Inside, wriggling shapes darted out from among the rocks and logs at the bottom to feast upon the tangles of bloodworms which Cullen spooned onto the surface. Sleek, torpedo-shaped amphibians that swam like sperm with their underdeveloped legs folded against their slimy bodies, the Guatemalan axolotl (Ambystoma petensis) had a broad, featureless shovel for a head, with feathery gills on blood-engorged stalks that jutted out from behind its skull. Like its more famous cousin which lived only in the streams and alpine lakes around Mexico City, the Guatemalan axolotl resembled Acanthostega, the earliest known tetrapod to emerge onto dry land, but the axolotl was neotenic, never shedding the gills of its aquatic larval stage like more advanced amphibians. Having rejected the earth and returning to the watery womb, the axolotl reaped some benefit from being eternally unborn, for it had a pronounced capacity for limb regeneration.
Cullen had caused a stir back at the university when he isolated the enzyme in Mexican axolotls that, when injected into other amphibians and even some reptiles, caused an accelerated regeneration of tissue in amputated limbs. However, while exciting, the results, led nowhere, and there was no question of experimenting on human subjects. If he had not met Audrey by chance, Cullen would have abandoned his research, and gone to a more promising territory to learn about a university expedition’s discovery of the Guatemalan axolotl. While new to science, the obscure swamp amphibian was no secret to the native population, of course. Local folklore declared that one could rub the prepared blood of an axolotl on the stump of a lost digit or limb, and perhaps it would grow back, though he could find no one among the natives who had tried it.
Audrey was too pure of heart to understand how complicated his feelings had become. He wished they were as easy to cut away as a deformed limb.
“Only the regenerative genes should have expressed, or the growth should have aborted, but a functional chimera… it’s impossible!”
The axolotls glided through the murky water, sending primitive green shadows creeping across the walls. Soothing, they seemed to drift outside of time, in the eternal cradle in which all life lived and died before rashly venturing out onto land.
He thought he was feeling better, but then he picked up a tray and threw it like a discus at the aquarium. The glass shattered and a torrent of green water tumbled out onto the floor. Stepping over writhing axolotls, frogs and a furiously flapping arapaima, Cullen picked his way to the door. His unshod steel feet skidded and skipped on the slick terracotta tiles, causing agony to his stumps.
“I’m pushing too hard, I’m going to…” Hurt somebody. He couldn’t even say the words himself.
Turning to find Hilario gone, he also found the door to the freezer standing open. The damned tropical heat caused metal to flex, the damp caused it to rust, and nothing stayed the way he intended it.
Leaving Hilario careful instructions for Audrey’s care, Cullen packed a suitcase and drove the Packard down to San Benito.
It would seem that since he came to Guatemala, the government had changed hands, and thuggish guards with patent leather bedpans for hats stood on every corner. He checked into a room at the American Hotel, saw the barber for a shave and haircut, and then went to the lounge.
Fresh faces abounded, but the appraising eyes of even the working women did a disgusted double take when they took in the bandy, metallic stilts he stood on, instead of legs. As if, he was not merely less of a man, but some kind of monster… and they didn’t know the half of it.
He was damnably susceptible to rum, and he was already seeking punishment when the Americans joined him.
For a couple of middle managers at United Fruit Company, Buzz and Flash––former gridiron heroes, with their crew cuts, ruddy, rugged good looks and bluff nicknames––seemed quite engaged with local politics, about which Cullen couldn’t care less, but which provided a swell diversion from his own troubles. They were quite bullish on the new Presidente, calling him “our man” and assuring him that the armed squads patrolling the countryside were there to protect Americans like himself from the “armies of the poor.” The new jefe would be a lot less of an asshole than the last fellow was, they said, if he kept in mind that his predecessor was killed by his own security detail.
They were politely interested in the regenerative properties of Ambystoma petensis, perhaps with some real sincerity, because Buzz, the older, heavier man, was missing two fingers on his left hand from an accident he declined to discuss.
