by Dan Glover
She knew Lily had extra sensory powers that went beyond human ability but it still startled Karen when she spoke so abruptly. Natalia approached going to Lily to hold her close.
"I'm sorry, Lady Lily."
"Hush, my child. I was only interested in the view from this side of the glass. Tell me, Karen, have you been successful in acquiring the male parts you need for the procedure to advance?"
"Yes, I have. I don’t mean to hurry you but we need to get back to the castle as soon as possible. Otherwise deterioration will set in."
"Come; let us leave this horrid place. It is my fervent hope we never return."
Chapter 7—Itch
Harrison Buckminster Nottingham the Third had an itch. Though he was fairly certain it was nothing he nonetheless made the obligatory appointment with his physician.
"Can you schedule me for an appointment today, Miss Cotton?"
"Oh I think so, Mr. Nottingham. Is it an emergency?"
"I must say, I'm not feeling well at all. I have this itch, you see, and a bit of a rash. I just returned from work. I fear I may have inadvertently ingested something disagreeable."
"Please come by the office at two o'clock this afternoon. We'll fit you in."
Harry disconnected his cell phone to busy himself getting ready for his visit. Removing his clothes for his second shower of the day and staring into the mirror he noted the rash running around and down his neck to cover his chest had spread dramatically in just the last couple hours.
"It must be in part from my all scratching."
He attempted to reassure himself while standing in front of the mirror but still, it felt as if something was moving beneath the skin of his chin and running around to the back of his neck and up his scalp. Harry deftly maneuvered a hand-held mirror and a magnifying glass to see if his suspicions were correct.
He was positive his eyes were deceiving him. On second thought, however, he decided to forego the shower, yes, to dress, and to go immediately to the doctor's office. Though it was still but midmorning he reasonably convinced himself the physician would see him straightaway once he explained his symptoms to that dreadful office attendant.
While walking to the door a wave of dizziness beset Harry causing him to lose his balance, careen across the room, and falling down he struck the side of his head upon the corner of the massive stone hearth in front of his fireplace.
He dreamed how his body was caught up in a silken web. Spiders the size of kittens were taking turns pouncing upon his chest from high up in the darkness where his vision would not reach.
Waking, Harry wasn’t exactly sure where he was. A fog obscured his eyes. As he attempted to rise something prevented his movements. His right temple hurt but when he tried to touch it his arm refused to do his bidding.
He wondered absently if he was still dreaming about the spiders who had mistakenly ensnared him within their web but the insistent throbbing in his head along with the persistent itching in his chin and back of his neck brought about a distinct sense of reality.
"I say."
He called out to no one in particular. The kittens were gone, or were they spiders? He couldn't seem to tell his dreams from reality.
"I say... I seem to have fallen. Can someone be so good as to help me up?"
His voice sounded hollow, like an echo. There was a crackling in his ears that was not all together disagreeable. He momentarily wondered if he should be frightened by what was happening to him.
A visage of Lily crossed his mind's eye, her eager lips drinking him in, that tongue... why yes, that tongue... it seemed to have a life of its own, worming its way up inside of him... only it was not her tongue at all.
A timorous and tangled darkness began weaving pale green geometric shapes along the edges of his vision as the silken web was slowly slithering over him warm and inviting. He was in a tunnel. Perhaps, he thought, he was remembering being born. Or was he being born again? The thought puzzled him as the glossy shroud grew ever more persistent over his eyes and he thought no more.
Chapter 8—Sons and Daughters
"You must consider procreating if we are to survive and thrive."
Lily coughed out the words detesting the sound of them even as they emerged from deep inside her throat and passed between her lips. Natalia reacted as if she had been cussed by a trusted lover.
"What are you saying, my love? Do you wish to share my body with a man?"
"Never, my sweet Natalia... there are ways to avoid such a calamity."
"What of the other women here, darling Lily? Why can't they do the procreating and leave us to our own desires?"
"These women are scrawny and slovenly and their offspring will reek of it. Don't you sense that too?"
When Natalia didn’t answer Lily took her lover into her arms cooing sweet nothings. She abhorred having to prod Natalia into doing something so against her nature and yet watching the People interact with one another over the last few years Lily realized something must be done to alleviate the malaise that had crept into the species.
The People had to be forced into providing for their own sustenance. Working the fields and feeding the livestock was only the beginning. It was a constant battle to get the only two men, Drummond and Kirk, to help in the harvest. They flat out refused to partake in plowing the land or doing any planting.
Drummond drank.
At first he hid it but in time he no longer seemed to care who knew. Lily considered the consequences of his actions as potentially harmful yet she was unwilling to talk to the boy. She understood his kind much better than she desired. Words were futile in such situations. She knew his drinking would only increase with time.
His influence on Kirk was obvious. Though the two of them fought with each other every chance they got—even to the point of coming to blows—they paired off against anyone who made an attempt at coming between them.
