by Curtis, Greg
“I'm not a monster and neither are you. I know it's hard to understand but this is all exactly as it should be. You're just scared and that's only because you don't understand. But when it's done, when the change is complete you will. You'll be pleased and the world will be a better place.”
“Pleased?!”
Will was stunned by the idea. As if anyone could want this! And yet he knew the doctor meant it. He really thought this was a good thing. How could anyone think this was good? But a lot of his anger went away as he realised the doctor was mad. Completely, barking mad. There was no point in being angry at a mad man. They didn't understand. And in the end he knew as his logic started returning to him, he had to know what he'd done. Where it would end up. It took a few seconds to calm down enough to ask him though. More than a few seconds as he stood there concentrating on not hitting him.
“What did you do to me?”
Will forced each word out, trying not to scream them at the mad man. Trying not to just give in and scream full stop. The fear, frustration and anger were making it hard to keep control.
“That's the wrong question.” The doctor started smiling and reached out with a hand wanting to touch him again. Will knocked his hand away once more.
“It's not what I did to you. It's what I've made you into. A miracle given form.” He was smiling again. The look on his face was one of complete rapture.
“You'll understand when it's complete. The whole world will understand. And in time others will join you. Perhaps the entire world. You've just got to have faith.”
“Others?”
Will was appalled by the idea. As if he could really be considering doing this to anyone else. He shouldn't have done it to him in the first place. “No others! I'll have you locked up long before that happens. No one should have to go through this. No one should have to suffer this nightmare!”
“No, you don't understand!”
The doctor seemed upset, which didn't strike Will as a sane thing. Especially when it was Will who was experiencing the problems. What did the doctor have to be upset about? Except perhaps the loss of his medical license, and a jail term if he wasn't either willing or able to fix whatever he'd done to him. A very long jail term since apparently he wasn't. “It's not a nightmare – it's a blessing. You have to understand that.”
“I understand that I'm a freak! That my body and mind are both falling apart. That people point and stare. That I can never go home to my family. That I'm in pain and can't sit down. That my life is over. And I understand one more thing. That it's all your fault. You did this to me deliberately.”
“None of those things are true. And even the last is a lie because I wasn't “doing” anything to you. I was trying to help you.”
But finally some of that confidence was starting to slip. Doubt was creeping in. Will could see it in the doctor's eyes. He was finally starting to question what he'd done. Though of course it was too late for him.
“They're all true.” Will took a deep breath. “You've hurt me, maimed and disfigured me, crippled me. Why did you do this to me?”
“Hurt? You're not hurt.” But even as he said it the doctor was starting to look worried. “You can't be hurt. This is a miracle, and miracles can't be bad.”
“This is no miracle. It's a damned curse!” Will told him the obvious truth. Though he was beginning to realise that the doctor couldn't really afford to hear it. This whole mess had something to do with his faith. He was a religious nutter.
“It is. It has to be. I mean I used the paint brush and it is a miracle.”
And just like that more pieces started falling into place. The paint brush. Will knew he had to be talking about the one that had been stolen from the church. Though how exactly it connected he wasn't sure.
“Doctor I don't care about a damned paint brush! Not even a religious one. I just want whatever you did to me to be fixed!” Though he was certain it couldn't be. He was just letting himself get angry because he didn't want to face the truth. That he was doomed.
“I told you, this can't be undone. I asked you if you were sure. Ten times. You signed forms.” The beatific smile was gone and suddenly the doctor was being defensive. As if he thought he was in danger of being sued.
“Yes and you also said the genes came from some guy who was resistant to diseases. That six others had had the same genes given to them. You lied to me! You gave me something else! Something bad.” And that was the part that scared him the most. That he didn't know what he'd been given.
“No, I said that six others had been through the same procedure. I didn't say that they had got the same genetic spliced virus that you did. And the donor is as far as I know resistant to disease. I didn't lie.” But he was playing fast and loose with the truth Will realised. Splitting hairs to keep himself out of jail. Will didn't care if he went to jail.
“Stop lying you snake! You deceived me and it was deliberate. Now what the hell did you put in me?” Will was becoming angrier by the minute as the doctor evaded the truth, even though he knew he had to keep calm.
“I told you. It was the brush!”
Will stared at him, wondering for the first time if the doctor was completely crazy. If there was any reason in his path at all. He'd put a brush in him? That made no sense. And anyway the brush had been stolen. He stood there staring angrily at the doctor, waiting for him to explain and wondering if he should just hit him with something until he did. Eventually though the doctor seemed to find some words – before he had to.
“There was a legend about the brush. A tale that no one really believed. But one that I knew was true. That the brush was brought to the artists by an angel so that they could paint the frescoes on the walls of the Mileseva Monastery.”
