The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist) Read Online Free

Pellinore Warthrop so I might share in the “great business” and see with my own eyes “wonders only poets can imagine.” What I saw in those first few months was neither great nor wonderful. I did, however, get a taste of those fires of hell itself.
    It always came just as I was finally falling into a fitful slumber. After hours of my wailing in the utter dark, knowing that when I did fall asleep, exhausted from my inexhaustible grief, I would watch once more my parents dance in the flames—always in that moment, as if he knew somehow, and sometimes I was sure he did, the cry would come, highand shrill and filled with terror: Will Henry! Will Henreeeee!
    And down I would climb into the darkened hall and stumble bleary-eyed to his room.
    “There you are!” A match sparked; he lit the lamp beside the bed. “What? Why are you staring at me like that? Didn’t your parents teach you it was impolite?”
    “Is there something you want, sir?”
    “Why, no, I don’t want anything. Why do you ask?” He flicked his finger at the chair by the bed. I sank into it, my head pounding, loose upon my shoulders. “What is the matter with you? You look terrible. Are you sick? James never mentioned that you were a sickly child. Are you sickly?”
    “Not that I know of, sir.”
    “Not that you know of? Wouldn’t that be something even a simpleton would know? How old are you, anyway?”
    “I am almost eleven, sir.”
    He grunted, sizing me up. “Small for your age.”
    “I’m very fast. I’m the fastest player on my team.”
    “Team? What sort of team?”
    “Baseball, sir.”
    “Baseball! Do you like sports?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What else do you like? Do you hunt?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Why not?”
    “Father keeps promising he will take me . . .” I paused, slamming head-on into another promise that would neverbe kept. Warthrop’s eyes bored into mine, glittering with that strange, unnerving, backlit glow. He’d wondered if I was sick, but he was the one who looked sick: dark circles beneath his eyes, hollow-cheeked and unshaven.
    “Why do you cry, Will Henry? Do you think your tears will bring them back?”
    They coursed down my cheeks, empty stygian vessels, useless. It took everything in me not to throw my body across his and beg for comfort. Beg for it! The simplest of human gestures.
    I did not understand him then.
    I do not understand him still.
    “You must harden yourself,” he told me sternly. “Monstrumology is not butterfly collecting. If you are to stay with me, you must become accustomed to such things. And worse.”
    “Am I to stay with you, sir?”
    His gaze cut down to my bones. I wanted to look away; I could not look away.
    “What is your desire?”
    My bottom lip quivered. “I have nowhere else to go.”
    “Do not pity yourself, Will Henry,” he said, the man whose own self-pity rose to operatic heights. “There is no room in science for pity or grief or any sentimental thing.”
    And the child answered, “I’m not a scientist.”
    To which the man replied, “And I am not a nursemaid. What do you desire?”
    To sit at my mother’s table. To smell the warm pie cooling on the rack. To watch her tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. To hear her say it isn’t time, Willy, you must wait for it to cool; it isn’t time. And the whole world, down to the last inch of it, to smell like apples.
    “I could send you away,” he went on: an offer, a threat. “There is probably not a person in all of North America more poorly constituted to raise a child. Why, I find most people unbearable, and children hardly rise to that level. You may expect the worst kind of cruelty from me, Will Henry: cruelty of the unintended kind. I am not a hateful man—I am merely the opposite, and the opposite of hate is not love, you know.”
    He smiled grimly at my puzzled expression. He knew—knew!—that the heartbroken waif before him had no capacity to understand what he was saying. He, the patient