The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine

by Jason Sizemore

  “She is one of us, one of the made. Why does she carry a gun? Why does she carry a whip? Let her join her own people.”

  The Beast Men stood, staring, and I could see the inquisitive look in their eyes.

  “Why does she not come to us?” said Catullus, the Satyr. “We have few females. Why does she not come to live in our huts, and work in our gardens, like the other females?”

  “Yes,” said the Ape Man. “Let her live with us, with us, with us! She can be my mate.”

  Then others spoke and said that she could be their mate as well.

  I could see Montgomery looking puzzled. He had been up late drinking, the night before, and was still nursing a hangover. He could not understand this rebellion among the usually peaceable Beast Men. From where he stood, he could not see the Hyena-Swine.

  I could see Catherine’s hand on her gun.

  The Beast Men began arguing among themselves, each claiming her. Moreau had never made enough Beast Women, and they were constantly trying to lure the ones they had away from each other. One pushed another. Soon there would be a fight.

  I stepped through the doorway, into the enclosure.

  “The Master, who has gone to live among the stars, and watches you from above, has intended her for another purpose. She will not be any of your mates. She will be without a mate, but will bear a child that will perpetuate your race. That is the purpose for which he has created her. She will be the mother of a new race of men. Bow to her, who is dedicated to such a high purpose!”

  They stared at me.

  “Bow!” I said, raising my gun. I could see the Hyena-Swine slinking through the gate.

  One by one, reluctantly, they inclined their heads.

  “Hail to the holy mother,” said the Ape Man. He had always been sillier than the rest.

  “Well then,” I said. “You may continue to trade. There will be no punishment today, despite your disobedience.”

  That night, Montgomery lit the bonfire. He lit it every night. If there was a ship sailing within sight of the island, we did not want it to miss us. Sometimes the Beast Men came and danced by the light of the bonfire. “A regular corroboree,” Montgomery called it.

  “Catherine,” he called, after the fire was lit. I could see him standing in the enclosure, with the full moon behind him, larger than it ever is in England. “Come to the dance. There’s a regular crowd of them tonight.”

  “Not tonight,” she answered. “Tonight I wish to speak with Edward.”

  “Damn Edward. Come on, Catherine.” I realized that he had already started drinking, or perhaps had never stopped.

  I did not hear her answer, but he shouted, “All right then, damn you!” And then I heard the gate crash shut.

  “He’s gone,” she said a moment later, standing in my doorway.

  “What did you want to speak to me about?”

  She came closer. She had a smell about her, not unpleasant but particularly, I thought, feline.

  “Do you think he had a purpose for me?”

  “Who?”

  “Moreau. You can see that I’m made—differently from the others. My hands—he must have taken particular care.”

  He hands were on my shoulders. I could feel her claws through my shirt.

  “Am I not well made, Edward?”

  I looked down into her eyes, dark in the darkness. I don’t know what possessed me. “You are—divinely made.”

  Where my shirt was open, she licked my chest, then my neck. She was almost as tall as I was. I could not help remembering Moreau’s neck, torn open.

  He had done his work well. Standing on an English hillside, watching her with her veil blown back by the wind, I shuddered at the memory of her brown thighs, with a down on them softer than the hair of any woman.

  She smiled at me, and despite my sweater and mackintosh, I felt cold.

  We were lying together in a tangle of sheets when we heard the shot.

  “Get your gun,” she said.

  We ran out, me in my trousers, she in Montgomery’s shirt. As we passed the storeroom, she disappeared suddenly, then reappeared with an ammunition belt over her shoulder.

  On the beach, around the bonfire, Beast Men were dancing. There was a throb in the air, and after a moment I realized that it was a drum. Someone—it looked like the Sayer of the Law— was keeping time while the Beast Men turned and leaped and shook their hands in the air, and shouted each in his own way—some like the grunting of a pig, some like the barking of a dog, one caterwauling. I will never forget that sight, watching from the shadowed dunes while the Beast Men capered together and the Puma Woman stood, with her gun in her hand, the ammunition belt slung over her shoulder, at my side.

  “The fire is larger tonight,” she said. “What are they burning?”

  I looked again, more carefully. “The boats!” They had not been large enough to carry us away from the island, but they had at least been tangible signs that escape was possible.

  Without thinking, I ran among them. “Damn you to hell! Damn you all to hell! What beast among you—”

  One of the Beast Men turned toward me. I started back with a cry. He was wearing a mask that made him look like a gorilla. But the eyes behind it were Montgomery’s. The other Beast Men stopped, stumbling into one another in confusion.

  “What the hell—”

  “I’m the—the Gorilla Man. See?” He began to caper about, with the stooping gate, the hanging arms, of a gorilla.

  The other Beast Men laughed. I could see the firelight on their teeth.

  “Drunk! You’re all drunk! It’s disgusting—”

  “Come on, old stick-in-the-mud Prendick. Old hypocrite Prendick. Having your fun with the Cat. I deserve some fun too, don’t you think?”

