Chapter Text
Antlers; Or, a True Narrative on a Life-Long Haunting, the Subsequent Horrors thereof, and to What Conclusion It Came, by Mr. W. Graham
First printed c. 17——
"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"
Translated from Spanish, Francisco De Goya
I. Antlers
One of my earliest memories is of being awoken from a dream as if by falling. It was, as if, in slumber my soul had gone out of my body and been yanked suddenly back in. I lay in my bed for some time after and felt disembodied, as if that very soul that had just ventured out did not anymore enjoy being in the confines of the mortal flesh. Since this instance I have never felt quite at home in the flesh, though I have been told by various physicians hired by my father over the years that this sensation was a malady of the mind rather than the flesh, and not attributable to any bad humors or miasma I may have been exposed to. My father agreed that the sensation I experienced was of the mind and the mind alone.
I wiped the sweat from my brow and opened my eyes. It was a chilly Maryland winter and the fire in my chambers had gone out what must have been hours ago. I, having been a boy raised in French Louisiana, was yet unaccustomed to the harsh winters of the East, and I often expressed my disposition towards the humid climate of Louisiana to my father. He often agreed, but reminded me that our business now lay in Maryland, and that I would come to adjust to its frigid climate.
I looked around my room and saw no person or animal. I was not a child predisposed to imaginings of the other worldly—I was not raised on superstition and expected to see no strange phantasms race before me. I was not one to scream ‘witch!’ or ‘goblin’ as children of the previous century were wont to do. I lived in an age of reason where emphasis was placed upon the material world and that alone. I was raised among those where speculation on the Mind and Soul was a thing confined to discussion of philosophy and the works of Descartes. I pulled my blanket up over my body and turned so that I was facing a window.
When I went to bed the heavy curtains that hung over the window had been closed. Now, they were slightly opened and some moonlight crept its way onto the floor of my chambers. I presumed that the window wasn’t securely shut enough, and that some draft had blown the curtains open. I attempted to close my eyes to sleep again but I could not with any light in the room. I stood up and drew the curtains shut, and lay back down.
However, there was a strange phenomenon upon my laying back down. There was a side of my bed on which I never slept, and that was the right. I had no recollection of laying there and yet there was a large indent in the feather pillow, and in the bed next to me. I swept my hand over the area and felt it warm.
I did not then come to any conclusions. I was of the opinion that I’d done something in my sleep I had no remembrance of.
I soon found myself in that strange state between waking and sleeping, and while I knew it to be an illusion, I was somewhat afrighted at the strange visions of spindly, black spiders crawling up and down the walls when I opened my eyes in the blackness of my room. This had happened many a time, though, and I had come to know it was only a false image.
I closed my eyes again and found that the spiders did not crawl on the back of my eyelids. The last thing I remember, before I found myself once again dreaming, was that of a warmth near my right ear. Hot, moist air hit it, and a foreign voice spoke, to my remembrance, a string of words along the lines of,
“We are as one…”
...
We were by no means extravagant people, though we lived in a great house built upon the early settlement of the New World in a rural part of Maryland. We lived on what was a small income for the size of our estate, but I never took this into account in my growing up. I could only remember having everything I ever needed and more, and I am thankful I never sunk to a more greedy disposition as some in my position might have.
By the age of twenty I was a learned fellow thanks to the long teaching of a devoted governess and a maid, Miss Annie, who seemed to watch over me as a maternal figure in the absence of my mother. I spent little time in the confines of the old house, for long hours among its creaking boards and dark corridors made me feel somehow rather ill and sent me into the strange habit of seeing those crawling little spiders again. So, spending much of my time out of doors, my father fretted about this habit at certain times of year. He would insist that I could easily take ill from all of my excursions, particularly during the wintertime, and that many of them were outright unnecessary.
But he had always been one to fret over my health. He saw, in me, as he often told me himself, the eyes of my mother. I do believe it is not a false assumption to think he also feared that he could see, in me, the health of my mother, and feared I would develop the same consumptive illness that sent her to an early grave
We had not any close neighbors, nor was there a settlement near that was not at least half a day’s journey by horse. Those neighbors that we did have were many miles off, even so, I had become childhood friends with a young girl of that estate which was many miles north of us. To see her, after winter finally subsided, had been my hope for the new year.
