The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  He spoke very softly—now and then throwing me a worried glance—of his work in the field of genetics. He pitched his gaze just higher than my head (standing pressed into the corner now, as if someone in the room had driven him there) and he spoke with unnatural gentleness, as if to renounce John Hunter’s history of laboratory murders—grave on grave of dead foetuses—or as if he had hope of appeasing the howl and shriek outside.

  “But to men of true Imagination,” he said—and cast his eyes toward the shuddering ceiling—”to men of Feeling and Intellect, the truths of the Ancients need not be exhausted! Suppose you and I should deny God’s existence, crush the mad poets’ idea of Soul. Would we not have at last made life whole again?”

  “Wholly bad, I venture.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps! But then again, we might get a shock, don’t you think, Doctor? Suppose all goodness is immanent, buried in matter—in animal spirits, the humours, in cryptarch, inorganic atoms—buried there since Time began, where it labors to be born? Suppose knowledge is a thing that can be eaten, as cannibals imagine—West Indian savages, for instance, who consume the shamans of rival tribes. Suppose, in other words, that knowledge is actually, in some way we can’t understand, mere meat.”

  The anguished wringing of the woman’s hands was dreadful to behold. My diagnosis was that the man’s revelation of his mind’s imbalance was profoundly unsettling to her sensitive soul. I’d have comforted the lady if possible. But I could hardly reach out and pat her arm to reveal my fellow-feeling. Hunter’s eyes, paranoiacally rolling, missed nothing.

  “The hypothesis would not be very good for one, it seems to me,” I said. “As to its ultimate truth or falsity—”

  “Heaven knows, not ‘good for one,’ not healthy, I agree!” He blanched, lips trembling, and clasped his hands together. “Yet what is the intellect for if not to penetrate, dissect? There’s your God, Dr. Thorpe! The human intellect!—God and Devil both! It creates and burns the crepuscular world with its own pale flame and leaves nothing in its wake.”

  I fidgeted. He was actually catching me up in his lunatic paradoxes. Rather than reason with a raving madman, rather than play my mouse’s part in his mysterious game of cat and mouse, I would sit more heavily, arms pressed firmly to the arms of my chair, my spectacles rigid and low on my nose. I would cling to common sense as to an oak tree. “You say knowledge is meat. You would hardly call beefsteak crepuscular, a thing of twilight.”

  He leaned forward, squinting. “Nothing exists, Dr. Thorpe. We’re dreams in the mind of a sleeping dragon. That’s our hope.”

  “Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley!” I said, rather fiercely, and gave the chair arm a resounding thump.

  He squealed with laughter, a noise indescribably terrible to my ears, as if the chair arm should suddenly have felt pain and should confusedly express it by a laugh. Then for a long time Hunter was silent, his frightened eyes riveted to me. The swaying oil lamp above us projected his shadow on the wall, a crouched, wild-headed animal. I received a strong impression that the poor man was trying to tell me something, flash me some warning or signal some desperate appeal. I glanced at the woman—small, dressed in white, like a virgin laid out for her funeral. Was it possible, I wondered, that she was the threat, and Hunter’s nonsense all aimed, in fact… Sickly as she was in all other respects, her bosom was large, like the bosom of a healthy young wet nurse.

  Puzzling. But the storm, baying, tearing with ferocious jaws at Time and Space …

  I’ve lost my thread. Let me see.

  He spoke of Lamarck’s idea, in Zoological Philosophy, of the transfer, from male to female, of a complete but tiny man. The old idea was in part correct, he said, though in ways no one but he, John Hunter, had recognized. He spoke of the theory of inherent influences—the idea, now all but universally scorned, that a rifleman’s child might be born with the overdeveloped shoulder of his father. That too, though greatly oversimplified, was true. And he told of some monk who had recently gotten some curious information from beans—or perhaps from peas; I’ve forgotten. I understood, alas, hardly two words out of three. It was all very technical, and even though I am, in a sense, a scientific man, it was beyond me. I set it down as gibberish, in fact. Mere fancy without judgment.

