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

FOUR

“He Was My Best Friend, and How I Hated Him!”

We embarked upon our impromptu rescue mission the following morning—to a place that has now vanished from the earth.

Seventeen years after our expedition to that rough-and-tumble outpost on Canada’s western frontier, the town of Rat Portage merged with two sister settlements named Keewatin and Norman, each lending the first two letters of its name to the new incorporation: Ke-No-Ra. The change was brought about by the refusal of the Maple Leaf Flour Company to build in Rat Portage, fearing that the word “rat” on its bags might depress sales.

Situated on the north shore of Lake of the Woods near the border of Ontario and Manitoba, the area around modern-day Kenora was known in the native tongue as Wauzhushk Onigum—literally the “portage to the country of the muskrat,” from which Rat Portage derived its name. Today the town is a mecca for sportsmen; in 1888, the hunting was of a different sort entirely. Gold had been discovered ten years before, transforming the sleepy little village into a bustling boomtown of swindlers and speculators, starry-eyed fortune seekers, and desperadoes of every stripe, with the occasional bandit, cutthroat, and scallywag thrown into the mix. Even the ladies of the town, it was said, dared not venture onto the boardwalk unarmed.

Thank goodness for the gold, though! If it had not been discovered, our journey to the edge of the vast Canadian wilderness would have taken weeks. As it was, by the time of our expedition, the gold had transformed Rat Portage into a major distribution and supply hub of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Our journey took only three days, and those were spent in luxury aboard a well-appointed Pullman sleeper.

The doctor, expecting no end of hardship at the journey’s end, spared no comfort during the journey itself. Three copious meals each day, a pot of tea and a platter of scones in the afternoons, and between times candies and mints and all the salted peanuts he could eat, and Warthrop could eat quite a lot of them. He slept more soundly than I had ever witnessed at Harrington Lane. In fact, the teeth-jarring resonance of his snoring kept me up most nights well into the indecent hours.

But I hardly minded. For the first time in my life, I had left behind the quaint confines of the Massachusetts countryside on an adventure of wondrous promise. What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet? It called to me with thrice the urgency of a thousand “snap to!”s in a language unspoken by any human tongue but apprehended by every human heart. It made all things bearable, even the monstrumologist’s insistence that we dress each night for dinner, and the globs upon globs of philocome he applied to my hair in a vain attempt to plaster my multitudinous cowlicks.

It was the first time I had witnessed him take the slightest care in his appearance. Even to this day, when he has been forty years in the grave, when I picture the monstrumologist, I see him in that tattered old smock smeared with the blood and dried viscera of his latest “curiosity,” his hair swirled into tempestuous confusion, his cheeks dotted with three-day-old stubble, his nails cracked and encrusted with gore. It was startling and oddly disconcerting to see him wearing a high collar and a fashionable cravat, freshly shaven and washed, his nails neatly trimmed, his black hair glistening, its waves tamed and swept back from his strong brow.

I was not the only one who took note of this remarkable transformation. At dinner service I saw women glance at him or offer a smile as we made our way to the table. This was every bit as vexing as his transformation. Women were fascinated by—nay, one might even say attracted to—Pellinore Warthrop! Some would even blush or—more horrifying still—smile and attempt to flirt with him. Flirt—with the monstrumologist!

Of course Warthrop, being Warthrop, ignored these coquettish advances, or rather, he seemed oblivious to them, which, naturally, made him all the more intriguing. I’d always thought him more cold stone than flesh and blood, and these shy smiles, these glancing looks, these blushing cheeks—I simply did not know what to make of them.

“The conclusion is unavoidable. After three months, he must be dead,” the doctor opined abruptly while we enjoyed the final evening service, his face turned toward the large window beside our table. Night had fallen, and the landscape was obscured by our reflections; I could not tell if he was looking beyond his own face in the glass. “More a recovery than a rescue, and there’s small hope of even that, since the failure of professionals practically ensures our own.”

“Then, why are we going?” I asked.

He turned from the window and stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment.

“Because he was my friend.”

Later that evening, as we lay in our bunks and the train’s lulling motion and the lullaby of her wheels eased us toward slumber, he spoke up suddenly, as if no time had passed since the onset of the conversation.

“I was an only child like you, Will Henry, but in John Chanler I found the closest thing I would ever have to a brother. We lived together for six years under the tutelage of von Helrung, sharing the same room, eating the same meals, reading the same books—but in nearly every other aspect we were complete opposites. Where I was retiring and somewhat sickly, John was outgoing and quite the athlete—an accomplished boxer with whom I made the mistake of picking a fight; he broke my nose and fractured my left cheek before Meister Abram pulled us apart.

“We came to monstrumology by different routes. He loved the sport of it, the thrill of the chase, whereas I was drawn to it for more complicated reasons, many of which you already know. John’s father was no scientist and was appalled when he applied to apprentice under von Helrung. The Chanlers are one of the wealthiest families on the East Coast, his father a friend to presidents and men such as Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Astor. John was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, and, to my knowledge, he has never been forgiven for his recalcitrance. I don’t know for certain, but I believe his father may have disowned him. Not that John cared. He seemed to delight in defying the expectations of others.”

He fell silent. After a time I thought he must have fallen asleep, and then suddenly he spoke again.

“He loved practical jokes, particularly at my expense. You may be surprised to hear this, but the Warthrops have always been known for their lack of humor; it’s a sort of congenital defect. In his lifetime I heard my father laugh only once, and that politely. It delighted John to short-sheet my bed or dip my hand in warm water as I slept. Once he drained the blood from the carcass of a Tanzanian Ngoloko we were to dissect the next day and placed the pail on top of the door going into our room. Well, you can guess what happened. He put sealing wax in the earpieces of my stethoscope; he mixed dried feces in my tooth powder; and, in one memorably unfortunate incident, right before I was to take my final exams before the entire governing board of the Society, he laced my tea with an extract of dried beans heavy in oligosaccharides, a sugar that most human beings—including me—cannot digest, causing excessive bloating and, at least in my case, explosive gas. I literally farted my way through the entire dissertation, and the tears that flowed from every eye had little to do with the profundity of my presentation. The hall seemed larger than the Metropolitan Opera house when I entered. By the time I left, it seemed as cramped as a water closet, and was just as odiferous. . . . What is that sound, Will Henry? Are you laughing?”

“No, sir,” I managed to gasp.

“I hated John Chanler,” he said. “He was my best friend, and how I hated him!”

We arrived in Rat Portage the next morning under a cloudless sapphire sky, with a biting north wind at our backs that ruffled the surface of Lake of the Woods like the invisible hand of a giant baby splashing its bathwater. Fishing boats bobbed upon the chop, loons dove and splashed in their wake, and I spied a steamboat chugging along the far southern shore, a bald eagle soaring high above its billowing stacks.

A wiry lad of native descent wearing a buckskin jacket and beaver hat popped out from the milling crowd and offered in broken English to tote our bags to the hotel for twenty-five cents. His offer inaugurated a prolonged negotiation. Like many of substantial means, Warthrop was tighter than a clam. I had witnessed him dicker for an hour to save a penny on a two-day-old loaf of bread. Add to this his native distrust of his fellow man’s honesty—he never could shake the suspicion that he was being cheated—and a simple transaction that should have lasted no more than a minute could stretch out to seventy times that. By the end of their prolonged dickering—offer and