The Monstrumologist (4 page)

Though it lacked a head, the
Anthropophagus
was not missing a mouth. Or teeth. The orifice was shaped like a shark’s, and the teeth were equally sharklike: triangular, serrated, and milky white, arranged in rows that marched toward the front of the mouth from the inner, unseen cavity of its throat. The mouth itself lay just below the enormous muscular chest, in the region between the pectorals and the groin. It had no nose that I could see, though it had not been blind in life: Its eyes (of which I confess I had seen only one) were located on the shoulders, lidless and completely black.

“Snap to, Will Henry!” the doctor called. I was taking too long to steel myself. “Roll the tray closer to the table; you’ll wear yourself out trotting back and forth.”

When the tray and I were in position, he reached out his hand, and I smacked the chisel into his palm. He slipped the instrument a few inches into the monster’s mouth and pushed upward, using the chisel as a pry bar to spread the jaws.

“Forceps!”

I slapped them into his free hand and watched as they entered the fang-encrusted maw … deeper, then deeper still, until the doctor’s entire hand disappeared. The muscles of his forearm bulged as he rotated his wrist, exploring the back of the thing’s throat with the tips of the forceps. Sweat
shone on his forehead. I patted it dry with a bit of gauze.

“Would have dug a breathing hole—so it didn’t suffocate,” he muttered. “No visible wounds … deformities … outward sign of trauma… . Ah!” His arm became still. His shoulder jerked as he pulled on the forceps. “Stuck tight! I’ll need both hands. Take the chisel and pull back, Will Henry. Use both hands if you must, like this. Don’t let it slip, now, or I shall lose
my
hands. Yes, that’s it. Good boy. Ahhhh!”

He fell away from the table, left hand flailing to regain his balance, in his right the forceps, and in the forceps, a tangled strand of pearls, stained pink with blood. Finding his balance, the monstrumologist held high his hard-won prize.

“I knew it!” he cried. “Here is our culprit, Will Henry. He must have torn it off her neck in his frenzy. It lodged in his throat and choked him to death.”

I let go the chisel, stepped back from the table, and stared at the crimson strand dangling from the doctor’s hand. Light danced off its coating of blood and gore, and I felt the very air tighten around me, refusing to fully fill my lungs. My knees began to give way. I sank onto the stool, struggling to breathe. The doctor remained oblivious to my condition. He dropped the necklace into a tray and called for the scissors.
To the devil with him,
I thought.
Let him fetch his own scissors.
He called again, his back to me, hand outstretched, bloody fingers flexing and curling. I rose from the stool with a shuddering sigh and pressed the scissors into his hand.

“A singular curiosity,” he muttered as he cut down the
center of the girl’s burial gown. “
Anthropophagi
are not native to the Americas. Northern and western Africa, the Caroli Islands, but not here. Never here!”

Gingerly, almost tenderly, he parted the material, exposing the girl’s perfect alabaster skin.

Dr. Warthrop pressed the end of his stethoscope upon her belly and listened intently as he slowly moved the instrument toward her chest, then down again, across her belly button, until, back where he began, he paused, eyes closed, barely breathing. He remained frozen this way for several seconds. The silence was thundering.

Finally he tugged the ’scope from his ears. “As I suspected.” He gestured toward the worktable. “An empty jar, Will Henry. One of the big ones.”

He directed me to remove the lid and place the open container on the floor beside him.

“Hold on to the lid, Will Henry,” he instructed. “We must be quick about this. Scalpel!”

He bent to his work. Should I confess that I looked away? That I could not will my eyes to remain upon that glittering blade as it sliced into her flawless flesh? For all my desire to please and impress him with my steely resolve as a good foot soldier in the service of science, nothing could bring me to watch what came next.

“They are not natural scavengers,” he said. “
Anthropophagi
prefer fresh kill, but there are drives even more powerful than hunger, Will Henry. The female can breed, but
she cannot bear. She lacks a womb, you see, for that location of her anatomy is given to another, more vital organ: her brain… . Here, take the scalpel.”

I heard a soft squish as he plunged his fist into the incision. His right shoulder rotated as his fingers explored inside the young girl’s torso.

