Dead Bait 3

by Cody Goodfellow

  DEAD BAIT 3

  www.severedpress.com

  Table of Contents

  STUMPED

  Cody Goodfellow

  WORM BAIT

  Lance Schonberg

  THE DEMON IN THE WATER

  Mark C. Scioneaux

  THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE NEEDLE

  S.T. Gulik

  OLD MAN AND THE FISH

  Randal Tanabe

  SINKERS

  Murphy Edwards

  THE FISH IN THE FIELDS

  C. Dennis Moore

  THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA OF THE DEAD

  By

  Tim Curran

  STUMPED

  By Cody Goodfellow

  When night falls in the marshlands of the Guatemalan Petén, it feels less like the daily failure of sunlight, than an epochal change that will last a million years. The birds that fill the air with brazen trills and raucous cries retire, and the nocturnal chorus is taken up by the piping, croaking voices of a million frogs.

  Few natives stray into the swamp after dark, except for poachers hunting exotic wildlife, but here is one of the last remaining places where a white man from the north, for a trivial cost by his reckoning, may pursue pleasures frowned upon or banned in his homeland.

  In the ramshackle hulk of a Spanish colonial plantation house at the end of a sunken, broken road, Mr. Cullen Donleavy of Boston had acquired a certain notoriety in the surrounding countryside for his eccentric needs and unmeasured wealth. His driving appetite was not for base pleasure, but the extreme boundaries of scientific discovery, through experiments, which would be not only ethically questionable or illegal in North America, but quite impossible. Tonight, however, it was not mere possibility that stood in his way, but his patient.

  “I’m so sorry, Cullen… I want to, you know I do… but I’m just so tired…” Audrey left her arm in his gentle grasp, but she twisted away from him on her bed. Her big brown eyes sparkled with gathering tears that she couldn’t wipe away or hide with her sunny smile, but she needn’t have bothered. Cullen fixed his gaze on the abrupt and minimally scarred stump of her slender, pale left arm, just below the elbow.

  Cullen set the massive syringe in a tray on the surgical trolley beside the bed. He didn’t want to upset her, and he didn’t want it to get broken if there was a struggle. “But darling, we’ve come so far! Think of what this could mean for you, for us, and for the world!”

  His own eyes were equally brimming with emotion in his angular, earnest face, but he was gifted with a mastery over his own heart that made Audrey’s weakness all the more mystifying. Gently, he pushed her back against the rubberized pillow with one hand as he tested the syringe, squirting a stream of iridescent mauve fluid from the big needle. “Please, Audrey, this time I believe it’s really going to work… If you don’t believe in me…”

  Her heart-shaped face fell and she reached up to caress his bristled cheek with her stump. Her other arm, with its whole, healthy hand, was still strapped to the bedframe. “I want to believe it’ll work this time, but… I’m afraid––“

  “Afraid of what? Of being whole again? Audrey, lie back and ask yourself! What else do you have to lose?”

  Stung, the young beauty curled up in studied repose, her breath coming in short stabs. Her demure façade finally began to crumble. It was almost a relief, when she finally showed herself capable of anger. “How dare you! If you knew how much these treatments hurt… The pain, the phantom sensations, hopes dashed again and again… It’s almost worse than when I lost my arm!”

  Cullen was shaken. His trembling hand almost flung the syringe against the bookshelf-lined wall. His surgical smock draped down to his knees, but he wore only shorts and an undershirt beneath, owing to the heat. The legs that emerged from beneath the smock were elegant constructs of steel and wire and springs.

  “I’m sorry to push you, darling,” he said, haltingly. “I know well enough about suffering and false hopes. You lost a limb in childhood, but you lost something that I was born without. But I also know how important it is never to give up!”

  Sensing a minute relaxing of her resistance, he hovered over her, with downcast eyes, cloudy with remorse. “I know how hard this is for you, and it eats at me to drive you so. I only want to help you… to heal you. This procedure was too radical for those idiots at the university, but I know that I’ve found a way to make the body regenerate, not only tissue, but organs and limbs! I know it will work! I know this time will be different.”

