The next morning I awoke to discover something had grown out of my head.
At the first glimmer of consciousness I only registered the weight, the strange warmness on my forehead, as if I’d fallen asleep with a slab of meat on my face. Staggering to the bathroom in frenzied disbelief I felt gravity tug at a new and unfamiliar weight.
In the bathroom mirror I saw them in all their glory.
Two horn-like formations the length of my forearms protruded from my forehead, just above my eyebrows. They weren’t hard, keratinous ones like those of a cow or a goat, but soft and flexible, meaty cylinders pinched at the ends where they split in two like the tongues of snakes.
And they seemed to be alive. Alive and sentient.
I forced myself to remain calm, to steer myself away from that edge which promised a plunge into sheer, raving insanity. The only way to avoid falling, was to hang on to the last straws of dignity and reason. There would be a solution to this, I knew. An explanation.
When my initial horror receded, I went back to bed and sat, cross-legged, and stared in astonishment at the slow, undulating motions of my new appendages, my new feelers. They were moving with a kind of revolting blindness, as if they were tasting the air of a new environment with worm-like curiosity.
It was a curious sensation to feel the light touch of air against the skin that stretched across them. It was my skin, undoubtedly my skin, but stretched across alien muscle. My hands found the stems, and I felt my own touch. The horns were truly part of me, twin aberrations grown from my own matter like tumors in the dark of night.
Where had they come from? Where had my body found resources to adorn me with such extremities?
When Marion awoke, she screamed at the sight of the feelers and jumped out of bed. Her face turned ashen and twisted in horror and disbelief as she pressed herself against the wall.
“Marion,” I said, speaking slowly and clearly, while looking into her eyes, “I need you to take it easy.”
She still wasn’t able to get any words out of her mouth, her lips reduced to a tight, white line.
“It’s obvious something has happened to me during the night,” I continued, “but since you haven’t been affected there doesn’t seem to be any reason to fear contagion.”
I climbed out of bed and once again was taken by surprise by the weight of the feelers, almost toppling over.
I walked around the bed to where Marion was standing, and took her in my arms. She couldn’t bear to look at me, and fastened her eyes on some spot on the carpet, shaking all over as if it was a winter morning back in Harvard, and not another sun-baked day in Nevada.
I was just about to say something when one of the feelers grazed her hair, and she tore herself from me.
“Get those things away from me, Randy!” she cried in a voice I had never heard her use before in all our time together.
“Dear God, what are those things?” she moaned as she shook her head, her face all screwed-up while tears started washing down her cheeks.
“Honey,” I said, “I don’t know, but please listen to me. There is a natural explanation for this. I’m a scientist. Maybe it’s some sort of radiation, like in that film we saw with the ants, remember?”
“They did something to you at that awful place, didn’t they?” she screamed and made for the door.
I grabbed her as she tried to rush past me, and held her tight. I didn’t like restraining her like that, against her will, but I couldn’t let her run. She might hurt herself or wake up Junior.
“Please,” I begged into her ear, “keep your voice down. Think of Junior.”
“We never should have come here,” she muttered through tears. Her strength was faltering against my grip, and I relaxed it a little.
“Junior’s going to be up any minute now. I need you to keep it together for his sake. Take a Valium and go out there and get him ready for school like you would on any other Friday, do you hear?”
She sobbed and hiccuped, but managed to nod.
“I love you,” I whispered and let her go.
She straightened up, closed her eyes for a moment as if to find some inner resource, then quickly and resiliently wiped the tears from her face with clenched fists.
“I love you, too,” she said, and slipped into the living room.
I waited behind, my ear to the door.
The sun was spilling through the window behind my back, showing me the idiot shapes of the feelers moving languidly like sea anemones on the carpet.
My own body had betrayed me. I couldn’t shake that thought. It had betrayed the regulation of my physiology, allowed something from another place to push through me, through my flesh, reaching out to taste a new frontier. I couldn’t wait to be rid of the feelers. I even thought about sawing them off with a kitchen knife, but vivid images of dark blood gushing over my face and my hands deterred me from the idea.
Soon, I could hear the patter of Junior’s feet scampering down the stairs. I don’t know why it was, but I found myself listening intently to the sound of his beloved Sugar Smacks ringing against his Roy Rogers bowl as Marion poured the cereal for him. He was speaking excitedly about his science fair project at school – building an X-Ray tube – and it made me smile. He took after me. Naturally gifted when it came to math, physics, and chemistry. Like me, he could see the beauty behind the numbers and the principles, the intricate mechanisms that explained the universe in equations and formulas. He might grow to become a great scientist one day.
Then the bus pulled up outside. Remand was too small to have its own school, so every day Junior rode the bus to the town of Carlin nearby.
The little morning ritual, so beautiful and touching in its mundanity, passed much too soon. I almost ran out the door to stop Junior from boarding the bus, so I could hug him and tell him I loved him. But I forced myself to stay put, and the bus drove off, the moment dissolving in its exhaust fumes.
I wrenched myself from the grip of those melancholy thoughts and jumped to my feet. After putting on a clean shirt and some dark pants, I entered the living room.
