The Isle of Blood (Monstrumologist)

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“She said it would bring me luck.”

“Ah. Luck. Then, you did know why she gave it to you.”

“I don’t like her very much.”

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Can I have it back now?” I asked.

“You mean ‘May I have it back now.’”

“May I?”

“Have you fallen in love, Will Henry?”

?That’s stupid.”

“What is? Love or my question?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’ve tried that trick once. Why do you suppose it will work better the second time?”

“I don’t love her. She bothers me.”

“You have just defined the very thing you denied.”

He stared at her face in the photograph with a curious expression, the naturalist stumbling upon a strange new species.

“Well, she is pretty, I suppose,” he said. “And you are getting older, and there are some contagions for which we will never find a cure.”

He handed the photograph back to me. “I told you once never to fall in love. Do you think that was wise advice or self-serving manipulation?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “I don’t either.”

Kearns returned at dusk with a fresh catch of camel spiders and a chip on his shoulder. For Kearns, he was downright sullen.

“Bagged only three today,” he said. “This isn’t a hunt; it’s a turkey shoot.”

“Except they are not turkeys and we are not hunting them,” replied the doctor. “We are ending their agony and preventing the spread of a deadly disease.”

“Oh, you’re always desperate to be so bloody noble.” Kearns glanced at me. “Are you cured?”

“It appears so,” Warthrop answered for me. He preferred to limit Kearns’s interaction with me, as if he feared an altogether different sort of contagion.

“Then, shouldn’t we be using what you have to cure them and not be slaughtering them like cows?”

“Human beings are not cows,” retorted the doctor, echoing his old master. “I’ve only two vials of sera. These vials must be preserved in order to replicate the antidote.”

“You realize you are talking out of both sides of your mouth, Pellinore. You didn’t worry about preserving the antidote when it came to your assistant here.”

“And you really should avoid mimicking the voice of conscience, Kearns. It rings hollow, like someone attempting to speak in a language he does not understand.”

Smiling mischievously, Kearns stuffed a whole spider into his mouth. The monstrumologist turned his head away in disgust.

The doctor had designed a brutally efficient protocol to finish the grisly work of eradicating the magnificum from the island. We set up camp at a spot that provided good cover and some shelter from the elements, a few hundred feet below the clouds that enveloped the nesting grounds. We kept our quarry’s hours, sleeping by day and luring them into the killing zone by night.

Fire was our bait. It drew them in, and Warthrop and Kearns would hide behind an outcropping or a boulder and pick them off as they crept into the circle of light. The bodies from the night before were used for fuel for the next night’s fire.

It was grim, grisly work. There was no thrill of the chase, no near brushes with death. There was just death.

This was the somber side of monstrumology, heroism of the grittiest kind, the labor in darkness that the rest might live in the light. It began to take its toll on my master. He stopped eating. He slept only a few minutes at a stretch, and then would be up again, staring into the distance with eyes that had taken on a desperate, haunted look, like a man caught between two unthinkable alternatives.

Kearns was not faring much better. He complained constantly that he still had not found his Minotaur and this was far from the epic quest he had envisioned.

“Come now, Pellinore. Surely we could make this more fun,” he said late one night. Not a single victim had wandered into our trap. “We could split up—make a game of it. Whoever bags the most wins the prize.”