The girl looked around at his voice. The pupils of her eyes were of different sizes. Dr Pretorious slapped her face until a faint bloom appeared on her cheeks.
“You see! She lives! Ask her a question. Anything. She has returned from death, and there is more in her head than in yours or mine. Ask!”
“I have nothing to ask,” Dr Stein said.
“She knows the future. Tell him about the future,” he hissed into the girl’s ear.
The girl’s mouth worked. Her chest heaved as if she was pumping up something inside herself, then she said in a low whisper, “It is the Jews that will be blamed.”
Dr Stein said, “That’s always been true.”
“But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Dr Stein met Dr Pretorious’s black gaze. “How many have you killed, in your studies?”
“Oh, most of them were already dead. They gave themselves for science, just as in the ancient days young girls were sacrificed for the pagan gods.”
“Those days are gone.”
“Greater days are to come. You will help. I know you will. Let me show you how we will save her. You will save her, won’t you?”
The girl’s head was beside Dr Pretorious’s. They were both looking at Dr Stein. The girl’s lips moved, mumbling over two words. A cold mantle crept across Dr Stein’s skin. He had picked up a knife when he had stooped to help the old man, and now, if he could, he had a use for it.
Dr Pretorious led Dr Stein to the pen where the pig snuffled in its straw. He held up a candle, and Dr Stein saw clearly, for an instant, the hand on the pig’s back. Then the creature bolted into shadow.
It was a human hand, severed at the wrist, poking out of the pink skin of the pig’s back as if from a sleeve. It looked alive, the nails suffused, the skin as pink as the pig’s skin.
“They don’t last long,” Dr Pretorious said. He seemed pleased by Dr Stein’s shock. “Either the pig dies, or the limb begins to rot. There is some incompatibility between the two kinds of blood. I have tried giving pigs human blood before the operation, but they die even more quickly. Perhaps with your help I can perfect the process. I will perform the operation on the girl, replace her rotten foot with a healthy one. I will not have her imperfect. I will do better. I will improve her, piece by piece. I will make her a true Bride of the Sea, a wonder that all the world will worship. Will you help me, doctor? It is difficult to get bodies. Your friend is causing me a great deal of nuisance . . . but you can bring me bodies, why, almost every day. So many die in winter. A piece here, a piece there. I do not need the whole corpse. What could be simpler?”
He jumped back as Dr Stein grabbed his arm, but Dr Stein was quicker, and knocked the candle into the pen. The straw was aflame in an instant, and the pig charged out as soon as Dr Stein pulled back the hurdle. It barged at Dr Pretorious as if it remembered the torments he had inflicted upon it, and knocked him down. The hand flopped to and fro on its back, as if waving.
The girl could have been asleep, but her eyes opened as soon as Dr Stein touched her cold brow. She tried to speak, but she had very little strength now, and Dr Stein had to lay his head on her cold breast to hear her mumble the two words she had mouthed to him earlier.
“Kill me.”
Behind them, the fire had taken hold in the shelving and floor, casting a lurid light down the length of the room. Dr Pretorious ran to and fro, pursued by the pig. He was trying to capture the scampering mice-things which had been driven from their hiding places by the fire, but even with their staggering bipedal gait they were faster than he was. The old man ran into the room, and Dr Pretorious shouted, “Help me, you fool!”
But the old man ran past him, ran through the wall of flames that now divided the room, and jumped onto Dr Stein as he bent over the drowned girl. He was as weak as a child, but when Dr Stein tried to push him away he bit into Dr Stein’s wrist and the knife fell to the floor. They reeled backwards and knocked over a jar of acid. Instantly, acrid white fumes rose up as the acid burnt into the wood floor. The old man rolled on the floor, beating at his smoking, acid-drenched costume.
Dr Stein found the knife and drew its sharp point down the length of the blue veins of the drowned girl’s forearms. The blood flowed surprisingly quickly. Dr Stein stroked the girl’s hair, and her eyes focused on his. For a moment it seemed as if she might say something, but with the heat of the fire beating at his back he could not stay any longer.