The girls were made to shoulder the majority of the responsibility to not only harvest crops and raise and butcher animals but to cook and clean besides. The two men seemed to feed off each other's lethargy doing less and less every year until they did nothing but eat and drink and crap. The girls continued to work yet they too showed signs of rebellion. Lily feared the day would come when no one would want to work.
"You will make a wonderful mother to a son who will strengthen the People and lead them into a new age. What we build here today will resonate for thousands, perhaps millions of years. We must take care not to give birth to another race of warmongers eager to kill one another. I am unable to help give rise to such beings yet, but if our arrangement comes to fruition one day I too may bear a child."
"Who shall be the father of our children?"
"This is something we must consider together, my Natalia. The Kurgan boys are imbeciles, everyone knows that. They are weak, lazy creatures, such as are all the daughters of the People. I have talked with Karen, however, and we planned a trip. Perhaps a father will be found where one is least expected."
Lily paused a moment thinking of how the People arrived at the castle, brought to them by her would-be captors, Karen and Marilyn. Fires burned in the distance with an odor of death in the air as an automobile appeared on the horizon.
Lauren attempted to turn the new arrivals away. For reasons she was still not sure of, Lily invited them to stay. Everything she knew told her to let Lauren to drive those pitiful creatures away. Her intuition overrode her logic, however. Maybe she knew that Karen would certainly die if they didn’t welcome her. Lily saw the sickness in her and her companions even from a distance.
At the time, Lily assumed the Lake disease was isolated to this particular location. Soon, she learned the plague raced around the world in just days killing every human in its wake. The Ladies never frequented social media but Karen informed the group how the news feeds all went silent as traffic on the Internet slowed to a trickle and then stopped all together, something unthinkable only a week prior.
The two girls were on
ly a bit more talkative than the two sullen boys. Mindy, a dour little thing with mousy hair and a face carved from wood, seemed to blossom under the tutelage of Lauren. They spent hours together making charcoal drawings of Orchardton Hall from every possible angle. Kendra the invisible hung around the edges of conversations rarely speaking at all unless spoken to.
The boys were trouble from the start. Despite being admonished not to leave the grounds Drummond went back to the surrounding villages to raid the liquor stores. It became clear the boy was a hardened alcoholic at the age of twelve. Kirk was more fortunate in that the liquor only seemed to make him sick and so he did not imbibe to the extent of Drummond.
During the next couple decades the boys procreated like rabbits with both Mindy and Kendra giving birth to a number of girls. Lily soon lost count of how many and what their names were. These offspring lacked a vital sense of comportment to the common good, however, much like their mothers.
In the last two years several of these children attempted to break away from the People, to go off on their own in misguided efforts to establish their own habitats far from Orchardton Hall. They chafed at the leadership offered by Lily and Lauren as if the Ladies of the Lake—as they were known—sought to aggrandize their own stations in life at the expense of the People.
They all perished, of course.
"Do you ever feel guilty, dearest Lily?"
Natalia's voice brought Lily out of her day dream.
"Guilty for what, my lovely Natalia... what have I done that I should feel this way?"
"For the Great Dying... if not for that single kiss of our darling Lauren's perhaps none of this would have occurred."
"Is this something you believe... that our lover is responsible for billions of deaths?"
"Never, my sweet Lily, I assure you that I do not feel this way."
"And yet you wonder do I feel guilty. No, I do not. I neither love nor do I hate the People. I feel nothing at all toward them. I watched as they came down out of the trees to plunder the planet and to kill each other in countless atrocities. They polluted the waters of my home and forced my kind to the surface. They condemned us as witches and drove us from our lands.
"We could have fought back but instead we chose to hide ourselves in places where we might not be discovered. Though by a quirk of nature we are endowed with virtual immortality one by one my kind vanished until there were only a few of us left. Our men are gone. We cannot reproduce without men and so when the last one of us dies it will be the end of our lineage. And still we refuse to fight back.
"But then the human beings who judged themselves as among the most intelligent life on the planet made a fatal error. They discovered me, Lily of the Lake. They kidnapped me. They locked me away to study, to discover my secret over life and death. Though they fully understood the danger I represented to their kind they willingly accepted the risk in return for the reward of eternal life.
"As with everything else, these humans believed they could take me to use for their own advantage. They do not reckon on the love I feel for freedom. They did not realize I would destroy their entire race to save myself from prison. Even when the disease was unleashed with that one little kiss these people could have saved themselves by taking a few simple precautions... instead, what did they do?
"They ran away like frightened children, spreading the sickness far and wide. Once the tipping point was reached there was no stopping it. If you ask my opinion, my sweet Natalia, the world is better shut of these wicked humans who use it only to further their own agendas, never counting the loss they cause it."
"I'm sorry, darling Lily. I didn’t mean to insinuate that you are in any way responsible for what happened."
"I know that, my love. Do not fret about it a moment longer, please."
"I'll do whatever you think is best. If you believe I should bear children, I will do so."
"You are no longer human, my sweet Natalia, but neither are you like us, yet. Perhaps in a few million years you may come to resemble us more than your own kind... that I do not know. But I do know you are something completely new. With your addition to the gene pool the People will prosper and become enlightened to the ways of the Lake in a fashion that would not otherwise be possible. If it were not for this, I would never ask you to do this thing."