“But nature is ingenious, Will Henry, and marvelously implacable. The fertilized egg is expelled into her mate’s mouth, where it rests in a pouch located along his lower jaw. He has two months to find a host for their offspring, before the fetus bursts from its protective sac and he swallows it or chokes upon it… . Ah, this must be it. Ready now with the lid.”

His body tensed, and all became still for a moment. Then with a single dramatic flourish, he yanked from the split-open stomach a squirming mass of flesh and teeth, a doll-size version of the beast curled about the girl, encased in a milky white sac that burst open as the thing inside fought against the doctor’s grasp, spewing a foul-smelling liquid that soaked his coat and splattered around his rubber boots. He nearly dropped it, holding it against his chest while it twisted and flailed its tiny arms and legs, its mouth, armed with tiny razor-sharp teeth, snapping and spitting.

“The jar!” he cried. I slid it toward his feet. He dropped the thing into the container, and I did not need his urging to slap on the lid.

“Screw it tight, Will Henry!” he gasped. He was covered head to toe in the blood-flecked goop, the smell of it
more pungent than that of the rotting flesh upon the table. The tiny
Anthropophagus
flipped and smacked inside the jar, smearing the glass with amniotic fluid, clawing at its prison with needle-size fingernails, mouth working furiously in the middle of its chest, like a landed fish gasping upon the shore. Its mewling cries of shock and pain were loud enough to penetrate the thick glass, a haunting, inhuman sound that I am doomed to remember to my last day.

Dr. Warthrop picked up the jar and placed it on the workbench. He soaked some cotton in a mixture of halothane and alcohol, dropped it into the jar, and screwed the lid back on. The infant monster attacked the cotton, stripping the fibers apart with its little teeth and swallowing chunks of it whole. Its aggression hastened the effects of the euthanizing agent: In less than five minutes the unholy spawn was dead.

Stopping only twice—for another cup of tea around three a.m. and to relieve his bladder near four—the monstrumologist worked through the night and well into the next day, though with noticeably less urgency after the abortion of the abominable creature growing inside the young woman’s corpse.

“Upon reaching full term,” he explained to me in a dry, lecturing tone, which somehow made the topic more horrific, “the infant
Anthropophagus
bursts from its amniotic sac and immediately begins to feed upon the host, until nothing is left except bones, and those he drills into by means of his needlelike teeth—to suck out the nutrient-rich marrow. Unlike
Homo
sapiens,
Will Henry, the
Anthropophagi
develop teeth before practically anything else.”

We had separated the bodies with no small effort, for the beast had sunk its two-inch claws completely into its victim. The doctor pulled them out, one rigid digit at a time, using the chisel as a pry bar.

“Note how the claws are barbed,” he pointed out. “Like a whaling hook or the forelegs of a praying mantis. Feel the tip, Will Henry—carefully! It is as sharp as a hypodermic and as hard as diamonds. The natives of its natural habitat use them for sewing needles and spear tips.”

He pulled the massive arm off the dead girl’s chest.

“Their reach exceeds that of an average man by nearly a foot and a half. Observe how large its hand is.” He placed his own hand, palm to palm, against the monster’s. The creature’s hand engulfed the doctor’s as an adult’s would a child’s. “Like the lion, it uses its claws as its primary form of attack, but, unlike the large mammalian predators, it does not attempt to kill its prey before it begins to feed. More like the shark or an insect, the
Anthropophagus
prefers living flesh.”

It required both of us to drag its leg off the girl. A bit breathless from the effort, the doctor said, “They possess the largest Achilles tendons known to primates, enabling them to leap astonishing distances, up to forty feet… . Note the heavy musculature of the calves and quadriceps… . Careful now, Will Henry, or he’ll roll off on us.”

He directed me to clear a space on the worktable. He took the shoulders of the girl, I took the legs, and together we moved her corpse. She was so light she seemed to weigh
no more than a bird. He folded her arms across her chest and gathered the gown around her violated torso. “Fetch a clean sheet, Will Henry,” he instructed me, and then he covered her. We stood for a moment before the shrouded figure, neither of us speaking.

