The Dulwich Horror & Others

by David Hambling

  “Audrey Hepburn, epigenetics’ poster girl,” said Jack. “She was Dutch, and she lived through the Hunger Winter of 1942 in Holland when she was a teenager. However, it left her permanently changed: thanks to epigenetics she would always have her slim, willowy figure. And that’s the point about epigenetics: you don’t just inherit it. Unlike DNA, you can actually change the epigenetic make-up of a human, even an adult one. It’s like there are several different versions: a skinny you, a normal you, an obese you—it just depends on the epigenetic switches.”

  “Ye-es,” said Lottie. She wondered if his big discovery was going to be a dieting aid.

  The next picture was a man in uniform sitting slumped over, his head in his hands.

  “And we know that all sorts of things can make epigenetic changes—exposure to chemicals, viruses, even psychological experiences. Post-traumatic stress disorder produces epigenetic changes to the nervous system. You end up permanently adrenalised and ready for action, jumping at loud sounds. It’s a good adaptation when you’re in a constant life-or-death situation, but it’s a problem when you go back home after the war.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Lottie, “There are real researchers out there working on therapeutic applications of epigenetics.”

  “Too slowly. They need a penicillin moment,” said Jack. “And I’ve done it, through Paracelsus’ method of looking at folk medicine. Just as aspirin was derived from willow bark and quinine—”

  “What have you found?”

  The next picture was a grainy black-and-white photo of Hitler talking earnestly to two men in white coats, in what might have been a laboratory. On a table on front of them were ranged glass jars containing pale, half-formed things in liquid. Swastika flags hung behind them for a gala occasion.

  “The Nazis should have cracked it,” he said. “They had open minds on science and traditional folklore. Plus they didn’t have any scruples about human experiments—and you can’t test this with animals.”

  Lottie did not like his tone. She wondered just what Jack had been up to, what he was planning to do. Human experimentation took a huge raft of bureaucratic paperwork before you could get permission. Jack was known to cut corners. It occurred to her that Jack’s girlfriend worked in a bar and was well-placed to spike people’s drinks.

  “Human beings have a unique epigenetic flexibility,” Jack was saying. “Which the mainstream hasn’t really realised. Anyway, the Nazis’ stupid racial theories got in the way. They thought in terms of pure blood, which is rubbish—if you tinker with the epigenetic switches, you can turn a white Aryan giant into a dark-skinned pygmy. Even inherited mental illness doesn’t actually kick in until the genes are switched on.…Anyway, Hitler’s pet scientists almost got there with embryos, but not quite. They should have looked more at ritual cannibalism and its effects.”

  Lottie sipped her tea. At least he hadn’t turned into a Nazi, but he was at the level of a tabloid paper rather than a scientific paper.

  Another black-and-white photo, a man in a dark suit and white shirt contemplating a stem of wheat with lunatic intensity.

  “The Soviets got close too. Maybe they got further than we know, but it’s all secret. Lysenko showed that wheat could be ‘vernalised’—made to sprout in spring rather than autumn—by exposure to cold, and the effect was inherited by later generations of the same grain. It meant they could grow wheat in Siberia. They tried the same thing with humans.”

  “They transplanted dogs’ heads in the laboratory too. Lysenko wasn’t what you’d call a scientist.”

  “That’s the typical mainstream reaction: anything that doesn’t fit with your worldview you just dismiss. What the Russians showed was that human beings could be altered; they just didn’t find a very good way if doing it. They got side-tracked into stupid human-ape hybrids.”

  Her phone played the opening bars of Dusty Springfield’s I Only Wanna Be with You, and Lottie answered it awkwardly with her free hand, watching Jack’s reaction. He did not try to stop her, but fidgeted anxiously as she talked.

  “Hi, Grant, how’s things? Well, I’m getting Jack’s alternative version of biochemistry. Pretty flaky as you’d expect. Yes, he is. No, it’s fine. No, I’m still waiting for him to get to the point. Fine. Okay. I’ll call you when I’m leaving—shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes tops.”