It might be thought of as odd, upon further reflection, that this girl and I got on as well as we did. Perhaps my father or hers hoped for our union in marriage one day. However, my father never voiced any sentiment regarding such a prospect to me, and I myself thought of her more as the sister I never had. Her Christian name was Alana and the reason for her father’s retirement to the country was not dissimilar to that of my own father; he had owned a medical practice in Baltimore, but his health had declined, which led him to the purchase of an estate previously abandoned for a decade.
...
“I told you that I would catch more than you!” The girl had giggled as she taunted me with the small brook trout she’d caught by holding it up and waving it in my face.
I huffed at her taunts, shook my head, and attempted to grab the still squirming fish from her grasp. “You only know how to fish because it is I that taught you!” I had grumbled, while continuing to struggle with her for the poor creature, which was more and more deprived from its natural state, its eyes bulging out of its body and its mouth closing and opening as if in a stupor.
Our struggle ended with neither of us winning the fish. Providence was good to the trout, and it was thrown haphazardly back into the stream before us. When the trout was gone from both our hands I considered it to be a draw, and wiped my slimy hands on my breeches.
Immediately, Alana crossed her arms over her chest and her face grew red with annoyance. “Now, look, Will! Do you see what you’ve done!”
“What I’ve done? Why, I would not have struggled for the thing if you hadn’t taunted me with it!”
“Well,” Alana paused, put her finger to her lip, and seemed to consider something for a long while. “Why don’t we start over, then?”
The question had seemed to come out of her with some difficulty, and I suspected the whole proposal stemmed from one two many scoldings from her dear father about maturity.
I agreed with her proposal to start our fishing game again, and so we did, but after the passing of an hour, according to my timepiece, there was still not a fish to be found. Now this was singular, for I knew the stream generally to be full of fish at most times of the year and it was a sport which I had always found to be reliable.
It was as if that poor trout who’d been caught up in our disagreement had gone and told his friends of the giants who had lifted him from his home and attempted to murder him.
Growing bored due to a lack of fish, we gave up the game, and discarded our hand fashioned poles by the stream in search of another adventure in the nearby forest.
After some time we found ourselves in a game of tag. I was the pursuer, and was nearly caught up to her when the chase stopped abruptly, and she tumbled to the ground. I thought this to be play, until I saw a large gash running up her pale leg and fresh, crimson blood running down it. She began to weep and, being a good friend, I rushed to her side.
She, however, threw up an arm and cautioned me. “Careful!” She cried, “The antlers!”
“The antlers?” I had muttered to myself, looking to the forest floor around her.
Ah, yes: the antlers. I had never seen such a pair like them before that day.
I had seen many pairs of shed antlers over the years, but none of this particular size or color. Certainly, they were not a set belonging to the common white tail deer. Nor. however, were they likely to have belonged to an elk, for they were uncommon where we lived in the East. These antlers, being the great size of an elk’s, were not of the tanned color of other antlers but of a blackened hue as if they’d been long burnt in tremendous heat.
I lifted one heavy antler and another, dragging them out of the way so that I could attend to my friend, and I did, tearing up a section of my shirt and wrapping it around her wound as a make shift bandage. I swiftly escorted her out of the forest, and reminded myself to come back and have a closer inspection of these oddities left behind.
In consequence of this incident, Alana’s father forbade her from my company for some months after the event. I was bored near to death at that time, having lost the consolation of my only friend within miles.
Unfortunately, in going back to find the anomalous set of antlers in the woods, I found them to be gone, and scorned the lucky hunter who’d likely picked them up to mount upon his wall and forevermore gawk at.
My father, a lover of Hume and Voltaire and other such philosophers, denied the possibility of such an event, and was offended that Alana and I deigned to try to fool him in this particular manner; I found his skepticism rather strange—could not this have been some other creature yet unknown on this continent?
Unknown to us, at least.
Being precocious as I was at the time, this sparked something in my mind. If this curious animal were to exist, surely there were people living amongst us who would know what such a creature was, as they knew the land much better than we.
Some weeks after the event in the forest, in one of my rare excursions to a local village, I approached a trader of the Nanticoke people, though he seemed initially disinterested at the French child asking him questions, and almost as amused by my tales as my father was. However, he was somewhat more patient with my prodding, surpsingly so, given that he had come to the village to sell skins and not have conversations with strange children.
