Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  He became aware that he was lying in a bed in a mostly bare room with no windows and an old television set, which was on.

  His instincts kicked back in, and he felt the false tooth that contained the cyanide capsule next to his left side eyetooth. He could slide it open with his tongue and the capsule would drop into his mouth. Glass in rubber so if he accidentally swallowed the thing he could pass it no problem, but if he bit down he’d be snorting and shaking inside two minutes.

  Between his blanketed feet sat a man sat in a chair with his back to Boaz, in front of the television, blocking out the picture. The light of the screen limned him as though he were some supernatural being. He wore a white coat.

  The man turned, as if he sensed Boaz’s eyes, and smiled.

  It was Meinhard Austerlitz.

  “Ah, you’re awake at last, my friend,” he said, in the clipped German accent Boaz had always imagined.

  Boaz blinked, eyes coming into focus, and flexed his arms. His right, he had full mobility. The left made him wince. It was in a sling, but not broken. Stiff, but he could move it.

  “No friend of yours,” he mumbled, struggling to sit up. Pain shot through his legs like a bolt and he gasped.

  Austerlitz flicked off the television and came to stand over him.

  “Oh I wouldn’t try that. Your legs are shattered, you know. Would you like something for the pain?”

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in the last room you will ever occupy,” said Austerlitz with a thin, sympathetic smile. He looked at his watch. “In a little over forty minutes, a pair of Mukhbarat agents are going to come through that door and shoot us both, or else I’ve misjudged my patron’s temperament by a considerable margin.”

  Boaz looked to the left. There was a door there, and as he watched, it opened. A dark man in sunglasses with a thick mustache and a pistol in a shoulder holster looked in, a cigarette in his lips. Behind him in the hall, a younger man in a white koofiyad cap with an AKS-74U stood peering in.

  “Everything’s alright, my friend,” said Austerlitz, in his doddering, congenial accent. “It’s alright.”

  The man looked from Boaz to Austerlitz and shut the door.

  Mukhbarat. Iraqi secret service. That explained the Arabic speaking sentries at Austerlitz’s compound. But it didn’t explain the monster.

  “You’ve been asleep for quite some time, Mr. Meyeroff,” said Austerlitz. “I was afraid, after all the trouble it took to keep you alive, you’d miss the big finale, but you’re right on time.”

  “Why am I here? Where’s the rest of my team?”

  “Oh they’ve all been dead for over a month,” said Austerlitz. “Killed by the creature. I was very nearly killed myself, before it decided to turn into the interior. The Paraguayans brought it down in the hills, I believe, but I understand it took some doing. The Mukhbarat came for me, and I requested they let me keep you alive. I’m due some indulgences considering all I’ve done for them. I’ve kept you alive because, in my hubris, I want someone at my side who understands and can appreciate everything that is about to happen.”

  The old man went to the chair and dragged it closer to the bed, settling in it.

  “Tell me, have the Mossad, in all their intelligence sharing with the United States, any knowledge of the Dissemblers?”

  Boaz thought back. He had heard the term, but it wasn’t in his line. He knew it had caused a stir in the Mega-Affairs Division about a year and a half ago. Something to do with the theft of some genetic material from an African monster the Americans had liquidated. But they had only recently come on the agency’s radar.

  “When did you join them, Austerlitz?”

  “Oh, I have always counted myself among their number. From birth I was taught of The Coming and urged to prepare for it. My life has been directed towards facilitating its arrival. Clearing the path.”

  Boaz narrowed his eyes. This had the sound of fanaticism, not something he had expected out of an old ex-Nazi living in Paraguay. What were these Dissemblers after?

  “What’s arrival? What’s coming?”

  “Something from up there,” Austerlitz said, pointing to the ceiling with a whimsical grin.

  Ah. So he was insane.

  “So the Nazis....?”