  Jack was visibly relieved when she ended the call. Lottie kept the phone in her hand, ready to call back in a second.

  “Right,” said Lottie. “You’ve got twenty minutes to get to the point and wrap this up and then I’m out of here. Even if I have to take the fucking chair with me.”

  “Look at this.” The slides came one after the other: a cave painting of a figure with the head of a dog, a hairy ape-man in a jungle, an Egyptian jackal-headed god, Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man, a cartoon of an odd humanoid thing with spines along its back, a Gothic black-winged vampire, an amphibious toad-human thing. Too many of them, a parade of monsters. “Do you see it? Do you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “They’re all the same thing—all modified human forms. There’s a word for it: abhuman. All of them descended from, or interbreeding with, humans. And look at this, look at this.”

  The next slide took her back to A-level biology: a line drawing of rows of embryos at different stages.

  “Recapitulation,” Lottie said automatically. “As it develops the human embryo goes through all the stages of evolution—it starts as a blob of cells, then it goes through a fish-like stage with pseudo-gills, and an amphibian stage, a lizard stage with a tail, et cetera.”

  “Ex-actly!” he said triumphantly. “Now you’ve got it. ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’”

  “It’s a shit theory and it was disproved about a hundred years ago,” she said.

  “What if I told you that it’s true—all the embryonic forms represent viable alternate adult forms? A fish version of you, an amphibian version of you. You know aquatic ape theory—that humans passed through an amphibious stage quite recently? Epigenetics. Also the source of legends like the Russian Vodyanoy, a frog-human hybrid, and probably mermaid traditions. No other species has this. This is absolute, definitive evidence for some interference in human evolution a few hundred thousand years back. The aliens were here and they’ve left their mark right under our noses.”

  “Prove it. Let’s see the evidence for these other forms,” she said.

  “Here,” he said, and the next slide was a cartoon with two panels. In one a cackling witch, leaning over a cauldron, held up a scoop of bubbling green brew to a prince in a coronet. In the next the prince had been turned into a small green frog, still wearing a coronet.

  “The classic, the original ur-story,” he said, “a potion that turns a human into a frog. Of course the frog would still be human-sized, but what’s interesting is that the stories all agree on practically every point.” Jack held his hands up, as though delivering a final argument. “Now if that’s not epigenetics, I don’t know what is.”

  “Evidence?”

  “In Europe it was called Vinum Sabbati,” he said. “Sabbath Wine, consumed by witches at their Sabbaths to transform themselves. The secret was only known to a few scattered individuals in pre-Christian cults. What’s intriguing is that it crops up everywhere in prehistory—Siberia, Africa, Central America—”

  “And like Paracelsus, you’ve been ignoring science and tracking down wise women who make this stuff in a village in Guatemala. Carlos sodding Castañeda rides again.”

  “Except I made contact on the Internet,” he said, nodding. “It’s difficult. They won’t talk to just anyone. You have to go through a load of tests and trials and initiations to get to the good stuff. But I did it, I bloody did it!”

  “There’s no science then,” she said, obscurely disappointed. Why had she ever expected him to take the difficult route and do actual research, collect evidence? Had she been expecting a proper laboratory with labelled samples, or rows of seedlings with
different epigenetically determined characteristics?

  “I’ve got an actual sample of Vinum Sabbati.” His eyes were shining. It was not love, unless it was self-love. Jack had excelled himself, Jack was on top of the world, as high as a kite. “I can transform a human into any abhuman form. How’s that for science?”

  She laughed nervously. “Have you actually tried this stuff?”

  He smiled, and for the first time he looked dangerous. “I needed someone who would understand, who has the right mind. You’re the only person I know. It has to be you. This stuff is way beyond Lisa.”

  A cold shaft of panic shot through Lottie. Her stomach lurched. The witch’s green potion. The green tea in front of her. Jack’s anxiety that she had to stay. The handcuffs. Why had he handcuffed her to the chair?

