Guinea Pig

by Curtis, Greg

  Resignation had given way to bitterness Elijah thought. But William had every reason to be bitter.

  “Then?”

  “I don't actually care. As long as he can't do this to anyone else and stays the hell away from me, I just don't care.”

  “Besides, it's not as if I'm without blame in this. I trusted someone I shouldn't have. I let him do these things to me without considering it properly. All because of ten thousand dollars. I was blinded by greed. I don't know why the doctor did what he did. He's mad obviously. But I do know why I did what I did. I'm no innocent.”

  “That seems harsh.”

  It seemed more than harsh actually Elijah thought. The victim was blaming himself for the actions of his attacker. His righteous anger had turned inwards.

  “But fair. And I can live with it. At least until the end.”

  Once more he smiled sadly at him and Elijah wondered how he was able to. Maybe when he'd lost the ability to read and write he'd lost some other parts of his mind as well? The parts that allowed him to react as a normal human being.

  “Are you in any pain? Because the church can probably arrange for a doctor to see you. A proper doctor.” To ease his pain not cure him of course, but they both understood that.

  “Some, but I can handle it Pastor. And not to be rude but I've had enough doctors for the moment.”

  Elijah nodded, understanding that at least. Not a lot else made sense but that did.

  “But there is one thing you can do for me Pastor. You and the church. The one thing that the doctor can't. You can give me some idea of what's coming.”

  “How? I mean we will of course, if we can. But how?” Elijah was mystified by that. He had no idea what was coming. He was still trying to come to terms with what he was seeing.

  “The doctor can't tell me because he's never seen an angel. All he's seen are some chromosomes under a microscope. But the church has surely got records of hundreds or thousands of encounters. You can give me some idea of what to expect. What changes there could be. I mean, will these things on my back really become wings? Is this gold skin a halo or is that something else? Is my spine going to become even stiffer and sorer? How much more of my mind is going to go? And what about this damned diet?”

  They were all practical, sensible questions. The things anyone in his position would have wanted to know. And unfortunately Elijah knew he couldn't give him the answers he wanted. He'd come to help, but really what help he could give was limited.

  “I can ask, but the truth is we don't know a lot either. Not those sorts of details. We can tell you about the encounters, why they came and what they said. But the nuts and bolts – not so much. A lot of my brethren believe that angels don't have physical forms at all.” And that was something he realised was going to change. The fact that you could get DNA from an angel meant that they actually did have physical bodies didn't it?

  “Damn! I was hoping. It would just make it a little easier to have some idea of what's coming.”

  “We'll do what we can.”

  It was after all the least they could do. Especially when it was their artefact that had been used to cause him this pain. Elijah took a sip of his coffee as he tried to think of what they actually could tell him. He feared it would be little. And there was another problem. Even if he had known what an angel would look like there was no guarantee that William would end up looking like one. After what had been done to him he could look like anything. Reluctantly, after another sip on his coffee he told him that. Honesty was all he had.

  “So you don't actually know what an angel looks like and you don't know that I'm going to end up looking like one.”

  He didn't sound angry or even surprised Elijah thought. He sounded more tired than anything else. Elijah wondered if that was an emotional reaction to what he'd discovered only a few short hours before, or because of the transformation. William had said the changes were affecting his mind. Maybe they were doing more than just damaging his ability to read and write? Maybe even his ability to feel was being taken from him?

  “No. I'm sorry. You are actually as close to an angel as anything I've ever seen.”

  “Believe me I'm not. I'm just as normal as anyone else. Or I was.” William laughed bitterly. “I'm no angel.”

  In that moment Elijah understood something more of his pain. He understood his fear. He was a man and he’d been happy as such. Happy with his imperfections. But angels weren't men and they had to be perfect. He couldn't be that way. He didn't want to be that way. And he was frightened that the process was going to try and make him like that. Harp playing, messengers of God with no true existence of their own. And maybe Elijah thought, he could help with that at least.

  “There are two parts to an angel, just as there are two parts to everyone. Body and soul. What Reginald has done is only of the body. It may affect your brain, but not your soul. Even if he got everything perfectly right and you transformed completely, you would still not be an angel. That requires something more.”

  “So he could turn a cat into a dog, but it'd still want to chase mice?”

  “More or less.”

  William's pithy summary fairly much agreed with his assessment of the situation Elijah thought. But there was no reason to think that things would turn out even that well. There was no reason to assume that the doctor had got everything right. In fact, from the pain and the loss of William's ability to read and write it seemed almost certain that Reginald had got it wrong – horribly wrong. But he didn't say that. The young man could probably work it out for himself. He probably already had. How he was keeping himself from screaming out in fear was what Elijah didn't understand. It spoke to some inner strength. Maybe even to faith as much as he denied it.

  “Then is there anything else I or the church can do for you?”