“I have hunted my whole life, and have seen no such thing,” Alsech said.
“Do you have any idea of what it might have been?”
“If I were to say I did it would be dishonest of me. You do not have the antlers yourself?”
I shook my head no, and wondered if he was beginning to think my whole story to be a tall tale with no substance.
“They were gone when I went back to find them.”
“Well,” The man began, and I wondered if he would proceed to dismiss me, “I am sure if such a creature is around, you will find more of these antlers you speak of.”
“I suppose you are right. I know the thing exists. Something will surely turn up eventually.”
“When it does, you are welcome to find me again and bring that something to me.”
“I will. In the meantime, I brought some ammunition to trade.”
And I had. I had essentially raided my father’s armory; it was my hope that he would not notice, as he rarely went in there anymore. He had stopped hunting in the previous few years due to a worsening of his rheumatism. He was no longer so fond of the hunt for it reminded him now only of his age, and the cracking of his bones did not allow the kind of subtlety so valued by the hunter.
…
I visited Alana on my way homeward, as her father’s house was on my way. By this time her wound had begun to heal, but the scar was prominent and distressed her. In my young mind, I could not comprehend why she was so bothered.
“Your stocking will cover it up,” I reasoned.
She crossed her arms. “I know that, but I wish it weren’t there at all,” she shook her head, and tried to console herself (apparently my words had done little to), “At least it didn’t become inflamed. At least I still have my leg. My father has an acquaintance who lost a leg to an inflamed wound. He has not stopped talking about this friend all this time.”
“Has he not?”
“I wish he would stop. It makes me nervous.”
…
One night, when I was four and ten, I dreamed of being eviscerated, though I was ignorant of the term for this punishment at the time. The knife that sliced me was a distinct one: it seemed to be in the shape of a claw or talon that might belong to a large bird of prey. I knew not what I had done to deserve such a thing, to be gutted, but when my entrails began to spill onto the ground in front of me, onto a kind of slick surface that seemed entirely unfamiliar to me, and I tried to gather them back into myself (I know now this is impossible) a pitch, sickly thin hand reached from beside me and helped me gather up my inner parts which had been spilling onto the floor.
I woke to a contradictory feeling; the most severe abdominal pain of my short life, and the kind of hunger only those living through famine know. I called out for food and shortly grew disgust at the taste of anything given to me. I vomited all I ate up and could not help my nurse one bit in cleaning for I was constantly doubled over.
What followed were some of the most terrible days of my life. I grew pale, my sheets were soaked with sweat, and I took in nothing and expelled all. By the end of the third day I had grown so weak that even my deist father (though nominally Catholic as any good Frenchman in those days) had called in a Priest to perform last rites. So distraught was my father that he was lapsing into the childhood comfort of the Roman Religion.
…
“We commend to Thee, O Lord, the soul of this Thy servant Will Graham…”
And between the words of the Father I heard the Voice of my childhood,
“Come with me and we shall be as one. We are almost conjoined already, Will…”
I knew for sure that it wasn’t the voice of the Lord God.
“...Thou becamest man, so now Thou wouldst vouchsafe to admit him into the number
of the blessed…”
I groaned at the idea of exiting the world so soon. To leave my father? To never see Alana again? To never go fishing for trout or explore the woods near my house…?
“Come, and I will take you into my body. Piece by piece.”
“Let his soul find consolation in Thy sight, and remember not his sins, nor any of those excesses which he has fallen into…”
“My body, my blood.”
I shook my head, writhing on my bed in resistance of the Father’s words and the words of The Voice.
“No. No…”
“We will be conjoined now…
“Through the violence of passion and corruption…”
“...as we have been in all worlds. The mistake of this one shall now be undone.”
I went completely insensible for a long while after that, but woke up in this world, to the joy of my father. I did not speak of the other voice that I had heard, and supposed it to be a fancy only of my fever.
…
It so happened that I had not been the only person with that unknown illness that overcame me, but I was the only one in the region, from what I could gather, that had survived it. This made me something of a curiosity in my county, which annoyed my father, him being such a private person. So many had not fallen dead at one time since the smallpox swept through the region a decade prior. In my life I had never heard of so many pine boxes being lowered into the ground. The droning of the funeral masses and the similar funerary traditions of the protestants grew monotone and uninteresting when once they had been deeply mournful. When one is reminded of death every day it becomes a rather banal concept. Memento Mori, as it goes.
