It was pitch dark.
Cable fumbled her way to Alec’s sprawled, chained body. She sat on the timbers next to him.
“Cable,” he said simply.
“Alec,” she said in reply.
And volumes of feeling passed between them.
They heard something bump in the blackness among the timbers. “It’s just me,” Bruno informed them.
Cable leaned close and ran her hand across Alec’s massive brow. Somehow his skin seemed softer, less resistant. It felt cold.
“Do you have any matches, Bruno?” Cable asked.
“No,” he said. “Sorry.” He had blundered his way through the cross-braces and was close by.
“Tell me what did it,” Bruno asked Alec.
Alec did not answer. In the dark, his hand had found Cable’s and he felt the touch of her fingers on his massive palm.
“Please,” Bruno asked again.
“I think,” Alec said, his voice rumbling in the rock and timber chamber, “you kept yourself small, Bruno, and made yourself stupid. So that you would not have to make changes you saw were necessary, you pretended not to see. Pretty soon you weren’t pretending any more. You had made yourself conveniently blind.”
“I—I wanted to be a big man,” Bruno whispered.
Alec said kindly but without mercy, “You made yourself a big something, but from what you’ve become now, I don’t think you were much of a man.”
“No,” Bruno agreed. “If I get better, can I change back?”
Alec said, reflecting talks he had had with himself, “You have to live with yourself whatever form you find yourself in. You can’t ever count on going back.”
Cable lay on the damp rocky floor and used Alec’s chained hand as a pillow. “We have to stop Arcane,” she said.
He said nothing. After a moment he began to laugh.
“What’s the matter?” Bruno asked sharply, alarmed at the sound.
“He’s laughing,” Cable said, puzzled.
Alec said, “A long time ago I saw this cartoon. Two men in rags were chained, hands and feet, to an immense stone wall. There was no floor down as far as you could see, and the ceiling, half a mile up, had a tiny grate in it. The situation was preposterously hopeless. And one of the ragged, bearded men turns to the other and says, “Now here’s my plan.”
Cable snorted. “Oh,” she said.
Alec laughed again, and Cable joined him. She stopped and wiped her eyes and said, “What do you know—I’m not going to cry this time.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he said.
27
Unshaven, his jacket discarded, Arcane stood at one of the narrow Tudor windows of his laboratory and looked out toward the swamps. Dawn was some time away, but the sky had lightened to charcoal. He could make out lake-like layers of fog out of which towered ink-black silhouettes of moss-covered cypresses and live oaks. He brushed a fly from his ear.
The laboratory was teeming. In the humid air, a mere vapor from Holland’s substance had accelerated and exaggerated the growth of insects—which reproduced at a prodigious rate—and plants.
Earlier Arcane had leaned exhausted over his worktable and dozed—and dreamed of all the things in his refrigerator coming to life and parading out after him.
He walked through a cloud of gnats on his way from the window, and at the table he once again sloshed acid on new soilless sprouts of fern prothallia that had burst from spores settling out of the air—some of them green and growing even before alighting. In the conversation alcove, fern prothallia had mated to form new ferns, whose roots searched the upholstery, carpet fibers and woodwork for nutrients.
Mysterious vines grew up the legs of his work stool, and moss colored the walls in growing patches.
The air smelled rich with ozone, as after a spring rain.
These matters struck Arcane as mere nuisances to be overlooked for the moment. He had before him a beaker of the solution, a trifle stronger than that which Bruno had drunk; and deadly immortality beckoned to him through its pale amber color.
Did he hesitate? He would have said no. He would have said the scientist in him urged caution while the romantic grasped at the dare.
The notebook beside him was filled with his own notes: his sketch of the incident with Bruno, his findings upon examining the swamp thing—which he did not call Alec Holland, in preparation for claiming Holland’s discoveries as his own—and his declaration of intent to experiment with his own body for the advancement of science. The exact concentration of the solution in the beaker before him had been noted with great precision. In contrast to Linda Holland’s shorthand scribbling, Arcane’s penmanship had artistic flourish and was difficult to read only where he was uncertain of his data.
The lab was dim, dungeonesque except for the pools of light made by the high spots; and the buzz of flies and gnats was joined by something larger that sounded like a wasp but had not shown itself. He pulled a sprout from the floorboards and laid it across his work table out of idle curiosity: would it continue to grow?
How long before the vapor in the air would have an effect on Arcane himself? He estimated it to be a matter of weeks, unless the vapor concentration changed.
His eye roved from the beaker of full-strength solution to his diluted mixture intended for consumption. The mixture seemed richer than it had. Arcane wondered suddenly if, due to the reproduction of microorganisms within it, it grew stronger by the minute. And what of the full-strength solution: was it full strength, or was it increasing also?
He took a wine glass and poured his mixture into it. It brightened like yellow phosphorus and then began to dim. He carried the glass with him to the intercom panel and pressed a call button.
By the time there was an answering knock at the door, Arcane had returned to the window to look out at the ever-lightening sky.
“Hi,” said a lovely woman at the door, rubbing her eyes. “What can I do for you?”
