The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey

lifelessness—I scampered down the remaining steps. I found the trunk beneath the stairs, shoved against the wall and covered in a fine patina of dust, as if it had not been moved or opened in years. It gave a loud protesting screech against the stone floor when I dragged it from its cozy nook, like a creature woken rudely from a long winter nap. Grasping it by its worn leather handles, I lifted the trunk a few inches from the floor: heavy, but not so heavy I couldn’t haul it up the stairs. I set it back down and dragged it to the base of the stairs, keeping my eyes focused forward, though out of the corner of my left I could see a shadow blacker than the surrounding gloom common to old basements. The
Anthropophagus.
As I lifted the trunk for the trek upstairs, the voice of my enemy spoke; fear whispered in my ear, echoing the words of Warthrop:
The fertilized egg is expelled into her mate’s mouth, where it rests in a pouch located along his lower jaw. He has two months to
find a host for their offspring, before the fetus bursts its protective sac and he swallows it or chokes upon it.

    What if he had missed it in the necropsy? What if
another
monster child had rested undetected within the big male’s mouth, had subsequently ripped free of its fleshy cocoon and even now was scuttling across the floor toward me?
They are accomplished climbers
, the doctor had said on the cemetery road. What if, by means of its barbed nails, it now clung to the ceiling above me and, in the space of my next breath, would drop on my head, reach down with its pale, thin arms, and tear my eyes from their sockets? I saw myself spinning around the laboratory, blood streaming down from my vacant ocular cavities, as a creature no larger than a fist crawled down my face and silenced my horrified screams by shredding my exposed tongue with tiny tooth and minuscule claw. It was a ludicrous notion, born of panic, but no panic is ludicrous in its particular moment. Panic possesses its own logical integrity. It goaded me up the stairs, gave me unnatural strength and endurance. Unnoticed went the cramping in my fingers, the burning in my shoulders from the trunk’s weight, the hard slap of the box against my knees as I climbed, the sunshine that flooded the higher steps bathing me in its luminescent shower of its beneficent light. I dropped the box upon the kitchen floor and slid it into the room, clambered up the final three steps, hopped over the threshold into the kitchen, and slammed the door closed behind me, gasping for air, head spinning, black spotsbobbing like dark, dancing pixies before my eyes, feeling as if I had made a narrow escape—but from what? So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.

    “Will Henry!” called the doctor. “Have you fallen asleep? Are you sneaking something to eat? Time enough for sleep and supper later. Snap to, Will Henry, snap
to
!”

    With a deep breath—how sweet the air did taste there above!—I picked up the trunk and carried it down the hall to the library, in the doorway of which the doctor was impatiently waiting. He snatched the box from my hands and dropped it beside the worktable. It landed with enough force to send a shudder through the floorboards.

    “Dedham, Dedham,” he murmured, falling to his knees before the old trunk. He threw back the brass clasps and heaved open the lid. The hinges of the ancient vessel answered with a protesting screech. I edged closer, curious to discover what this box, which I, despite spending the majority of the past year in that macabre chamber, had never noticed before tucked away in the shadows beneath the stairs, might contain and how its contents related to the particular puzzle presently perplexing the monstrumologist, a conundrum he considered, by all appearances, more urgent than the pressing problem of the
Anthropophagi
running, heretofore unbeknownst, in our