Dr Stein knocked out a shutter with a bench, hauled himself onto the window-ledge. As he had hoped, there was black water directly below: like all palazzos, this one rose straight up from the Grand Canal. Smoke rolled around him. He heard Dr Pretorious shout at him and he let himself go, and gave himself to air, and then water.
Dr Pretorious was caught at dawn the next day, as he tried to leave the city in a hired skiff. The fire set by Dr Stein had burnt out the top floor of the palazzo, no more, but the old man had died there. He had been the last in the line of a patrician family that had fallen on hard times: the palazzo and an entry in the Libro d’Oro was all that was left of their wealth and fame.
Henry Gorrall told Dr Stein that no mention need be made of his part in this tragedy. “Let the dead lay as they will. There’s no need to disturb them with fantastic stories.”
“Yes,” Dr Stein said, “the dead should stay dead.”
He was lying in his own bed, recovering from a rheumatic fever brought about by the cold waters into which he had plunged on his escape. Winter sunlight pried at the shutters of the white bedroom, streaked the fresh rushes on the floor.
“It seems that Pretorious does have friends,” Gorrall said. “There won’t be a trial and an execution, much as he deserves both. He’s going straight to the galleys, and no doubt after a little while he will contrive, with some help, to escape. That’s the way of things here. His name wasn’t really Pretorious, of course. I doubt if we’ll ever know where he came from. Unless he told you something of himself.”
Outside the bedroom there was a clamour of voices as Dr Stein’s wife welcomed in Abraham Soncino and his family, and the omelettes and other egg dishes they had brought to begin the week of mourning.
Dr Stein said, “Pretorious claimed that he was in Egypt, before he came here.”
“Yes, but what adventurer was not, after the Florentines conquered it and let it go? Besides, I understand that he stole the apparatus not from any savage tribe, but from the Great Engineer of Florence himself. What else did he say? I’d know all, not for the official report, but my peace of mind.”
“There aren’t always answers to mysteries,” Dr Stein told his friend. The dead should stay dead. Yes. He knew now that his daughter had died. He had released her memory when he had released the poor girl that Dr Pretorious had called back from the dead. Tears stood in his eyes, and Gorrall clumsily tried to comfort him, mistaking them for tears of grief.
For Ernest Thesiger, in memoriam.
Michael Marshall Smith
To Receive is Better
Michael Marshall Smith won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction with his debut story “The Man Who Drew Cats” (from Dark Voices 2) and again the following year for “The Dark Land” (from Darklands). He was also presented with the Best Newcomer award for 1991.
A freelance graphic designer and radio scriptwriter, his short fiction has appeared in various volumes of Dark Voices, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Touch Wood, Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. His first novel, Only Forward, was published to critical acclaim by HarperCollins in 1994.
The author believes that the story which follows speaks for itself, but adds: “The image of the blue tunnels is one I dreamed about ten years ago, and I’m glad it’s finally found somewhere to rest.”
I’D LIKE TO BE going by car, but of course I don’t know how to drive, and it would probably scare the shit out of me. A car would
be much better, for lots of reasons. For a start, there’s too many people out here. There’s so many people. Wherever you turn there’s more of them, looking tired, and rumpled, but whole. That’s the strange thing. Everybody is whole.
A car would also be quicker. Sooner or later they’re going to track me down, and I’ve got somewhere to go before they do. The public transport system sucks, incidentally. Long periods of being crowded into carriages that smell, interspersed with long waits for another line, and I don’t have a lot of time. It’s intimidating too. People stare. They just look and look, and they don’t know the danger they’re in. Because in a minute one of them is going to look just one second too long, and I’m going to pull his fucking face off, which will do neither of us any good.