  “Jack,” she said, “what was in that tea?”

  Now he was setting up a compact video camera on a tripod on the other side of the dining table. The red light winked on as he pointed it at her. She swallowed and tugged at the handcuff.

  “Vinum Sabbati,” he said. “Lottie, it had to be you. You’re the only one who would understand, and the psychological aspect is key. Paracelsus was bang on about mental imprinting.”

  He sighted her through the viewfinder. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said, “the effects wear off in an hour or two. I promise. This is gonna be the biggest breakthrough ever.”

  By then she was frantic, pulling and wrenching at the handcuffs, not even noticing the pain, furious, desperate just to get away, the phone dropped, lost, forgotten in her haste. After that, nothing, just a timeless blank.

  II

  Grant was helping her into her clothes. Lottie was confused. He was putting her shoes on and he kept asking her something over and over.

  “Can you drive?” he said. “Do you think you can drive now?”

  “Of course I can drive,” she said without thinking, wanting to be helpful, and he helped her into the car. There was another car too, a blue Volvo which seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Just go to the A-road,” he said. “Wait there for me. Can you do that?”

  He had to repeat it three times. She was fine, she was really fine, nothing was wrong, but she felt fuzzy and confused as though the parts of her brain were not connecting up properly.

  Lottie drove slowly down the unpaved road, the car lurching and diving over the ruts and potholes. After two miles, where the road joined with the carriageway, she pulled over on to the verge.

  She got out of the car and leaned over a grassy ditch and was thoroughly sick. She vomited again and again. It was not as painful as such bouts could be; her body was simply ejecting foreign material, naturally and thoroughly. When she was finished she heaved once more and it was over.

  After that she felt much better. It was getting on to evening—Lottie’s watch had gone—and the contrails and the clouds in the distance were stained pink with the setting sun. Cars and lorries whizzed past; she watched them for a while and then sat down in the car again and turned on the radio, her mind drifting. The nearest experience was jetlag, that odd mental dislocation you had after a long journey across many time zones, to find it was dawn when you were expecting dusk. The songs on the radio were pleasant; they came and went, as soon as they finished she forgot what they were. After a while she realised that she kept feeling her wrist; it was not even bruised. It was not as bad as she thought.

  After a while the blue Volvo came down the track. Grant and Lottie embraced for a long time.

  “Are you all right?” he asked at last.

  “I think so.”

  Grant kissed her, then looked up and down the road.

  “There’s a lot of traffic—do you think you can drive home if you follow me?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Lottie—you do still sound a bit spaced out.”

  She shook her head. “No, really. I’m much better now.”

  They drove back, slowly, and as they got closer to home Lottie’s mind started to clear as though they were driving back to reality. She recognised the Volvo, which belonged to a friend of Grant’s. The familiar sight of the Crystal Palace aerial, a landmark showing they were nearly home, further revived her. At home, everything was exactly as she had left it. She had come back to perfect, untouched normality.

  That evening they cooked chili con carne together, drank wine, and watched some old movie on DVD, holding hands but talking little. It was only afterwards, when the end credits had rolled, that she asked him.

  “Grant—what happened at that house today?”

  Grant shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you can tell me about it.”

  It was unlike Grant to avoid a direct answer. But it was not unfair; he had been dragged in, after warning her not to go, and he had the moral high ground. So she told him as much as she remembered, which was not much: Jack’s shining-eyed enthusiasm, the green tea, the handcuffs, the garbled mixture of epigenetics, history, and folklore, the point when she realised it was all horribly wrong.

  “I called your mobile,” said Grant, “and he—Jack—answered. I knew something had happened. I warned him what would happen if he harmed you, and I came over as fast as I could. I borrowed Steve’s car. I found you passed out, and your clothes around the kitchen table.”

  “What about Jack? Did you see him?”

