Rick Yancey - The Monstrumologist

“Only when I opened up the casket,” the old man said dryly.

“No holes or mounds of dirt nearby?”

Erasmus shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing like that.”

“No unusual odors?”

“Odors?”

“Did you smell anything odd, similar to rotten fruit?”

“Only when I popped open the casket. But the smell of death is not so odd to me, Doctor Warthrop.”

“Did you hear anything out of the ordinary? A snorting or hissing sound?”

“Hissing?”

The doctor forced air through his closed teeth. “Like that.”

Erasmus shook his head again. “It was a normal operation in every way, Doctor, until I opened the casket.” He shuddered at the memory.

“And you noted nothing unusual until that point?”

The grave-robber replied that he had not. The doctor turned away to contemplate the grave, the family plot, the grounds beyond, and the line of trees to his right that bordered the lane beside the stone wall, hidden now behind the dense brush.

“Most curious,” he muttered a second time.

He shook himself from his reverie, his tone abruptly changing from contemplative to crisp. “The mystery deepens, but doesn’t bear upon our errand tonight. Dig it up, Mr. Gray. And you dig with him, Will Henry. We’ll return at daybreak and pray our fortunes rise with the sun. Perhaps the light of day will illuminate what evidence the night’s shadow conceals! Snap to, Will Henry, and make short work of it.”

He abandoned us then, hurrying toward the trees, torch held low, stooping over as he went, swinging the fire left and right and all the while muttering to himself.

“I wouldn’t go into those trees if I was him,” Erasmus Gray said dourly. “But I’m not the monster hunter, am I?” He clapped a calloused hand upon my shoulder. “Let’s snap to it, as your master says, William Henry! Many hands make light work!”

Twenty minutes later, my lower back and shoulders aching and the tender flesh of my palms burning, at only three feet closer to our goal, I thought I could take issue with his proverb, for four hands did not seem that many in this circumstance, and the work proved anything but light. The soil of New Jerusalem, like most of New England, is rocky and unyielding, and despite having been turned the night before by Erasmus Gray in his quest for macabre riches, the soil of Eliza Bunton’s grave gave itself up stubbornly to our spades. As I labored, I thought of the enormous male Anthropophagus , who, with no tool but his steel-hard claws, had somehow managed to tunnel his way through the hard ground to reach his prey. Like the doctor, I found it most curious that we found no evidence of his invasion and that Erasmus claimed to have found none the night before. Could the old man have missed it in the dark? Had he simply failed to notice it in his lust for booty, and obliterated the evidence in his haste to retreat with his monstrous find?

We could hear Dr. Warthrop in the trees fifty yards away, stomping through the underbrush and the detritus of fallen leaves from the previous autumn, the sound punctuated now and then by soft, incoherent cries of consternation, the first of which caused Erasmus Gray to raise his head in alarm, thinking, no doubt, that the doctor had found-or had been found by-a living specimen of the species hanging in our basement. But they were not cries of panic or fear, I assured the old man; they were the ejaculations of a miner, his pan coming up empty yet again.

Presently the doctor returned and flopped down next to our deepening hole in utter dejection, stabbing the end of the torch into the mound of dirt beside it. He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his long arms around them, staring glumly at our upraised sweat-streaked faces with the expression of a man who has suffered some irreplaceable loss.

“Well? Did ye find anything, Doctor?” asked Erasmus Gray.

“Nothing!” snapped the doctor.

Erasmus Gray was obviously relieved, and the doctor, just as obviously, was not.

“It defies all logic,” the doctor said to no one in particular. “It flies in the face of reason. They are not phantoms or shape-shifters. They cannot float above the ground like pixies or astral project themselves from one spot to another. He must have found her by use of his acute sense of smell, and that is employed by crawling over the terrain, yet there is no evidence of his passing anywhere.” A stake lay within his grasp. He reached over and tugged it from the earth, turning it over and over with his dexterous, delicate fingers. “He would have left a breathing hole, yet there is no breathing hole. He would have left a trail, yet there is not so much as one bent blade of grass.”

His eyes fell upon our upturned faces. He stared down at us; we stared up at him; and no one spoke for a moment.

“Well, what in God’s name are you doing? Dig. Dig!”

He rose and, in his frustration, hurled the stake toward the line of trees, where the deep shadows swallowed it with a muted rattling hiccup of broken branch and fallen leaves.

From the small rutted path behind us came a huffing and a snorting, and all heads swiveled to follow the sound. The old horse, with flaring nostril and rolling eye, stamped its forelegs and gave a low-pitched whinny.

“What is it, ol’ Bess?” Erasmus Gray called softly. “What’s the matter, girl?”

The beast dropped its head, stretched forth its thin neck, and pawed at the hard ground. The ancient cart creaked and the rickety wheels rasped. I glanced up at the doctor, who was staring at the horse, arms hanging loosely at his sides, his entire being focused on the animal’s distress.

“Something’s spooked her,” said Erasmus Gray.

“Quiet!” breathed the doctor. He slowly pivoted on his heel, scanning the grounds and the path that snaked through the headstones, glimmering sentinels in the starlight, until he stopped, his back to us, peering against the darkness toward the trees. For a long, awful moment there was no sound at all, save for ol’ Bess’s soft protests and the stamping of her hooves upon the path. The doctor raised his left hand, fingers curling and uncurling, his shoulders drawn back with tension, and a terrible sense of foreboding overcame me. A few more seconds dragged by, during which the animal’s agitation grew, corresponding with my own.

And then, on the heels of that ghastly silence, from the trees came the hissing.

Low-pitched. Rhythmical. Faint. Not from one particular spot, but from many. Were they echoes-or replies? Not continuous, but sporadic: hiss… pause… hiss … pause… hissssss…

The doctor turned his head, looking over his shoulder at me. “Will Henry,” he whispered. “Did you remember to fill the flash pots with gunpowder?”

“Yes, sir,” I whispered back.

“Fetch them at once. Quietly, Will Henry,” he calmly cautioned as I heaved myself out of the hole. He dropped his hand into the pocket of his coat where he had dropped the revolver.

“I left my rifle in the cart,” Erasmus said. “I’ll get the pots. The boy should-”

“No! Stay where you are! Go, Will Henry. Bring as many as you can carry.”

“And my rifle if you can manage it, Will!” quavered Erasmus. I heard him whispering urgently to the doctor, “We shouldn’t stay, any of us! We’ll come back when it’s light to return her. “’Tis madness in the devil’s own dark to-”

The doctor curtly cut short his plea. I could not make out the words, but I was certain of the gist of his reply. In light of subsequent events, his stubborn refusal to obey the command of our most basic of instincts, which he characterized as “the enemy,” exacted a terrible price. There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.