So instead I turn and look out the window. There’s nothing to see, because we’re in a tunnel, and I have to shut my eye to stop myself from screaming. The carriage is like another tunnel, a tunnel with windows, and I feel like I’ve been buried far too deep. I grew up in tunnels, ones that had no windows. The people who made them didn’t even bother to pretend that there was something to look out on, something to look for. Because there wasn’t. Nothing’s coming up, nothing that isn’t going to involve some fucker coming at you with a knife. So they don’t pretend. I’ll say that for them, at least: they don’t taunt you with false hopes.
Manny did, in a way, which is why I feel complicated about him. On the one hand, he was the best thing that ever happened to us. But look at it another way, and maybe we’d have been better off without him. I’m being unreasonable. Without Manny, the whole thing would have been worse, thirty years of utter fucking pointlessness. I wouldn’t have known, of course, but I do now: and I’m glad it wasn’t that way. Without Manny I wouldn’t be where I am now. Standing in a subway carriage, running out of time.
People are giving me a wide berth, which I guess isn’t so surprising. Partly it’ll be my face, and my leg. People don’t like that kind of thing. But probably it’s mainly me. I know the way I am, can feel the fury I radiate. It’s not a nice way to be, I know that, but then my life has not been nice. Maybe you should try it, and see how calm you stay.
The other reason I feel weird towards Manny is I don’t know why he did it. Why he helped us. Sue 2 says it doesn’t matter, but I think it does. If it was just an experiment, a hobby, then I think that makes a difference. I think I would have liked him less. As it happens, I don’t think it was. I think it was probably just humanity, whatever the fuck that is. I think if it was an experiment, then what happened an hour ago would have panned out differently. For a start, he probably wouldn’t be dead.
If everything’s gone okay, then Sue 2 will be nearly where she’s going by now, much closer than me. That’s a habit I’m going to have to break, for a start. It’s Sue now, just Sue. No numeral. And I’m just plain old Jack, or I will be if I get where I am going.
The first thing I can remember, the earliest glimpse of life, is the colour blue. I know now what I was seeing, but at the time I didn’t know anything different, and I thought that blue was the only colour there was. A soft, hazy blue, a blue that had a soft hum in it and was always the same clammy temperature.
I have to get out of this subway very soon. I’ve taken an hour of it, and that’s about as far as I can go. It’s very noisy in here too, not a hum but a horrendous clattering. This is not the way I want to spend what may be the only time I have. People keep surging around me, and they’ve all got places to go. For the first time in my life, I’m surrounded by people who’ve actually got somewhere to go.
And the tunnel is the wrong colour. Blue is the colour of tunnels. I can’t understand a tunnel unless it’s blue. I spent the first four years of my life, as far as I can work out, in one of them. If it weren’t for Manny, I’d be in one still. When he came to work at the Farm I could tell he was different straight away. I don’t know how: I couldn’t even think then, let alone speak. Maybe it was just he behaved differently when he was near us to the way the previous keeper had. I found out a lot later that Manny’s wife had died having a dead baby, so maybe that was it.
What he did was take some of us, and let us live outside the tunnels. At first it was just a few, and then about half of the entire stock of spares. Some of the others never took to the world outside the tunnels, such as it was. They’d just come out every now and then, moving hopelessly around, mouths opening and shutting, and they always looked kind of blue somehow, as if the tunnel light had seeped into their skin. There were a few who never came out of the tunnels at all, but that was mainly because they’d been used too much already. Three years old and no arms. Tell me that’s fucking reasonable.
Manny let us have the run of the facility, and sometimes let us go outside. He had to be careful, because there was a road a little too close to one side of the farm. People would have noticed a group of naked people stumbling around in the grass, and of course we were naked, because they didn’t give us any fucking clothes. Right to the end we didn’t have any clothes, and for years I thought it was always raining on the outside, because that’s the only time he’d let us out.
I’m wearing one of Manny’s suits now, and Sue’s got some blue jeans and a shirt. The pants itch like hell, but I feel like a prince. Princes used to live in castles and fight monsters and sometimes they’d marry princesses and live happy ever after. I know about princes because I’ve been told.