  “Oh you Jews and your Nazi fixation!” Austerlitz exclaimed, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “Will you never let go of all that? You despise their methods on one hand and adopt them yourselves with the other. The Nazi Party created a scientific renaissance in Germany, with unprecedented funding and freedom for theoretical experimentation. As a German, as a Dissembler, I could not choose but pay lip service to them to further my own sacred ends.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Not so crazy as you may think. You’ve seen the fruits of my research with your own eyes, and now you will see the culmination of hundreds of years of planning. We’ve conspired a long time to bring this day about.”

  He stood again and went to the television, flicking it on.

  There was an Arab news station on, depicting young Palestinian men and boys in the streets of what looked like the West Bank, chucking stones and molotov cocktails at passing IDF military vehicles. What was happening? He tried to sit up, and only barely managed it.

  “It’s being called The Intifada,” said Austerlitz, the flames from the television screen dancing on his eyeglasses. “Last month two Palestinian Liberation Organization commandos landed over the northern Israeli border in motorized hang gliders. One was tracked down and killed by your IDF, but the other managed to kill six soldiers of the Gibor Army camp a couple miles east of Kiryat Shmona before he was brought down. The New York Times picked up a statement made by Yassir Arafat to the Christian run radio station Voice of Lebanon, which I can quote. ‘The attack demonstrated that there could be no barriers or obstacles to prevent a guerrilla who has decided to become a martyr.’” He smiled at Boaz.

  “I can quote this not because I’ve heard it personally, but because I had a hand in writing it. It was a coded phrase, the signal for two PLO martyrs to infiltrate Jerusalem. They have been in the city for about nine days now. Four days ago, at the Erez Crossing, an IDF tank transporter crashed into a row of cars containing Palestinian workers commuting home from Israel. The accident was witnessed by hundreds of day laborers, and that evening their funeral led to widespread demonstrations. We couldn’t have asked for a better incentive to riot. It was much better than the one we had planned. As you can see, the situation has deteriorated quite rapidly. For three days the Palestinians have been in widespread revolt, throwing stones and homemade bombs, burning vehicles, barricading streets, and refusing to work. The protests have not quite reached the level of violence we had hoped for, but the situation is sufficiently volatile to be ready for the change we are about to enact.”

  “Change?” Boaz asked, watching the raging civilians marching and chanting Allahua Akbar, waving Palestinian flags across the television screen, as waves of yellow Arabic characters flashed across the bottom. “What are you going to do? Set off some bombs? What change will that enact?”

  “Mr. Meyeroff. You must know I do not deal in mere bombs.”

  Boaz thought back to Paraguay and the thing that had emerged from the laboratory. What did it mean? How had it gotten in there? And where had the first sentry gone after Austerlitz had whispered something to him? Mukhbarat in Paraguay. A secret laboratory. Austerlitz had been trying to create monsters for the Iraqis. His original experiments in the camps had been in combining the genetic material of humans and animals. The guard had gone in, and a monster had come out. Was it possible?

  His expression must have changed, because Austerlitz clapped his hands together.

  “Have you got it now?”

  “It’s not possible.”

  “It is possible! I assure you, I have done it!” he chuckled. “My previous experiments only failed because I didn’t have the Inagi genome or the required technology. You have seen the r
esults yourself. I was aware of your team’s presence as soon as the barbed wire fence was cut. I sent the Mukhbarat agent into the lab and instructed him to ingest a certain pill of my own creation. Just a harmless little pill that tastes of cinammon. How long did it take you to reach the house, crawling on your bellies through the field? Twenty minutes? In that time, I made a man into a monster.”

  Boaz shook his head, though he had already accepted the truth of it. Forty minutes he had said. In forty minutes the Mukhbarat would come in and kill them he said. Why? What was going to happen?

  In that instant, the voice of the Arabic commentator took on a different, more excited tone, and the images shifted from crowds of stone throwers and burning cars to the domes of the Hadassah Hospital complex on Mount Scopus.

  “Ah, here we are,” said Austerlitz. “Precisely on schedule.”

  Boaz’s heart broke as one of the domes blew open in a shower of rubble and fire.

  * * * *

  The Palestinian Ploni Almoni had been admitted into the hospital twenty minutes earlier complaining of stomach cramps.

