Looking up, my own vision clouded by sorrow for his plight and-I confess-for my own, I made out O’Brien glaring down at me, his upper lip twisted into a derisive snarl.
“I hope he hangs for this,” he said.
I looked away, into Malachi’s eyes, red-rimmed and wide open. He whispered, “Did you know too?”
I nodded. Lying, the doctor had taught me, was the worst kind of buffoonery.
“Yes.”
They returned after what seemed like hours, but it could not have been more than a few minutes. All color had drained from Morgan’s owlish face, and his locomotion to the chair into which he carefully lowered himself was reminiscent of the stiff and awkward movements of a shell-shocked soldier. With trembling fingers he packed his pipe, and two attempts it took to light it. Warthrop, too, having so recently teetered upon death’s black abyss, seemed shaken and stunned, the round wound on his forehead caked in dried blood, perfectly centered an inch above his eyes, like the mark of Cain.
“Will Henry,” he said quietly. “Take Malachi upstairs to one of the spare rooms.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied at once. I helped Malachi to his feet, pulling his arm over my shoulders while he leaned against me, and together we shuffled out of the room, my knees nearing buckling under his weight; he was a good head taller than I. Up the stairs I lugged him, and into the nearest bedroom, the room in which the nude body of Alistair Warthrop had been found five years before. I eased him onto the mattress, where he, like the monstrumologist’s father, rolled himself into a miserable ball, until his knees nearly brushed his chin. I closed the door and collapsed into the chair beside the bed to catch my breath.
“I should not have come here,” he said.
I nodded in response to this obvious observation.
“He offered to take me to his house,” he went on, referring to Morgan. “For I have no place else to go.”
“You have no other family?” I asked.
“All my family is dead.”
I nodded again. “I’m sorry, Malachi.”
“You do everything for him, don’t you? Even apologize.”
“He didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“He did nothing. He knew and he did nothing. Why do you defend him, Will? Who is he to you?”
“It isn’t that,” I said. “It’s what I am to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am his assistant,” I said not without a touch of pride. “Like my father. After he… after the fire, the doctor took me in.”
“He adopted you?”
“He took me in.”
“Why did he do that? Why did he take you in?”
“Because there was no one else.”
“No,” he said. “That is not what I meant. Why did he choose to take you in?”
“I don’t know,” I said, a bit taken aback. The question had never occurred to me. “I never asked him. I suppose he felt it was the right thing to do.”
“Because of your father’s service?”
I nodded. “My father loved him.” I cleared my throat. “He is a great man, Malachi. It is…” And now my father’s oft-spoken words fell from my lips, “It is an honor to serve him.”
I attempted to excuse myself. My avowal had reminded me of my place by the doctor’s side. Malachi reacted as if I had threatened to throttle him. He grabbed my wrist and begged me not to go, and in the end I could not refuse him. My failure was not entirely owing to a congenital curse (it seemed my lot in life to sit at the bedsides of troubled people); it resulted too from the painful memory of another bereft boy who lay comfortless in a strange bed night after night, consigned to a little alcove, set aside and forgotten for hours, like an unwanted heirloom bequeathed by a distant relation, too vulgar to display but too valuable to discard. There were times, in the beginning of my service to the monstrumologist, when I was certain he must have heard my keening wails long into the night-heard them, and did nothing. He rarely brought up my parents or the night they died. When he did, it was usually to chastise me, as he had the night we’d returned from the cemetery: Your father would have understood.
So I remained a few minutes more with him, sitting on the edge of Alistair Warthrop’s deathbed, holding Malachi’s hand. Clearly he was exhausted from his ordeal, and I urged him to rest, but he wanted to know everything. How had we discovered the creatures that had overcome his family? What had the doctor done in the interim, between the time of our discovery and the attack? I told him of the midnight visit of Erasmus Gray with his nightmarish cargo, of our expedition to the cemetery and the mad flight that followed, of our sojourn in Dedham and the tale of Hezekiah Varner. I omitted the elder Warthrop’s involvement in the coming of the Anthropophagi to New Jerusalem, but stressed Warthrop’s innocence in the matter as well as his efforts to answer the critical questions presented by their presence. Malachi seemed little satisfied with my defense of the doctor.
“If a rabid hound runs amok, what fool looks instead for the creature that made it sick?” he asked. “Shoot the hound first, and then find the source of its madness if you must.”
“He thought we had time-”
“Well, he was wrong, wasn’t he? And now my family is dead. Me, too, Will,” he added matter-of-factly, without a shred of self-pity or melodrama. “I am dead too. I feel your hand; I see you sitting there; I breathe. But inside there is nothing.”
I nodded. How well I understood! I gave his hand a squeeze.
“It will get better,” I assured him. “It did for me. It will never be the same, but it will get better. And I promise you the doctor will kill these things, down to the last one.”
Malachi slowly shook his head, his eyes ablaze. “He is your master and rescued you from the bleak life of the orphanage,” he whispered. “I understand, Will. You feel bound to excuse and forgive him, but I cannot excuse and I will not forgive this… this… What did you say he was?”
“A monstrumologist.”