the Prince of Leaves—a rather weak bit of whimsy, I thought, but a monstrumologist’s sense of humor, if he had one at all, tended toward the macabre. Efforts at anything lighter of heart invariably fell flat.