Even after my full recovery from this illness, like with my feeling of disembodiment, a curious few symptoms stuck around and acted as something like a pox scar, forever marring me in its way. After this illness, all food and drink was dull and merely palatable. It is as if my sense of taste and smell were drained from me with all the blood that was let from me in the days of my illness. I would additionally, from time to time, dream of the ravenous hunger I had experienced during my illness and wake to find myself in the back garden, or on the edge of the woods, or in our scant family graveyard that consisted of my dear mother and some of the family dogs we had grown fond of. Eventually, my father began to bolt the doors at night to prevent these fits of my somnambulism, and stationed servants outside my chambers.
…
At present I had been anticipating a visit from my dear friend Miss Alana Bloom for months. The winter in Maryland had been particularly harsh that year and had stopped most travel for the season. She and I had been exchanging weekly letters, planning our walks through the forest and our excursion to a local village.
My feet were light on the stairs that morning as I came down for breakfast and seated myself next to my father as we awaited breakfast to be served. His countenance was not terribly altered from its usual sternness, but it was altered enough that it provoked concern within me. Why did the wrinkles on his aging face appear so prominent? Was it merely a trick of the eye or did I perceive a real change?
“Why so grim, father?” I asked. “We shall see friends today!”
“No, as it happens, we shall not.”
My spirits sank at the revelation and my heart skidded in my chest. “Has there been a delay?”
“Yes, Will, there has been a considerable delay.”
My father tended towards the most ardent forwardness; this drawing the subject out did not sit well with me.
“Father. Out with it. Has something happened?”
For the life of me I could not figure what may have happened. If I did begin to imagine, my mind would begin to nurse the most outlandish fancies.
“I received correspondence from Doctor Bloom yesterday…”
Instantly, there was the considerable urge to stop up my ears like a child, as if the act of doing so would cause any horrible truth told to me to become instantly untrue. How was it that he had received word the day prior and not yet told me? Whatever was in that correspondence could not have been good if my father had kept it from me for an entire day.
My father went on, despite my unvoiced wishes that he would not, “Miss Bloom seems to have caught some terrible distemper as of late—”
“Does she yet live?”
I knew the next words before he even spoke them by his hesitation to speak them in the first place.
He sighed, and the dreaded confirmation came, “She does not. She expired two days ago.”
“When is the Requiem to be said?”
“It has already been said.”
I stood up from the breakfast table in anger, “You knew!” I accused him. “You knew and yet you told me not! The correspondence was brought to you before this morning.”
“The illness Miss Bloom contracted was an exceedingly odd one. Her father in all of his knowledge failed so badly to treat it that it took her in five days. God forbid, Will, I should risk exposing you to such an illness, you alone are what I have left in the world—”
“God forbid? You are a deist, father. What should God forbid, when he is the great voyeur!”
I left our breakfasting room in a hurry. I could not further speak to my father for I knew I would speak words I would regret later. I ran out of the house and into the woods that surrounded our home. I ran down an old familiar path that she and I had trod many times, to the stream where we caught our poor trout.
Allowing myself to collapse to the forest floor I laid and looked up and had the view from the ground so generally uncommon to the human eyes. I laid and tears seeped from my eyes and felt alone in all the world.
…
Upon standing after laying flat for some time I felt a rush of dizziness overcome me, and I had to lean upon a nearby tree to avoid falling back to the ground. I continued down the familiar path that Alana and I often took and found myself stumbling, eventually, upon the clearing wherein she and I once found those antlers that had so impressed themselves upon my memory.
I was utterly stupefied when I spied, against a stump on the other side of the clearing, another set of said antlers. How bizarre it was that I might stumble upon such specimens, in such a place again, at such a time. Perhaps God—or someone—was more than just a voyeur after all? Perhaps it was the late Alana herself who had some intercession now in these matters and sent them to me, so that I at least might solve our decades long mystery.
I felt renewed purpose as I began to inspect the antlers and drag them. I would drag them out of the forest so that they could be seen by the eyes of others. If Alsech was still around in the village these days, I would seek him out. I would haul them into town as soon as I could. I would make an early start the next day.
