The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine

by Jason Sizemore

  “A what?” I wondered what Mrs. Pertwee meant by a lady, exactly. Perhaps one of the female parishioners who lived in the village that surrounded the stone church, with its post office, pub, and collection of six or seven houses, coming to solicit for some missionary society to help our savage brethren.

  “A lady, Mr. Prendick. She—” Mrs. Pertwee hesitated. “She calls herself Mrs. Prendick.”

  I tripped over the chair. The next day, Mrs. Pertwee had to wash the spot where my fountain pen had sputtered on the carpet with strong soap.

  She was waiting for me in the parlor, a sanctuary that Mrs. Pertwee only entered to do whatever housekeepers customarily do to horsehair sofas and china ornaments. I had not used the room since renting the cottage, and had seen no need to alter it.

  She was heavily veiled.

  “Edward,” she said. “How nice to see you again.”

  We are divided beings. One half of me had known that it could not logically be she. The other half had known that no one else in the wide world could claim to be my wife. That other half had been right. I could not mistake her voice, almost too deep for a woman, with a resonance to it, as though she were speaking from the depth of her throat. Like a viol.

  “You look better than when I last saw you, on the island.”

  “Catherine.”

  “So I have a name now. Did you forget it when you wrote this?” She held up a copy of my book. The book I should never have written, that my alienist had urged me to write. “Did you forget that we all had names? What a terrible liar you are, Edward.”

  “Let me see your face,” I said. The veil was disconcerting. I needed to know, for certain, that she really was speaking to me, that this was not some sort of hallucination.

  She laughed, like an ordinary woman, and lifted her veil.

  When I had last seen her, her face had been seamed with scars, the remnants of Moreau’s work. Now, her face was perfectly smooth. The high cheekbones were still there, the nose aquiline, the best I think that Moreau ever created. The eyes yellow and brown together, like Baltic amber. The tops of her ears were hidden by her hair. Were they still pointed? She noticed me looking, laughed again, and pulled her hair back. They looked completely human. I am a scientist, and no judge of female beauty. But she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

  “How did you...”

  “Walk with me, Edward.” She indicated the French doors, which opened onto the garden. Her gestures were unnaturally graceful. “Let’s reminisce, like old friends. Eventually, I’ll have a favor to ask of you. But first, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing with myself for the last few years. Since, that is, you left me to die on the island.”

  “I didn’t leave you to die.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  I followed her into the garden. It was an ordinary autumn day, the sky grey above us, with clouds blowing across it, and a herd of sheep like clouds in the valley below. I could see a dog driving them, first from one side of the herd and then the other. Somewhere, there was a man, and it was at his whistle that the dog ran to and fro. What dogs had done, and men had done, and sheep had done, for a hundred years. A quintessentially English scene.

  “To what fate, exactly, did you intend to leave me?”

  Her voice took me back to another scene, an entirely different scene. The southern sunlight on Moreau, lying in the mud, flies crawling over his shirt where the linen was stained red.

  “The Puma,” said Montgomery. “We have to find her.”

  “How did she do this?” I felt sick, mostly I think with shock. I had never, somehow, imagined that Moreau could die. Certainly not like this.

  He pointed to Moreau’s head. “She struck him. Look, the back of his skull is smashed in. Probably with her own fetters. She must have torn them out of the wall. Damn.”

  As a word, it seemed completely inadequate.

  We followed her trail easily enough. She was heading, not toward the village of the Beast Men, but toward the sea. I wondered for a moment if she might try to drown herself, as I had tried to drown myself, my first few days on the island. But Beast Men did not do such things. They killed others, not themselves. It took a man to do that.

  “There she is.” Montgomery gestured with his gun.

  She stood, up to her hips in the water. She looked at us, then shook herself, flinging spray from her wet hair. She walked toward us. So might Aphrodite have walked when she rose from the sea. But this was an Aphrodite with skin like gold rather than ivory, and the eyes of a beast. Everywhere, her body was covered with fresh scars.

  “My God,” said Montgomery. “So that’s what he’s been hiding from me.”

  “Hiding?”

  “For a month, he wouldn’t let me into the laboratory. He said the process was working at last. And look at her. She’s his masterpiece. Poor bastard.”

  “I killed the one with the whip,” she said. Her voice reverberated, like waves in a cavern beneath the sea. “Will you kill me for what I have done?”

  “We will not kill you,” said Montgomery. “It was not right to kill him, but we will not punish you for it.”

  “Have you gone mad?” I whispered to Montgomery. I aimed, but Montgomery caught hold of my arm.

  “Can’t you see what he did to her?” he whispered. “The man was a brute.”

  “It was right to kill him, and it gave me pleasure,” she said. She walked out of the sea, like a statue of burnished gold.

  With that unprepossessing statement began our time with the Puma Woman.

  Her scars faded, but they remained visible all over her face and body. She looked like a south sea islander, marked with cicatrices.

