“But I saw the creature.”
“An ape. I assure you it was merely an ape. A curious cross-breeding of Old and New World primates, resulting from one of my experiments in controlled mutation. Unsuccessful, from my point of view, actually, since it’s merely a hybrid, not actually a mutation – far less a regression.” He chuckled at the absurdity of such a concept.
“I don’t believe you.”
Hodson shrugged.
“As you like. Your opinions cease to interest me, now that I’ve had my little game.”
“Will you allow me to examine it then? There can be no harm in that, if it’s just an ape.”
“That, I regret to say, is impossible. The wound you inflicted upon it was more serious than it appeared. There were internal complications and my surgical skill is paltry. I’m afraid that the ape has expired.”
“An examination of the body will satisfy me.”
“I have no desire to satisfy you. If it weren’t for you, the ape would still be alive. At any rate, the remains have already been dissected and disposed of.”
“Already?”
“You have been sleeping for – ” he regarded his watch, “some ten hours. Sufficient time to derive whatever scientific benefit can be found in examining a deceased hybrid. You may see my notes, if you like.”
“Everything you told me was a lie?”
“Not a lie. What is a lie? A study in man’s gullibility, perhaps. An objective observation of the effect of the absurd upon the credulous. You have undoubtedly heard how I used to enjoy shocking people with unfounded theories? My pleasure was not so much in the outraged reception of my statements, as in observing a man’s reaction afterwards. This, in its way, was also a study of mankind. And that, Brookes, is my field, in all its manifold aspects.”
I shook my head. It should have been so much easier to believe him now than it had been before. But, somehow, I couldn’t quite do so. His tone lacked that enthusiasm and excitement it had carried before – an enthusiasm derived from success and pride in his accomplishments. And yet, I had not been thinking clearly, I’d been feverish and weak and susceptible to suggestion, and Hodson was a master of deliberate deception. I tried to reason, but my thoughts came helter skelter, my mind whirled, touching on valid points and then spinning on before I could follow a line of reasoning.
“Rest now,” Hodson said, far away again. “You’ll be able to laugh at yourself in the morning.”
He took the candle with him. The room was black, and a sympathetic blackness began to nudge me towards sleep, a blank space growing larger in my brain.
The light had returned when I opened my eyes again.
Anna stood beside the bed, holding the candle. The curtains swayed behind her, the house was very quiet. She smiled down at me, looking concerned.
“You are all right?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I was worried for you.”
She hovered over me uncertainly. She wasn’t embarrassed, because she knew nothing of propriety or shame, but she seemed undecided.
“May I sit beside you?” she asked.
“Of course.”
I slid over. Anna sat on the edge of the cot. I was still wearing my shirt and trousers and she was still naked. She curled one leg beneath her and placed the candle on the floor, stared at it for a moment and then moved it a few needless inches. Her smile was shy, although she did not know what shyness was. She placed a cool hand on my brow. My fever seemed to have left me now, but that cool palm felt very good and I placed my hand over hers. She leaned slightly toward me and her firm breast brushed against my forearm. I remembered how much I had wanted her the last time we were together in this little cell; realized that desire was stronger now than before; wondered if she knew, if she understood, if she had come to me because she felt the same way.
“I don’t disturb you?” she asked.
“You do. Very much.”
“Shall I leave?”
“No. Stay here.”
It wasn’t the playful teasing of a woman, she meant exactly what she said, honest and artless.
“You are not yet well – ”
I moved my hand to her hip. Her flesh was silken warmth, her hair so black it seemed a hole in space, falling over her shoulders and absorbing the candlelight completely, without gloss or shine. My hand moved, stroking her thigh, and my mind avoided all thoughts of right and wrong.
“Shall I lie down?” she asked.
I pulled her to me and the length of our bodies pressed together. I could feel her smooth heat through my rough clothing, and her lips parted willingly against my mouth.
“I don’t know how to do it,” she said.
“You’ve never made love?”
“No. You will show me how?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Very much,” she said. Her arms clung to me, timidly but firmly. I shifted, rising above her, and she lay back, watching and waiting for me. Her passion showed only in her eyes, and was all the more inspiring because she did not know the accepted motions of manifesting desire.
“Really? You never have?” I asked.
My hand moved on her gently.
“Never. There has been no one to teach me.”
It cut sharply through my fascination. She hadn’t come because she wanted me, but simply because I was the first man available to her. My hand stopped moving on her flat belly, she frowned, looking into my face.
“What is wrong?” she asked.
Another thought was toying with the edge of perception, a vague uneasiness that had seized its foothold in that moment of diminished desire. I wasn’t quite sure what it was . . .
“Does Hodson know you’ve come to me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t mind?”
“Why should he mind?”
“I don’t – Anna, when I was unconscious – did Hodson do anything to me?”
“He fixed you. Made you well.”
“What did he do?”
My heart was thundering, pumping icebergs through my arteries.