“Come here,” he requested. “I’m distracted. I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Nola,” she said kittenishly, stepping full into a spotlight. She had long blonde hair, an exquisite mouth, an unbelievable shape, and she wore glasses. She had been a guest of a guest at dinner; and due to a most generous offer had elected to join the estate. “This your lab? It’s kinky. I like it.”
“Would you bring me a brandy, please, Nola?”
“Sure. Be right back.” She made a gliding turn that flounced her transparent night shift.
When she was gone he looked back at the swamp. Over the jungle of gray shapes there was a pink opalescence in the clearing sky.
He toasted the dawn with the living concoction in his wine glass, and tossed it down in a single swallow.
In the colonial catacombs beneath him, others watched the high windows burn pink. They had talked very little in the past hours—just enough to know that no one slept.
Suddenly a cloud slipped by, and a ray of sunlight broke into the dungeon. It struck high on the heavy timbers opposite the window.
Alec said weakly, “Cable!”
“Yes Alec?” she said, concerned.
“The sun . . . I must reach the sun. I have no strength.”
She looked at him in the gloomy light. His eyes were barely open, and he seemed unable even to lift his hand. Tears came to her eyes and she angrily wiped them away. “Is there a way we can reflect it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Alec murmured; the words were barely discernible from the rasp that rumbled from his chest.
“If I . . . if I climb up there, Alec, is my white dress enough to—?”
“No. Too indirect. Can you work the winch?”
“Oh! Of course,” she said. “Will that raise you high enough?”
“Almost. I think.”
The chains rattled through pulleys until they were taut, until the hard part began. Pushing with all her might, Cable was able to cause only one click of the ratchet. But it lifted the timbers Alec was attached
to an eighth of an inch off the ground.
Bruno took the crank away from Cable. He said, “I got to have a few muscles left, lady. Let me try.”
The ratchet clicked, clicked again, clicked again and again. The X of wood lifted slowly off the floor.
Alec’s head was in the angle of the shape; it fell through, bent back, bobbed like an unconscious man’s head as the timbers slowly, one jolt at a time, raised him like a ship’s anchor.
The chain around his waist dug into him, and the chain at his wrist felt as though it would pull off his remaining arm. He groaned in pain.
“Stop!” Cable told Bruno.
But Alec managed to whisper; “No—go ahead. Quickly!”
The ratchet continued to click. Bruno had to hook his shriveled bare feet under the iron stanchions of the winch to maintain his leverage and purchase. With each turn of the crank he emitted a garbled grunt of effort. His turns began to slow.
“I’ll help you,” Cable said, adding her weight to each downward thrust of the crank.
Soon the X of timbers was upright, back where it had been before.
He was still a foot or two short of reaching the sun’s rays.
Hard as they tried, Cable and Bruno could not budge the crank with the full weight of his five hundred pounds plus the weight of the wood. He could not be lifted any higher.
Cable ran around to him. With his waist tied at the axis of the X, his feet were off the ground, sagging in tangles of chain. His head leaned against his arm.
“You have to do the rest, Alec,” she challenged him.
He did not stir.
She pounded on his leg. “Wake up, damn you!”
“I’m awake, Cable,” he said slowly. “But it’s no use.”
“The hell it is! Look, you can reach it if you try. It’s not far!”
He looked down at her and smiled. His eyes opened a little wider.
“Look up there, not at me. Reach for it, Alec!”
He raised his limp hand and aimed it above him. It almost touched the ray in which peach-colored dust particles boiled.
“Higher, Alec. You can do it! Please. Do it for me. For all of us,” she pleaded.
She suddenly rushed to his feet. “Bruno! Help me get a loop of chain under each foot. He can push up on them!
Alec said, straining, almost inaudibly, “Just under the left foot.”
They managed. The chains rattled and creaked as he pushed upward. His finger tips reached into the ray. They seemed to glow with the brightness. Almost at once his body trembled, and with a little more strength he pulled up higher, until his open palm was a shining god’s hand of green brass.
In Arcane’s laboratory, the same pink rays cut through the small square panes and lighted the busy air inside.
Arcane held a clock in his hands resentfully, as if calling it a liar. So much time could not have passed.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he barked.
Nola backed in with a breakfast tray—covered dishes, orange juice, toast, and a large snifter of brandy.
“I just wanted brandy,” he said, his anger diffusing with the sight of her. She had taken time, while the tray was being prepared, to make herself look spectacularly alluring.
“You always keep flies in your lab?” she asked as she set the tray on the table in front of him. “Gee, you need a shave.”
“Do you care?” he asked, amused. His anxiety over the clock was almost a thing of the past. “Come here.”
Her raised eyebrows said: Oh, we shouldn’t—not on an empty stomach. But she obediently drifted into his arms and kissed him. “I like a man to have a beard,” she warbled.
He took the brandy and handed her the orange juice. “Apparently,” he said, “I am what I’ve always looked like.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. You were there last night. How long did it take for Bruno to . . . what’s wrong?”
She was staring at his face, frowning. “Your beard,” she said tentatively, “it’s longer—”
“Longer than what?”
She dropped the orange juice.
“What’s the matter with you?”