  Montgomery took her to live with us, in the enclosure. He gave her his bedroom and slept in mine. We cleaned out the laboratory, releasing whatever still had its own form, killing the results of Moreau’s experiments. We had food, guns, and M’Ling, Montgomery’s favorite Beast Man, to guard us at night. We planned to wait until the next supply ship came, and then—what? I assumed that we would leave the island, leave Moreau’s abominations to their own fate. But what about her? Montgomery seemed to have become particularly attached to her. She walked around the enclosure in one of his shirts, tucked into a pair of his trousers tied at the waist with rope. She looked like a gypsy boy.

  She walked so quietly that I never knew, until she spoke, that she was beside me. When I launched one of the boats to go fishing, she would suddenly appear, help me push off, and leap into the boat. Montgomery would stare at us from the shore, with one hand on his gun belt. I didn’t want her with me, but what was I supposed to do, push her into the water? She would sit, silent, and stare at me with her golden brown eyes—a woman, and not a woman. No woman could have sat so still.

  It was Montgomery who named her Catherine. “Catherine, get it?” he said. “Cat-in-here. There’s a cat in here!” He had been drinking. He watched her cross the enclosure, so lightly, so silently, that she seemed to walk on her toes. I did not like the way he looked at her. Perhaps he had initially been disgusted by the Beast Men, as I had been when I landed on the island, but he had long ago grown accustomed to them. They seemed to him human, and natural. I suspect that if you had set him down in the middle of London, he would have exclaimed at the deformity of the men and women who passed. She was Moreau’s finest creation. Montgomery had always had his favorites among the Beast Men: M’Ling, Septimus, Adolphus. What did he think of her?

  It was he who taught her to shoot, to read the books in Moreau’s collection. As she learned, he answered all of her questions, first about the island, then about the world from which we had been isolated, and finally about Moreau’s research. If we had been rescued then, I think he would have taken her with him. I imagined her scarred face, her long brown limbs, in an English drawing room. But it seemed to me, sometimes, that she had a preference for my company. And sometimes at night I would imagine her as I had first seen her, rising from the sea like Aphrodite, fresh from her kill
.

  Once, sitting in the boat, she said to me, “Prendick, how large is your country?”

  “Much larger than this island, but smaller than some countries.”

  “Like India?”

  “Yes, like India. Damn Montgomery. What has he been telling you?”

  “That your English queen is the Empress of India. How could a country as small as yours conquer a country as large as India?”

  “We had guns.”

  “Ah, yes, guns.” She looked at her own complacently. “So, like on this island, it was a matter of guns and whips.”

  “No!” I tossed a fish with bright orange scales into the basket. “It was a matter of civilization.”

  “I see,” she said. “You taught them to walk upright and wear clothes and worship the English queen. I would like to see this English queen of yours. She must have a long whip.”

  What were the Beast Men doing all this time? With the control that Moreau had exercised over them gone, they reverted to their natural behaviors. The predators formed a pack, with Nero, the Hyena-Swine, at its head. They moved to the other side of the island. The others stayed in the village, with Gladstone, the Sayer of the Law, to organize what vestiges of government they retained and Adolphus, the Dog Man, to organize their defense. Septimus, the jabbering Ape Man who had been the first Beast Man I had met in my initial flight from Moreau, attempted to create a new religion for them, with various Big Thinks and Little Thinks, but the others would have none of it. Montgomery thought that we should give them guns, but I refused. His sympathy for them angered me. Let them all perish, I thought, and let the earth be cleansed of Moreau’s work.

  So we went on for several months. It was, I later realized, a period of calm between the killing of Moreau and what came after.

  She walked through the garden, stopping once to touch a lily with her gloved hands. “Your native English flowers,” she said, “have many admirers. But have you seen anything more beautiful than this? The original bulb was brought generations ago from the slopes of the Himalayas. It flourishes in your English soil.”

  “Where did you learn botany?” I asked her.

  She did not answer, but walked ahead of me, over the fields, up the hill, so quickly that I had difficulty keeping up with her. At the top of the hill, we looked down on the valley, with its English village sleeping under the grey sky.

  “Would you like to hear what happened after you abandoned me on the island?”

  I nodded. I looked at her again, sidelong. What had she done, to become what she was? She had a way of moving her hands when she spoke that was charming, almost Italian, although no woman could have had her fluidity of movement. Her grace was inhuman.

  “I lived in the cave we had shared. I kept track of the time, as you had taught me. I had a gun, but no bullets, and anyway there were only a few of his creatures left on the island. You think that I cannot say his name, but I can—Moreau, the Beast Master. It was burned into my brain, remember? Doubtless it will be the last word I say before I die. But that will not be for a long while yet.

  “You wrote that the Beast Men reverted to their animal state. What a liar you are, my husband! You know that would have been an anatomical impossibility. But you do not want your English public to know that after Montgomery’s death, after the supplies were gone, you feasted on men. Oh, they had the snouts of pigs, or they jabbered like apes, but they cried out as men before you shot them. Do you remember when you shot and ate Adolphus, your Dog Man, whom you had hunted with, and who had curled up at your feet during the night?

  I looked down at the valley. She was bringing them all back, the memories. My hands were shaking. I lifted them to my mouth, as though they could help with the wave of nausea that threatened to engulf me.