  Perhaps he guessed that. He fell silent, studying me intensely. Suddenly, out of the blue, he asked: “Does the Greek word klone have any meaning to you, Doctor?”

  I searched through what little remained of my Greek. Then: “It means ‘crowd,’ if I remember rightly.”

  “Exactly!” He smiled, then went still more pale. “Dr. Thorpe, I have discovered the secret of kloning animals—including human beings. I can turn one animal to an infinite number, every last one of them identical, a perfect duplicate.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. I spoke sternly, to snap the man out of it; but one might as well have rebuked the storm.

  “I’ve discovered a ray with strange properties—that is, I think it’s a ray. Perhaps a stream of particles, or motes. In any case—” He glanced nervously at the woman, then, with sudden determination, crossed to a desk at the far end of the room, opened it, and brought out a daguerreotype. He looked at it a moment, as if screwing up his courage, then hurried over to my chair with it. He practically hurled it at me, snapping his lean, stiff arm at me, the daguerreotype hanging in his violently shaking fingers. “Dr. Thorpe, do you recognize this man?”

  It struck me that I did, though at first I couldn’t place the features. Then with a jolt I remembered the etching one comes across so often in old medical books. “Why, that’s Hunter!” I said, and was immediately flustered. My host, he claimed, was this same Professor Hunter. But the man in the picture was in his seventies. His beard was trim, his bespectacled eyes were …

  Hardly knowing, I…

  Hardly knowing what I was doing, I put the picture away in my pocket as though it belonged to me.

  “Don’t you see?” he said loudly. His voice cracked.

  “My dear fellow, I see nothing!” I shouted.

  “That man is my father. Or, rather, that man is my identical self. And this woman—” He swung to point at her. “This woman is my mother, my wife, my sister. We’re not human, Dr. Thorpe. We’re copies!—klones!”

  “Stark mad,” I whispered, and clasped my hands tightly.

  “Miserable, but not mad,” he cried, dashing away from me, pacing in strides that would have been comic were they not so outrageously full of woe. “I can multiply my body and soul indefinitely— or any human being’s. I’ve lived twice already. I have fleeting memories of people dead a hundred years ago. Imagine, Doctor! There could be a thousand John Hunters!” He laughed wildly at the horror of the thought. The laughter arched out toward the storm like a lost soul’s screech.

  I refused to be terrified. I did not believe him.

  “You’re incredulous,” he said, “but I can prove every word of it, to the last syllable! I can show you my machines, my papers. Come!” He leaped at the woman and snatched her hand, dancing crazily past me. She threw me a wide-eyed imploring look, like a helpless animal in flight from dogs, but there was nothing I could do. I avoided his hand when he snatched at me.

  I said firmly, forgetting all fear of him, “Hunter, you’re mad.”

  “Yes, mad, God knows! But every word of my incredible tale is true. Mad as Faust—nay, mad as Lucifer! But I’ve told you no lies, if there’s any salvation in that, sir. Follow me!”

  The storm was growing worse. He stood stamping by the door like a lunatic child, his white hand clamped around the woman’s. With every new gust, the whole house cracked and shuddered. I could swear there was flame in his eyes.

  I said slowly, soberly: “Where are these machines and papers you mention?”

  “In the tower,” he answered, and his crazy eyes were triumphant, as if I’d conceded.

  “Impossible, then! Unthinkable! There’s no place in all this country less safe. Calm yourself! Show me where the storm cellar is, and
I’ll inspect your materials tomorrow—if there’s anything left of them. I’ll look, I swear it. I give you the word of an official, licensed physician and veterinarian.”

  But my sensible suggestion had no trace of effect. Some demon was in him, and nothing in ordinary humanity could any longer reach him.

  “Dr. Thorpe, I beg you!” he wailed, and reached for my hand again. His whole body shook. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Even she—his mother, as he insisted on calling her—was wavering and surely in a moment would convert to his side.

