Mbwun

The New York Museum of Natural History is closing for the night, the last schoolchildren gone, the great halls emptied of everything but echo, and somewhere below the public floors, in the miles of storage and forgotten sub-basement where the collections outnumber the visitors a thousand to one, something large is moving on four legs. It goes without hurry and almost without sound, a heavy body sliding between crates that have not been opened in decades. There is a smell where it passes, a rank animal musk that clings to the stone long after it is gone. For a while it wants nothing from the people upstairs. Then the thing it has been feeding on runs out, and it comes up into the light to find more.

This is Mbwun, whose name means He Who Walks On All Fours, the monster at the centre of Relic, the 1995 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child that introduced their FBI agent Pendergast and reached a wide second audience as a Paramount film two years later. It belongs to no ancient people. It was invented whole for a thriller, and its makers gave it a false pedigree deep enough to pass: the Kothoga, a small tribe living on a tepui in the upper Amazon, who fed and feared a creature they would not name aloud. When a Brazilian mining operation razed their mesa, the Kothoga vanished and their god followed a crate of packed artifacts north, across an ocean, into the basement of a museum in Manhattan. The neat horror of the story is that the god was a man.

The man was Julian Whittlesey, an anthropologist whose expedition went up the Xingú in the late 1980s and did not come back. What he found there was the Mbwun lily, a purple-flowered water plant carrying a virus that rewrites the flesh of anything that swallows it, threading reptilian material into the cells until the body reshapes around it. Whittlesey took the change and stopped being Whittlesey. But the new shape is not free. It burns through a hormone the transformed body cannot make in quantity, and the richest natural source of that hormone is the plant itself. Cut off from the lily, the creature has one other supply to draw on, and it lies inside the human skull.

For a time it did not have to kill. The crates that carried it from the ruined tepui were packed with dried lily fibre, and while the packing lasted the creature stayed hidden in the museum’s under-levels, quiet and fed, a rumour of smell and a few missing animals. When curators finally moved the crates and the last of the fibre with them, the hunger turned. In the days before the museum’s new Superstition exhibition was to open, guards and staff began turning up in locked rooms with the tops of their heads torn away and the brain lifted out with a terrible economy. Only the hypothalamus was ever taken.

Anyone who saw it clearly did not survive to describe it well, so the book assembles the creature from its parts and its wreckage. It is built to a graded plan the scientists in the story call extreme, mammalian toward the front and saurian toward the back: a low broad skull, near-human at some angles and wholly wrong at others, set on a body that shades from coarse sparse fur and pale hide into overlapping scales and bony scutes along the hindquarters. It runs on all fours with the rolling power of a big cat and the mass of something much larger, forelimbs ending in claws that open steel doors and human skulls with the same ease. It leaves that goatish reek behind it and a track no zoologist can file.

The exhibition opens anyway, because the museum’s directors would rather risk a monster than a cancelled gala. A storm fails the power, the security doors seal, and several hundred donors in evening dress are shut into the dark with the thing that has been living beneath their feet. What follows is a long flight down through flooding sub-basements, and at the end of it the creature is brought down not by any weapon equal to it but by the plain fact that it was always mortal underneath. It bleeds. It can be shot enough times to die. When it does, the body on the floor is recognisably the ruin of a man.

Its strength is the direct, overwhelming kind. It is fast, silent for its size, armoured across the back, and it hunts by scent through a building most people could get lost in sober and in daylight. It is also, and this is the worst of it, not stupid. Something of Whittlesey survives inside the animal, enough to have carried his own journal and a small carved figure across a hemisphere, enough to choose its rooms and bide its time. It kills with intent and a kind of grief.

The same thing that made it also chains it. The virus demands its hormone without pause, and the plant that supplied it is extinct, its last fibres scattered and destroyed, so the creature is driven to hunt whether it wishes to or not, and hunting exposes it. Deny it the supply entirely and it starves, or goes mad with the pain of a shape it can no longer hold. Beneath the scales it keeps the frailties of the flesh it was made from, a heart that can be stopped and eyes that can be blinded. It is powerful, cornered, and doomed, which is a bad combination to be locked in a building with and a fatal one to be.

The 1997 film keeps the shape and loses the name, calling the creature Kothoga after the tribe, moving the whole nightmare to a museum in Chicago and renaming the lost anthropologist. The book’s version is the fuller one. It is the version in which the monster is a diagnosis as much as a beast: a man who ate the wrong flower and could not stop paying for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Mbwun?

The Mbwun is a fictional monster from Relic, the 1995 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Its name means “He Who Walks On All Fours,” and it is a chimera of primate and reptile that stalks the New York Museum of Natural History. It serves as the antagonist of the first Special Agent Pendergast novel.

What does the name Mbwun mean?

Mbwun means “He Who Walks On All Fours.” In the novel it is the name that the Kothoga, a fictional Amazonian tribe, give to the creature they worship, while the tribe itself is called the Kothoga. The 1997 film adaptation confusingly renamed the monster Kothoga after the people.

Why does Mbwun kill people?

Mbwun kills people to eat the hypothalamus in the human brain. A virus carried by the Mbwun lily transformed its body and left it dependent on a hormone it cannot produce; the plant was the natural source, and when the supply ran out the creature turned to the next richest source, the human brain. It tears open the skull and removes only that single gland.

Where did Mbwun come from?

Mbwun was originally Julian Whittlesey, an anthropologist who led an expedition into the Brazilian Amazon and was transformed by the virus-bearing Mbwun lily. Addicted to the plant, the creature followed a shipment of packed artifacts to the New York Museum of Natural History and hid in the sub-basement. It began killing only after the last of the dried plant fibre was moved beyond its reach.

How is Mbwun defeated?

Mbwun is ultimately killed because it remains mortal beneath its armoured hide. Despite immense strength and near-impervious scales along its back, it can be shot enough times to bring it down, and its dependence on a now-extinct plant leaves it starving and desperate. In the end the creature is revealed to be the ruined body of the man it once was.

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