“I know that! But what does any of it have to do with me?” It was hard not to shout and scream at him in frustration as the doctor kept going back to the tale of the brush. Was he just being evasive? Or did the brush somehow have something to do with him?
“It was brought by the archangel Raphael. But when he brought it, it wasn't a brush. You see God had told him to bring the artists inspiration, and inspiration does not come from bits of wood and horse hair. It comes from the soul.”
“Raphael himself was the inspiration. And so he brought the artist himself. And then he commanded the artist to take the hair from his head and fashion it into a brush so that he might inspire him in his work.”
“An angel hair brush! Great!” Will shook his head wondering if the doctor had any grip on sanity left to him. It was all madness. “But what does any of that have to do with me?”
And then it hit him. Like an ice bomb exploding in his brain he understood. And it was worse than anything he could have imagined. More terrible and more frightening. There was DNA in hair!
“Oh crap! You stole the brush. The angel hair brush. And then you extracted the genes from it, and put them in me. You put something in me that might not even be human!” Might not be human? Even as he said it Will knew he was understating things. It wasn't human.
“Calm down!”
The doctor spoke to him in what he probably thought was a soothing voice, and it was exactly the wrong thing to do. It set Will's teeth on edge. He'd done this to him and now the doctor wanted him to be calm? Will was staggered by that. By his complete lack of empathy for what he'd done. As if the doctor had any right to tell him to calm down when he had turned him into some sort of monster. It was like a killer telling his victim to relax. And now that he knew there was no calm.
“Calm down? You monster! You bungling quack! Frankenstein! Don't you dare tell me to calm down! How could you do something like that to me?! To anyone?! What the hell sort of nut case are you?!”
Will screamed at him like a mad man, losing complete control as he never had before. Really, he just wanted to pick the doctor up and rip him to pieces. It was hard to restrain himself. But he had to. He knew that. He had to find out what else was going to happen to him. The loss of his bo
dy hair, the sun tan and the golden eyes. He could deal with those. He could live with the stiff back, weight loss and the change in his diet. Maybe he could even take having two hearts and the loss of his mind. He didn't know. But what other changes were coming? Wings? Halo? Harp playing?
“It'll be all right.”
The doctor was still trying to soothe him Will realised, and it really angered him. Did the man have no understanding of what he'd done? Not a single clue? Finally Will gave into his anger and simply screamed his rage at him. A wordless sound that expressed everything he was feeling perfectly. And a sound that at least seemed to get through to the doctor. It made him take a step back. The doctor even looked slightly worried. And while the doctor still might not have understood why Will was so angry, at least it stopped him trying to placate him with his stupid words. It shut him up.
Eventually Will managed to reclaim his self-control, though it took a while. A very long while. But then he'd never been so angry before. Not in his entire life. Eventually though he calmed enough to ask him his most terrible questions. The things he knew that he most desperately needed answered. His darkest fears of what was coming. His questions sounded like an accusation. But then they were an accusation.
“You don't know what's going to happen to me. You've never seen an angel. You don't know how they look or act or think. And you can't undo it. If you don't know what you did you can't fix it. You just decided to play mad scientist on my arse. So don't tell me to calm down! Just tell me how bad it is. How much worse it's going to get. And if you have any idea what's coming before the end. Am I going to grow bloody wings? How many damned genes did you throw in me?” And was that what the skin on his back was? The start of wings?
“All of them.” Doctor Millen looked straight at him and smiled as he said it, as if he was actually proud of what he'd done. Which, Will suddenly realised, he was. His confidence had returned. He actually thought this was a good thing. Somewhere in his twisted little mind he thought he was doing God's work. The man was mad. How on Earth had anyone ever given him a medical license? But this wasn't the time to scream at him. It might be the time to cry instead.
“All of them?!”
“The hair bulbs were in surprisingly good condition. I managed to extract whole chromosomes and sequence them. To find everything that didn't match normal human DNA. And then to plant those sequences into virus carriers. A hundred and ten different viruses. And you got all of them. At a guess at least ninety percent of your genome is being rewritten.”
“Ninety percent!”
Will's legs suddenly went weak and he felt the need to sit down on the bench before he fell down. But of course he couldn't sit and instead just collapsed sideways on to it and buried his face in his hands. There were some things that were actually worse than what he could ever have imagined. Soon he wasn't going to be human. Not even close. Ninety percent wasn't a gene or two. It was tens of thousands.
But at least he now knew why he was changing. Why he couldn't stand the smell of meat any more. Why he was finding some things easier to understand and others harder. Why he was having trouble with his memory. His mind as well as his body was being slowly rewritten. Rewritten into something completely alien. Something a man had never been meant to be.