  “Actually yes Pastor. One thing. It hasn't come to it yet. I'm still alive and can still talk. But at some stage I don't think I'll be able to. And I'm going to have to put my affairs in order. Mostly that means writing some letters to my family. I don't want them to see me. Not like this. I sent them an email a few days ago, saying that I was moving because my flat was destroyed and that I'd be out of contact for a while. And I bought a digital recorder and some batteries. But I can't seem to figure out what to tell them exactly. Perhaps in a few days you could help me with that.”

  “Of course.”

  That would have been a good place to leave things, and Elijah truly wanted to. But as he sat there sipping at the last of his coffee he knew there was one more thing he had to do. Not for William but rather for the church. In the end despite everything that had gone wrong, the doctor had still managed to extract the DNA of an angel. Something no one would have ever thought possible. And that was a big thing. It was proof, of a sort, that there were angels. And for years if not centuries the church had been losing believers to doubt. Fighting an every worsening battle with sceptics. Those who believed in nothing and wanted no one else to either. They could use that proof.

  It was difficult broaching the subject. More than difficult, it was almost impossible. To ask a victim of a terrible crime to willingly expose himself and his deformities to a camera and potentially the world. It was almost as though he was harming him all over again. But it had to be done. And somehow he managed to choke the shameful words out.

  “Actually I don't mind.” William agreed in a heartbeat. Far more easily than Elijah would have expected. Most people tended to hide away their disfigurements out of shame. But he wasn't ashamed. And he had no reason for shame. This was not of his doing.

  “The only thing I ask is that the pictures not be made public. I have a family and I don't ever want them to see what's happened to me. They shouldn't have to see that.”

  “Agreed.”

  It was a small request and the right thing to do, so Elijah had no problem agreeing. The church's leaders might have a different view, but in the end they had to abide by the wishes of their parishioner. But Elijah discover
ed a more immediate problem when he saw William dropping his jacket and lifting his T shirt. He had a very large problem. He had to try and understand what he was seeing.

  He'd guessed, he'd suspected, and he'd even been told but he still hadn't understood. And how could he understand? What he was seeing just wasn't right. The clothes had concealed so much.

  It wasn't just the glow that shocked him, though that did take him aback. When it had just been his face he could see buried under the hood of his jacket, it had seemed minor. A small discolouration. But with the jacket gone and him standing out in the sun he knew it was no small thing. William was glowing gold, almost as though he was lit from within. That took some getting used to. But in the scheme of things it was probably the least of his differences.

  He wasn't asymmetrical at least. But he was misshapen. A man caught between two forms, stuck in the middle and not really either. Neither fish nor fowl as they said. You could see the human in the body. The layout, the basic shape. But it wasn't right. His waist was far too narrow, his chest far too large, and with something growing out the front of it. Something bony that ran down his sternum. And everywhere the man was a contrast between a superman and an anorexic. His limbs were far too long and thin, but the muscles that bulged everywhere were far too large. His shoulders looked wrong. Bony beyond belief as the skin was stretched taut over them. But there were also huge slabs of muscle in front of them, resting on his chest and arms.

  Elijah took the photo on his phone but a part of him didn't want to. Especially when William turned around so he could see his back. There it was more of the same. He could count every rib in his back. But he could also see muscles in his side and back that he was sure weren't part of the normal human anatomy.

  But it was the wings that stole his thoughts. And they were wings, the stumps of them at least. But not like any wings he'd ever seen. William had two massive growths running all the way down his back, coming to a point somewhere around his tail bone at a guess and extending upward in a wide V to end at his shoulders. And the flesh wasn't just thick where it joined with his back, it had bones in it. Big bones.

  On both sides of the wings he could see muscles. Bands of muscles that he knew were flight muscles. Those inside the V he guessed were for lifting his wings up after he'd flapped them. The others were for flapping, and unlike the rest they weren't all lined up. Some ran down from the bottom part of his wings to connect up somewhere in the front of his pelvis. The middle ones ran around his rib cage, he guessed to connect with the new bony growth following the downward line of his sternum. And the top ones ran right over the top of his shoulders.

  “So what do you think?” William sounded almost chirpy as he spoke. “Do they look like wings and flight muscles to you?”

  Elijah nodded as he clicked the button, not quite trusting himself to speak.

  “I think so though it's hard to see what's back there. But I'm guessing that in a few more days at this rate I'll be able to flap them. I don't know what that'll feel like but I am curious.”

  “And maybe, before the end, I'll be able to fly. It'll be something to look forward to. I've been dreaming of flying a lot lately.”

  “Dreaming?” Elijah asked, his mind almost running on automatic.

  “Strange dreams. Of flying, soaring like a bird. Dreams so real that I can almost seem to touch them. And I now have them even while I'm awake. Every time I let myself get a little bit distracted. It's very confusing.”