Manny told us stuff, taught us. He tried to, anyway. With most of us it was too late. With me it was too late, probably. I can’t write, and I can’t read. I know there’s big gaps in my head. Every now and then I can follow something through, and the way that makes me feel makes me realize that most of the time it doesn’t happen. Things fall between the tracks. I can talk quite well, though. I was always one of Manny’s favourites, and he used to talk to me a lot. I learnt from him. Part of what makes me so fucking angry is that I think I could have been clever. Manny said so. Sue says so. But it’s too late now. It’s far too fucking late.
I was ten when they first came for me. Manny got a phone call and suddenly he was in a panic. There were spares spread all over the facility and he had to run round, herding us all up. He got us into the tunnels just in time and we just sat in there, wondering what was going on.
In a while Manny came to the tunnel I was in, and he had this other guy with him who was big and nasty. They walked down the tunnel, the big guy kicking people out of the way. Everyone knew enough not to say anything: Manny had told us about that. Some of the people who never came out of the tunnels were crawling and shambling around, banging off the walls like they do, and the big guy just shoved them out of the way. They fell over like lumps of meat and then kept moving, making noises with their mouths.
Eventually Manny got to where I was and pointed me out. His hand was shaking and his face looked strange, like he was trying not to cry. The big guy grabbed me by the arm and took me out of the tunnel. He dragged me down to the operating room, where there were two more guys in white clothes and they put me on the table in there and cut off two of my fingers.
That’s why I can’t write. I’m right-handed, and they cut off my fucking fingers. Then they put a needle into my hand with see-through thread and sewed it up like they were in a hurry, and the big man took me back to the tunnel, opened the door and shoved me in. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything the whole time.
Later Manny came and found me, and I shrank away from him, because I thought they were going to do something else. But he put his arms round me and I could tell the difference, and so I let him take me out into the main room. He put me in a chair and washed my hand which was all bloody, and then he sprayed it with some stuff that made it hurt a little less. Then he told me. He explained where I was, and why.
I was a spare, and I lived on a Farm. When people with money got pregnant, Manny said, doctors took a cell from the foetus and cloned another baby, so it had exactly the same cells as the baby that was going to be
born. They grew the second baby until it could breath, and then they sent it to a farm.
The spares live on the farm until something happens to the proper baby. If the proper baby damages a part of itself, then the doctors come to the farm and cut a bit off the spare and sew it onto the real baby, because it’s easier that way because of cell rejection and stuff that I don’t really understand. They sew the spare baby up again and push it back into the tunnels and the spare sits there until the real baby does something else to itself. And when it does, the doctors come back again.
Manny told me, and I told the others, and so we knew.
We were very, very lucky, and we knew it. There are farms dotted all over the place, and every one but ours was full of blue people that just crawled up and down the tunnels, sheets of paper with nothing written on them. Manny said that some keepers made extra money by letting real people in at night. Sometimes the real people would just drink beer and laugh at the spares, and sometimes they would fuck them. Nobody knows, and nobody cares. There’s no point teaching spares, no point giving them a life. All that’s going to happen is they’re going to get whittled down.
On the other hand, maybe they have it easier. Because once you know how things stand, it becomes very difficult to take it. You just sit around, and wait, like all the others, but you know what you’re waiting for. And you know who’s to blame.
Like my brother Jack, for example. Jamming two fingers in a door when he was ten was only the start of it. When he was eighteen he rolled his expensive car and smashed up the bones in his leg. That’s another of the reasons I don’t want to be on this fucking subway: people notice when something like that’s missing. Just like they notice that the left side of my face is raw, where they took a graft off when some woman threw scalding water at him. He’s got most of my stomach, too. Stupid fucker ate too much spicy food, drank too much wine. Don’t know what those kind of things are like, of course: but they can’t have been that nice. They can’t have been nice enough. And then last year he went to some party, got drunk, got into a fight and lost his right eye. And so, of course, I lost mine.
The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) Page 62