They lent a conciliatory ear to his woman troubles, even if their only recommendation was to drink more rum. At first, the recounting of his misadventures with Audrey and the axolotls seemed quite funny, but it turned suddenly tragic again, and they cried with him for as long as seemed proper.
They were wonderful friends, and he was sad to lose them when he blacked out, and sadder still when he woke up in a crowded jail cell without his legs.
Cullen strove mightily to plead his case to his jailers, but none of them seemed to speak English, or to care that he was the victim, and not the perpetrator of a crime. He tried to explain that he was an American citizen and to send for his passport and luggage at the American Hotel or to contact his friends at United Fruit, but they took a fiendish delight in incomprehension. His cellmates were apparently, former or potential guerillas in the armies of the poor that he had been warned about, and took every advantage afforded them by their superior numbers and limbs.
For three days, he lay in the darkest, filthiest corner of the cell as it grew hotter and more crowded. Every hour that he was not beaten by police and peasants was a lonely vigil in which he dwelt upon the grinding irony of his situation, and saw how he had earned this.
Audrey… How could he have been so blind? One hour would have been enough to make a change in him, but the hours and days limped by uncounted, while his remorse twisted and forked in the sweltering miasma until it became delirium.
It was at least three days before a doctor came to examine a man who had died by misadventure in the cell. By then, Cullen had fallen so ill with a fever that he couldn’t even speak his own name. Fortunately, the doctor was far more sympathetic to American interests than the rest of his countrymen. Threatening the jailers with reprisals from the capitol, he took Cullen out on a stretcher and secured him a private room at the local Catholic hospital.
How long he laid raving or what he said in his sickness, the nuns would not tell him, but they could not get him out of their care fast enough, once he recovered his senses.
Hilario had been sent for, but no one could be found at the house to bring him home. The concierge from the American hotel finally sent over his baggage, but no one had returned his prostheses. A taxi had a difficult time negotiating the washed-out roads into the Peten, where desecrated rebel bodies were laid out at every crossroads.
Cullen couldn’t help but wonder what had become of Audrey in his absence. All this time, I wanted only to make a name for myself. I could see she had feelings for me, but I just used them––used her! She trusted me and I made a freak of her! But I’ll make it right…
He could not hope to find her still at the house. Surely, she must have thrown off Hilario’s half-hearted nursing efforts and forced him to take her to the capitol. She must be back in Massachusetts by now, perhaps too upset by the ordeal to tell anyone what happened, too poisoned in her heart even to wonder what had become of him.
To return to an empty house now would give him the space to complete his painful growth, to slip out of the watery womb of his obsessions, and out onto the terrifying dry land of true adulthood. Then, he would return to America and show her how he had grown.
The cabbie planted him in his rickety hospital wheelchair and sprayed him with mud in his haste to get back to town before the sun set.
Cullen struggled to roll up the brick path that questing mangrove roots had buckled and bent, and calling for Hilario. The generator still growled down in the cellar, but no lights burned on the porch. With no one to help him up the stairs, he had
to slide out of the chair, crawl up the stairs, drag the wheelchair up the bowed limestone steps, and then crawl back into it like an overgrown infant. Thankful that no one had seen his indignity, he rolled through the open front door, fully intent on giving his servant a good stiff kick in the ass, as soon as he had strapped on his spare pair of legs.
Darkness greeted him at the door, but as his eyes adjusted, he saw that lights did indeed burn inside. The electric lamps along the walls of the cavernous great hall were lit, but their glass enclosures were coated with emerald veils of moss and mold, so their glow gave the room the green mottled gloom of a dirty aquarium. Water dripped and frogs croaked, and the fetid stench of mold and mildew spores plugged his nose.
Cullen’s hard rubber wheels squeaked through shallow puddles, but then bumped into something too large to roll over. His shadow obscured it, so he backed away, straining to adjust his eyes to the palpable gloom. Shock almost caused him to flip backwards out of the chair.