  Life, as I have said, is preposterous. Heaven knows what came over me. All my personal fear, all my lifelong good sense were overwhelmed by the pitiable spectacle before me: They seemed all at once neither human nor monstrous but merely outcasts of Nature, clinging to each other, hand in hand, and looking up to me imploringly for help. Before I could change or even know my mind, I took one step toward them, and in that step gave up and followed.

  7

  The door through which they led me—the woman went willingly, eagerly—opened on a circular wooden stairway with a rail worn smooth by many climbings in the night, a pitchdark room as airless as dreams of the grave. At what was perhaps the third turning, I saw light above, frail and unearthly—the lumination of the storm. It grew brighter, more ominous. I could feel the giddying sway of the tower. But at last we arrived, despite all that—came out into the world of Hunter’s ungodly laboratory.

  It was not the machines I looked at first—great, square, black boxes over operating tables, glass-walled vats, cramped chemicals and tubing—though Hunter ran to them immediately. Most of the room’s south wall was a window, and the spectacle that window conveyed to us now is one I pray never to be witness to again. The churning sky was the unholy purple of glass balls on a lightning rod. The bloom of the lightning was virtually continual: it was like watching flames touched by cobalt and copper, but watching from deep within them. The torches Hunter had lit near his machines were a tragicomic mockery, a human shout against the fury of breakers on a rocky coast. And Hunter was, I saw, shouting to me now. I could hear, against the roar of the storm, not a whisper. Sparks and reflections of sparks danced weirdly in the room as he turned a great brass crank on the largest of the two machines. I glanced again at the window, then back at the machines and at the stacks of journals and loose papers in the glass-doored racks beyond. Suddenly, for no conceivable reason—unless imagination is the soul of judgment, and things in the world (black boxes, books) are the heart and soul of imagination—I believed him for an instant—believed he was, as he claimed, not human, and neither was she.

  Then it came. All three of us heard the sound at once. My blood congealed. It was a noise like a thousand railroad engines, every one of them with its whistle blowing. It was the voice of the cyclone, or of God, as the woman fancied. I cannot swear that my eyes really saw what I think I saw when I turned to the window. I seemed to see not one cyclone but four, creatures more terrible than the Bible’s Four Horsemen, close at hand now and moving toward us as if sentient: four black giants that towered above us to the beams of Heaven, swaying like witchdoctors, watching us, moving with terrible purpose toward our tower. I stood wide-eyed, stunned. Now the woman—she who’d said so little before—was screaming like a beldame directly in my ear: “They’ve come! The Hounds of Heaven have found us! Forgive us, Thorpe!”

  I rolled my eyes at her, my feet rooted to the tower floor. And then for some reason my nightmare chains melted and without pausing to waste one word on her I bolted to the top of the circular staircase and threw myself headlong down into the darkness, my only conceivable hope. As I fell, the tower was already giving way, tearing free like a tusk being yanked from its supporting bone. I couldn’t tell whether the violent blows were the stairs, as I tumbled down head over heels, or falling beams, or bodies, or bricks, or scientific equipment; but I knew the great roar was like an awesome silence, and my lungs—nay, my very soul—screamed to heaven for air.

  I lay.…

  The rest is confused. I have an image of papers and books rising up into the night like startled birds. So much for a lifetime’s labor! But I can’t have seen that, must have dreamed it.

  I lay pinned under something, still conscious, it seemed to me, though I cannot assert as a medical man that the consciousness was not illusory. I felt the draw of the cyclone’s heel, and things all around me rasped like snakes in a pit, and writhed and stirred. Then, it seems to me, I was crawling, and I came upon Hunter and seized his legs, trying to drag him to safety—to the house, perhaps. Part of it held fast. But I felt his death tremor, his violent jerking as he fought his way to a better world—and I released him in horror. In purple-green light I watched him cringe one last time, and jerk, and die. Then, not exactly with amazement, with—what?—I watched the dying body separate. It became several small creatures, pink, blue, green. (All this was surely not real, mere nightmare; but for certain reasons which will soon be evident, it is necessary that I record all I saw or thought I saw, on the chance that something in all this may give some hint of what actually took place.) I studied the creatures, so it seemed—I could hold four or five in my two cupped hands—and then I apparently lost consciousness.

