Free The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey Page B

more absurd or insidious a precept has ever been laid down than ‘Where there is life, there is hope.’ Just as the trout is doomed once the bait is taken, there was no hope for him once the barbs were set. He would thank me if he could. As I would thank you, Will Henry.”

    “Thank me, sir?”

    “If one day I should meet the same fate, I pray you would do the same for me.”

    Left unspoken but conveyed in his dark eyes was the corollary to his blasphemous prayer:
As you should pray I would for you.
If, in that hole, the monster had seized me instead, no doubt he would not have hesitated to grant me the mercy of the bullet. I did not argue with him, though; I did not have the words to argue. I, at twelve, had only the inarticulate protests of a child whose acute sense of justice has been offended by the pious rationalizations of an authoritarian adult. I did not—only because I could not—argue. So, I nodded. Nodded! Even as my face burned with righteous indignation. Perhaps I was a slave to something he believed to be silly and superstitious: the idea that all life was worth defending and that nothing justified surrender to the forces of destruction. Had I known that night what was to come from deep in the dark belly of the earth, I might have felt less like pummeling his smug countenance with my little fists and more like throwing myself into his arms for the comfort that only one who has trod the dark path can give.

    “But enough philosophy! On to more practical and pressing concerns, Will Henry!” he cried, brushing my body aside as casually as he had my troubled soul. He went round to the other side of the long table and peered at the map; already he had drawn a red circle around New Jerusalem. “Obviously the events of this evening prove my originalhypothesis incorrect. This is a mature pod of
Anthropophagi,
whose alpha male now hangs in our basement. Twenty to twenty-five breeding females and a handful of juveniles. Perhaps thirty in all, though the circumstances made it difficult to ascertain their exact number.”

    He looked up from the map. “Did you manage to get a count, Will Henry?” he asked, in all seriousness, as if it were plausible I might have counted them while simultaneously running for my life.

    “No, sir,” I said.

    “But does that seem close to the mark?” he asked. “Twenty-five to thirty? Based upon your observation.”

    One hundred thirty was closer to the mark based on my observation, but that skill had been tarnished by terror. The cemetery had seemed to overflow with them, pouring from every shadow and from behind every tree.

    “Yes, sir,” I replied. “I would say twenty-five. Twenty-five to thirty.”

    “Nonsense!” he cried, slapping his open hand upon the tabletop. The resulting retort caused me to flinch. “Never tell me what you think I wish to hear, Will Henry. Never! I cannot rely upon you if you chose to be a parrot. It is a detestable vice not entirely limited to children.
Always
speak the truth, all the truth in all things at all times! No man ever rose to greatness on the wings of obsequious deceit. Now be honest. You’ve really no idea whether there were thirty or fifty or two hundred and fifty.”

    I bowed my head. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I could not tell.”

    “Nor could I,” he admitted. “I can only make an educated guess, based on the literature.” He picked up the Herodotus from the stack and flipped rapidly through the ancient pages until he came upon a passage and read it quietly to himself in the original Greek. After a moment or two he slapped the book closed, replaced it upon the stack, and returned to the map. He produced a ruler from his pocket, measured the shortest distance between New Jerusalem and the coast, and then proceeded to make calculations in a small notebook, muttering to himself the entire time, while I, so recently the object of his full attention, stood entirely forgotten. His was a concentration more complete and