The Monstrumologist Read Free Page A

the top of his nose and his intense dark eyes exposed.

    “Are we ready, Will Henry?” he breathed, his voice muffled by the mask. He drummed his fingers in the empty air.

    “Ready, sir,” I replied, though I felt anything but.

    “Scissors!”

    I slapped the instrument handle-first into his open palm.

    “No, the big ones, Will Henry. The shears there.”

    He began at the narrow end of the bundle, where the feet must have been, cutting down the center of the thick material, his shoulders hunched, the muscles of his jaw bunching with the effort. He paused once to stretch and loosen his cramping fingers, then returned to the task. The burlap was wet and caked with mud.

    “The old man trussed it tighter than a Christmas turkey,” the doctor muttered.

    After what seemed like hours, he reached the opposite end. The burlap had parted an inch or two along the cut, but no more. The contents remained a mystery and would remain so for a few more seconds. The doctor handed me the shears and leaned against the table, resting before the final, awful climax. At last he straightened, pressing his hands upon the small of his back. He took a deep breath.

    “Very well, then,” he said softly. “Let’s have it, Will Henry.”

    He peeled away the material, working it apart in the same direction as he had cut it. The burlap fell back on either side, draping over the table like the petals of a flower opening to welcome the spring sun.

    Over his bent back I could see them. Not the single corpulent corpse that I had anticipated, but two bodies, one wrapped about the other in an obscene embrace. I choked back the bile that rushed from my empty stomach, and willed my knees to be still. Remember, I was twelve years old. A boy, yes, but a boy who had already seen his fair share of grotesqueries. The laboratory had shelves along the walls that held large jars wherein oddities floated in preserving solution, extremities and organs of creatures that you would not recognize, that you would swear belonged to the world of nightmares, not our waking world of comfortable familiarity. And, as I’ve said, this was not the first time I had assisted the doctor at his table.

    But nothing had prepared me for what the old man delivered that night. I daresay your average adult would havefled the room in horror, run screaming up the stairs and out of the house, for what lay within that burlap cocoon laid shame to all the platitudes and promises from a thousand pulpits upon the nature of a just and loving God, of a balanced and kind universe, and the dignity of man.
A crime
, the old grave-robber had called it. Indeed there seemed no better word for it, though a crime requires a criminal … and who or
what
was the criminal in this case?

    Upon the table lay a young girl, her body partially concealed by the naked form wrapped around her, one massive leg thrown over her torso, an arm draped across her chest. Her white burial gown was stained with the distinctive ochre of dried blood, the source of which was immediately apparent: Half her face was missing, and below it I could see the exposed bones of her neck. The tears along the remaining skin were jagged and triangular in shape, as if someone had hacked at her body with a hatchet.

    The other corpse was male, at least twice her size, wrapped as I said around her diminutive frame as a mother nestles with her child, the chest a few inches from her ravaged neck, the rest of its body pressed tightly against hers. But the most striking thing was not its size or even the startling fact of its very presence.

    No, the most remarkable thing about this most remarkable tableau was that her companion had no head.

    “
Anthropophagi
,” the doctor murmured, eyes wide and glittering above the mask. “It must be … but how could it?This is most curious, Will Henry. That he’s dead is curious enough, but more curious by far is that he’s here in the first place! … Specimen is male, approximately