  It was probably more evidence that his mind was slipping Elijah realised. If this was what was being done to his body, the changes to his brain had to be just as terrible. Reginald had told him that William had lost the ability to read and write. That must have scared him. Now he was reporting daydreams. Hallucinations in all likelihood. There had to be serious brain damage, and it would only get worse. But he knew better than to mention it. William probably already knew. And if he didn't why frighten him with more problems he could do nothing about?

  “It may be instincts awakening. Like learning to walk all over again.”

  “Maybe. I suspected as much when the doctor told me what he'd done. But I had them from the first night after the procedure, long before these things started to appear.”

  Elijah couldn't answer him. He simply didn't have any idea of what was happening inside William’s body or his mind. But as he put the camera away in his pocket he wondered if perhaps some others in the church might. After all, they had some very advanced scientists among their congregation. And maybe the dreams weren't so much an angel thing as it was a bird thing? How did birds learn to fly after all? Maybe they had dreams too.

  And maybe, Elijah thought after the meeting was over and as he slowly headed back to his church on foot, that was something they could help him with. All the religious experts in the world might not be able to tell him anything certain about angels. The doctors might not be able to give him any hope of surviving this thing. But a single biologist might be able to tell him about birds and dreams of learning to fly.

  Chapter Eighteen.

  The little rectory to the side of the church was full, and Elijah was beginning to wonder if they would be better to hold the meeting outside. Normally he was the only one who lived there – it was a small church and one priest was enough to look after it – so the living quarters were similarly sized. But even so it would have been more spacious if they weren't all gathered around the dining room table, crammed shoulder to shoulder. If they could have at least gone into the living room.

  At least Reginald wasn't there. He was in the church praying. Something he did morning, noon and night. Even though Elijah had offered him the spare room, many nights he fell asleep in the church. His guilt and shame owned him now, and he was desperate to atone in some way. But he couldn't. And when he'd been told what William had said, that he had no desire to press charges, his guilt had only grown worse. In all his years Elijah had never seen a man more broken by his crimes. Which made it all the harder to understand how he could have done what he had.

  The doctor didn't talk about that though. His conversation these days was very limited, and it always came back to the same thing. Guilt.

  For a while Elijah had toyed with the idea of showing him the photos in the hope that he might have a better understanding of what was happening inside William's body. But he also worried that the sight might destroy him. And he was almost certain that Reginald could do nothing to stop the transformation anyway. He had no doubt that if the doctor could have he would have done it instantly.

  It was the people around the table with him that he'd in the end asked for help from. And looking at them he had the uncomfortable thought that there was no help they could give. That instead they were the ones who needed help.

  Pastor Franks stared at the others wondering if any of them had any idea of what to do. Because he didn't. And that frightened him. Though he had asked only for the information Mr. Simons had requested as well as something about how birds learned to fly, he had hoped they might be able to offer something more. Some counsel, maybe even some hope. They had a responsibility. To the man and to God. But responsibility was one thing; being able to live up to it was another. The pastor very much feared by the looks of the faces on the people at the table that they wouldn't be able to. That they would fail William Simons just when he needed them most. But then he had the horrible feeling that they had been failing for some time.

  When the doctor had told him what he'd done the pastor had been by turns angry, hurt, shocked and betrayed. That someone could come to the church and steal from them in such a way was terrible. And that that person could then go out and intentionally toy with another's life as though he was a rat in a research trial was worse. But the thing that hurt the most was that Reginald had always seemed to him to be a good man. Devout in his belief. He had trusted him. The betrayal cut deep. It made him doubt how well he knew his congregation.

  Yet at the same time he had to wonder; could he have done more for t
he doctor? Could he have watched him more closely? Seen where his dark desires were leading him and stopped him? Elijah didn't know the answer. But he feared it.

  And then when he had visited William and seen first-hand the damage the doctor had done to him his shame had become worse. To be responsible in any way no matter how slight for that was a terrible thing. So even if the doctor could do nothing for him – and Reginald had sworn repeatedly that he couldn't as he hid in the church and prayed ceaselessly – Elijah had determined that he would. Or at least he would try.

  Because of that he had brought William Simons' request to his brothers and asked for their help. Not just with the knowledge he sought, but with the biological side of things. Mr. Simons might have given up, but that didn't mean that he had to.

  It was for that reason too that he'd taken the photos and brought them before the others. So that they could see for themselves the terrible damage that had been done to him. It wasn't only about proof. In fact he wondered if using them as proof of anything was even right. Long ago Kierkegaard had said that it was necessary that belief was an act of faith. That it must always be a leap beyond what could be known, reasoned or proven. And in a way the photos seemed to run directly against his argument. They made belief too easy. That could be more dangerous to the faith than scepticism.