by Jay Lake
Driscoll was already opening his mouth too, presumably to protest that instruction—but neither man contrived to utter a word, because Driscoll’s eyes suddenly betrayed astonishment, and Sir Julian read that astonishment with all the alacrity that dire anxiety could induce.
Diable! Mathieu thought. One hour was all I needed. Just one hour!
Sir Julian’s face had begun to change. Sean Driscoll and everyone else could see it plainly—and the baronet, although he had no mirror, could read what was happening in their expressions.
This was not the slow and gradual transformation that overtook the girls who had sold their looks for a guinea. This was more reminiscent of a lycanthropic transformation, as brutal as it was sudden. It was not simply that Sir Julian’s complexion became dull, or his features slack; this was a tortuous transfiguration, which erased the face of an angel with a single merciless sweep and substituted the face of a demon.
Common ugliness, Mathieu knew, really was mere plainness—a purely negative phenomenon, a mere absence—but the total absence of human beauty was no mere featurelessness. When a human face became a tabula rasa, it exposed the pre-human animal: the species of beast that humankind had been before human beings and their microcosmic passengers their long collaborative evolution towards naturally-selected aesthetic perfection. Sir Julian might have been ugly, as Sean Driscoll had alleged, when he was thirty-and-one years old, but he became a great deal uglier than that, now that the vast majority of his benevolent commensals had been extracted from his personal microcosm.
Mathieu had tried to leave an adequate population of the commensals behind, although he had known full well how difficult and how pointless that would be. He was not surprised by his failure, but even he was astonished by its extent and rapidity. Human beings, according to Darwin, were close kin to gorillas and chimpanzees, but the ape that Sir Julian now became was by no means as handsome as a gorilla or a chimpanzee, and the ghastly pallor of its glabrous skin only added an extra dimension to its simian awfulness.
It occurred to Mathieu—and must have occurred to Driscoll too—that Sir Julian might have a great deal of trouble henceforth persuading anyone, including his own servants, that he really was Sir Julian Templeforth.
It was impossible to judge what thoughts might have sprung into the baronet’s mind, but the resultant action was obvious enough. He suddenly snatched the revolver from Thomas Dean’s reluctant hand, and did his best to cover everyone as he backed through the door of the laboratory and headed along the corridor—not aiming for the front door, it seemed, but for the kitchen.
Mathieu waited, holding his breath, for the scream that would accompany Sir Julian’s first sight of himself in the shaving-mirror, praying that he might hear a shot immediately afterwards as Julian proved incapable of tolerating the notion of what he had become.
There was no shot. Sir Julian Templeforth still had faith in Mathieu Galmier, and in the possibility that what had just been undone might easily be done again.
Thomas Dean, meanwhile, was staring at his sister, obviously expecting a similarly abrupt transformation that might transform her into a living angel. Nothing of the sort happened, or seemed likely to happen any time soon.
“Go!” said Mathieu, to anyone and everyone who could hear him. “For the love of God, go away! Leave me to do what I can for Sir Julian!”
No one moved to obey, but he received support from an unexpected direction when Sir Julian appeared in the doorway again, brandishing the pistol wildly, and screaming “Get out!” at anyone and everyone—except, presumably, Mathieu. The words were hardly distinguishable; clear speech was difficult for the baronet now.
Mathieu supposed that it was simply some absent-minded mechanical response that made Thomas Dean reach for the shelf where he had deposited his knife. The seaman was merely collecting his property before departing—but Dean had already thrown a scalpel at Sir Julian, and had cut him badly in the face: a wound that Sir Julian had felt as a profound insult as well as a source of pain.
Misreading Dean’s intention, the baronet fired.
The ape-man’s hand and eye were still sound, whatever had become of his voice; the shot struck Dean in the side of the head, and the sailor collapsed, struck dead—but he was a tall man, and a long-limbed one, and he did not fold up as neatly as he might have done. His convulsively-extended arms struck out in both directions, upsetting the Bunsen burner, the bath full of hot water, and one of the oil-lamps. A flood of flame gushed across the table.
What the intentions of the three Irishmen might have been, Mathieu could not be sure. Driscoll, at least, probably tried to disarm the baronet in a spirit of pure altruism. The others did the same, albeit more probably driven by an instinct of self-preservation. Whatever the truth of the matter, there was the immediate threat of a brawl. Sir Julian, no matter how ugly he might be, was strong and he was furious. He fired again, and again, Driscoll went down, and Reilly too, and neither was at all careful about the way that he sprawled as he fell. Broken glass flew everywhere, and the initial river of flame was scattered into half a dozen tributaries.
7.
Mathieu could not have said, afterwards, with his hand on his heart, that he kept his presence of mind. Indeed, he had no clear memory of exactly what he had done, let alone the intentions behind it.
What he actually did, though, was heroic, after a fashion. He made haste to seize Caroline Dean, plucking her thin frame out of the chair as if she weighed nothing at all, and ran for the door, cradling her like a babe-in-arms. Somehow, he got her through the doorway without tripping over anyone, living or dead, and without even smashing her head against the doorpost.
He went out the back way rather than the front, kicking the rickety back gate off its hinges rather than troubling to lift the latch. No one followed him.
