Rick Yancey - The Monstrumologist

Warthrop gave Kearns no chance to respond. “You assumed they would starve to death.”

“I thought it the wisest course. It was something your father and I discussed before his death. If it makes you feel any better, Warthrop, he did express morbid remorse from time to time; I don’t think the operation gave him any joy. More than once he mentioned to me the possibility of terminating the experiment-starving them, poisoning them, setting their pens ablaze. But at heart he was an optimist, I think.” Starr added, “He truly thought with enough time he could tame them.”

“Tame them?” asked Warthrop. “I thought the idea was to interbreed them.”

“Oh, he gave up on that after a few years,” said Starr with another wave of his splotchy talon. “Every potential mate I sent over they simply tore to pieces.”

Kearns laughed. “Not too different from human marriage!”

Warthrop was nodding, but not at Kearns ’s cynical observation. “That explains all of it, or nearly all. There was no reason to leave the safety of their man-made dens, until their food supply was cut off and hunger drove them to the surface. I had assumed the attack upon the Stinnets was a territorial response brought about by our trespass upon their domain…” The monstrumologist sighed, an exhalation of both relief and painful acknowledgment. “I was wrong. Wrong in my assumption and wrong in my response. But not all questions have been answered, Starr. Why did you let Varner live? Wouldn’t it have been safer to discard him in the pit with the other ‘garbage’?”

“Dear God, Warthrop, what do you take me for? I may be avaricious, but I am not completely corrupt.”

I thought of flies buzzing maddeningly upon a windowpane, of their repugnant progeny squirming in open sores, of boots filled with liquefying flesh. I am not completely corrupt.

“Oh, no,” agreed Kearns. He crossed the room to stand before the withered, wheezing old man. With great tenderness he said, “To the contrary, you are a humanitarian, Dr. Starr. Let no one tell you otherwise! An anthropological alchemist, turning lead into gold! The chains that bind most men do not bind you, and in this you and I are brothers, dear Jeremiah. We are the new men of a new and glorious age, free of lies and unbound by any ridiculous rectitude.”

He placed his hands on either side of Starr’s weathered pate, cupping his face while he bent low to purr into his oversize ear, “The only truth is the truth of the now. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ There is no morality, is there, Jeremiah, but the morality of the moment.”

And with that, John Kearns, student of human anatomy and hunter of monsters, with his bare hands gave his victim’s head a violent twist, snapping his neck, severing his spine cord, killing him instantly.

Then, brushing past a stunned and speechless Warthrop on his way out of the room, he said this, with no trace of irony: “He will not be missed.”

The doctor could barely contain his fury, though by all outward signs he appeared perfectly collected; but I knew him too well. He held his tongue until we had turned off the narrow lane to the house on Motley Hill, and then he turned on Kearns.

“It is murder, Kearns, plain and simple.”

“It was a mercy killing, Warthrop, simple and plain.”

“You’ve given me no choice.”

“One always has that, Pellinore. May I ask a question? What would happen should the old coot’s heart suddenly spring to life and he makes a deathbed confession to his crimes? Would you not like to continue your life’s work?… Sorry, that was two questions.”

“I have a better question,” retorted Warthrop. “What is my choice if staying silent allows you to continue your life’s work?”

“Why, Pellinore, you wound my feelings. Who is to say whose work is more worthy of approbation? ‘Judge not, lest you be judged.”’

“They say no one knows the Bible better than the devil.”

Kearns laughed merrily, reined in his mount, and turned back toward town.

“Where are you going now?” demanded the doctor.

“To and fro in the earth, my dear monstrumologist, walking up and down in it! Look for me upon the rising of the moon; I shall return!”

He spurred his horse and rode off at a full gallop. Warthrop and I watched him until he disappeared behind the crest of the last hill. The doctor was chewing his bottom lip anxiously.

“Do you know where he’s going, sir?” I asked.

He nodded. “I think so.” He sighed, and then laughed long, softly, and bitterly. “‘John J. J. Schmidt’! Do you know, Will Henry, I don’t think Kearns is his real name either.”

He kept his word, though, whatever his true name was. An hour after our dinner, as the full moon lifted her silvery head above the treetops, he returned, retreating to his room without a word for either of us, only to clump down the stairs again in fresh clothing, draped in his traveling cloak, bags in hand.

“Well, Pellinore, I’m off,” he announced. “Jolly good fun this, but I don’t wish to overstay my welcome, which I suspect I might have by at least a day.”

“More than one, John,” replied Warthrop dryly. “What have you done to Jonathan Peterson?”

“Who?” He seemed genuinely bewildered. “Oh! The old codger’s lackey. Yes. Him. Why do you ask that?”

“Where is he?”

He shook his head sadly. “No one seems to be able to find him, Pellinore. It is a sad case.”

Warthrop said nothing for a moment, and then, gravely: “I still intend to inform the authorities.”

“Right, and really I can’t blame you for it, so I will make no more appeals to your good sense. It’s rather like God switching the covenant to the insects.” He giggled into the doctor’s stony countenance. “Do you know why I like you so much, Warthrop? You’re so bloody earnest.”

He turned to me. “And you, Will Henry! No hard feelings, I hope, about that unfortunate incident in the caves; it really couldn’t be helped. Not that I would, but if I ever told anyone of your bravado in battle, I would be taken for a liar. You shall make an excellent monstrumologist someday, if you can survive the tutelage of Warthrop here. Goodbye, Will.”

He shook my hand and tousled my hair. The doctor asked, “Where are you off to next, Kearns?”

“Oh, really, Pellinore, you threaten to turn me in and then ask for my whereabouts? I’m not a complete fool, no Bobby Morgan, after all. By the way, however did you convince him not to throw you in jail?”

Warthrop stiffened, and said, “Robert is an old friend of mine. He understands the importance of my work.”

“Keeping you on the hunt keeps New Jerusalem safer? Tell that to the good reverend Stinnet and his clan.”

“I thought,” the doctor said evenly, “that you were leaving.”

“So I am! In all seriousness, though, I do think I need a nice long holiday. A more leisurely kind of hunt, a less daunting quarry to tax me, particularly since I shan’t have the indispensable services of Master Will Henry here.”

“Another matter I haven’t forgotten,” the doctor replied darkly. “You should leave, Kearns, before I begin to dwell too long upon it.”

He took the doctor’s advice, taking his leave at once, and the next morning Warthrop kept his promise, reporting the murder to the authorities, though nothing, to my knowledge, ever came of it. One notice appeared in the papers regarding the mysterious disappearance of Jonathan Peterson, but to my knowledge, nothing else; his body was never found.

We did not speak much of Jack Kearns after that spring of ’88. The topic seemed to subject the doctor to moral dilemmas with which he did not care to be burdened.