By noon, I had dragged the mysterious antlers to the house and brought them along with me wherever I went, as I was terribly anxious about them vanishing as they did last time. Disliking the idea of wasting food and having been taught not to do so, I came back when I knew my father would have retired to his study and ate the bland, cold eggs in a deep melancholy. I ate the dull nourishment and continued to contemplate the antlers. I was numb by this time and could weep no more. There was a growing ache in my skull.
…
I will insert into the narrative, here, the correspondence from Doctor Bloom to my father the day before our meeting was to take place. I do not, and can never now know exactly why my father never shared this letter with me in life, though I do have my suspicions regarding the after; My belief is that my father refused to share this letter with me upon the occasion of Alana’s death as not to upset me further, and not to infect me with the unsettling, superstitious, and pointed agitation displayed by Doctor Bloom upon his grief. I would only find this letter among many others in a lock box in his chambers after his death.
I do believe the letter will greatly enlighten the reader regarding the later events of my narrative. I apologize for the demented and unorganized nature of the letter, but I provide it unaltered for it would be dishonest to do otherwise. There are sections harshly scribbled out and I did my best to translate Doctor Bloom’s original words.
The correspondence from Doctor Bloom to my father went thus:
Mr. Graham,
The life of the human creature is a fickle thing & I urge you to cherish it, cherish your light while you can for one never knows when darkness will swallow it up. The light that existed, at one time, in my life has been rapidly snuffed out & I know not exactly by what—or is it even that God & the Devil & Nature conspire against me for the various evils I have committed in my life? Is this why the Devil has been sent to me? Why was it she that suffer’d in my place? I suppose to make the punishment all the worse. I feel as Job, now, who asked in his trials: why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? Let the day perish wherein I was born, as said Job.
You might ask how this illness came upon her & I will tell you clearly, though you may, through your own judgements assume me mad & stricken with grief so deeply that I have lost my faculties. I say now only that you would do best, Mr. Graham, to let in no strangers to your house & in particular I must advise against a certain Doctor Roman Fell of Florentine origin which was referred to me by a colleague for treatment of my own nervous disorder which you know well I have greatly struggled with for years & which led me to retire to the country. He is an unscrupulous man despite whatever he may appear to be at first.
It did seem to me that the various remedies that the doctor prescribed appeared to work for me initially & I was deeply thankful for the physician, but it came to trouble me the interest he took in my Alana. She, always seeking a friend in the world and hardly ever knowing a stranger, became enamoured with the Doctor & conversed long hours in Italian regarding her beloved subject of moral philosophy and the faculties of the mind. Now tell me, Mr. Graham, if you think it appropriate for a physician to take such a deep interest in the daughter of his patient? He looked at her and whetted his lips and I believe he is the Devil. The Doctor did not ever indicate any clearly untoward intentions & I supposed this was another odd friendship of hers. But in him—I could not shake it nor explain it with the logic of these times—there was an infernal aspect, a serpentine appearance that did begin to unsettle me when I would look at him long during meals and consultations; when I described this trait to my daughter she seemed wholly uninterested and ascribed my feelings to come from the nervous disorder I was being treated for. In any case they were under strict supervision at all times when they met & I prodded my Alana to such a degree about their conversations that she grew easily annoyed with me from then on. No, I shan’t lie to you—I must admit that it is not entirely true that this supervision remained at all times. I shall be dead soon & whatever reputation I had upon this Earth will not matter.
I will write it plainly now that it is my belief that it is Doctor Fell that made my Alana sick.
It was after dinner one evening but six days ago that the three of us were in the drawing room enjoying a bottle of vintage that I suddenly became insensible & when I awoke Doctor Fell & Alana were gone from the room.
Dear Alana took ill but five days prior to my writing this letter; it does seem plain to me now that something is amiss here given the dates & that the Doctor did my Alana some injury & yet at the time I allowed him to treat her for the illness that, in my present belief, he did inflict upon her; what evil! What Treachery!
How is it that already she is to be shut up into the confines of the family mausoleum next to my wife & son, I do not think I myself will live long after this—no food, no medicine, no bleeding would work for her & she was young & strong of constitution while I am old & have taken ill quite easily for years. Requiem is to be said for her soon but I urge caution.
Another thing unprecedented, Mr. Graham: This illness of my daughter’s does not seem far from the one that swept through this region but a decade ago & of all the sufferers it was but your son that did live, so let him live & let him come not near any of us & let him come not near the place wherein she will lay, for I could wish upon no man the same agony.
