The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist, Book 2)

Adolphus, as it turned out, was not in the Lower Monstrumarium that day. His business rarely brought him down there, for he wasn’t a monstrumologist and didn’t consider himself a zookeeper. He was, rather, the curator of the Monstrumarium proper.

Adolphus Ainsworth was a very old man who walked with a cane, the head of which was fashioned from the skull of the extinct Ocelli carpendi, a nocturnal predator about the size of a capuchin monkey, possessing six-inch razor-sharp fangs protruding from its upper jaw and a partiality for the human eyeball (if that of other primates was not available), particularly the eyes of children, which the Ocelli would rip from their sockets while they slept. Adolphus had named the skull Oedipus and thought himself quite clever, despite the inconvenient detail that Oedipus had plucked out his own eyes.

Adolphus Ainsworth was well into his fortieth year underground in that fall of ’88, and the sunless years had taken their toll upon his complexion. His eyes were weak and rheumy, magnified threefold by his thick spectacles, and his coat was threadbare, the sleeves an inch too short and tattered. He trudged about the narrow corridors in a pair of old open-toed slippers, his toenails glimmering like polished bronze in the dim light.

A maxim emerged during his tenure as curator of the Monstrumarium, “You can smell Adolphus coming,” referring to a development or event easily predictable, along the lines of “as surely as night follows day.” The aroma of those subterranean floors—a foul mixture of formaldehyde, mildew, and decomposition—seemed to seep from his very pores. A certain monstrumologist who was close to him politely suggested the smell was being absorbed by his profusive muttonchops, and perhaps he should shave. Adolphus rebuked the man, protesting that, since he was as bald as a billiard ball, he intended to maintain what hair he could, and, moreover, he cared not how badly he smelled.

Though he was well into his eighth decade, his memory was prodigious. A researcher, after hours of wandering through the labyrinthine corridors and claustrophobic dusty chambers housing thousands of samples, his patience tried by the seemingly inchoate system of unmarked drawers and unlabeled crates stacked floor-to-ceiling, would find his complaints answered by a simple question: “Have you asked Adolphus?” Suppose you wished to examine the phalanges of the rare Ice Man of the Svalbard Archipelago. Adolphus would lead you right to its little compartment, indistinguishable from all the others in the cabinet, and would hover about you as you examined it, lest you return it to the wrong place and thus throw off his entire catalogue.

His office was located a floor above us, where he napped behind a desk buried in papers and books and pieces of calcified material that may or may not once have been living. The office itself was as disheveled as he— stacks and stacks of materials occupying every available surface, including most of the floor. A small, winding pathway though the melange afforded the sole artery into his roost.

One floor beneath where he snoozed that rainy November afternoon, Lilly’s lamp supplied what little light there was to navigate the forbidding snarl of dusty narrow halls of the Lower Monstrumarium, with their faint odor of formaldehyde, their patina of dust, and the occasional fitfully waving cobweb.

We came to a juncture of two corridors, and Lilly hesitated, swinging the lamp this way and that, chewing on her bottom lip.

“We’re lost,” I said.

“I thought I told you to be quiet!”

She took the passage to the left and, with little choice in the matter, I followed. She had the only light, after all, and I might have wandered those acheronian halls until I collapsed of exhaustion and died of slow starvation. Presently we came to a door labeled—ominously, I thought—UNCLASSIFIED 101.

“This is it. This is it, Will! Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“I asked for this for my birthday, and instead I got a stupid old book.”

She pushed opened the door, and a very familiar smell charged into the narrow hall. I’d been assaulted by it many times in my service to the monstrumologist—the unmistakable evidence of biological functions—the smell of animal waste and rotting meat.

Lining three walls of the small chamber were steel cages stacked on top of one another, most of which were empty—but for a bit of damp straw and a dry watering dish in each—but a few had occupants that scurried to the comforting shadows of their prisons or pressed their snouts hard against the mesh, slobbering and snarling with bestial rage at our intrusion. What manner of organisms they were, I could not say; the cages were not labeled and I did not possess the entirety of the monstrumological canon inside my head. I saw the flame reflected in furious eyes here, a snatch of fur or scaly hide there, a talon yanking at the steel wire, the tip of a serpentine tongue exploring the latch as if for weakness.

Lilly ignored the clamor and made straight for a table placed against the far wall, upon which sat a rectangular container made of thick glass. She set the lamp down beside it and motioned for me to come closer.

Within the terrarium I spied a three-inch layer of fine sand, a saucer filled with a viscous fluid that resembled blood, and several large rocks—a desert landscape in miniature. I could not see, however, anything living, even after she removed the heavy lid and instructed me to look closely.

“It’s just a baby,” she said, forced by the din to bring her lips to within an inch of my ear. “They grow as big as five feet, Uncle says. That’s it there, that big lump. He likes to do that—bury himself in the sand—if it is a he. Uncle says they’re very rare and worth a great deal of money, especially alive. They don’t do well in captivity. There! Did you see him move? He hears us.” The hidden thing undulated under its blanket of ochre grains.

“What is it?” I breathed.

“Silly, you’re the monstrumologist-in-training. I’ve given you enough clues. It lives in the desert; grows to five feet; very rare; and very valuable. I’ll give you another clue: It’s from the Gobi Desert.”

I shook my head. Her mouth dropped open in astonishment at my ignorance, and she said, “I knew right away what it was, with fewer hints than that, William Henry. You haven’t learned very much under Dr. Warthrop, have you? Either he’s a very bad teacher or you’re a very poor pupil. I know more than you, I’m beginning to think. Uncle says women aren’t allowed into the Society, but I will be. I will be the very first female monstrumologist. What do you think of that? . . . Look! I think he’s poking his snout out.”

Indeed something was emerging from the undulating sand—a quarter-size puckered ring with a pitch-black center, crowding into which appeared to be tiny triangular teeth. It was undoubtedly the creature’s mouth, but that is all I could identify; it had no eyes or nose or any other distinguishing feature, only the little mouth opening and closing like a sucker fish.

“The Mongolians are so frightened of them that even saying their name brings bad luck,” Lilly said. “Since you don’t know, I’ll tell you. It’s an Allghoi khorkhoi.”

She watched my face, waiting for it to light up with the shock of recognition. Ah, of course! The Allghoi khorkhoi. Without thinking it through, still smarting from her disdainful disparagement of the quality of my training, in one of those moments we are doomed to regret, I slapped my forehead hard, as I’d seen the doctor do a thousand times, and cried, “Ah, of course! The Allghoi khorkhoi! I didn’t think of that. They are very rare, so it never occurred to me you might actually have a living specimen! This is really something!”

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “So you have heard of it?”

“Yes, I have. Didn’t I just say so?” I could not meet her gaze, though.

“Would you like to hold it?”

“Hold it?”

“Yes. So we may sex it.”

“Sex it?”

“Why are you repeating everything I say? We have to know if it’s a boy or girl so we can name it. You do know how to sex a khorkhoi, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.” I waved my hand dismissively—again, as I’d observed the doctor do innumerable times— and snorted. “It’s like eating pie.”

“Good!” she cried. “I’ve decided ‘Mildred’ if it’s a girl and ‘Howard’ if it’s a boy. Pick it up, Will, and let’s see.”