  “I saw him,” said Grant. Then, finally, “He’s dead, Lottie. He was in the bathroom. Can you remember anything?”

  “What happened? Did he overdose, or…?”

  “Think, Lottie. Can you remember anything at all?”

  She tried, but there was nothing there, just an empty space like the gap between sleeping and waking.

  “Blank,” she said.

  “There was a lot of blood,” Grant said, even more quietly. “It didn’t look like an accident. It wasn’t suicide.”

  Lottie digested the information gradually.

  “I wiped everything that might have had your fingerprints on it,” Grant went on. “Got all your clothes, your bag, your phone. I washed up the teapot and put away one cup so it wouldn’t have looked as if he’d just had a visitor. I wracked my brains, but I think I got everything. There’s car tracks in the mud…but no CCTV around there.”

  “Do you think I killed Jack?” Lottie asked. A pause, and she swallowed. “Did I kill Jack?”

  “If you don’t remember, then there’s no way of telling,” said Grant.

  “There was a video camera,” she remembered suddenly. “What—”

  “I deleted it,” he said. “Put the camera away. The police could undelete the file maybe, if they think to look for something, but there’s no reason they should.”

  “You saw the video,” she said. “You saw what happened after he drugged me.”

  “It didn’t get much,” he said. “After the first couple of minutes it’s all off-camera.”

  “And what happened?”

  “You lost your rag,” said Grant. “Went completely berserk, and you attacked him.”

  “I don’t remember any of it,” she said. She recalled the knife block in the kitchen. “Was there a knife?”

  “I cleaned up everything I could,” he said. “I made sure there were no forensic traces. I had to break a window to get in, but…that can only help the scene from our point of view. Make it look like a break-in.”

  “What happened to my clothes?” Lottie asked.

  “I don’t know. All I saw was on that bit of video…you were very angry. Screaming mad. That drug had a bad effect on you.”

  “Oh my God,” said Lottie. They sat holding hands on the sofa until the minutes became hours, and Grant suggested they go to bed at last.

  She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her teeth, thinking, Today I killed a man. I don’t remember it, but I did. But it did not feel real.

  The next day it seemed even more unreal. Whatever the drug was, it had not had any longer-term effects. She looked up some mat
erial on substances used by witches and in pagan ceremonies—mushrooms, hemlock, bella-donna. They were used to make something called flying ointment, which gave the illusion of flight. That was why witches believed they could fly on broomsticks. She could not find any drugs associated with transformation spells, but was side-tracked into lycanthropy. In the eighteenth century, lycanthropy was defined as a condition where the sufferer turned into an animal; by the nineteenth century it was the delusion of turning into an animal. Transformation was unlikely. But a drug that made you think you were a wild animal was more plausible.

  The next day Grant warned her not to look at the news. Jack was in it, initially as the fourth or fifth item. By the next day he had moved up to second place; this was not the routine burglary-gone-wrong they initially reported, but something more brutal and deliberate. There were pictures of Jack and a girl on a beach. Police were questioning Lisa, Jack’s Australian girlfriend.

  Lottie started to worry about the car. Her bright yellow Peugeot had been parked outside the cottage for a couple of hours at least. Someone might have seen it. She remembered hearing a tractor go by. The driver must have noticed her car there. How many of Jack’s acquaintances had a yellow car like that?

  Grant told her not to worry.

  On the third evening two police officers showed up, one in plainclothes and one in uniform. They sat round the dining table, with Grant hovering in the background, and quizzed Lottie about her relationship with Jack. How long she had known him, when she last saw him, what she knew about his recent activities. They knew from phone records about the call the previous week, and she gave an accurate account of the conversation up to the point he asked her to visit.

  “He said it was something huge, but he couldn’t tell me about it.”

  “Strange to call just to say he couldn’t tell you anything,” said the plain-clothes man reasonably. It was not quite a question, but it demanded an answer.

  “He was very excited,” she said. “He wanted to tell someone about his work.”