The Curse of the Wendigo (18 page)

“Well, hullo there!” he called softly, motioning me closer with a freshly manicured claw. “And you must be Pellinore’s Will Henry! I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.”

His hand was icy cold, though his grip was hard.

“I am John,” he said. “I am so glad to meet you, Will—and I’m
delighted to see you up and about. Pellinore told me you’ve been under the weather.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“And now you’re feeling much better.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Glad to hear it!” His eyes had lost their yellow hue. The last time I had looked into those eyes, they’d seemed to burn with golden fire.

“You look just like him,” Chanler said softly. “Your father. The resemblance is remarkable.”

“You knew my father?” I asked.

“Oh, everyone knew James Henry. He was practically attached to Warthrop’s hip. A terrible loss, Will. I am sorry.”

In the awkward silence that ensued, we stared at each other across a space that felt far greater than the few feet that separated us. There was an odd blankness about him, a flatness to his inflection, like a poor actor reading from a script, or like the parroting of words in a language he did not comprehend.

“Will Henry,” the doctor said. “John wanted to thank you.”

“Yes! Pellinore tells me your services were indispensable to my rescue.”

“It was Dr. Warthrop,” I said quickly. “He rescued you from Jack Fiddler and he carried you, sir; he carried you all the way. For miles and miles he carried you—”

“Will Henry,” the doctor said. He shook his head slightly and mouthed the word “no.”

“Well! You
are
your father’s son, William James Henry!
Glad to be of service, honored to be in his august company, et cetera, et cetera.” He turned to my master. “What is this magic you work on underlings, Pellinore? Why can’t they see you for the irascible old mossback you are?”

“Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my company happens to
be
august.”

Chanler laughed, producing a rattle deep in his chest. He wiped the resulting spittle from his chin with the back of his hand.

“That was my chief mistake,” he said. “I should have brought you with me on the expedition, Pellinore.”

“I would have refused.”

“Even for old times’ sake?”

“Even for that, John.”

“It doesn’t matter that I failed, you know. The old man won’t give it up.”

“I’m prepared to deal with von Helrung.”

“You know who’s to blame for all this, don’t you? That damned Irishman Stokely.”

“Stokely? Who is he?”

“Or Stockman . . . Stickler . . . Stoker . . . Stocker? Oh, I don’t know what’s the matter; got moss on the brain or something. His first name is Abraham, but he doesn’t go by that.”

“I’ve never heard the name—or any variant of it. Is he a monstrumologist?”

“Good God, no. He’s in the theater. The theater, Pellinore!
Met the old man through his patron, that British actor—Harold Lerner—is that it?”

Warthrop was shaking his head. “I’ve no idea, John.”

“He’s very famous. Been knighted by the queen and everything. Over here on a tour last year and . . . Henry! That’s the first name. Sir Henry—”

“Irving?”

“That’s it! Sir Henry Irving. Stickman is his personal clerk or something. Sir Henry introduced him to von Helrung, and ever since the two have been as thick as two peas in a pod.”

“Thieves,” the doctor said. “The expression is as ‘thick as thieves.’”

“Yes, I know that.” Chanler’s face darkened. “I misspoke, professor. Thank you so much for correcting me, though.” He looked at me. “He does it to you, too; you don’t have to tell me.”

“So this personal secretary of Sir Henry convinced von Helrung of the Wendigo’s existence?” Warthrop seemed dubious.

“Did I say that? You aren’t listening to me. A vain man has no room in his head for the thoughts of others—remember that, little Bill! No, I don’t think Stockman knows a Wendigo from a Welshman—but he’s positively obsessed with all things monstrumological—even wants to write a book about it!”

The doctor’s eyebrow rose. “A book?”

“He’s an aspiring
novelist, too. Fixated on the occult, native superstitions, that sort of thing.”

“None of which has anything to do with monstrumology.”