Our house was modernistic, having an open-ended living room with the kitchen located at the other end, and tall windows facing out towards the desert. Marion was in the kitchen, her back turned to me. She had cleared the table and was washing Junior’s bowl now, not acknowledging me in the slightest. I didn’t say anything, figuring the routine was helping her keep it together.
I didn’t have the necessary equipment to analyze my mutation here. I would have to go back to the Wormhole. Except everything was trashed after the explosion, Leary had said.
I decided to call Lissner instead. He picked up after three rings.
“Carter.” His voice on the other end was not much more than a whisper. “I thought you might call.”
I was momentarily distracted when the feelers started investigating the Bakelite’s receiver, and found myself at a loss for words. But Lissner didn’t ask for any explanation. Right then and there, I became convinced he too had been affected. A chill rose up my spine even though it was already a hot day. It was a coldness that lived inside, that had nothing to do with temperature.
“I thought we should meet and talk about what happened yesterday,” I said, forcing my concentration back to our conversation.
“Oh yes, indeed,” Lissner agreed, “Can you come by my place in, say, half-an-hour?”
And it was settled. After hanging up, I realized I should have asked Lissner to come here instead – that the drive across town presented a curious obstacle with my changed appearance. However, I was not inclined to surrender. It seemed vital not to let the changes control me, so instead of calling Lissner again, I decided to solve the problem by wrapping a towel around my head like a big, terrycloth turban.
“I’m going over to Lissner’s house. He is going to help me sort this out,” I told Marion’s back.
“Will you be back for lunch?” she chirped, seeming to have regressed into a state of complete den
ial.
“No,” I sighed, wondering how many Valiums she’d taken, “probably not.”
Lissner and his wife lived on the other side of Remand, which luckily meant only about a five-minute drive. It was only half-past eight, but already the sun was burning down on the desert, making the air shimmer above the bitumen. The terrycloth around my head made my scalp itch, and sweat poured down my face, while the feelers squirmed restlessly underneath. I wondered if they resented this restraint on their freedom?
Even though I had never been fond of working for Lissner, I was looking forward to examining my predicament with him. Originally, the irony of moving across the country to do my patriotic duty, and then being told I was going to work for someone whom less than a decade ago we had been taught to hate and despise, had eaten me up. Leary had told me the truth about him shortly after I’d come to Remand. There had been a lot of waiting around at first, before the William James Project could start properly, and there wasn’t much to do around the base other than drink and talk. One night, sitting atop boxes of laboratory equipment yet to be unpacked, Leary poured me a whisky and told me about Lissner.
He had been a prominent physicist in Nazi Germany and when the war ended the Office of Strategic Services had recruited him to work for the United States military. The great American Eagle had swooped down and pulled Lissner out, as Leary said. His past had been erased, he had been given false papers and a home in Remand with his wife. ‘Operation Paperclip,’ they called it.
Leary knew a lot about those kinds of things. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he liked his drink so much.
However, Lissner really was a good scientist, I had to give him that. Furthermore, he was truly a man of science who believed in the scientific method above all else, and who could be trusted to remain calm and levelheaded, no matter what.
At a crosswalk, I stopped for a red light. A young woman with a baby stroller crossed in front of me, offering me a polite smile that turned into a frown when she saw my headwear.
I returned the smile, pretending nothing was wrong.
Remand was small, and full of bored housewives who had nothing better to do while their husbands worked than spy on each other. If I wasn’t careful, the whole town would be boiling with gossip before noon.
It was Lissner’s wife Dora who opened the door for me, and led me through the house to her husband’s study.
She had a couple of years on Marion, and a few silvery streaks in her short, bouffant hair, but nonetheless she radiated a powerful, warm sexuality. You only had to throw one glance at her to know she was a strong-willed, self-assured woman who wasn’t ashamed of her roots.
“Mr. Carter is here, mein schatz,” Dora said when we’d stopped outside the door to the study.
She pushed the door open and motioned me to go inside. For a moment I thought I saw a kind of knowing smile play on her face, and I got the unnerving feeling she and her husband were playing some sort of trick on me.
The study was a lofty room about twenty-times-thirty feet, bounded on all sides by heavy-set wooden bookcases filled to the brim with many leather bound volumes.
The curtains were closed, allowing only a minimum of sunlight to penetrate the shallow dusk of the room. I could only just make out a small black and white picture on the wall, showing Lissner and a group of other scientists posing for the camera outside the Zeppelin Grandstand.
The centerpiece of the room was an antique writing desk behind which Lissner was sitting, a small and lonely majesty among the reminders of a past life.
Lissner was a man of about forty, with a round face, short dark hair on hasty retreat atop a high forehead, and a pronounced eagle nose. He had wrapped himself in a heavy woolen robe and I couldn’t help wonder if he wasn’t hot. There was a bottle of whisky on the table, and a half-empty glass in his hand.
“Ah,” Lissner exclaimed and jerked to his feet when he saw me. He threw one glance at the towel around my head with those dark, piercing eyes of his, but didn’t say anything.
