The Isle of Blood

“I don’t think so,” said the doctor slowly. He stepped back, studying the man carefully, dark eyes dancing with that eerie backlit fire. “We still have a few moments… but only a few! Will Henry, stay with our guest while I mix up the antidote.”

“Then, I am not too late?” the man inquired incredulously, as if he could not dare to allow himself to hope.

“When was the poison administered?”

“On the evening of the second.”

“Of this month?”

“Yes, yes—of course this month! I would be as dead as a doornail if it had been last month, now, wouldn’t I!”

“Yes, forgive me. Tipota is slow-acting, but not quite that slow-acting! I shall be back momentarily. Will Henry, call me at once should our friend’s condition change.”

The doctor flew down the stairs to the basement, leaving the door slightly ajar. We could hear jars knocking against each other, the clink and clang of metal, the hiss of a Bunsen burner.

“What if he’s wrong?” the man moaned. “What if it is too late? My eyesight is failing—that’s what goes just before the end! You go blind and youheart blows apart—blows completely apart inside your chest. Your face, child. I cannot see your face! It is lost to the darkness. The darkness comes! Oh, may he burn for all eternity in the lowest circle of the pit—the devil—the fiend!”

The doctor bounded back into the room, carrying a syringe loaded with an olive-green-colored liquid. The dying man jerked in the chair upon the doctor’s entrance and cried out, “Who is that?”

“It is I, Warthrop,” answered the doctor. “Let’s get that coat off. Will Henry, help him, please.”

“You have the antidote?” the man asked.

The doctor nodded curtly, pulled up the man’s sleeve, and jabbed the needle home.

“There now!” Warthrop said. “The stethoscope, Will Henry. Thank you.” He listened to the man’s heart for a few seconds, and I thought it must be a trick of the light, for I spied what appeared to be a smile playing on the doctor’s lips. “Yes. Slowing considerably. How do you feel?”

A bit of color had returned to the man’s cheeks, and his breathing had slowed. Whatever the doctor had given him was having a salutary effect. He spoke hesitantly, as if he could hardly believe his good fortune. “Better, I think. My eyesight is clearing a bit.”

“Good! You may be relieved to know that…,” the monstrumologist began, and then stopped himself. It had occurred to him, perhaps, that the man had already suffered enough distress. “It is a very dangerous poison. Always fatal, slow-acting, and symptom-free until the end, but its effects are entirely reversible if the antidote is administered in time.”

“He said you would know what to do.”

“I’m quite certain he did. Tell me, how did you come by the acquaintance of Dr. John Kearns?”

Our guest’s eyes widened in astonishment. “However did you know his name?”

“There is only one man I know—and who knows me—who would play such a fiendish prank.”

“Prank? Poisoning a man, hurling him to the threshold of death’s doorway, for the purpose of delivering a package— that’s a prank to you?”

“Yes!” the doctor cried, forgetting himself—and what this suffering soul had been through—for a moment. “The package! Will Henry, carry it down to the basement and put on a pot for tea. I’m sure Mr.—”

“Kendall. Wymond Kendall.”

“Mr. Kendall could do with a cup, I think. Snap to now, Will Henry. I suspect we’re in for a long night.”

The package, a wooden box wrapped in plain brown paper, was not particularly heavy or cumbersome. I toted it quickly to the laboratory, placed it on the doctor’s worktable, and returned upstairs to find the kitchen empty. I could hear the rise and fall of their voices coming from the parlor down the hall while I made the tea, my thoughts a confusion of dreadful anticipation and disquieted memory. It hadn̵t been quite a year since my first encounter with the man named Jack Kearns—if that was his name. He seemed to have more than one. Cory he had called himself, and Schmidt. There was one other name, the one he’d given himself in the fall of the previous year, the one by which history would remember him, the one that best described his true nature. He was not a monstrumologist like my master. It was not clear to me then what he was, except an expert in the darker regions of the natural world—and of the human heart.