“That’s what I told the old man! But he’s slowing down; you know he’s been slipping over the past couple of years. And this Stroker won’t leave him in peace. Back in England now and writing letter after letter, forwarding von Helrung what he called ‘eyewitness accounts,’ excerpts from personal diaries and such, some of which von Helrung showed me. I told him, ‘You can’t trust this man. He’s in the
theater.
He’s a
writer
. He’s making it up.’ Well, the old man won’t listen. Goes off and writes this damn paper to present to the congress and asks me to head up here—because proof of
one
lends credence to the existence of the
other
.”

“The other,” echoed the doctor.

“Nosferatu. The vampire. That damned Irishman’s pet project.”

“So
Meister
Abram sends you to bag its North American equivalent,” Warthrop said. “Utter folly, John. Why did you agree to it?”

Chanler looked away. He did not answer for a moment. When he did, it was with a voice so soft I could hardly hear him.

“That is none of your business.”

“You could have turned him down without hurting him.”

The bulbous head whipped toward him; veins popped in the spindly neck; and John Chanler’s eyes burned with anger.

“Don’t preach to me about
hurt
, Pellinore Warthrop.
You have no concept of the word. What did you ever care about his feelings—or anyone’s? When did you
ever
shed a tear for another human being? I challenge you to name one time in your miserable little life when you gave a damn about anyone but yourself.”

“I shouldn’t have to,” returned my master calmly. He did not appear fazed by this vehement outburst. “Least of all with you, John.”

“Oh,
that
. What a hypocrite you are, Warthrop. You must be a hypocrite; you’re too intelligent for any other explanation. Throwing yourself into that river was the ultimate act of vanity and self-centeredness. ‘Woe is me, poor tragic Pellinore!’ Pitiful! I wish you had drowned.”

The doctor refused to rise to the bait. “You have been through a terrible ordeal,” he said gently. “I understand you are not yourself, but I pray in time you’ll see your anger is misdirected, John. I am not the one who sent you here; I am the one who brought you out.”

I thought of him crashing to the frozen ground, Chanler cradled in his arms, and the wild look in his eyes when Hawk tried to help him with his burden—the revolver inches from Hawk’s face—and his broken cry so pitiably small in the unforgiving desolation:
No one touches him but me!

“One and the same,” whispered his friend cryptically. “One and the same.”

Before Warthrop could ask the meaning of this remark, a knock came upon the door. The doctor stiffened at the
sound and briefly closed his eyes, breathing to himself, “We have stayed too long.”

Muriel Chanler stepped into the room, seeing Warthrop first and saying to him, “Where is John?”

Then she saw him, huddled in the little chair, a man who appeared twice as old as when she’d seen him last, pale and shriveled, ground down by the wilderness and the exorbitant cost of desire. She gave an involuntary gasp; her eyes welled with tears.

Chanler tried to rise, failed, tried again. He rocked unsteadily upon his feet. He seemed taller than I remembered.

“Here I am,” he croaked.

She hurried toward him, slowed, stopped. She touched his cheek tenderly. The moment was heartrending and intensely private. I looked away—toward the author of the play, who had endured the unendurable so he might stage this scene—the woman he loved in the arms of another man.

“John?” she asked, as if she could not quite believe it.

“Yes,” he lied. “It’s me.”

“We Should Be Honest with Each Other”

We saw them to the depot. As the porter was helping her husband board their private car, Muriel laid her hand upon the doctor’s arm.

“Thank you,” she said.

He eased his arm away. “It was for John,” he said.

“You thought he was dead.”

“Yes. You were right and I was wrong, Muriel. See to it he’s looked after; he is far from recovered.”

“Of course I will.” Her eyes flashed. “I have every hope in
his
recovery.”

She bade me good-bye. “I kept my promise, Will.”

“Promise, ma’am?”

“I prayed for you.” She glanced at the doctor. “
Half
of it was answered, at least—you’re not dead.”

“Not yet,” said Warthrop. “Give it time.”

I wasn’t sure,
but it appeared she was fighting back a smile.

“Will I see you in New York?” she asked him.

“I will be in New York,” he said.

Now she did laugh, and it was like rain after a long, dry season.

The locomotive’s whistle shrieked. Black smoke belched from the stack.