“How could you?”
Will barely even whispered the words. He didn't seem to have the strength. But in the end the “why” didn't matter. It was too late for “why”. He'd done it. That was all that did matter. The doctor had done it and Will was screwed. Utterly screwed.
“I had to know.”
And there it was Will realised. The reason. The essence of the doctor. Curiosity. He'd wanted to know if there really were such things as angels. What they were like. And so he'd set about finding out in the only way he could. By recreating one of them. At any price.
“You sacrificed my life for your own curiosity.”
He should have been angry and bitter. And deep down he was. But the shock and despair were overwhelming him just then and what was left was little more than a shell of a man. Fairly much what he would be in time. “Go away.”
“Sacrif -? … You're not going to die.” Doctor Millen sounded upset. Defensive. But it was a bit late for him to start trying to pretend that he was innocent.
“Liar! You don't know that. You don't know anything. You have no idea. You never had any idea what would happen. You just guessed and played God. Rolled the dice for your own amusement and wagered me.”
“That's not fair! Who wouldn't want to become an angel? To know the wonder?”
“Me you imbecile!” Will screamed it at him, unable to hold it back. “Or had you missed that? I don't want this. Not any of it. No one would want it. And thanks to you I'm doomed to suffer it anyway. Who the hell do you think gave you the right?”
“But -.”
“Don't!” He held up his hand. “No more lies. I hope you're happy because live or die I won't be me. Even if I survive this nightmare what comes out the other end won't be me. I won't be William Simons. I won't be able to go home to my family. Continue my life. Finish my degrees. Marry and have a family. I'll slowly become something else. And I don't want to be something else.”
“I had a life!” Will shouted it at the doctor, the anger bursting loose once more, and it made the doctor flinch. It even wiped that infuriating expression off his face. Finally he'd said something to destroy the doctor's smile. But it wasn't a victory of any sort. Will knew now that there was no victory for him.
“But -.”
“Save it. There's no point. There's nothing you can do. Just go away. And please don't do this to anyone else. No one should have to go through this.” He had to say it. He couldn't let anyone else go through the same thing.
“I can't. The DNA wouldn't multiply properly. Not outside of a living body. I used nearly everything on you. And all that was left was in the clinic.”
“Good. At least no one else has to suffer and die for your amusement. Go away.” Will raised his voice a little at the end and gestured at the path hoping the doctor would get the message. But he didn't. He just sat there looking horrified. As though he'd been unjustly accused of something.
“That's not -.” He was going to protest. To claim it wasn't fair. But Will was in no mood for his self-serving lies.
“Fair? You really think I'm being unfair? You've deliberately destroyed my life and you think I'm being unfair?”
“You want the truth do? You want to know what you've done to me? Then listen. The physical is bad. My spine has fused, my guts are in a permanent uproar. I have two hearts. I have crippling stomach cramps. Every part of me aches. But the pain is nothing compared to the shame. I can't go anywhere without people pointing and staring. I can't tell my own family what's happened.”
“And then there's the loss of my future. I had hopes and dreams. Marriage, career, happiness. All gone now. You've stolen that from me. All of it.”
“Then there's what's happening to my mind. And my mind as well as my body is slowly being shredded Doc. My brain is being rewired into something that doesn't work like a human brain. Thanks to you.”
“I find it hard to remember things. To understand them. Things I once knew so well that they were second nature are gone. It's hard to think in certain ways. Hard to concentrate. I find myself seeing and hearing things I don't understand. Things that aren't even there. And I don’t always understand what's right in front of me. I often don't know what's real and what's not. It's called schizophrenia. I can't read or write any more. Literally I don't know how. I'm a masters student and I can't even read!”
“I'm going to end up a bloody vegetable because of you!”
“My sex drive is completely gone, and I will never have a family. Never know love again. I am not even a man any more. My tastes are changing. Things I like and things I don't aren't what they were. I’m no longer human. I'm ruined. Make no mistake I'd rather be dead than continue like this. The only reason I haven't taken that opt
ion is that I can't do that to my family.”
“You've murdered me. The very least you could do is to go away and let me die in peace.”
The doctor stood there for what seemed like ages. His eyes were wide and staring, his mouth opened and closed for the longest time without his actually saying anything. But Will had had enough of him. Now that he had his answers he had to turn his thoughts to what mattered. And mostly that meant preparing for whatever was coming. Helping his family to grieve. Because one way or another they were losing him. Just as he was losing himself.
“Get out!” Will yelled at the doctor when he still seemed unwilling or unable to move, and at least it made him blink a little in shock.