  His voice rose to a reedy, spittle-flecked shout, but she offered him her brightest smile. It was not for science, after all, or for herself, that she had offered to become his guinea pig. “Alright, my love… one more time…”

  Wasting no time, Cullen penetrated the Olecranon depression at the end of her left humerus, forcing the wide-gauge needle through the bone and into the spongy marrow within, biting his lip as he forced the full volume of the cumbersome syringe into her arm.

  Her face contorted and a mewling cry escaped her white lips as her arm went cold and seemed to vanish into the void that had taken her hand and forearm.

  Even as he held her down, Cullen plied her with his whispered entreaties, delivered in a lover’s breathless whisper. “Hold still, Audrey. The needle has to penetrate the marrow, to reactivate cell division. If it breaks off, we’ll have to start over…”

  The injection left her too weak to do more than offer a weak nod of acquiescence.

  Cullen sealed her arm in the incubator and pumped it full of nutrient syrup. He mopped the cold sweat from her brow and began packing up his instruments, certain she’d fallen asleep. When her right hand reached out to grab at his trailing smock, it startled him so that he dropped everything.

  “I know… you want only the best for me… I… Cullen, I––“ Her voice trailed off in a moan that in turn became a soft, feminine snore.

  Gently prying her hand loose and laying it across her breast, he backed out of the cellar and turned down the light. “Rest now, Audrey. The first twenty-four hours are critical for core bone regeneration.”

  He should feel some satisfaction at the experiment’s progress, but Audrey’s feelings for him were complicating the experiment. Why couldn’t she see…?

  When Audrey had met Cullen at the university, she’d had some misgivings, but she felt safe with him. The few boys who did show any interest in her all too often figured she was an easy lay with no self-esteem, or worse, they had some perverse fantasies involving her amputation. Cullen had never forced any premature physical complications into their relationship, had always been a perfect gentleman. He knew how to look past her missing limb, and the fact that he was missing both his legs, put them on common ground. He knew all this, because he had read her diary, essential to monitoring her emotional state in this delicate period.

  Had he lured her here under false pretenses? Just before final exams, he had all but proposed to her, and he had never forced himself upon her. However, he was unsure what, if anything, he felt for this woman who trusted him to try to remake her.

  Audrey was studying psychology and had some very amusing ideas about the application of Kinsey’s scandalous study to women’s talking cures. He doubted she’d put up a fight about shelving her career to bolster his if and when they married, but her studies had made her a shrewd manipulator. He thought sometimes, when he looked at her that she wanted him to try some kind of physical advance, but she knew he was too old-fashioned. Nevertheless, he wondered, if he could make her whole would there still be any attraction lef
t?

  If she hadn’t let out that nerve-wracking feline whine at the moment of truth, he might not have had the resolve to get through it. If only she knew the toll this was taking on him, she might not be so wrapped up in her own discomfort…

  At least, now he could focus on less upsetting tasks, working up new dosage variations in case this treatment went the way of the others. The first tests had gone awry almost immediately, and it had been very trying for him, and painful for her. This time, he had isolated and concentrated the enzyme complex that, catalyzed the tissue regeneration to a saturation, exceeding its expression in nature by twenty times.

  Audrey slept for two days, only stirring into dim lucidity when he came in to administer a second dose and to snake a feeding tube up her nose. Though he wasn’t sure if she heard, he kept up a running patter of soothing commentary.

  “Forgive me, sweetheart, but any exposure to sunlight or strain on your metabolism may cause a deformation. A hand is a miracle; they take the first two trimesters to develop in the womb, and lobe-finned fish of the Devonian took almost sixty million years to develop even simple forelimbs to walk on land. But bone spurs are already emerging from your stump and bifurcating. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Audrey gave no answer. For another two weeks, she slept and slept… and slept.