A body lay splayed out facedown upon the floor, but the extremity of its damage and decay made it impossible to say whether it was the front or the back of a man. Skin and muscle were torn away from bone in great ragged chunks; while the ribcage was wrenched wide open like a breadbox and its contents ripped out to make a burrow for a toad that puffed its throat in hope of attracting a mate.
Another body in a similar state of savage undress lay beside the first. Cullen studied it coldly, imposing his scientific eye as an antidote to panic. Both bodies were clothed in the tattered rags of men’s suits, and one of them was missing two fingers on its left hand.
It was difficult to sort out his reaction to the discovery. It touched him deeply that his fast friends from the American Hotel should’ve come here, perhaps looking for him, after having lost him on that ill-advised night of debauchery, but how could they have met such a horrible fate? Hilario was hardly capable of such violence. Perhaps the armies of the poor had swooped out of the jungle to slaughter them, and wild animals had then ravaged their corpses. There were wild pigs and even leopards and jaguars, about…
It was a terrible thing to come home to, but he would sort it out. At least, he could say for certain that Audrey must’ve gone away…
Could he?
From somewhere deep in the waterlogged mansion, a plate smashed, and something heavier than water struck the floor in a driving, insistent rhythm.
“Hilario?” His quavering voice barely seemed to cut through the chorus of croaking frogs. “Audrey?”
A much louder, wet, and sinusoidal sound came from directly behind him. Spinning in his wheelchair, Cullen saw something looming over him, blocking out the wan moon glow from the open doorway. He saw only the dim gleam of green light reflected in great, bulging black eyes, and a webbed paw with claws like scimitars, closing over his face to jerk him out of his chair.
***
He woke up in a strange, terrible place, steeped in amphibian musk. His laboratory.
His body ached all over, but his eyes were the worst of it. They contracted violently and streamed tears when flooded with hot white light.
He couldn’t move anything below his head, because he was strapped down so tightly that he could barely breathe on a wheeled gurney in the center of the room, surrounded by surgical tools. The light came from a slide projector. Turning his head fully, he saw several other projectors blazing still images and loops of documentation… but not of his experiments…
One of the films showed the deformed claw he had removed from Audrey, but something was wrong. Some kind of Hollywood stop-motion trickery must have been employed to make it seem to crawl out of frame each time a pointed stick pushed it back.
“Hilario?” he called out, but he didn’t expect his servant to answer. As he strained to see through the crossfire of projector beams, he noticed a lumpy black shape floating in the shallow, scummy water in the broken aquarium. Even though it was bloated, blackened with rot and picked apart by something with teeth like a piranha, he could not help but recognize the bristly white hair that stood out from the skull like a Fuller brush, where the scalp was not flayed to the bone.
A canvas tarpaulin covered the aquarium against the opposite wall.
Even wild animals were not capable of such extremity of violence. Someone had usurped his laboratory and perverted his experiments. Nobody in the United States knew where he had gone, or expected his return. Who could it be, but…
“Audrey? Darling, please…”
Behind him, the warped door to the darkroom swung open with a querulous, rusty squeal. He struggled to see who was walking with bare feet slapping the puddle tile floor, to stand behind him.
A gentle hand with slender, feminine fingers ran through his hair, making him shiver with relief. Then the fingers took hold of his bangs and slammed his head against the stainless steel.
“I was careful to take exhaustive records, Cullen. I knew you would want to have all that data, for posterity.”
She had gone mad! He had driven her over the edge. She could have no way of connecting with the awful acts she had committed, not his gentle Audrey. Careful, he prayed to himself, she’s lost her reason, but she can still be handled… she’s still just a woman… “Audrey, please. You don’t understand. There’s something dangerous out there…”
Audrey loomed over him, looking half corpse from her extended drugged captivity. “Oh, Cullen, darling… there’s something dangerous in here, too.”
He strained to get free, but even his hands were immobilized by leather and taut rubber surgical tubing. “Audrey, I’m sorry for the way I treated you… So sorry about your arm… Sorry, I hurt your… feelings…”
Something caressed his face, leaving a cool kiss of fetid slime. Twisting away from it, he bit back a scream as Audrey took hold of his jaw with her right hand, forcing him to look. “I wanted to tell you how you made me feel, but I thought it would be wasted on you. Emotions are so unscientific. That’s what you’d say, right, dear?”