  “They were animals.”

  “So too, if your friend Professor Huxley is right, are you an animal. As am I. You are startled. Why? Because I mentioned Huxley? I have done more things than you can imagine, since I left the island. I too have taken a class with Professor Huxley, whom you described so often. Your descriptions of his examinations served me well. He thought, of course, that the questions I asked him after his lectures were theoretical. He was delighted, he told me, to find such a scientific mind in a young lady. He did not know that I had been created by a biologist. I cut my teeth, as you might say, on the biological sciences. Or had my teeth cut on them.”

  During our time together on the island, after the death of Montgomery, I taught her about the origin and history of life on earth. We looked at geological formations, examined and cataloged what we found in the tidal pools, or the birds that roosted on the island. There were no species native to the island higher than a sea-turtle that laid its eggs there, but we studied the anatomy of the Beast Men we shot, discussing their peculiarities. I explained to her what Moreau had joined together, how pig had been joined to dog, or wolf had been joined to bear. I even, eloquently as I thought then, showed her what Moreau must have intended, where the beast became the man.

  “You feasted on them too.”

  “They were my natural prey. If I had still been the animal Montgomery bought in a market in Argentina, I would have hunted them without thought, without scruple. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For months, I was alone. I reverted, not in appearance but in behavior. I hunted at night, ripped open my prey, ate it raw. After I thought all of Moreau’s creations were gone, I lived on what I could find in the tidal pools—fish when I could catch them, clams that I smashed open on the stones. I dug for turtle eggs. I was half starved when the Scorpion came. There was nothing left on the island but some rabbits and a Pig Man that had somehow managed to escape me, and rats that I could not catch in my weakened state. They would have devoured me eventually.

  “It was searching for the remains of the Ipecacuanha. The captain took particular care of me. He thought I was an Englishwoman who had been captured by pirates, and brutally treated. I have to thank you, Edward, for teaching me to speak so correctly! I did not realize, when I imitated your accent, that I was learning to sound like a lady. Montgomery’s cruder accent would not have suited me so well. I told the captain that I had lost my memory. He took me to Tasmania, where the Governor treated me kindly, and a collection was taken up for me. Imagine all those Englishmen and women, donating money so that I could return home, to England! It was a great deal of money, enough for my voyage to England and a surgeon, a very good surgeon, to complete what Moreau had left undone.

  “After the surgery, I had no more money, and money is necessary in this civilized world of yours. But I found that men will pay money for the company of a beautiful woman. And I am beautiful, am I not, Edward? I should be grateful to the Beast Master. I was his masterpiece.”

  She smiled, and I did not like it. Her canines were still longer than they should have been. Sometimes, when we lay together, she had bitten me. I wanted to believe she had done so by accident, but had she?

  “And so I began to study. In this England of yours, a woman cannot attend universities, but she can attend scientific lectures. She can read at the British Museum. And if she is beautiful, she can ask as many questions as she wishes, and important men are flattered by her interest. I would venture, Edward, that I am now more knowledgeable about biology than you are. I intend to put that knowledge to use. But I need your help. I have come here,” her hand swept to indicate the hills around us, the birds that were flying above, the clouds floating against the grey sky, “with the most vulgar of motives. I require money. You see, I have a particular project in mind. The surgeon who repaired me, who erased the scars that Moreau had left, is a Russian émigré, a Jew driven out of his country by religious persecution. How fond your species is of persecutions! For two years I have worked with him, learning everything he could teach me. I am now, he has been generous enough to say, even more skilled than he is. Your women who are agitating for the right to vote believe that they should have professions other than marriage. I too wish to have a profession.
I propose to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a vivisector.”

  I stared at her. Gazing over the hills, with the wind whipping her skirts back and tossing her veil, she looked like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. But where was she headed? Moreau’s work had brought us once to disaster. Was she now truly planning to continue what he had begun?

  After his death, the more peaceable Beast Men had developed the habit of coming to the enclosure to trade what they grew in their gardens for our flour and salt. Twice a week they came, crowding into the enclosure, like an English market crossed with a menagerie, or a Renaissance painting of some level of Dante’s Inferno.

  Montgomery should have noticed that Nero and the Wolf-Bear Tiberius had entered the enclosure. M’Ling should have been guarding the gate, but his attention was elsewhere. The Beast Men had begun adopting our vices, for which Montgomery was in no small measure to blame. He had taught them the use of tobacco, which he traded for food, and to pass the time he had whittled a pair of dice, with which they gambled for onions, turtle eggs, whatever the Beast Men had brought to trade. That morning, M’Ling was gambling with the Beast Men.

  “Why does she carry a whip?” I heard the shout and went to the window. I usually avoided these market days. I still found it disconcerting to be in the company of so many of Moreau’s creations.

  Montgomery stood by the door of the storeroom, which held our barrels of tobacco, flour, biscuits, salted meat. Next to him stood Catherine, dressed as he was, with a gun in her holster and a whip tucked into her belt. All around stood the Beast Men with the goods that they had brought, and in the back, close to the gate, stood the Hyena-Swine.