“Tonight,” Arcane said casually. “Immediately.”
Cable looked at her almost empty wine goblet. A wave of fear shot through her, but she quickly mastered it and said to Arcane: “Have you taken it, then?”
He looked at her with magnanimous patience. “No, my dear. I have given the priviledge of taking the first dose to our guest of honor.”
Out of a long silence, Bruno said, “Me? Oh, sir, I’d rather not. You know how I hate shots.”
There were audible smirks among others of Arcane’s men.
Arcane said, “No shots, Bruno. This is something that can be taken orally, or, evidently, even through the pores of the epidermis.”
“I don’t want to,” Bruno said childishly. There were tears in his eyes.
“I’m afraid you already have,” Arcane said. “But you can tell it, can’t you? You know what I’ve said is true.”
“I don’t feel good,” Bruno said.
“I expected a quicker reaction,” Arcane confessed to the guests. “Perhaps I slipped too moderate a dose into his wine.”
As if on cue, the old wine steward brought a corked bottle and set it for safe keeping at Arcane’s place.
“Look at my gardenia!” said the Britisher, who had stuck one in his buttonhole. It had grown a stem that emerged from the bottom of his lapel with dozens of new leaves and buds. “How long will this grow, do you think?” he asked Arcane.
“Not indefinitely without soil,” Arcane said. “It will extend to the limits of the nutrients available within it and then stop—unless it is planted again. It will eventually die—according to Holland’s notes—if left alone. But it needs only a small fraction of the nitrogen and minerals and water other plants need. You see, the complete efficiency of the exchange of oxygen and carbon di—”
Bruno screamed. When he did, his jawbone lengthened and his upper teeth pushed forward.
“Oh, my God!” said the Britisher, jumping to his feet.
The woman next to him screamed.
Bruno lashed out in pain and sent china and crystal crashing to the floor.
Cable wanted to look away, but she had to see—no matter how horrible and inhuman this game Arcane was playing. She pulled at the clamps holding her feet to the chair; it was an instinctive reaction to a feeling that what she was about to see would prove so unbearable she must run from the scene.
The massive man tried to stand on his chair. His voice was an endless moan that rose in pitch and volume as if he had no need to breathe. He put a knee on against the table.
His hands gripped the sides of his head and he seemed to be squeezing it into a new shape—long, snoutlike, his eyes narrowing and his forehead shrinking. He clawed at the top of his head as if his skin were burning. Suddenly, a blue flame flickered from his head, down his arm, and winked out at his elbow. He screamed—a high-pitched, childlike sound. Hair fell from his scalp, burning.
The guests had scraped their chairs back and away from Bruno’s end of the table.
“Terry!” Bruno rasped.
The woman sitting by Cable jumped to her feet, horrified, and started to go to him.
“Don’t,” Cable said to her; “you can’t help.”
Bruno was shrinking. His back was becoming hunched as his spine obeyed the new genetic dictates of his changing body.
He pitched forward onto the table.
Guests scrambled to their feet and backed away.
“Now don’t be alarmed,” Arcane admonished his guests. “Remember, this is not happening to you! I’m sure this condition will be only temporary. Don’t panic.” The guests paid no attention. One by one they rose and bolted from the room.
Bruno reached up for the chandelier. Before, he could have reached it while standing on the floor; now he had trouble from the table. He gripped two of the brass bars of it and held on—rattling the myriad crystals—as if hoping to keep himself tall by stretching his body.
His feet left the table. He dangled, whining, crying, as his swaying feet knocked over glasses and bottles, and things crashed to the floor.
Everyone was gone but Cable, Arcane and Bruno.
“I don’t understand,” muttered Arcane. “I don’t understand,” he repeated, turning to Cable for an explanation.
She shook her head.
Bruno was a bald midget, his clothes falling off like a circus clown’s—with the head of an albino rat.
“Oh, come down from there,” Arcane ordered, annoyed.
Bruno obeyed. He dropped onto the table and sat in the middle of the mess crying like a baby. “What did you do?” he whimpered.