He did not stop running until he reached the bushes in Ravenscourt Park, where he swiftly took shelter, collapsing in the leaf-litter to recover his breath.
Caroline was weeping. “Tom,” she murmured, in a grief-stricken voice. “I’ve killed Tom.” Seemingly, it had not yet occurred to her to blame anyone else for the train of events that her arrival in Mathieu’s lodgings had precipitated.
Mathieu made a rapid estimate of the amount of flammable material contained in his laboratory, and the time it would take for a fire engine to reach the burning building. MacBride, he assumed, might well have escaped through the front door, but whether he would linger to explain to anyone what had happened, and to identify the four charred bodies that would be pulled from the ruins tomorrow or the day after, was a different matter.
“For all that anyone knows,” he told the girl, “I’m probably numbered among the dead. They’ll work out easily enough that Sir Julian was there, but they’ll readily assume that he died as handsome as he went in. Whether or not they’ll be able to put names to the others might not matter at all. If only Sir Julian had handed over the money he brought, I could be back in France within three days—or Belgium, given that it might be unwise to return to Paris.”
The girl was not listening. By the not-so-distant light of a street-lamp in Paddenswick Road he could see that she was touching her face, perhaps wondering if and when it might be possible to go home again.
“Miracles only work one way, I fear,” he told her, in a sincere spirit of apology. “Destruction is easy; restitution is hard. In a fairer world, there would be a balance in these matters, but Nature’s notion of a balance is by no means egalitarian. The owl’s delight in making each of its nightly meals is poor compensation for the agony of the mouse that has to die to provide it.
“Beauty is a delicate and costly prize, my dear, or millions of years of natural selection would have made it a far more common commodity than it is. The increase in Sir Julian’s handsomeness was hard-won, requiring a kind of continual predation similar to that which sustains the owl in the ceaseless struggle for existence. It’s not just the inefficiency of the process of extraction and filt
ration, although much potential is certainly lost therein. The agent is alive, you see, and each unique strain, being the product of a single human microcosm, cannot help but compete against others of its kind.
“The introduction of the alien strains into Sir Julian’s microcosm was far from problematic. As you saw just a little while ago, his original native population had been gradually obliterated by the sequence of invasions, so that the removal of a substantial fraction of the warring factions that remained to him resulted in a rapid and total collapse of his internal equilibrium.
“I wish with all my heart that I could promise you that his loss will be matched by your gain, but that will not be the case, alas. Your own internal equilibrium has been disturbed, with no prospect of any but a temporary recovery. Yes, you might recover something distantly akin to your former prettiness in a few days’ time—but it will not last, and its inevitable collapse will surely leave you even worse off than you are now.
“Had I a fully-equipped laboratory, an abundance of time and a lavish supply of funds, I would be able to help you—and I would help you; make no mistake about that. I would, because it has never been any part of my intention to do any lasting harm to anyone—but the path of progress is a thorny one. Unless and until I can find a means of cultivating the agent outside the human body, and growing it in unlimited quantities, more harm than good will accrue from my research. Only think, though, what the fruits of my eventual success will be! Imagine the world when beauty can be mass-produced, when ugliness will be banished forever, when self-satisfaction will be universal!
“Imagine, if you can, what an Age of Miracles the twentieth century will be, when I have succeeded in my quest—not merely for men like Sir Julian Templeforth but even for the likes of you and me! You will have played your part in that, Caroline Dean, no matter what might happen to you tomorrow, next week or next year. You will have played your part, and all humankind will thank you.”
“Poor Tom,” the girl murmured, still bewildered and half-delirious. “You killed poor Tom.”
“Not I, child,” Mathieu assured her. “I am no murderer, nor have I ever been. I am the life of the world that is to come, the seed of the glorious future. Fortunately, given what we have just endured, I’m alive, without a scratch upon me—and while I’m alive, hope is alive too, for the future of humankind. I don’t know, at present, where my next meal is coming from, but I shall not be destitute for long. If Destiny protects anyone, it will surely protect me.”
Feeling fully recovered, Mathieu Galmier got to his feet then, and looked around the park, wondering which way he ought to go in order to find the favor of Destiny. He was not the sort of person, though, to abandon even the most accidental of acquired responsibilities.
He put out his hand so that the girl might take it, so that he might give her the continued benefit of his protection.
She took it. She had, after all, sought him out in the hope that he might be able to help her. She had not expected to find her brother in his house, and could not be grateful fact the fact that her once-beloved Tom had seen her face, as it now was. She was more than ready to accept Mathieu’s offer of succor, and to put her trust in his knowledge, his ambition and his dreams.
Besides which, the scientist thought, there was still a slim chance that she might be useful to him—at least for a fortnight or so.
THE TAILED MEN, by Arthur O. Friel
Those are true words, senhor, though spoken in jest. You say that if men were shaped to fit their natures some would find it hard to wear hat and trousers, because they would have horns and tails.
I have met men who should have been so marked, and who ought also to have had claws instead of hands and split hoofs instead of feet; for, though their bodies were human, they were fiends at heart. True, in time their malice became known, and at last their own evil deeds caused their deaths, but not until they had brought much misery to others. How much blood and tears could be saved if only Deos Padre would make men—and women too—so that their natures could be seen at once.