Most of all do not let this stranger who was, in my belief, the cause of her illness and subsequent death, into your home & trust no one in these days.
This is goodbye, dear friend, for I will be going soon from the World, I think, whether or not it be the illness.
Doctor Bloom.
…
The journey to the village the following day was lonesome. The weather was humid and dreary, and the skies a pallid grey. I had tied a thick cord to the base of both antlers and was thus dragging them behind me. Occasionally they would get hooked on something and I would nearly topple over at the sudden arrest of movement. At those times I could hear echoes of late Alana’s laughter in my mind. Out of what I could only assume was an old habit, I would glance behind and expect to see her. It seemed at times she taunted me by teasing me and haunting my peripheral vision.
I had happened upon another snag when I heard the sound of hooves coming up this path. When I expected the traveller upon the horse to continue past me, he did not. He came to a swift halt on the near black colored steed on which he rode. The fellow’s horse neighed and seemed somewhat startled as he began to pace. A creature with a mercurial temper, this beast seemed.
And this beast’s rider—it’s rider had such a visage as I had never known before. It was a distinct one. The man on horseback appeared as a figure in a great painting of Caravaggio might. His eyes were dark and hooded, and he had a prominent brow ridge that stood out almost as much as his sharply cut cheekbones. He was neither pale nor particularly darkened by the sun, but due to the burgundy hue of his justaucorps and that of the uncommonly dark horse he did stand out in contrast. He wore no wig upon his head but did sport a tricorn, and his hair was tied with a ribbon at the base of his neck.
This whole incident had stopped me in my tracks, and evidently it was the case that I caught the eye of the lone traveller, or perhaps the antlers had, for soon he removed the tricorn and tipped his head in greeting.
“Good morning, young sir,” the gentleman greeted, and then gestured to the horse on which he rode, “Do not mind Mephisto, he is a particularly stubborn one.”
The Gentleman’s accent was a peculiar one, and while I could not place it, I was of the mind that I had before heard it.
“Mephisto as in Mephistopheles? An odd name for a horse is it not?”
“It is not if you know him as I do,” Rejoined the stranger.
“Fair point, traveler. Say, what brings you to these parts?”
“I happen to be heading back to my residence from a patient’s home in Annapolis.”
Upon hearing this statement, I was instantly struck with an idea.
“How would you be addressed, sir? You are a physician then, are you not?”
“It so happens that I am,” The gentleman said, dismounting from his steed, “Doctor Hannibal Lecter.”
Doctor Lecter removed his tricorn and bowed slightly, and then took my hand in his in greeting. I thought this a bit overly familiar for a first greeting but assumed the customs of his land were different, and voiced no objections. He gave off a strong floral scent, though the scent was more of decaying flowers than of fresh ones. Even so, it was not an unpleasant scent. “You must be Mr. Graham?”
He let go of my hand. It seemed to me a bit extraordinary that this Doctor Lecter knew my name, because I did not know him nor even know of him.
“And how, pray tell, is it that you know my name? For I have never met you before, nor have I heard of you.”
“It so happens that I have read of you in the pamphlets occasionally published by Miss Fredericka Lounds.”
“If I may speak so plainly, you do a disservice to your mental faculties by reading such sensationalism.”
This provoked, in my mind, a memory of Alana and I paying a postboy to pick up a pamphlet of hers and deliver it to us with the rest of the post the following day. We had many laughs reading the nonsense written by Miss Lounds. I could not, for the life of me, imagine a knowledgeable doctor reading such things.
“On the contrary,” He began, “I quite enjoy the words of Miss Lounds, though I do not delude myself into believing many of them true, but words do not have to be true to be entertaining, do they?”
“By the popularity of her words it is evident that they do not.”
Doctor Lecter did not wear gloves, and I wondered about this until I noticed that on his left hand were six fully formed fingers. As such, I supposed gloves were a hassle for him, though surely a fellow so well dressed as this would think of having gloves tailored to his peculiarity. I had never observed such a trait in a man, but had in a few cats that skulked around my father’s property. The conclusion followed that if such a thing occurred in cats it might also occur in humans—a variation of nature, merely.
“Say, Doctor, do you possess any knowledge on illness?”
“I have worked with many illnesses in my time,” noted the Doctor, whose gaze had gone from me to looking past me. The antlers. He'd have noticed them in all their ineffable glory now.