“Come, come, sit please, my friend,” he waved me closer and motioned me to sit down opposite him.
He offered me a drink and I welcomed the piquancy of the whisky, allowing it to shore me up against the storm.
I was relieved there didn’t seem to be anything changed about Lissner – that he hadn’t sprouted an extra pair of arms or another head during the night – but I couldn’t help notice how he seemed almost giddy with excitement, as if his hands were itching to peel away my towel.
“I must confess, Randy, I was expecting your call when I realized what was happening … well, I suppose you know better than anyone.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said, frowning.
“All I can be relatively sure of is that something happened in the Wormhole yesterday. Something that has caused … this.”
I started to unwrap the towel, while Lissner watched, sweaty-faced and wide-eyed, not so much afraid as expectant.
The towel fluttered to the floor. The feelers stretched in their new-found freedom.
“Mein Gott,” Lissner whispered.
The absurdity of it all, the way he looked at me, set my cheeks ablaze.
It didn’t help when he got up and asked if he could touch them.
“Das ist unglaublich …” Lissner muttered as his hands traced the feelers’ shapes. He was standing so close to me I could smell the mothballs in his bathrobe, and behind that smell, something else, some subtle exudation from the German’s body registered on the edge of my awareness.
The feelers didn’t seem to mind Lissner’s touch. They continued their undulating dance, but the sensation of his hands on my flesh made goosebumps rush across my skin.
“They’re magnificent …” Lissner’s shameless curiosity was starting to get to me, and I brushed his hands aside.
“Please Dr. Lissner,” I begged him, “If you know something about this, for God’s sake, tell me. I’m at my wit’s end.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Lissner said as he returned to his chair.
“But first, tell me what happened in the laboratory after I passed out.”
I told him. It was relieving to put into words what I had hidden away in my head. And yet it was also terrifying, as if by turning my thoughts into words I was lending the events a validity I had been able to withhold until now.
“I assume you ascribe your … changes to the encounter with this … creature?” Lissner asked when I had finished.
“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking maybe the radiation caused me to hallucinate …”
“Hmm,” Lissner shook his head. “Perhaps. It is possible, I assume … but that wouldn’t explain the … changes, would it?”
“Maybe a new kind of radiation,” I pressed on. “An undiscovered kind of cosmic ray? Bertha was registering all kinds of exotic matter in the time up until the explosion.”
“We did no doubt detect states of matter and particles not commonly encountered,” Lissner agreed. “But you are overlooking another explanation, which, incredible as it is, might be closer to the truth.”
“Which is?”
“Well, we know the human body sometimes exhibits quite astounding levels of ingenuity when it comes to improvising on its form. The body can sometimes even become our enemy. Just think of common allergies. And what about hypertrophic scarring? Or in more extreme cases, mutations such as hypertrichosis – der werwolf syndrom – which causes excessive hair growth on the face. We really don’t know why the body reacts the way it does in certain cases. We might as well ask why one man has blue eyes and another brown. The answer to these magnificent mysteries lie buried … in unserem fleisch … how would you say, in our flesh. We need not look to space or the depths of the oceans for uncharted territory, there are latent mysteries within our very flesh.”
“That’s all very well, Dr. Lissner, but you must admit this is a bit more extreme than a case of hay fever.” I indicated the feelers, which were waving restlessly in the air
like a pair of hand puppets.
“Carter,” Lissner said, “Allergies, like I mentioned, occur when the immune system reacts to a normally harmless substance in the environment. If indeed we encountered something from another world that day in the laboratory, if we punched a hole in reality and something from outside came through …I think it is possible for this being to be so profoundly strange, that by its mere presence it inspired a revolution of our bodies. Made our flesh attempt to … to sing in unison with it.”
Silence settled over the study when Lissner finished. I had been staring at the carpet for a while, but now looked up at him.
“You keep saying ‘we’,” I said.
Lissner took a deep breath.
“Ja, I too have indeed been touched,” he said as he stood up. I watched as he undid his belt and exposed himself to me.
The thing that immediately hit me was Lissner was wearing a purple brassiere and matching panties – I wondered if they were Dora’s – and then I noticed the fullness of the breasts cupped by the brassiere, and the absence between his legs.
“Jesus,” I whispered. I felt repulsed, unclean, just being in the room with Lissner now, “It’s horrible.”
“You see,” Lissner said, still holding out the sides of his bathrobe like some sideshow attraction, “I too have been affected, albeit in a very different manner than you.”
“All right, Dr. Lissner,” I managed, “What do we do? How do we reverse this?”
Lissner blinked a few times, then folded the bathrobe around himself with an almost disappointed look on his face.
“But Carter, why are you so quick to dismiss these changes? Our visitor has shown us potentials we never knew ourselves capable of. This isn’t just something to be removed or burned away. Don’t you see? This is an unparalleled chance to enter into a dialogue … with our bodies.”
It was obvious the changes had gotten to Lissner’s mind. He had talked himself into a rapturous state, and I realized I couldn’t count on him any longer.
I felt overcome by lassitude, of an inability to fight against the torrent of futility that suddenly washed over me.
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