Yes, that is a useless wish. But your remark, senhor, brings to my mind a memory of the strangest creatures I ever saw—creatures so queer that perhaps you will not believe me when I tell of them. Yet the tale will pass the time while we lounge here on the steamer’s deck, and anything which kills the tedium of this long journey down the Amazon is worthwhile.
Now you two North American explorers, if I am not mistaken, have been adventuring in the country along the river Javary and westward in Peru toward the Ucayali. Then you have not visited the river Jurua, east of the Javary? It is well. If ever you return to Brazil and go far up that river, be prepared for trouble.
I have been there—and I am not going back. If the floods had not been very heavy that year I should never have gone there at all. With my comrade, Pedro Andrada, I had recently been out on a long rambling trip through the wild jungle along the border of Brazil and Peru, and there we had met with hardships which made us satisfied to stay in idleness at Remate de Males, a Javary town where we rubber-workers gathered in the rainy season. But now, loafing one day at the store of a trader with nothing to do but smoke and watch the dirty waters swirling past, we grew restless again.
“Lourenço, too much idleness is worse than too much work,” said Pedro, yawning and stretching his powerful arms. “I feel stupid, and you are getting fat. If the flood does not go down soon you will get such a big belly that you will grunt like a sloth every time you tap a tree.”
This was only a joke, for, though I am broad and had grown heavy from inaction, I had not swollen up along the belt-line. But I felt sluggish, as he did, and so weary of lounging that I wished someone would start a fight, or anything else that would quicken my blood. Lazily I tried to think of something we could do, but the only ideas that came to me were old ones and not worth trying. So I only grunted and sat still, looking up the river.
Something was floating down toward us and I watched it because there was nothing else to look at—drifting trees were so common that I hardly ever noticed them. As this thing came nearer, though, I saw that it was not a tree but a small canoe. It swung slowly around on the current, seeming empty and useless.
“There is something we can do,” I said, nodding toward it. “A short paddle will stretch our muscles and give us another boat.”
He yawned again and untied our own canoe, fastened to a post of the store. I got up and splashed toward it—the water was so high that, in spite of the tall poles on which the store stood, it flowed over the platform—and we were about to step in when Pedro started.
“Por amor de Deos!” he cried. “Look!”
The drifting boat was quite near us now. Above its edge something had risen and was moving weakly in little jerks; a thing like a skinny claw, or the hand of a man almost dead from starvation or fever, trying to attract attention and bring help. As we stared it dropped out of sight.
Without a word we leaped into our canoe and drove our paddles in deep. We were both old in the ways of the bush, and we knew what to expect. Yet the man we found out there on the river was in such a condition that even we, who had looked on many hard sights, turned cold as we stared down at him.
He seemed dead. His eyes were fixed and glassy, his mouth open, his chest motionless, his body shrunken to a skeleton. This did not disturb us, for we who work in the jungle of Javary see much of death. He was totally naked, and scabbed from head to foot by the bites of thousands of piums or carrapatos. Yet this did not shock us either, for any man who travels the Brazilian bush will be badly bitten at times by insects, and if he loses his clothing he will suffer much. The things that chilled us were two—the fear stamped deep in his ghastly face, and the marks of torture.
The scars were not new, but they were plain. They were the marks of fire and knife. And the worst of all was that he had been not only burned and cut, but mutilated.
Gripping the edge of his canoe, we went drifting down the current, looking at him and at ea
ch other. It seemed useless to take him ashore, for there was nothing to show who he was or whence he came, and the water was so high that we should have some trouble in finding a good place to bury him. Yet we nodded to each other, and were preparing to tow him in, when we jumped as if a snake had struck at us. He moved!
We had fully decided that he was dead, and that the fluttering movement of the hand we had seen was his last struggle. And when you see a dead man move, senhores, you are likely to recoil from him. We twitched our hands away from his boat. Before it could float off, though, we grabbed it again and hung on. His movement had been slight, only a quivering of the arms and a rise of the chest, with a low moaning sound as he breathed. Now, seeing that he still lived, we swiftly fastened his craft to ours and bent our paddles in hard strokes back to town.
Other men loafing at the doors facing the river had been watching us, and some of them were coming in their montarias and dugouts to see what we had found. Warning them out of the way, we drove ahead at full speed straight to the small barracão where we lived. There we put him into a hammock and poured brandy into his mouth.
He strangled, shivered a little, and coughed. We rubbed his cold hands and feet, raised and lowered his arms and legs, and gave him more brandy. Soon he began to breathe more deeply, and his eyes moved and stared at us. But no light showed in those eyes; they were as blank as those of a fish.
“You are safe now, friend,” said Pedro. “Lie still and rest, and you will soon be strong again.” Then he turned to the men who had crowded into our house after us.
“Do not stand idle!” he commanded. “Do you not see that he is naked and starving? Meldo, your woman is a good cook—go at once and have her make some broth. You others, go to Joaquim’s store and get more brandy—this is gone. And bring clothes.”