At last he sighed. “Well, she is free of it now. If there is any mercy in this, Will Henry, she did not suffer. She did not suffer.”

He clapped his hands and turned away, his melancholy vanishing in a wink as he strode back to the examining table, eager to continue his communion with the creature. We pulled it to the center of the table and rolled it onto its back. The black, lidless eyes on its shoulders and the yawning fang-crowded maw in its chest reminded me more than anything of a shark. Its skin was as pale as a shark’s underbelly as well, and, for the first time, I noticed the thing was completely hairless, a fact that amplified its nightmarish appearance.

“Like the lion, they are nocturnal hunters,” the doctor said, as if he had somehow read my thoughts. “Thus the oversize eyes and the complete absence of melanin in the upper dermis. Also like
Panthera leo
—and
Canis lupus—
they are communal hunters.”

“‘Communal,’ sir?”

“They hunt in packs.”

He snapped his fingers, called for a fresh scalpel, and the necropsy began in earnest. While he carved up the beast, I
was kept busy, taking dictation, handing him instruments, and scurrying from cupboard to table and back again, filling empty specimen jars with formaldehyde, into which he dropped the organs. Out came one of its eyes, the optic nerves dangling like twisted rope from the back. He pointed out the monster’s ears: five-inch-long slits located on either side of its waist, just above the hips.

Then Warthrop opened the chest, just above the leering mouth, using the rib-spreaders to make room for his hand to retrieve the liver, the spleen, the heart, and the lungs, grayish white and oblong like deflated footballs. All the while he continued his lecture, interrupting himself from time to time to dictate measurements and describe the conditions of the various organs.

“The lack of follicles is curious, not something that appears in any of the literature… . The eye measures nine-point-seven centimeters by seven-point-three centimeters, perhaps owing to their natural habitat. They did not evolve in temperate climes.”

He made an incision a few inches above the monster’s groin, plunged both hands into the cavity, and pulled out the brain. It was smaller than I expected it to be, about the size of an orange. He placed it on the scale, and I recorded the weight in the little notebook.

Well
, thought I.
That’s good at least. With a brain this small, they can’t be very smart.

Again, as if he possessed the ability to read my thoughts,
he said, “Probably the mental capacity of a two-year-old, Will Henry. Somewhere between an ape and a chimpanzee. Though they lack tongues, they can communicate through grunts and gestures, much like their primate cousins, albeit with much less benign intent.”

I stifled a yawn. I wasn’t bored; I was exhausted. The sun had long since risen, but in this windowless room reeking of death and the acidic stench of chemicals, it was endless night.

The doctor showed no signs of fatigue, however. I had seen him like this before, when the fever of his peculiar passion was upon him. He ate very little, slept even less, all his powers of concentration, which was as formidable as any man’s I have ever encountered, focused on the task at hand. Days would pass, a week, a fortnight, without a shave or a bath; he could not even spare a moment to comb his hair or don a fresh shirt, until, for want of food and rest, he began to resemble one of his macabre specimens: bloodshot eyes sunk deep in their sockets, ringed in black; skin the color of coal dust; clothes hanging loosely from his emaciated frame. Inevitably, as night follows day, the flame of his passion would at last exhaust the fuel of his mind and body, and he would collapse, taking to his bed like one suffering from a tropical fever, listless and irritable, his depression made all the more striking by the intensity of the mania that preceded it. All day long and well into the night I would be up and down the stairs, fetching food and drink and extra blankets,
putting off callers (“The doctor is ill and can’t see anyone right now”), sitting at his bedside for hours while he bemoaned his fate: His work was for nothing. In a hundred years no one would know his name, recognize his accomplishments, sing his praises. I would try to console him the best I could, assuring him the day would come when his name would be spoken in the same breath as Darwin’s. Often with disdain these childlike attempts at succor were dismissed. “Oh, you’re just a boy. What do you know about anything?” he would answer, turning his head upon the pillow. At other times he would seize my hand, pull me close, look deeply into my eyes, and whisper with frightening intensity, “It is you, Will Henry, you who must carry on my work. I have no family and shall have none. You must be my memory. You must bear the burden of my legacy. Will you promise me that all will not have been in vain?”