“I have, before, experienced an unknown illness which nearly took me from this world. Just recently, another such illness took a dear friend of mine. No physicians my father hired at the time of my illness could find the seat of it nor identify the mechanism of its operation when I had the illness. I cannot promise you acess to my friend for she is already buried, and her father is no doubt quite stricken by grief.”
Doctor Lecter’s gaze moved so suddenly from the antlers behind me to my own eyes that I, for a moment, was stupefied and entirely unable to speak. What confounding variation of nature this man had, for he did not only possess that sixth digit on his left hand but also a maroon color of the eye which only appeared in its full reality when one stood close to him. When seeing him upon Mephisto, his eyes had only seemed of a brown color.
“And you would have me seek the origin and mechanism of this illness?”
It seemed as if, through physical force, I had to tear myself from his gaze. With some difficulty I did so, and looked past him at Mephistopheles who stood eerily motionless as if he was Donatello’s statue at Gattamelata. In a moment, the horse turned its dark head and with an uncanny intelligence its eyes startled me into looking away from it. Perhaps, to the good doctor, I appeared quite a skittish young man.
“I-I would have you do this, if you would be willing. If you require compensation, it will certainly be given,” I paused, in the realization that I was assuming much,"but surely you are a busy man. I would understand if you do not have time for such a thing. It is merely a whim of mine to ask in meeting you here.”
“On the contrary, I would gladly help. No compensation would be necessary, it would be reward enough if I were to relieve you of the terrible burden of the unknown. For it is a terrible burden indeed.”
“Indeed.” Was the only way I could respond, being so baffled at his actually taking me up on my offer.
Doctor Lecter smiled politely, and although this smile did not quite reach upwards from his mouth, I could still not help feeling the effects of the charm behind it.
“Now,” The Doctor interrupted a gap of silence that had opened between us, “I have answered a question of yours. Might I then ask one of you? Quid pro quo, as the proverb goes.”
“A thing for a thing,” I translated the Latin to myself quietly, “What question would you ask of me?”
His eyes looked past me once again. He strolled to the antlers behind me.
“Where did you find such an extraordinary set of antlers? They appear to me to be those of an elk, and yet, unless I am mistaken, elk do not frequent the Chesapeake Region.”
Doctor Lecter began to touch the blackened antlers as if they appeared to him a great work of art, and perhaps they were a great work of art, sculpted by the delicate and, at times, brutal hand of Mother Nature. Lecter seemed to anticipate the branchings-off of each point and all of the ridges.
“You are not mistaken. This is why I find this set so curious. I had wondered if a small population of elk might have made their way to the East. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine a deer with horns of such a size.”
“That is an interesting theory, and I suspect merit behind it. It is the case that these specimens must have originated from somewhere, and appearing nearly as those massive antlers of a bull elk do, they may be from such a wandering population.”
“However,” It was my decision that I should point out the fault of my own theory before the Doctor did, “This does not explain the particular appearance of this set.”
“It does not, but a theory does take time to develop,” was his consolation to me. “Say,” the Doctor placed a hand on my shoulder, “You do not plan to sell the antlers, do you?”
“No,” I assured him, “Of course not. There is a man in town who I hope will aid me in possibly identifying their origin.”
“I see. In that case, may I accompany you into town?”
“You may,” However, I did wonder: “Town is not the way you were heading, is it?”
“It is not, yet I did promise to investigate the illness you informed me of, and I do not break promises. I must also confess,” He said it in such a manner that his speech was almost conspiratorial, “you have me thoroughly enraptured in this business regarding the antlers. While my area of expertise is not in natural philosophy, I do find it to be fascinating.”
And while his ungloved hands again explored the antlers, his gaze was on me as he said those last words.
…
“I can confirm to you, young man, that I have seen no such antlers as these before.”
This confirmation from Alsech that he had never seen any such antlers settled something long-standing in my mind. If such a creature was native to this continent of North America, it was extremely elusive or existed generally in another part of the land entirely. A man before my time might have made other assumptions though, I thought.
“So then, Alsech, it is settled?”
“It is settled in the sense that I cannot identify them. It would be rash of me to say no one in the World could.”
“So it is settled, then,” Defeated, I sighed, “For I cannot possibly search the whole world for answers.”
“You are yet young, you have much time.”