He swallowed a sharp reply. He had said exactly that, more than once.
“No, you’d only tune me out if I tried to tell you… so I’d have to show you.”
Something wet and boneless pried his eyes open.
“You know, I always blamed myself when the trials went wrong before, but I’ve got to give credit where credit is due.” Out of the stump of her left wrist, buds of a new hand and fingers had already begun to sprout, though without the incubator, the bone structure was even more twisted than before.
“Oh, dear Audrey, I’m truly sorry… I’m a changed man. Listen…”
“Oh, don’t sweat it, sweetie. Your treatment worked better than you could’ve hoped for… I’m proud to have been your first human guinea pig. But I’m not the one who’s really angry…”
At the far corner of the lab, something stirred in the curtained aquarium, sending green water slopping over the rim.
“Audrey, what have you done?”
“I only let your experiment run its course, my dear. You set all this in motion.”
The automated slides on the walls showed the severed hand growing a new arm. Then a nodule of shapeless shiny flesh gradually separated into discrete compartments––a torso, then sapling limbs, and finally a head––a whole new body, with nary a passing resemblance to Audrey.
“You’ve heard of transplant tissue rejection,” she said, “but did you ever stop to think about how the rejected tissue feels?” Lurching away from the gurney, Audrey crept over to the aquarium, as if careful not to startle something, and ripped away the curtain.
“I said I was sorry. Why won’t you listen, darling, please. I admitted it was all a mistake…”
In the cloudy primordial soup, a black, sinuous form the size of a child rolled and thrashed, then threw out two froglike forelimbs with curving talons that gouged forking cracks in the filthy glass.
Wonder, disgust and a perverse strain of pride went to war in his throat. “What the hell is that?”
“Life wants to live, darling. When you injected me with the axolotl serum, you awoke in me that which I’d tried to bury… the will to resist you. When you cut it off, you gave it no choice, but to fight for itself…”
Springing out of the aquarium to squat on its rim, a misshapen gargoyle splayed out its claws and frilly gills and hissed. Its slimy green-black hide was marbled with great piebald splotches of unpigmented flesh that looked uncomfortably like the skin of a newborn human baby. Its body was that of an oversized axolotl, with a wide, blunt batrachian head festooned with flapping gill-fronds and a gaping mouth lined with tiny needle-teeth. Its stunted, yet thickly muscled hind legs, protruded outward from its tapered pelvis, like those of the proto-mammalians that preceded the dinosaurs. Longer than the creature was tall, its broad, fin-bladed tail chopped the water and arched up into the steamy air behind it, balancing as it prepared to leap.
“Take a good look, Cullen,” Audrey whispered in his ear. “Tell her she was a mistake.”
Cullen could only close his eyes and scream as the hybrid horror sprang from its perch and pounced on the gurney, sending it spinning into the autoclave and nitrous oxide tanks. Roaring mutely into his face, the thing clasped his throat in its teeth, but froze, leaving him almost begging it to finish him off.
Instead, it crushed itself against him. Its sinuous bulk pressed its gelid chill through his shirt and pants, its powerful tail thrusting between his truncated legs. Wriggling in awful imitation of human copulation, it rasped wordless primeval lust in his ear and, worst of all; he felt his own shameful arousal rising up to meet it.
He begged for it to stop. She moved a camera closer and set it rolling to capture his contorted face. “Make careful observations, Cullen. Suddenly, your emotions are quite important to you, yes? And what does it feel like? Feelings are biology, you see…”
Finally, having utterly humiliated him, the creature lifted itself up and ceased its gyrations. With his eyes still screwed shut, he counted his heartbeats and tried to discern what it was the monster appeared to be fumbling for on a nearby tray of instruments. He pleaded, “Audrey, darling, call it off! This thing, it’s an abomination! It’s not your daughter––“
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