“Your train is leaving,” the monstrumologist pointed out.

We remained on the empty platform until the train was well out of sight. The first stars were coming out. A loon cried mournfully against the dying of the light. The onset of darkness made me shiver more than the cold. Though miles from it, I was still very close to that spot where a man lay broken in half beneath the frozen ground.

“When will we be going home, sir?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” he answered.

I’d never been so happy to see that old house on Harrington Lane. I fairly bounded from our hansom when we pulled up, and kneeling to kiss the doormat would not have been out of keeping with my joy upon finding myself there. It seemed nothing short of miraculous. How I had hated that house—and now how I loved every single creaky old inch of it! Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it—I think the monstrumologist would have agreed with that.

I would have never left it again, but the packing began first thing the following morning. In the afternoon there were errands to run—to the post office, the Western Union office, the laundry shop, the tailor’s, and last, but certainly not least, the baker’s for a basket of raspberry scones. The doctor, it appeared, had missed his scones the most. He worked late into the evening practicing his presentation, assuming—he was Pellinore Warthrop, after all—the absolute worst case. Despite his lack of an actual physical specimen, von Helrung would proceed to argue for the inclusion of
Lepto lurconis
and its myriad mythological cousins in the monstrumological canon.

The night before our departure for New York, a very odd thing happened—practically the oddest thing to happen between us up to that point. I was drifting off to sleep when his head popped through the little trapdoor to my alcove and, with an uncharacteristic chagrined expression, he softly asked if I was awake.

“Yes, sir,” I replied. I sat up and lit the lamp beside the bed. In its glow the doctor’s face seemed to float against the backdrop of profound darkness. I was a bit unnerved, to be honest, for in our history he had never come to my bedside in the middle of the night. It was always I who was summoned to his.

“Can’t sleep either, then?” He sat at the foot of the bed. He looked about the tiny space, as if he, who had grown up in this house, had never seen it before. “You know, you might
consider moving into one of the bedrooms on the second floor, Will Henry.”

“I like it up here, sir.”

“Do you? Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess I feel more . . . safe here.”

“Safe? Safe from what?”

He looked away. He did not seem to be waiting for an answer to his question, though he did seem to be waiting for something. What was it? Why had he come like this? It was not in his character.

“I spent many hours in this room when I was a child,” he said, gently breaking the silence. “Our past dictates our perceptions, Will Henry. I could never associate this room with safety.”

“Why?”

“I was quite sickly as a child—one of the reasons, though not the chief reason, my father sent me away. To ‘toughen you up a bit,’ were his words. Every time I fell ill, and that was often, I was banished to this attic, lest my contagion run through the entire household. . . .” He was staring through the little window over my head, to the glistening stars beyond.

“My mother died when I was ten; I believe I have told you that. Consumption. My father, though he never said it outright, blamed me. From the hour of her death, my days in this house were numbered. He withdrew from me and, although we shared the same rooms and supped at the same
table, I was abandoned—as he was—both of us wrapped within the cocoon of our grief. He threw himself into his work—and threw me onto a boat to England. I would not see him again for almost fifteen years.”

I tried to think of something that would comfort him. “I’m sorry, sir” was the best I could muster.

He frowned. “I am not seeking pity, Will Henry. I was discussing how our perceptions are shaped by our individual experience, thus calling into question the whole notion of objective truth. We cannot trust our perceptions—that is my point.”

He abruptly cut short the lecture, looking away again, considering, by all appearances, the blank wall opposite the bed.

“I spent untold days up here, wracked with fevers and coughs, while upon the street below I could hear the laughter of the neighborhood children, their joy a cruelty I could hardly bear.”

He shook his head sharply, as if to rid himself of the memory.

“The other difficulty with our perceptions,” he continued at length in that maddeningly dry lecturing tone he often put on with me, “is our tendency to project them upon others. This room has unpleasant connotations for me and so I attribute the feeling to the room itself and am puzzled when you do not feel the same way.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What
have I told you about the incessant ‘yes, sir’s, Will Henry? It is sycophantic and demeaning to both of us.”