The Isle of Blood

“Go back? Go back for what? To bury her? you ever listen to what I say? Do you ever listen to what you say? I have offered her up in my stead, Will Henry. I have killed her!”

“You don’t know that, sir. You can’t know that.” His terror was infectious. I wrapped the covers around my quivering shoulders. Suddenly the compartment was very cold and very small. I could not see his face; he was an insubstantial shade against the darker gray.

“Look not into my eyes,” he muttered feverishly. “For I am the basilisk. Fear my touch, for I am the Midas of annihilation.” He sought out my hand in the dark, for comfort, I thought, but I was wrong. It was for proof. “James and Mary, Erasmus and Malachi, John and Muriel, Damien and Thomas and Jacob and Veronica, and the ones whose names I have forgotten and the ones whose names I never knew…” He pressed the spot where my finger should have been. “And you, Will Henry. You have given yourself in service to ha-Mashchit, the destroyer, the angel of death whom God created on the first day, the same day he said, ‘Let there be light.’

“And when I step upon the shore of the Isle of Blood to plant the conqueror’s flag, when I attain the summit of the abyss, when I find the thing that all of us fear and all of us seek, when I turn to face the Faceless One, whose face will I see?”

In the darkness he raised my hand and pressed it against his cheek.

His face is beatific when I picture it now, frozen in an attitude of godlike serenity, like a Greek statue of an ancient hero—Hercules, perhaps—or the bust of Caesar Augustus in the Musei Capitolini. The face of the living Warthrop has petrified in my memory, and his eyes, like those of a statue, are blank, devoid of detail, devoid of sight. It isn’t a failure of memory—how well I remember those eyes! It is the mercy I grant myself. And it is my gift to him—the absolution of blindness.

He fell silent. I do not think he spoke more than three words to me between Venice and Brindisi. He broke the verbal drought once, while we were standing in the ticket line at the P&O offices to secure our berths for the passage to Port Said.

“We are a few hours ahead of them, Will Henry. Barring the unexpected delay, we may expect to arrive at Aden long before they do. But there they may catch up to us. I don’t know how long it will take to arrange our passage to Socotra.”

He looked down at me. “Unless you wish to turn back.”

“Turn back?” I thought I must have been hallucinating. The monstrumologist was seriously thinking about giving up? It was so uncharacteristic a remark that I wondered if he had lost his mind—if Arkwright had jumped the gun by four months when he’d brought him to Hanwell.

“I can wire von Helrung to meet you in London.”

“And leave you alone? No, Dr. Warthrop.”

He shook his head ruefully. “I don’t think you understand what your no is saying yes to.”

“It’s never stopped me before,” I replied. “Not understanding the yes in ‘no.’”

The monstrumologist laughed.

For the first few hours of the Mediterranean leg of our seven-thousand-mile journey, I feared that the mal de mer I’d suffered in the Atlantic crossing would return, like an unpleasant relative who arrives unexpectedly for dinner. You loathe his company, but you cannot turn him away. The monstrumologist forbade me from remaining belowdecks, saying the atmosphere was foul with coal dust and “the effluvia of four continents,” meaning, I guessed, the other passengers. He brought me up to the forecastle and pointed straight ahead.

“Keep your eyes on the horizon, Will Henry. It’s the only trick that works. Works for almost every ailment, when you think about it.”

“Dr. von Helrung said I should dance.”

The doctor nodded seriously. “Dancing isn’t a bad idea either.”

He leaned his arms upon the rail. The southerly wind whipped his long dark hair back, turned his jacket into a snapping semaphore flag. He closed his eyes and raised his face into the wind. “Not yet, not yet,” he murmured. He looked down at my puzzled expression and explained, “Africa. You can smell it, you know.”

“What does it smell like?”

“I cannot tell you. It would be like trying to describe the color blue to a man blind from birth.” And then, because he was Pellinore Warthrop, he proceeded to try. “Old. Africa smells… old. Not old in the sense of something rotten or gone sour; old in the best sense—old because we’ve yet to make it ‘new.’ ‘Old’ meaning the world as it was before we recast it in our image, before we scarred the land with our plows and cut down the forests with our axes, before we dammed the rivers and drilled great holes into the earth, before we learned to take more than what we needed, before we stood upright, that kind of old, which is another way of saying that Africa smells new.”