  How long my unconscious state endured I cannot determine. I awakened to what seemed to be screaming wind, but when I opened my eyes the day was beautifully bright, very calm and peaceful, a day to give philosophers hope and artists new purpose. Shakespeare stood above me, looking puzzled and uneasy, still attached to what little remained of the gig. I had no idea where I was (I recognized at once that I’d suffered a concussion), and though I recognized Shakespeare as someone dear and familiar, I couldn’t for the life of me recall his name. My head throbbed and my whole body ached when I tried to move; nevertheless, I managed to move my head sideways, and saw the storm’s destructions. There was scarcely a brick or timber left of that once-proud tower, and the roof of the house had slid halfway off and lay cocked like a battered gray cap on a crumbling skull. It came into my bewildered consciousness that the screaming persisted, though it was not loud, and not wind. Slowly, painfully, I got my poor frame into a sitting position, then managed to get over on my hands and knees and drag myself, groaning and grimacing, in the general direction of the noise. Shakespeare watched, suffering for me.

  At last, some forty feet from the ruin, I came to the open storm cellar by the graveyard fence. Inside it I found three small, wet, bawling children—boys. They were all of them red-headed, buck-toothed, and pale as ghosts.

  8

  How I got home again is unimportant. I have been told by kind neighbors that it was the circling of vultures that signaled our distress. Despite their aversion to Hunter’s house, the neighbors steeled themselves, knowing what harm that storm had done throughout southern Illinois (the town of Murphysboro was almost wholly wiped out; Boskydell, Jonesboro, and Anna were all severely damaged), and so, guided by our sheriff, they came to the ruin and rescued us—myself, the horse, and the children. No trace was ever found of the scientist and the woman nor, so far as I know, his books. The children were placed, for a month or so, in the home of a well-meaning, though stern and rather too-otherworldly old woman, a widow, sometime midwife. I recovered very quickly from my trivial discomforts—a dislocated shoulder, scratches and bruises like a newborn babe’s, and a concussive bafflement that for two or three weeks blanked out all memory of the events of that night. The bewilderment I felt in that one connection had no serious effect on my performance of my duties. I walked, perhaps, more deliberately than formerly, as if feeling my way like a child; and at times I was conscious of a certain difficulty in remembering simple medical procedures that were normally automatic.

  The situation with the children was more serious. It was a difficult case. I visited them three, four times a week—an eight-mile ride in each direction, which fact I mention not to show my diligence but to suggest my concern and puzzlement. (We physicians are all too often maligned by those who conf
use objectivity with callousness. We’re as much like artists, it seems to me, as like scientists. Can any man of sober judgment assert that Mr. Poe, for example, does not vividly experience the anguish he so forcefully—and so objectively—portrays?)

  Discounting the obvious evidence of shock—blue nails, staring eyes—I could find nothing physically wrong with them. There was no vomiting, no bruise or bump to suggest that they were lost in the timelessness of skull fracture. Yet their eyes were full of terror, as if witness to things too monstrous to be recalled. Like the Albigensian initiates of old, they refused to eat, refused to confess to any feeling of pain or pleasure. They would recognize neither the old woman nor myself, indeed, seemed not even to recognize their own reflections in the mirror.

  The old woman stood hunched at the bedroom door, her crooked frame draped in Bible-black, her dim eyes like nests in a dying tree. Outside their window it was bright, breezy June. Shakespeare stood nibbling at the leaves of a magnolia, turning his head now and then to discover if I were coming. I sighed, lips pursed, shaking down the thermometer, snatching in the back of my mind for something I’d known once, some long-forgotten trick like Meno’s multiplication. Their temperatures were normal, except that they were identical—for some perfectly natural reason, no doubt, though it was queer, in fact, damned eerie. The old woman’s white, arthritic hand gave a jerk, and I glanced at her over my glasses. It jerked again, the crooked index finger raised as if signaling me near. Still frowning, I left the three staring redheads and went over to her.