“What did you do is more the question,” Arcane said. “Look what you’ve done to this place.”
Bruno picked up someone’s fork and played in someone’s plate of fish—much as a child with a shovel plays in a sand box. “I should’ve died,” he said softly.
Arcane sighed and said, “It’s always darkest before the dawn. Let’s pay a visit to the genius who really authored tonight’s disaster.”
26
Arcane’s mansion was antebellum; part of its understructure dated from even earlier times, when the area had been a lawless frontier.
The procession that descended to the catacombs beneath the laboratory was a queer one. Arcane had pried open his tight collar for comfort but otherwise looked formally dressed; Bruno—a hunched, snouted dwarf—had been re-dressed in rags that more nearly fit him; Cable was barefoot and frail in her flimsy diaphanous gown that did nothing to ward off the chill of the cellars. Behind them trotted two armed guards in tuxedos; and in the rear two lab technicians in smocks struggled with a handtruck of heavy equipment and a fat electrical cord which unrolled from a spool on wheels that bounced along the irregular paving stones of the floor.
Mice squealed and darted into holes and darker corners. One of the guards who had a penchant for neatness burned out spiderwebs as his blazing torch passed near them.
They passed a zoo of sorts. In small rooms with jail doors and high slits of windows cowered whining wolves with dogs’ heads, diseased deer, a wildcat with no hind legs and several domestic dogs with various malformations. The creatures whined and growled as flickering torchlight disturbed them and passed them by.
In the last cage before a spiral descent, two men in khaki rags clutched their bars, watching the procession go by. “For God’s sake, Arcane,” said one of them in a trembling voice, “enough is enough.”
The lab technician reeling out the power cord stopped at the cage and whispered, “Damn, Henderson, I thought you were dead!”
The grimy bearded man shook his head in the dwindling torchlight. “He put us here six months ago. He thought we were cowards ’cause we told him we were going squirrelly at that swamp camp.”
The technician commented callously as he hurried to catch up with his mates: “You’re lucky.”
The spiraling stone stairs, supported by rotting beams thick as tree trunks, led to a large room crisscrossed with beams like the underside of an old railroad trestle. This room, too, had a row of window slits at the high ceiling; but no light streamed in from the black night—only a damp mist rolled in from the marshes.
The swamp thing, difficult to pick out at first in the wavering light, was chained to a huge X of timbers, which in turn was chained to the trestle posts of the aged dungeon.
They kept Cable and the others on a landing, hidden from sight, while Arcane alone approached the creature that had been Alec Holland.
“Your formula is more complex than we thought,” Arcane said, thinly disguising the turmoil behind his casual words.
A low rumbling chuckle came from the chest of the thing. “Ah, it’s my formula again. I had not even begun to test it. I have no idea how ‘complex’ it is. What have you done with Cable?”
Arcane studied the creature; in the light of his torch, it looked weak, sagging on its chains—pale, if such a thing is possible for a tree. But it was still monumental, with a look of superhuman strength.
And the eyes danced.
“You are in there, aren’t you, Holland? All of you. Your brain is intact. You have everything you had—and now physical power besides, and . . . and everlasting life.”
Holland said, “You could kill me in a minute, Arcane.”
Arcane sloughed off the fine point. “Barring accidents, of course. You can live as long as you want to here, Alec.”
“As long as I help you.”
“Of course. That’s the agreement we reached this morning in the swamp, isn’t it?”
“It wasn’t my life I was bargaining for at the time.”
“But the effect is rather similar.”
“Where is Cable?”
“Not far away and in good health, I promise you. I’d like you to earn an opportunity to see her.” He yelled toward the eroded circular stairs: “Bring Bruno!” An afterthought: “And the equipment.”
Alec did not laugh when he saw the bald human rodent that still had some of Bruno’s qualities: the face still looked oddly innocent in combination with its furtive cowering shape; his stubby arms and legs retained their muscular definition, though all hint of stature had been lost. The sight was not amusing; it was pathetic.