  Dr. Shimon had gathered the interns around for a simple demonstration in diagnosis when the convulsions started.

  Shimon called for the nurses, but the man lashed an arm out wildly with enough force to send two of them crashing back into the interns. He shook and bent and contracted on the bed violently, and began foaming at the mouth, eyes bugging, screaming through his teeth.

  Then the hair sprouted. The nose and face became distended. A fin-like sagittal bone crest rose from his scalp and his neck thickened. Shimon watched fascinated as the heels popped and slid up the backs of his calves, bones grating audibly, feet elongating, ears sweeping back into elfin and then satanic proportions.

  At the same time, the body swelled, spine hunching and sloping, bursting the seam of the patient’s hospital gown, displaying a layer of coarse, pale hair so thick it obscured his musculature. Black slashes occurred along his ribs.

  American Werewolf In London. It reminded Shimon of the movie, American Werewolf In London.

  All his training was fleeing from his mind at the sight of the transformation occurring before him. The man’s eyes grew yellow, and as he gasped in pain, Shimon saw his teeth were elongated, the gums distending before his eyes.

  Shimon whimpered.

  But something else was happening. The bed groaned and collapsed to the floor. The man was not just transforming, he was rapidly increasing in size and apparently mass.

  One of the interns, Meyeroff, stepped forward, breaking from the mass of his screaming, cowering colleagues to try and restrain the man, or perhaps offer him some kind of help. Shimon didn’t know.

  The floor shifted beneath their feet, and beds, cabinets, IV-stands, all fell over or began to roll toward the thing in the broken bed, as if it was attracting them. But no, it was the floor. God, the floor was collapsing beneath its weight.

  And it was huge now! The remnants of the bed couldn’t even be seen beneath it. It’s canine muzzle nearly touched the ceiling. From chest to back, it was as tall as Meyeroff.

  The intern yelled for a sedative.

  Shimon laughed. What dosage would calm that thing? What would stop whatever it was becoming?

  He turned and shoved his way past his students, his run for the exit becoming a climb as the floor of the room suddenly gave way beneath the thing. He heard screams of people falling through the hole with it as he grabbed the doorknob to keep himself from falling with them.

  He looked back, and saw the fanged maw of the thing poking through the floor, felt its hot breath. The whole building rumbled and the door, the frame, and the wall into which it was set, buckled and gave. He shrieked as he slid along with tons of debris from the two floors above him into the things ever-expanding mouth.

  * * * *

  Boaz bit his knuckle and shook as he watched the Haddasah hospital shiver to pieces in a cloud of dust and gouts of fire as a giant, hairy humanoid stood up in the midst of it, helipads and rooftop air conditioners rolling off its ape-like shoulders. In the light of day, it was more canine that ape, with a short torso and a sloping hunchback that rendered its stout neck mostly immobile. It had long arms that ended in clawed humanoid hands, and bowed animal haunches. It resembled a grinning hyena with a lolling black tongue and luminescent golden eyes that seemed to constantly brim with tears of bright yellow energy. Its pale fur was slashed with black stripes and the tips of its sharp, spear-like ears looked as if they had been dipped in ink.

  And somewhere in that catastrophe in which the beast had been born from the body of a fanatic, his only son had likely died. No. No that was not supposed to happen. He was going to be a doctor. He would be at the deathbed of his old father, whispering for him to rejoin his wife, with teary-eyed grandchildren gathered all around.

  The television commentator was chattering excitedly in Arabic.

  “They insisted on striped hyenas,” Austerlitz remarked. “The national animal of Lebanon. I had hoped for a lion, something more dramatic.” He shrugged. “I suppose it is a collaborative effort. Concessions must be made.”

  “That was a hospital....,” Boaz hissed, fighting down the urge to blubber. Maybe Ari was in the dorms, or a different part of the medical center. “It catered to Jews and Muslims.”

  “Well,” Austerlitz shrugged. Then he pointed to the television set excitedly. “Ah there we are! There is our second subject.”