“What is wrong? Why have you stopped loving me?”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t know. He made you well. He took you to his laboratory and fixed you so that you would be all right for me to come to . . .”
She said this as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The icebergs melted in my blood.
“Why have you stopped?” she asked. “Am I no good for making love?”
My mind erupted in horror.
* * *
I stood beside the bed, my boots in my hand. I didn’t remember getting up. Anna was staring at me, hurt and disappointed, unable to understand how she had failed – a child punished without reason. But what reason could I give her? She was of a different world and there was nothing I could say. My breath came hard, but not with desire now. I wanted only one thing, to escape from that fiendish place, and Anna’s graceful body had become loathsome to me.
I moved to the door. Anna watched me all the while. I couldn’t even say farewell to her, couldn’t even beg her not to give the alarm. She was still staring as I passed through the curtains and they closed between us. It was more than those curtains that stood between us. I went down the hallway to the front room. The house was silent, Anna made no sound behind me. The front room was empty and I moved quietly on bare feet. I didn’t know what Hodson would resort to if he found me, didn’t know if he would force me to stay, even if he might not kill me. But I felt no fear of this. The numb horror of the situation was too great to share its place with any other emotion, too great to be realized; and my mind froze in self preservation.
I crossed the room and went out of the door, started walking calmly across the narrow basin of the valley, almost sluggish in my determination. The night was black and cold, my body felt like a heated rod passing through the absolute zero of space, my course preordained and no friction to halt me. The ground rose and I bega
n an angled ascent of the hills; I noticed objectively that I was climbing the same hill where the vultures had dropped down to feast the last time I departed from Hodson’s. But this made no impression. Everything was external, my breath hung before me and the clouded sky was low, blanketing the hills as I climbed up to meet it.
My thoughts were superficial and purely functional, my mind rejecting the horror of the situation and concentrating on the task at hand, plotting the logical course. I had to ascend the hills, keeping in a north-eastern direction which would bring me out east of the sheer cliffs which housed the tunnel, then descend the opposite side towards the north-west, compensating for the angle and coming out somewhere near the waterfall. The high, unscalable cliffs would be visible for miles as I walked down, and I felt certain I could find them, and find the camp in relation to them. I told myself I was safe now; there was no way that Hodson could find me.
Halfway up the incline I paused to catch my breath and realized I still carried my boots in my hand. I sat down and pulled them on, looking back toward the house as I tied the laces. The house was dark and quiet. Perhaps Anna was still waiting and wondering in that little room, or perhaps Hodson knew that pursuit would prove futile. The night was very dark, and there was no way he could follow me over that rocky land. Even the extraordinary Indian would not be able to track a man at night through such terrain. Hodson had no dog to follow by scent, no way to know what direction I’d fled in, no way to –
My fingers snapped the laces.
There was one way.
There was one being behind me with the senses and instincts of the hunting carnivore – one creature capable of silently tracking me through the blackest night – one creature whose eyes glowed with night vision and seethed with hatred –
I ran, mad with fear.
I ran. The broken laces slapped at my ankle, loose stones slid beneath my feet, trees loomed up suddenly before me and I crashed through in wild flight. I stumbled and fell, leaped up to fall again, banging against rocks and trees, tearing my finger-nails at the roots as I heaved myself over boulders and caught at sapling limbs, crushing my shins and elbows without feeling pain. My mind was outside my body; I watched myself scramble through dark confusion; saw my forehead collide solidly with a rocky overhang and a line of blood seep down my temple; saw my balance tilt as I overstepped a ridge and tumbled down, legs still churning – and, all the time, apart from my body, my mind screamed that Hodson would have no qualms, that Hodson had no regard for human life, that Hodson would release the creature –
And then my mind was back inside my throbbing head, and I leaned exhausted against a mangled tree at the top of the mountain. I’d run for hours and for miles, or for minutes and for yards, it was all the same. My chest heaved so violently that it seemed the tree was vibrating and the land was running beneath my feet. I looked back. All the trees were vibrating. A razorback of land humped up in the centre and crumbled at the edges, a solid wave of earth skimmed over the rock toward me, uprooting brush and trees in its wake, and the earth itself groaned in agony. Far away a deep rumble sounded for a moment, and then died out. The movement ceased and the moaning faded. The land looked different, the contours shifted and altered, but the same wind cried above and the same blood pounded through my bursting veins.
XV
Gregorio found me in the morning.
I was still walking, following some natural instinct toward the camp, the long night a blurred memory behind me, high-lights and shadows in contorted chiaroscuro and strained awareness. My panic had left with the dawn, I was walking on calmly and steadily, placing one foot before the other in studied concentration. From time to time I looked up, but I couldn’t see the cliffs; lowered my head and watched my feet; noticed that the broken lace was still flaying at my ankle but didn’t think to tie it. Then I looked up again and there was Gregorio. He was on the grey, staring at me, his mouth open, and I saw him through the red-rimmed frame of hollow eyes.
