Rick Yancey - The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist, Book 2)

“I can’t imagine her reaction when she receives the telegram,” he confided over our supper. His face fairly glowed with the thought. “Surprised, I would guess, but not shocked. I probably should keep mum till I have a definitive answer—I don’t want to get her hopes up. The odds that the poor fool is alive are practically nil, but I fear she might take it into her head to come look for him herself. It would be just like her. Muriel is a woman of remarkable—some might say damnable—stubbornness. She will not believe he is gone until she lays her hands on his lifeless corpse.”

So expansive was his mood, I decided to step foot into the no-man’s-land of his past and risk getting my head blown off.

“What happened, sir?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Between you and Muriel—Mrs. Chanler, I mean.”

“Weren’t you there? I distinctly remember it, though I also distinctly remember telling you to leave.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I meant before . . .”

“Why do you presume anything at all happened?”

My face grew hot. I looked away. “Some things that she said . . . and that you said, afterward, when you couldn’t sleep. I—I heard you calling out her name.”

“I’m certain you heard nothing of the kind. May I give a piece of advice, Will Henry? In everyone’s life, as the apostle said, there comes a time to put away childish things. What happened between Muriel and me is one of those things.”

On the night she had arrived at our house, it seemed to me he had put nothing away, childish or otherwise. He might have told himself so—even believed it to be so—but that did not make it so. Even the hardest cynic is gullible to his own lies.

“So you’ve known each other since you were children?” I asked.

“It is an expression that refers to the thing, Will Henry, not the person. I was not a child when we met.”

“She was married to Mr. Chanler?”

“No. I introduced them. Well, in a manner of speaking. It was because of me that they met.”

I waited for him to go on. He picked at his venison, sipped his tea, stared at a spot just over my right shoulder.

“There was an accident. I fell off a bridge.”

“You fell off a bridge?”

“Yes, I fell off a bridge,” he said testily. “Why is that surprising?

“Why did you fall off a bridge?”

“For the same reason as Newton’s apple. Anyway, I wasn’t injured, but it was February and the river was cold. I became quite ill with a fever and was laid up for several days in the hospital, and that’s how they met, more over me than through me, I guess you could say.”

“Over you?”

“Over my bed.”

“Was she your nurse?”

“No, she wasn’t my nurse. Dear God! She was—we were engaged, if you must know.”

I was stunned. The thought of the monstrumologist betrothed to anyone was beyond my poor power to comprehend.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he demanded. “It was a fortuitous fall into that river. Barring it, in all likelihood I would have married her and suffered much more than the discomfort of a fever. I am not constitutionally suited for it, Will Henry. Think of it—a man like me, married! Think of the poor woman in it. I am not opposed to marriage in principle—it is, at least in our culture, necessary for the survival of the species—only as the institution relates to monstrumology. Which is why I told both of them not to do it.”

“Not to do what?”

“Get married! ‘You will live to regret it,’ I told her. ‘He will never be home. He may never come home.’ Obviously, neither listened to me. Love has a way of making us stupid, Will Henry. It blinds us to certain blatant realities, in this case the spectacularly high mortality rate among monstrumologists. Rarely do we live past forty—my father and von Helrung being the exceptions. And now time has proven me right.”

He leaned forward, bringing the full force of his formidable personality to bear upon me. Involuntarily, I shrunk back, slipping down in my chair to make myself the smallest possible target.

“Never fall in love, Will Henry. Never. Regardless of whether you follow in my footsteps, falling in love, marriage, family, it would be disastrous. The organism that infects you—if the population remains stable and you do not suffer the fate of your father—will grant you unnaturally long life, long enough to see your children’s children pass into oblivion. Everyone you love you are doomed to see die before you. They will go, and you will go on. Like the sibyl cursed, you will go on.”

Sergeant Hawk was waiting for us in the lobby the next morning. We shared a hearty breakfast—our last proper meal for many days to come—and then stepped outside under a sky blanketed with clouds, into a brisk artic wind, reminders that the brutal Canadian winter was fast approaching. Our gear lay piled beside a hitching post: two bulging rucksacks, each festooned with tools and implements—shovels, hatchets, pots and pans, and the like; a smaller bag containing our provisions; and a pair of Winchester rifles.

“Traveling light, Doctor,” our guide said brightly. “Make the best time that way.”

The rifles reminded Warthrop he had left his revolver in our room, and he ordered me to fetch it for him.

He dropped it into the pocket of his duster and said, “Shall we snap to, then, Hawk? I’ll take the rucksack and a rifle. Will Henry can port the rations.”

Startled, Jonathan Hawk said to him, “Your boy is coming with us?”

“He is not my ‘boy,’ and, yes, he is.”

The young policeman frowned. “It’s none of my business, of course—”

“Of course it is not.”

“He could wait for us here.”

“Will Henry is my assistant, Sergeant Hawk; his services are indispensable to me.”

“What kind of services might those be?” He was having some difficulty picturing it.

“Of the indispensable variety.”

“He’ll slow us down.”

“No more than standing on a sidewalk holding a pointless debate, Sergeant. I guarantee you that he is more useful than he looks.”

Hawk considered my “looks” dubiously for a moment.

“I’ll take your word for that, Doctor, but he strikes me as a little on the delicate side. You’re not in New England anymore; this is the backcountry we’re talking about.”

Sergeant Hawk turned to me. “There are no monsters in the bush, Mr. Will Henry, but there are other things just as eager to eat you. Are you sure you want to come?”

“My place is with the doctor,” I said, trying to sound resolute.

He gave up after that. With a shrug of his broad shoulders and a lopsided grin, he slung his rifle over his back and bade us follow. He was a tall man, and his stride was long; he was used to hiking long distances over difficult terrain; and in the days to come the doctor and I would be taxed to our limits, both physically and psychologically, for he was right. We were not in New England anymore.

SIX

“A Different Species Altogether”

We made camp that first night on the northern shore of a vast lake, after a hike of nearly twenty miles along a fairly well-trod path. Canoes had been left on each side of the lake, a courtesy for local hunters and the native peoples who used the trail as a trade route to Rat Portage. The lake crossing took the better part of two hours, so vast was the water’s expanse and so deliberate was our passage, for with the three of us and all our gear on board, the little canoe rode alarmingly low in the water. While Warthrop helped Hawk pitch the tent—he had packed only one, not expecting a party of three—I was dispatched into the surrounding woods to gather kindling for our fire. In the twilight shadows I thought I heard the rustle of some large creature slinking, and I cannot say if that was truly the case, only that the fruitfulness of my imagination seemed to grow exponentially as the daylight faded.