“You gave him the formula?” Alec surmised.
“And he shriveled up into this! Why?” Arcane stood with fists on his hips expecting an answer.
“I—I’m not sure,” said Holland within the beast.
“But you think you know. You will tell me.” He motioned for the two technicians to lower the monster to the ground.
The technician who had spoken to the caged men said, “It’ll take more than two of us to do that.” He gestured, indicating the size and shape of the beast and the timbers.
“Don’t you know about pulleys and leverage?” Arcane asked sarcastically. “I’ll help you. The top chains lead to a winch. Crank that down gradually and pull his feet out at the bottom. Plug up and let’s get some light in here!”
A harsh floodlight illuminated the sagging green monster as they began to tip him and crank him down.
Alec’s eyes met Bruno’s.
The rodent man said, “Does it hurt where your arm is gone?”
Alec smiled; he remembered the answer he had given Cable. “Not much anymore,” he said.
“That’s significant,” muttered Arcane as he puttered with the equipment on the hand truck.
Bruno asked the giant, “I won’t change back, will I?”
Alec had always hated the hollow and helpless feeling of pity. “I don’t think so,” he said honestly. “The . . . your new cells are so much stronger than the old ones, they will resist any attempt at alteration.”
“Am I going to live forever . . . like this?” the dwarf asked, horrified.
Alec turned away and could not answer.
They had lowered Alec in steps; now the last turn of the winch set him on the ground.
Alec laughed as they approached with electrodes and Arcane set dials on a glowing box. “Are you planning to torture me?” he asked. “To force me to do what? Tell you what?”
“My dear Dr. Holland, what do you take me for? You’re not to be tortured. You’re about to receive your first physical as a thing of the swamp rather than a man. I have to know what’s inside you.”
“Why not dissect me and see directly?”
Arcane smiled crookedly, “Oh, I should hate to do that.” As he attached electrodes from the cardiograph, he mused, “Do you suppose you could survive dissection, doctor? Could I remove your head and, say, plant it in my kitchen window box—so you’d be there when I needed to consult you, be there powerless to move or even to do yourself harm? Would that work, do you suppose?”
“Try it,” the creature suggested.
“Ah,” said Arcane. “You don’t think it would work. Sad that you currently place so little importance on your own survival.” He clicked switches on and off several times. “Machine’s on the fritz. Wouldn’t you know?”
“I don’t think so,” said a technician. “I think he has no heartbeat. There is activity, though,” he said, pointing to an unsteady line at the bottom of the graph.
“A sort of vibration,” Arcane said in wonderment.
“No blood pressure,” said the other technician who had just checked for it in the creature’s one arm.
In spite of himself, Alec said, “That’s interesting. I can feel a slow heartbeat.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Arcane. He asked the technicians: “Set up the portable fluoroscope.” He mumbled, removing the electrodes, “We’d need to inject a dye to do this properly; oh well, we’ll see what can be seen.”
While setting the scope in place, Arcane philosophized, “Odd, Alec. I envied you your genius when I kept an eye on you as Ritter. It was not your lab I wanted to possess, it was your mind. Now that’s changed. I’ll settle for my own brain, thank you, but I’d change bodies with you in a second.”
“Now that you’ve robbed my brain of what you wanted from it,” Alec surmised.
Arcane chuckled inanely, happily. “Say ‘Ahhh,’ ” he said switching on the scope.
Alec read amazement on Arcane’s face and asked, “What do you see?”
Arcane shook his head as he fumbled for words. “The shapes are there, but not as sharply defined. Everything—skin, bones, organs, fluids—is of roughly the same density. Vegetable! The heart . . . it’s there but smaller, working very slowly, incredibly slowly, to move the . . . the sap through your veins!
“There’s a bullet lodged in your left ventricle—in the very muscle of it—and it seems to have no effect whatever! Other bullets that would be fatal to a human are lodged in your lungs and other organs. You are truly a marvel! And to think you’re bored with life!”
