The Isle of Blood

“Perhaps his visitors will lighten his spirits. Please let him know. We shall be up momentarily.” He turned to us. “Last week Mr. Henry ended a hunger strike—his third since coming to Hanwell. ‘I would gladly die,’ he told me. ‘But I will be damned to give you the satisfaction!’ I must say, Dr. Walker, your patient has developed a highly sophisticated delusion, the most detailed and intricate that I’ve ever encountered. A ‘philosopher in the natural science of aberrant biology,’ he calls himself, a ‘monstrumologist,’ one of several hundred around the world who devote themselves to the study and eradication of certain malevolent species, upon which he claims to be the foremost expert. He claims to belong to a ‘society’ of these so-called monstrumologists, based in New York City, the president of which—”

“Is me,” finished von Helrung sadly. “I know this story, Herr Superintendent. Alas, I have heard it many times. To William I am not Abraham Henry, humble shoemaker from Stubenbach, but Abram von Helrung, the head of this imaginary society of monstrumologists. And young William here, not William anymore, no! But Will Henry, his faithful apprentice who aids him in this mythical monster hunting of his.”

“He even includes me in his fantasy,” Walker interjected. “I am, it seems, also a member of the Monstrumologist Society, somewhat of a rival, too, substantially more accomplished and therefore a threat to him—”

Von Helrung cleared his throat noisily, and said, “I want to take him home. He is no danger to anyone—unless you happen to be a three-headed dragon! My grandson, God rest his soul, should never have taken upon himself the burden that rightly belongs to the father. I came at once, as soon as I heard he was here. I will leave at once, as soon as I see my boy again. Will you bring me to my boy now, Herr Superintendent, to ease his burden and my own?”

We were escorted to the third floor, where the most dangerous inmates were housed. There were no bars on the doors, but the locks were sturdy and in the rooms the furniture was bolted to the floor. Some rooms were padded for the patients’ own protection, but no one was shackled or restrained in any way, another humane distinction of the Hanwell philosophy. It occurred to me that Warthrop could have suffered a fate much worse than confinement in a house of the mad. No doubt it had been torture for him; without question he had suffered to be sane and to have that very sanity cited as the proof of his madness, but he was alive. He was alive.

The keeper of the ward was waiting for us in the hall. The superintendent nodded to him, the keeper threw back the bolt and swung wide the door, and I saw my master seated on the small bed on the other side, wearing a white robe and slippers that seemed to glow in the shaft of light pouring through the window behind him. He was pale and thin and haggard but alive, his exile at its end, alive—the monstrumologist.

For a moment I forgot my lines. My mind went blank, my knees shook, and I almost shouted Dr. Warthrop! which would have abruptly brought down the curtain. There was joy at seeing him again—I will not deny that—yet there was trepidation, too, a little thrill of dread. The monstrumologist may have been all that I had in the world, but that meant the monstrumologist was all that I had!

He stood as I stepped forward, a look of nearly comical astonishment on his drawn features, dominated by the expression in his dark eyes—the strange, haunted look of slow starvation.

“Will Henry?” he whispered, hardly daring to believe it.

I remembered my lines then. “Papa! Papa!” I rushed forward. I threw myself into his chest, hard enough to rock him back on his heels, and hugged him with all my might.

“Papa! Papa, you’re alive!”

“Well, of course I’m alive. For the love of God, Will Henry… Von Helrung, is that you? Good! I was beginning to think you were fool enough to believe—Who is that beside you? Not Walker? Why did you bring Walker? What did you tell Walker? Please, Will Henry, release me. You are crushing my spine.”

“Oh, my son! My son!” von Helrung cried. Now it was his turn to crush my master to his chest. “William! Your father has come for you!”

“I hope not! My father has been dead over fifteen years, von Helrung.”

“What? You do not remember me? William, you must remember me; I am your father!” Von Helrung was standing between Warthrop and the suspicious superintendent. He seized the opportunity to give the doctor an exaggerated wink. “Your father, Mein Sohn!”

Warthrop missed it entirely. Perhaps it was the suddenness with which he had been shoved upon the stage. Perhaps it was the result of a constitution weakened from three attempts at self-starvation. Or perhaps it was the inevitable consequence of caging a man like Pellinore Warthrop—like trying to stuff the sun into a bottle. Whatever it may have been, he refused to step into the part.