The Monstrumologist Read Free Page B

twenty-five to thirty years of age, no signs of exterior injury or trauma… . Will Henry, are you writing this down?”

    He was staring at me. I in turn stared back at him. The stench of death had already filled the room, causing my eyes to sting and fill with tears. He pointed at the forgotten notebook in my hand. “Focus upon the task at hand, Will Henry.”

    I nodded and wiped away the tears with the back of my hand. I pressed the lead point against the paper and began to write beneath the date.

    “Specimen appears to be of the genus
Anthropophagi,”
the doctor repeated. “Male, approximately twenty-five to thirty years of age, with no signs of exterior injury or trauma… .”

    Focusing on the task of reporter helped to steady me, though I could feel the tug of morbid curiosity, like an outgoing tide pulling on a swimmer, urging me to look again. I nibbled on the end of the pencil as I struggled with the spelling of “
Anthropophagi.”

    “
Victim is female, approximately seventeen years of age, with evidence of denticulated trauma to the right side of the face and neck. The hyoid bone and lower mandible are completely exposed, exhibiting some scoring from the specimen’s teeth… .”

    Teeth?
But the thing had no head! I looked up from the pad. Dr. Warthrop was bent over their torsos, fortuitously blocking my view. What sort of creature could bite if it lacked the mouth with which to do it? On the heels of that thought came the awful revelation: The thing had been
eating
her.

    He moved quickly to the other side of the table, allowing me an unobstructed view of the “specimen” and his pitiful victim. She was a slight girl with dark hair that curled upon the table in a fall of luxurious ringlets. The doctor leaned over and squinted at the chest of the beast pressed against her, peering across the body of the young girl whose eternal rest was broken by this unholy embrace, this death grip of an invader from the world of shadows and nightmare.

    “Yes!” he called softly. “Most definitely
Anthropophagi.
Forceps, Will Henry, and a tray, please—No, the small one there, by the skull chisel. That’s the one.”

    I somehow found the will to move from my spot, though my knees were shaking badly and I literally could not feel my feet. I kept my eyes on the doctor and tried my best to ignore the nearly overwhelming urge to vomit. I handed him the forceps and held the tray toward him, arms shaking, breathing as shallowly as possible, for the reek of decay burned in my mouth and lay like a scorching ember at the back of my throat.

    Dr. Warthrop reached into the thing’s chest with the forceps. I heard the scraping of the metal against something hard—an exposed rib? Had this creature also been partially consumed?And, if it had, where was the
other
monster that had done it?

    “Most curious. Most curious,” the doctor said, the words muffled by the mask. “No outward signs of trauma, clearly in its prime, yet dead as a doornail… . What killed you,
Anthropophagus
, hmmm? How did you meet your fate?”

    As he spoke, the doctor tapped thin strips of flesh from the forceps into the metal tray, dark and stringy, like half-cured jerky, a piece of white material clinging to one or two of the strands, and I realized he wasn’t peeling off pieces of the monster’s flesh: The flesh belonged to the face and neck of the girl.

    I looked down between my outstretched arms, to the spot where the doctor worked, and saw he had not been scraping at an exposed rib.

    He had been cleaning the thing’s teeth.

    The room began to spin around me. The doctor said, in a calm, quiet voice, “Steady, Will Henry. You’re no good to me unconscious. We have a duty this night. We are students of nature as well as its products, all of us, including this creature. Born of the same divine mind, if you believe in such things, for how could it be otherwise? We are soldiers for science, and we will do our duty. Yes, Will Henry?
Yes,