He moved forward on the horse and I leaned against his knee.
“Thank God,” he said.
He swung from the saddle.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“I rode this way. I didn’t know. I thought that I had killed you.”
That made no sense, but I didn’t want sense. I collapsed against him.
I was in Gregorio’s tent. My own tent was still spread over the ground. Gregorio gave me a tin mug of water and I gulped it down, feeling it trickle over my chin.
“You are all right now?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that I killed you.”
“I don’t understand. How – ”
“When you did not return in the morning – when it was light – I followed your tracks. And the tracks of the creature. I followed to the waterhole and saw where you had gone into the cave behind the water. There were no tracks coming out. I called to you and there was no answer. I did not dare to enter and I returned to the camp. But I felt very bad because of this. I waited all day and felt bad because I had not gone in the cave. I drank pisco and waited and when it was night again and the pisco was gone I was not so afraid. I went back to the waterfall, pretending that I was brave and that it was shameful I had not gone into the cave. I called again and then I went past the water and stood inside the tunnel. I stood in the entrance but I had no courage to go farther. I could not see the sky and I had no torch. I called more but there were only echoes. I thought you were dead. Then I thought that perhaps you were injured and were too far away to hear me call, and so I fired the rifle three times so that you would hear.”
He paused, his hands moving expressively and frowned as be sought the words.
“The noise of the gun and the echoes – they caused something. The noise inside the mountain. It caused the mountain to move. I ran out just in time. I saw the cave close, the rocks came together and the cliffs moved backwards so that the top slid down. But it slid on the other side, not on me. I thought you were inside, maybe you were injured, and that I had buried you. Thank God it was not so.”
I nodded. “The vibrations. There were faults in the rock. I felt the mountain move last night, but I thought it was my imagination. Did it move very far?”
“I think far. I could not tell, it moved on the other side. To the south.”
“Perhaps it is just as well,” I said.
“If the creature was inside – ” Gregorio began.
“Perhaps there are things that man should not know,” I told him. And then I suddenly understood the full import of that, the full extent of what I did not know. Hodson’s words sounded in my mind . . .
“It is only necessary to treat the male . . .”
Gregorio looked at me with concern. He thought I was sick again, because I was very pale.
Two days later I was well – as well as I will ever be. We rode back along the path of my flight, in the early morning. My horse was as placid as ever, despite the gruesome wound on its flank. It was a good horse, and I was glad it had survived. Gregorio was curious as to why I should insist on this journey, but there was nothing I could tell him. There was nothing I could tell anyone, and when we rode over the top of the hills my last hopes vanished. It was what I had expected, what I had known with terrible anticipation.
The narrow valley was no longer there. The sheer cliffs at the apex had slid back at a gentler angle, forming the Tarpeian Rock from which my hopes were hurled to their death, and the base spread out in broken rock and upheaved earth in a shallow triangle where the valley had been. There was no sign whatsoever of Hodson’s house or the cave beyond. I looked down from the hills, but hadn’t the heart to descend. There was nothing to be found amidst that wreckage that would help me, no way to discover which of Hodson’s stories had been deception. After all, it might have been an ape . . .
It might have been. Perhaps he had done nothing to me in that laboratory. Perhaps.
There was only one way to tell, and the method was too horrible to con
template; it shared a common path with madness.
“Shall we go down?” Gregorio asked.
I had a fleeting thought of Anna, innocent and helpless within the framework Hodson had built around her life, buried somewhere beneath those countless tons of stone. Had she still been waiting in my bed? It didn’t seem to matter. I had no sorrow to spare.
“Shall we go down?” Gregorio asked again.
“It won’t be necessary.”
“This is all you wished to look for?”
“This is all there is, my friend.”
Gregorio blinked. He didn’t understand. We rode back toward the camp, and he watched me nervously, wondering why I would not look at him. But it had nothing to do with him.
It was raining, but there was sunlight above the clouds. A flock of geese passed overhead, flying in precise formation toward the horizon, following a call they did not understand. Birds were singing in the trees and small animals avoided our path. The world was moving on at its own slow pace, with its own inexorable momentum, and nature avoided us and ignored us. Perhaps, for a few moments while the land was rumbling, nature had acted in outrage and defence, but now it was quiet once more; now it would survive.
We broke camp and headed back to Ushuaia.
There was a letter from Susan waiting at the hotel, telling how much she loved me, and Jones told me how Cape Horn looked from the air . . .
The restaurant was closing.
The late diners had departed, the waiters had gathered in the corner, waiting for me to leave. Susan had gone. My glass was empty and I was alone. I signalled and the waiter came over quickly with the bill. He thought I was drunk. I over-tipped him and went out to the street. It was late; only a few people hurried past. They were strangers, and I was a stranger. I began walking home, slowly and thoughtfully, accompanied by whatever horror I may, or may not, bear in my loins. I will never know.
There are some things it is better not to know.
The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) Page 76