She couldn’t speak. She pointed at his hand, or was it the glass of brandy?
He looked closely. The back of his hand was bubbling, breaking; but a brown foam, not blood, oozed out of it.
“Go—go—leave me!” Arcane insisted.
She was riveted to the spot, horror-stricken. Her eyes moved to his arms.
The skin was softening, as a hard dry sponge softens with water; the skin began to flow, sag, run, and that brown foam boiled up from the many tiny rips.
Arcane dropped the brandy and cried out in pain.
Nola screamed and ran from the room, leaving the door standing open after her. Arcane took a step to follow and then stopped, paralyzed. His entire body seemed to be on fire. His clothes began to smolder.
Nola’s screaming wakened the house. There were shouts and footsteps.
One of the gunmen ran in his underwear. “What’s wr—?” And stopped dead in his tracks. “Jesus!”
Arcane’s back was to him and as the back grew in breadth, the fabric of his shirt pulled apart in a zigzag rip. The skin that pushed through was brown and boiling.
Arcane staggered to a wall mirror and looked at himself. The face that looked back at him was moving, widening, lengthening. His eyes were red, bulging, blowing up like tiny balloons. He screamed and looked away. He was dimly aware of a clot of people by the door, staring at him; his image of them was red and wavering. He staggered to the work bench to hold himself erect against it.
He missed the edge he grabbed for because as he lunged his frame shot up a good ten inches. He fell against the lab stool and sent it clattering to the floor. He fell to his knees. His vision grew darker, more blurred, and soon he could see nothing before him.
His comrades and servants watched in abject terror. They saw his clothes rip away as his body swelled. His rib cage became enormous, and as it expanded the brown viscous substance bubbled out from between the ribs and covered the skin of his torso and trunk.
Skin literally fell from his legs—to be replaced by the fast-expanding foam and something that looked like scales.
The foam began to harden; it piled around him, covered him from head to foot. It hardened and cracked and was replaced by more foam from inside.
It hardened into a carapace of ugly umber crust. Arcane was inside it, not moving.
His followers stared at the titanic cocoon; a few of them took steps closer.
Suddenly the crust was broken by the emergence of something white and bony and hard; another followed beside it. They looked like tusks. The whole brown shape quivered. Some of the surface broke off and shattered to dust.
Then something scratched from inside, like a great bird attempting to hatch itself. A chunk of the brown substance fell away as something like a set of talons pushed out. The talons clawed back, breaking off more of the shell. Another hand—if that was what it was—broke through and ripped more of the shell away.
A terrible deep snarling wail boomed from the monstrous egg as it shattered from within and what was Arcane rose to its full height. He was a horrendous hyena-faced monster—lion-maned and covered with clumps of gray hair—seven or eight feet tall and apparently still growing. His teeth had turned to savage tusks, two of which protruded like those of a wild boar, and his hands were the huge scrawny reptilian claws that had ripped from the shell.
The monster saw itself in the wall mirror and recoiled, backing against the worktable. A massive mutant arm slashed out and demolished the glass condensers over the table.
The house staff had backed out the door, and most had fled. A few stood riveted with fascination. Even they turned and ran when the monstrosity let out a terrifying screech that carried to every corner of the estate.
Still he grew. His legs developed enormous thighs and spindly sinewy calves. He toppled off balance
and crashed into the worktable. The formula spilled and flowed across the black tabletop and splashed onto the floor.
A billow of blinding, yellow fire erupted from the floorboards and engulfed the worktable.
The thing reached into the fire to rescue his notebook, but withdrew his burning hand screaming in pain.
A flash of yellow flame flickered over him like St. Elmo’s fire, consumed him briefly and then winked out.
Then he listened. His supersensitive ears had heard a sound, a sound even his agonized brain could easily identify. It came from below, in the dungeons.
Arcane coughed out a shrill, deafening explosion of fury and staggered—gaining confidence with each step—to a display of ancient armaments decorating a far wall. He clawed at the brackets and flung aside shields and pikes to reach an enormous sword.
The laboratory in flames, Arcane—now a giant of muscle and armor-plated scales, a nightmarish amalgam of bestiality, still growing—charged toward the door leading to the dungeons below. Mindless of barricades that stop ordinary men, he crashed through the door—tearing through the lumber of the frame and several feet into the wall on top and sides of the opening.
He announced his coming with another shriek to wake the dead.
Behind him, his staff had begun to salvage whatever was portable of their private possessions; there was no fire department near enough to call.
28
As Nola was delivering Arcane’s brandy and breakfast tray, Alec Holland’s green hand was pushing up into the solitary ray of sunlight brightening the dungeon below.
The angle of light was such that as the sun rose the ray quickly expanded, reached deeper and deeper into the big wet room of rock and timbers. As it descended, more of the flesh of the swamp thing fell under its beneficent warmth.
With his returning strength, Alec stretched up higher, breathed deeper, exercised his muscles.
His feet pushed down under the chains, and thin tendrils grew out from his toes toward the rocks of the floor. He lifted his head higher into the sunlight.
“Alec!” Cable shouted suddenly. “Your arm!”
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