"Does our sweet Lauren know about this plan of yours?"
"Yes, my precious one. She is not in favor. Her love for you clouds her judgment. If our plan works, however, it may save both our races from eventual extinction. This is a risk worth taking... do you agree?"
"Yes, my darling Lily... and you can count on my help. All you need do is ask."
Chapter 9—A Death in the Family
"Lance Adams is dead, Hector."
She didn’t often visit his hotel room except for the rare occasions when they had sex so when he was awakened by someone banging on his door he threw on a robe and answered it bleary eyed and perturbed, thinking it was the maid.
Karen was standing there, crying. As always, Hector was put off by tears but he realized too that she couldn't help it. She had always adored Lance—not in a lover sort of way, but as a valued friend. At least he hoped so.
"You're not serious. What happened, Karen?"
Both surprise and alarm registered on Karen's face through her tears. For a moment he thought she would rush into his arms but his fears were unfounded as she seemed to simply sag into herself as more sobs racked her body.
He should have gone to her but he had never been good at comforting others. While his mother laying dying from the cancer that was eating her alive he had been called to her bedside to say goodbye.
He had just stood there staring at cracks running across the floor wondering if he was in danger of falling through while the poor woman moaned, rolled over, and turned her head to the wall. At the time he was a third year medical student who was supposed to be trained in showing empathy to the sick and the dying but he only felt revulsion.
That wasn’t his mother. Someone must have sent him to the wrong room. This woman was a stranger. His mother was home and healthy and awaiting his visit at Christmas.
Only it was his mother. She died later that night surrounded by his father and his brothers and sisters while he had absconded to the local gin mill where he drank himself into a deep oblivion and woke the next morning to an angry father pounding at his door.
Like this morning... only it wasn’t his father this time... it was a sobbing Karen. He would almost rather it was his father.
"He didn’t show up for work last night, Hector. When the police went to his apartment for a well-being check they found him dead on the bathroom floor."
"Was it from natural causes, Karen?"
He didn’t like to think what it might mean if it wasn’t. He shivered involuntarily though the floor was cold upon the bottoms of his bare feet and Karen seemed to think he was heating the whole outdoors since she didn’t seem inclined to stepping inside.
"No, Hector, it most definitely wasn’t from natural causes. The police were instructed not to touch the body. Our team isolated the corpse, secured it in a biohazard bag, and brought it to the compound to do an autopsy. I'm certain it was our girl's work. I've seen the same symptoms among the villagers in Lake Baikal. Lance was obviously the one who set her loose. I suspect he was seduced."
"Oh Christ in heaven... we should have known it was Lance all along. He was alone with her that whole night."
"It's my fault. Go ahead and say it. I defended the man and now he's dead. That poor bastard... I should have told him more about Lily. Why the hell does everything have to be such a secret, Hector?"
"You know that as well as I do. This isn’t your fault, Karen. At least now we know what happened. We'll have to take precautions it doesn’t happen to us when we catch up with her."
"We should expect more deaths, Hector. Let's issue an alarm to all first responders... tell them to make sure they treat any victims as possible points of contagion.
"
"That could jeopardize everything we've done over the last seven years. People might start asking questions that we have no answers for. Remember, you're in this as deeply as I am, my dear."
Karen must have known he had been using her to advance his own agenda for the past fifteen years but he had always taken the added trouble to make sure she was rewarded in some small way. Still, Karen was withholding valuable information from him, or at least he sensed it.
The woman spent countless hours sitting and talking to that creature, as if there was something they could learn in conversation that couldn't be learned by hard and practical science. It bothered him that Karen might be right, that the only way to study this monster was through intellectual discourse. It troubled him that this being might equal his own intellect, or even exceed it.
Hector looked at his watch. They'd been in Paris for twelve hours. He pondered flying back to England—to the compound—and doing the autopsy himself. Instead, he ordered Karen to send word that Lance's body was to be quarantined—frozen in liquid nitrogen—until further notice.
Karen looked especially alluring even though she'd been crying. Or maybe it was because she'd been crying... Hector couldn't decide. Perhaps the two of them should share a motel room tonight, under the pretense of saving the CDC money, of course.
He didn’t know why he was attracted to Karen. She did not fall anywhere within the range of beauty. The glasses she insisted upon wearing made her seem ten years older, her hair was the color of a rat, and her breath stank of the garlic she constantly ate.
He wondered if Lance had a family. He couldn't recall having said more than two words to the man in all the years they worked together at the CDC. He always seemed amiable enough. But something about large alpha males like Lance had always made Hector feel insecure. When he hired the man to guard the specimen he remembered how Lance glowered at him so intently that Hector had to look away. Rather than sitting down as Hector suggested, Lance stood in front of the desk with his arms folded in front of his chest. It was as if Lance knew the little man behind the desk had been bullied by brutes his whole life, as if he was daring Hector not to hire him.