How foolish I now felt to have judged the doctor for taking the life of Erasmus Gray. No more absurd or insidious a precept has ever been laid down than “Where there is life, there is hope,” he had averred, and what further proof was required beyond the case of Hezekiah Varner, captain of the doomed Feronia? Life he had, but what hope? His fate was no different from that of the fair virgin thrown into the sacrificial pit of the Oba-nay, it was worse, for that savage feeding frenzy lasted but a few seconds, while the maggots’ endured for weeks. Could any fate be more hopelessly horrifying than that? To be eaten while cognizant of your own consumption? No doubt Erasmus would have begged as Varner did, Kill me, and, no doubt, as the doctor had said, he would have thanked him if he could.
It came as a surprise, then, when the doctor opened the door-his long shadow thrown by the lamplight across the floor and up the opposite wall-lowered himself beside me to assume a similar pose of weary resignation, pressed his fists against his black-rimmed eyes, and said, “I cannot do it, Will Henry.”
He laughed humorlessly and added, “I cannot decide which it is, a triumph of will or its failure. Perhaps it is both. You see why I prefer science to morals, Will Henry. What is is. What might be only might be. They allowed him to lie in that bed unmoved until his own weight produced the infected sores into which the flies laid their eggs, and now that infection has reached his bones. He is doomed, Will Henry; there is no hope of recovery.”
“Then why can’t you…?” I whispered.
“Because I do not trust my own motives. I do not know whose hands would hold the pillow, his… or mine.”
He stood up with a rueful shake of his head and bade me rise. “Come, Will Henry. We’ve one final piece of business here. The theme of this affair is shaping up to be one of accounting and recompense. What of the flies indeed! The maggots that feed upon Varner’s body; the worms of doubt and guilt that fed upon my father’s soul. There are monsters like the Anthropophagi, and then there are the monsters of a more banal bent. What is still is, Will Henry, and will always be!”
He strode down the hall without a backward glance. I scurried after him, light-headed with relief that our sojourn there was nearing its end. Down the long hall, in which even at this late hour rang the calls and cries, the screeches and screams of the house’s confined “guests,” down the narrow, creaking stairs to the first floor hall, where the dour Mrs. Bratton waited, a splotch of white powder on her hooked, witchlike nose. She had donned both an apron and a pained, unnatural-looking smile.
“Are you finished with the patient, then, Doctor?” she asked.
“I am not finished,” snapped Warthrop. “Though he nearly is. Where is Starr?”
“Dr. Starr has retired for the evening,” she answered stiffly, clearly taking issue with his tone. “It is very late.”
The monstrumologist barked a bitter laugh. “Without a doubt, my good woman! What do you keep here for pain?”
A stern frown, much more natural than her smile, appeared. “For pain, Doctor?”
“Laudanum… or morphine, if you have it.”
She shook her head. “We have aspirin. Or if the patient is particularly uncomfortable, the doctor allows them a sip or two of whiskey.”
“Neither will do much good in this case,” said Warthrop.
“Is he feeling poorly?” wondered she with a perfectly straight face. “He hasn’t complained to me.”
“He will not live out the morrow,” the doctor said, his cheeks flushed. It took every ounce of his inestimable self-control to keep from seizing her by her scrawny neck and throttling her. “Fetch me the whiskey.”
“I can’t do that without the doctor’s approval,” she protested. “And he left strict instructions not to be disturbed.”
“You have my permission to ‘disturb’ him, Mrs. Bratton,” snarled Warthrop. “Or I’ll have the town constable do it for you.”
He turned on his heel and marched back toward the stairs. My heart sank. I thought our stay, like that night, would never end. As we passed the parlor, Warthrop directed me to grab the small rocking chair by the mantel. I followed him up the stairs, lugging the chair.
“The whiskey, Mrs. Bratton!” he shouted over his shoulder. “And a bottle of aspirin!”
We returned to Varner’s room. Warthrop had covered him again, but the smell of human decay still lingered in the air. I placed the chair beside the bed, Warthrop sat down, and the deathwatch began. Mrs. Bratton arrived with the whiskey and the aspirin, refusing to cross the threshold, staring daggers at Warthrop as I took the tray from her.
With casualness bizarre in this dolorous circumstance, she asked, “I’ve baked a batch of cranberry muffins. Would you or your boy care for one, Doctor?”
“No, thank you,” replied the doctor. He swallowed hard. “I’m not hungry.”
“As you like,” she said archly. “Will you be needing anything else, Doctor?”
He ignored her. She glanced at me. I looked away. She left us.
“Close the door, Will Henry,” he said softly. He lifted Varner’s head and slipped four aspirin into his half-open mouth. He pressed the mouth of the bottle against his discolored lips. “Drink, Hezekiah. Drink.”
For the next hour the captain slipped in and out of consciousness, muttering incoherently whether awake or passed out, groaning and sighing, grunting and moaning, eyes, even when closed, ever moving. Dr. Starr never appeared.
“We’ve a Hydra in this affair, Will Henry,” Warthrop said as he stroked Varner’s brow. “For every puzzle solved, two more rise in its place. We now know only two of the creatures were brought to our shores. Given an average birthrate of two offspring per year and accounting for losses owing to accident and disease-and the occasional male lost during the breeding season-it appears both must have survived the grounding of the Feronia, and the pod we encountered is the sole progeny of the original pair. Thirty to thirty-five individuals, then… and no more.”
He sighed. “Which raises the question of why. Why did my father desire more than one? If he wished to study the species, either in the wild or in the captivity of the Benin, why did he not go to Africa himself? My mother was dead; I was away at school in London; there were no ties to keep him in New Jerusalem. He had shown no hesitation in the past to go wherever his inquiries led him, and was no stranger to hazardous expeditions. He wanted living specimens brought here, and he paid a king’s ransom for it. Why?”
He stroked the old man’s brow absently as if his ministrations could coax out the answer. “Why?”
Neither the dying man nor I could offer a plausible explanation: He was unconscious and I had reached the end of my endurance. I sat upon the floor with my back pressed against the wall, unable to stifle my yawns or keep my heavy lids from drooping. The doctor swam in and out of focus, and the sound of his voice receded into the pooling shadows of the little room. The hum of the flies, the captain’s ragged breath, the rhythmic creak of the rocking chair, even the muffled symphony of the afflicted in the hall without-all merged in my ears to a lulling drone. I fell asleep as dawn approached, but not the doctor. With bowed back he bore the burden his father had bequeathed to him. He did not rest; he kept the vigil. Though his body was still, his mind furiously worked on.