After using a crude chromatograph, Arcane had a result on the gas exchange in that creature nature had never intended:
“What you exhale has almost the composition of what you inhale. You extract a trifle more nitrogen and carbon dioxide and exhale less than the equivalent in oxygen. How do you account, incidentally, for your essentially vegetable nature and Bruno’s conspicuous lack of chlorophyll?”
Alec answered with a bored sigh, “I was under water, surrounded by plant life when I was transformed. It combined with my molecules. And . . .” Alec trailed off; a thought had suddenly come to him.
“Go on,” Arcane insisted.
Alec smiled. “I have an affinity for plants. Always have had.”
Arcane thought for a moment, tilted his head, and peered into the creature’s fantastic expressionless face. It was lighted harshly by the one floodlight that had been clipped to a huge nail.
“Are you suggesting,” Arcane asked, “that there is a psychological determinant in the transformation?”
“Ask Bruno,” Alec advised.
“Bruno can’t tell me the time if he’s wearing two watches,” said Arcane.
Bruno walked—waddled like a short-legged duck—to look down into the monster’s face. “What do you mean?”
Alec looked up from the X of timbers to which he was chained. Of the two, the standing midget looked more helpless and susceptible to hurt. Because Bruno had guessed it.
Arcane said, “I want to know what we did wrong, Holland. We followed your notebooks religiously. There is precious little margin for error.”
“There was no error,” Alec said, his voice rumbling majestically from his chest. He was still looking up at Bruno—who suddenly hid his face in his hands.
Arcane pressed: “I want to know why Bruno there does not have your strength.”
“Because he never had it,” Alec said quietly.
Arcane got to his feet and motioned for the technicians to pack up the gear. He said angrily to his adversary, “No riddles, please. You’ll tell me or pay a heavy price. Your own life has no value for you, but we have the trump card you yourself suggested we hold over you.” He yelled toward the stairs. “Bring her down!”
Bruno turned and wandered int
o the dark slashes of shadows. His beady eyes were dry and staring.
They held Cable at the foot of the stairs and Arcane pivoted the floodlight to single her out. “What is it to be, Dr. Holland? The corrected formula—or Cable? Which?”
Alec had never seen her look so lovely. Her brown hair had been washed and dressed; she wore a little makeup and the white dress accentuated the litheness and fortitude of her body. Her bare feet made of her a supernatural spirit of woodlands.
“Don’t help him, Alec,” Cable pleaded.
He said to her helplessly, a world of wistfulness and longing in his voice, “I can’t help him.”
The statement was so forlorn that Arcane had no choice but to believe it. “Why can’t you?” he asked simply.
“You don’t understand,” Holland said to the ersatz scientist who bent over him, “there’s nothing wrong. Nothing hidden. No secret for me to tell you. The formula works in such a simple and direct way. What Bruno took was precisely the same as what changed me. It . . . it amplifies your essence—not just your physical characteristics. It takes the deepest, strongest urges of the soul as a directive factor, a code for reassembly. It simply makes you more of what you already are.”
Arcane had picked up the torch and was lighting it again with a cigarette lighter. “You’re saying that since Bruno’s essence was stupidity, the formula has simply extended, amplified this trait to ridiculous forms and proportions?”
Alec said, “I doubt if it involves his native intelligence. Rather—”
Arcane ignored him and continued his own line of thought: “But if the essence of the subject is genius, this genius shall be made monumental in body as well as intellect. You’re right, Alec. It’s beautifully simple.”
At Arcane’s signal, the floodlight was turned off and the others preceded him up the steps. As he reached the stone stairs, Arcane looked at Cable, then turned to Alec and said jauntily, “I’ll take it myself.”
He turned and disappeared into the stairwell. His flickering torch bounced light back at changing angles as he climbed. It stopped when there was only a faint reflection left, and there was the clanging sound of a door of metal bars being jammed into place. Then the light and the bumping thumping sounds faded completely.
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