  Cullen busied himself in his laboratory, harvesting extract for another round of treatment, grimly telling himself that if she showed progress, then this next dose might be for himself. She couldn’t appreciate that he was going to suffer this ordeal twice, but he would be right there with her. Sometimes, with only the mercenary company of his manservant, Hilario, in the rambling, half-ruined mansion, he found himself possessed of unworthy thoughts.

  Damn the girl! Audrey’s passivity always let him go too far before he realized it, and she never showed any temper, but only wounded resignation, which left him with no escape from his guilt. If only she would rail at him for failing so many times. For dragging her down to this godforsaken hellhole to try his ridiculous miracle-cure on her. For failing her as a man…

  If only he could make her see, without crushing her fragile heart, that he couldn’t accept her or himself until he had made them both whole… that he couldn’t bear the thought of people pointing at them and laughing, there go the freaks…

  She never even raised her voice, and her bottomless faith in him only drove him harder. It didn’t make him stronger, but only more deeply ashamed of his weakness.

  Vivisecting specimens always sterilized his mind, leaving him free of the emotional pollution that choked him up whenever he thought of Audrey.

  When she finally awakened, her eyes widened with bleary concern. “Dear, you’ve worn yourself down to a cinder…”

  “You’ve been sleeping enough for both of us, my darling,” he answered. Exhausted, but enervated, he could hardly resist unwrapping her like a present. Subjecting the experiment to radiation could wreak havoc upon the mitotic chain reaction, but he had waited as long as he could. He had to know.

  Turning her on her side to place the incubator under his field X-ray, he bit his lip at the stench of her, cursing himself for neglecting her hygiene. The sheets stuck to rosy bedsores on her back, but she put on a brave face.

  Adjusting the X-ray projector until the bones of her arm glowed through the aluminum and glass incubator, he marveled at the truth of the old evolutionary truism that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The screen showed the distinct finlike bones of an embryonic hand, not so much developing, as evolving from the stump. However, the thumb was lagging behind, a vestigial stub, while the palm itself was a compact gall of bone nuggets that sprouted long, scythe-like metacarpals within an indistinct, but oddly sheath of fetal flesh. His running commentary into the microphone was a breathless litany.

  “Such big unlovely words,” Audrey dreamily murmured.

  Once more checking the tripod-mounted 16 mm camera to insure that it had them in frame, he gritted his teeth and cleared his throat before addressing posterity.

  “Remarkable! The growth is much faster than expected, but I’m a little concerned about the morphology. We won’t be able to tell for sure until we crack the incubator open, of course…”

  “Then, it’s almost over…?”

  Startled, he added a sedative to her feeding tube. “We’re more than halfway there, darling. We’ve come this far together. One more big push…”

  Audrey slept. He couldn’t risk stopping the regeneration too early, and there was little risk in keeping her sedated for another week.

  Cullen had nearly depleted the swamp with his dissection and extraction, sleeping only when Hilario plied him with rum. At night, the frogs drowned out the sound of the Victrola with its scratchy bossanova records, or the radio with its screaming election news from the capitol. At night, Hilario went out on a canoe to catch more specimens, while Cullen toiled in his lab, or developed photographs and films in his darkroom.

  Then, almost too soon, came the day.

  When he woke her up, Audrey stared at him for a long, awkward minute. It took him still longer to realize that she didn’t recognize him because he’d grown a beard.

  “It’s finally time, darling! Aren’t you excited?”

  Her pale face lit up with tired hope. “Actually, I feel a bit nauseous... Please, if I could just…”

  Working as slowly and deliberately as he could, Cullen pried out the incubator’s prematurely rusty bolts. “That’s no way to talk, Audrey… If this works, I’ll… we’ll be hailed as pioneers… like Crick and Watson, or the Curies…”

  Dangling from the other end of the incubator, Audrey tried to lift her head to see. “Maybe, we’ll win the Nobel Prize, right, darling?”