  The report switched to a second striped hyena thing breaking out of a low rent hotel to the west of the Givat Ram district. The footage was apparently being shot from the ground where the crew had been immersed in the Intifada, but now IDF and rock throwers alike were staring up in horror at the savage creature rising above the skyline. The camera was jostled and jarred as the news crew itself backpedaled away from the huge beast. It opened its jaws and let out a strange, almost human, shrill groan.

  It was quickly echoed by the first.

  Boaz winced, fighting down his own outrage. Perhaps his son had survived. He latched onto that. It would help him think clearer. He felt a rumble beneath the bed, and saw the rabbit ears on the television set quake slightly.

  Was it a coincidence? Or were they near to what was happening on the news?

  The camera angle changed to an aerial view from a news helicopter.

  The first creature was kicking down the student village and the outbuildings and clambering down from Mount Scopus, knocking against the low structures and sending them toppling.

  The second appeared to sniff the air and broke into a devastating lope toward East Jerusalem, destroying everything in its path. An LRT train crossed in front of it and was summarily derailed, the cars sent flipping off in every direction, crashing into the neighborhoods and breaking the tops off apartment complexes.

  Oh God, Jerusalem, he thought. He hadn’t been back here to visit in years. Only now, as familiar sights crumbled before the onslaught of the monsters, did he realize how much his heart was tied to it. He’d first seen it in 1948, lived in a crummy apartment in the Mount Scopus area, and patrolled the old Mandelbaum Gate.

  “What are they going to do? What’s their target?” he asked breathlessly.

  Austerlitz sniffed.

  “Well you see, I assured my patrons that the creatures retain their human intelligence,” Austerlitz went on. “That they can be controlled, and would set out to destroy IDF installations and administrative centers. Given their placement, they will do what I promised, but....monsters in Jerusalem. They can do a great deal of damage if unrestrained. There are so many important structures in the city you know? To Jews, to Christians, and Muslims. I’m afraid I lied. Intellect and reason have never survived the process, which is quite irreversible, by the way. They give over to their bestial, animal natures, and in a matter of a few days, they burn out and die. It will be fascinating to see what they do before then though, I think.”

  Good God, Austerlitz was truly insane. He was right that the city w
as holy to most of the major contentious denominations, though. Around every corner was some precious heritage site, some monument from antiquity, neighboring the modern. Bedouins still trekked to the Dome of The Rock, leading their camels along the avenues in the shadow of the Mount of Olives, where David’s son Absalom was entombed near the Virgin Mary and the Prophet Zekariah, and kids smoked cigarettes and wrote their names on thousand year old grave markers there, perhaps as they had always done.

  The second creature was heading straight for the municipal center, and flattened half of Museum Row in a matter of minutes. The Bible Lands Museum, where Boaz had met Rebecca, then a university student, ironically browsing the gallery of Anatolian jugs beneath the verse "Behold, Rebecca came forth with her pitcher on her shoulder; and she went down unto the fountain and drew water" from Genesis, was destroyed.

  The museum tripped it up and it fell right into the Knesset building, the center of Israeli goverment. IDF Merkavah tanks had rolled onto the scene, diverting from crowd control too late. They battered it with rounds, but it only snuffled, and kept heading east toward the old city, unconcerned.

  God, it was heading for the Temple Mount, the home of the third holiest Muslim mosque and the remains of the Temple, the holiest place in Judaism. The other one tripped through the densely packed residential area and fell to all fours when it reached the hills of olive trees. Local police and armored cars were doing all they could to get its attention, but it didn’t even notice them.

  What was drawing them? The sun glinting on the golden dome, or something else?

  Boaz had long ceased to be an observant Jew. In his line of work, many of the commandments tended to fall necessarily by the wayside. But there was something about the Temple Mount that made even him draw a breath. That was the womb of his people. His grandfather had told him the Foundation Stone, where Adam had risen from the dust was there, and that it was where Isaac had been bound by Abraham. He’d fought the Jordanians hand to hand there in the ‘67, and shed tears when General Goren blew the shofar to signify its liberation.