  Cullen covered his mouth at the feculent stench that wafted out of the open incubator. As the depleted nutrient syrup drained away, the results of all his hard work and self-sacrifice came clear at last. He could not quite stifle a high, horrified shriek at his first glimpse of it.

  The bones and flesh resembled the rude, yet flexible limb of an amphibian, with stubby, webbed digits tipped with tapering, translucent claws and a vestigial thumb sprouting almost from the wrist.

  He stumbled backwards with his hand over his mouth and turned away, pressing his face against the wall. “No! It’s wrong! It’s all wrong…”

  Still heavily sedated, Audrey curled up amid her tangled sheets, protectively cradling the monstrous frog-limb. “No… It’s my arm! You were right, Cullen! It’s a miracle!”

  “I didn’t come this far, defy the law and the mores of society… to create an abomination.” For one terrible, howling moment, his emotions ran away with him. But he was made of sterner stuff. She would simply have to understand.

  He turned and advanced on her, eyes steely with implacable intent. “We have to start over.”

  Her head rolled on her straining neck as she sought to hide her face, ashamed of failing him, yet again. As gently, as he could manage, Cullen took her arm, while averting his eyes and then he turned up the sedative in her feeding tube.

  The new flesh was slick and slimy, and it easily slithered out of his rubber-gloved grasp. Audrey’s hand seemed to move with a will of its own, ripping out her tube and raking red furrows in Cullen’s face, shoving him across the room to tumble into a bookshelf.

  “No, please, Cullen!” Audrey cried out as her hideous new hand retreated to cling to her breast like a bad dog. “I won’t let you take my arm!”

  Cullen crawled to his feet, covering his face. Streams of blood flowed out from behind his hand. He turned his back on her and called for Hilario. His teeth protruded through his shredded cheek, nipping the meat of his face when he spoke.

  Still pressed to the wall, his strong, agile hand reached out and took blind inventory of a nearby surgical tray, finally selecting a bone saw like a massive, serrated meat cleaver.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Cullen. I would never––I…” Audrey held out her monstrous hand as if her he
art rested in it. “Damn it, Cullen, don’t you see? I don’t care what it looks like! I didn’t even dare to believe that I could grow a new arm! I only did this because… I love you…”

  Cullen lowered the saw, seemingly moved by her tender plea. Hilario stole up behind her and pressed a wad of gauze that was soaked in chloroform over her mouth until she lay still.

  “Jesus,” Cullen hissed, “that was awkward.”

  While Hilario tightened a tourniquet round Audrey’s shoulder, Cullen steadied the saw over Audrey’s hideous misfired limb. “I know it sounds hypocritical, but I can’t… I know what missing a limb does to a person, inside. Maybe if I could fix you, and heal myself… but I can see now that it was probably too much to hope for.”

  Just below the elbow, the new arm was pale and translucent and laced with webs of turgid capillaries, like something older than the dinosaurs, grafted onto her silky white flesh. The sight of it enraged him.

  The skin parted like a membrane and shrank away from the ripping blade. The new bone was soft and pliable like cartilage, but it fought the saw valiantly. Cullen lost his temper and nearly cut off a finger before he heard the gratifying sound of steel grinding on steel.

  Wrapping the severed limb in butcher paper, he took it to his laboratory, noting with horrified curiosity, how it continued to twitch spasmodically, even as he deposited it on the top shelf in the walk-in freezer. Waving Hilario away, he stitched and bandaged his wounded face without anesthetic, relishing the cleansing sting of the disinfectant and the maddening kiss of needle and thread.

  “Where did I go wrong, Hilario? The answer is all too obvious, but it was the first hurdle, I eliminated. Isolating the growth enzyme from the donor’s genetic material was child’s play, and none of the animal test subjects showed any sign of devolution…”

  Hilario wisely kept his own counsel. Cullen went to the far wall of the laboratory and turned up the lights on a row of enormous aquariums.