  “Come on, Montgomery,” I said. I tried to grab him, but he swung at me, punching me in the mouth. He could have hit harder had he not lost his balance, but I tasted blood. And then I saw a gleaming pair of eyes, and then another, staring at me. The Wolf-Bear was there, as was the Hyena-Swine, and with the instinctive reaction of a predator, the Hyena-Swine leaped at me.

  I heard a crack. The Hyena-Swine fell at my feet. Then another crack, and another, and more Beast Men fell. They began screaming, running toward the darkness of the jungle. I thought I would be deafened by the cacophony or crushed as they ran. But the last of them vanished into the jungle, and suddenly there was silence. I was still standing, alone. At my feet lay the body of the Hyena-Swine. Beyond him lay M’Ling, a Wolf Woman, one of the Pig Men, and the Gorilla Man, Montgomery.

  “You killed him,” I said.

  “He became one of them,” she said, out of the darkness.

  I did not answer. Silently, I turned, intending to walk back to the enclosure. It was a mass of flames. I heard a scream that I though might come from one of the Beast Men, until I realized that I was the one screaming. For the second time that night, I began to run.

  We saved nothing. There was nothing left to save. We had lost our supplies, and worse, we had lost the rest of our bullets. After the ones that Catherine had taken ran out, our guns would be useless.

  “One of us must have overturned the lamp,” she said. She was, as always, perfectly calm. The only evidence I had seen of her anger had been Moreau’s throat, or what was left of it.

  What could I say to her? If I had overturned the lamp, it had been by accident. But she, so agile—could she have done it deliberately? I hated her then, more than I had hated Moreau. If I thought I could have, I would have killed her. But I did not want to die Moreau’s death, to be buried, or worse, on that island of beasts that looked like men.

  When I remember it now, I realize that I must have overturned the lamp. Montgomery had burned the boats to revenge himself upon me, but she had no use for revenge. Her motives were always simple, logical. What she wanted, she obtained directly, not with human indirection. Although she looked and laughed at me like an English lady, she still thought with the mind of a beast.

&n
bsp; And so began the longer part of our stay on the island. Montgomery’s body we burned, but the other bodies... She was a predator, and slowly, unwillingly, I fell in with her ways. We hunted together, and with practice my vision became keener, although never, of course, equal to hers. I insisted on cooking our food, although she laughed at me. I would not watch her when she ate it fresh from the kill. We drank from the stream, sucking the water up. Our clothes grew ragged and hung on our brown hides. I lay with her in the cave we called our home, hating her, hating what I had become, but unable to leave her. Even now, I remember her touch, the rasp of her tongue on my skin, the gold of her eyes as she stared down at me and said, “What are you thinking, Ape Man?”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  She would laugh and push her nose against me like a cat that wants to be stroked, and make a sound in her throat that was neither a purr nor a growl.

  One day, I was walking along the beach, scavenging what I could, crabs, clams, seaweed. We were using our bullets judiciously, but they were beginning to run out. Soon we would be reduced to hunting like beasts. I would become like her. I saw something floating toward me. A sail! But the boat reeled, like a drunken sailor. It was the boat I have described in my book, with the captain and the first mate of the Ipecacuanha sitting aboard, dead. This might be my only chance to escape the island. If I died on the ocean, at least I died as a man.

  I stepped into the boat. I was certain, then, that I would never see her again.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you would like to know in what way you can help me.”

  A light rain had begun. Her veil caught drops of moisture, like a spider’s web.

  I turned away. I did not want to know, and yet I could not stop listening. As a scientist, and a man, I wanted to know what she intended.

  “I would have liked to bear children myself. But I cannot. You and I proved that, did we not, Edward? Would you have liked that, to have had children with me? What would they have been like, I wonder? Moreau took away my ability to breed with my kind, and could not give me the ability to breed with yours. Even Dr. Radzinsky was not able to give me that, although he tried. Somewhere, there is an incompatibility that goes beyond the anatomical. Perhaps someday your scientists will find it, and then we will be able to create a true race of Beast Men. But I am impatient. I want my children to flourish and populate the earth. Surely a natural desire, according to Mr. Darwin.

  “Here, in England, I will create a clinic, to revive and perfect Moreau’s research. But my clinic will be no House of Pain. We will incorporate all the technological advances of the last decade—and the educational advances, since my clinic will also be a school. Think, Edward! My children will be educated along the latest scientific lines. Educated to be the inheritors of a new age.”

  “What makes you think that I would finance such a—such a mad scheme? Is it not enough that Moreau did it once? Why would you wish to create such abominations yourself?”

  “Not abominations. Look at me, Edward. Am I an abomination?”

  I did not know how to answer.

  “You will finance my mad scheme, as you call it, for three reasons. First, because you are a gentleman, and a gentleman cares about his reputation. If you do not provide me with the financing I require, I will inform your English press. There are two laws, Edward, that all civilized men obey: not to lie with their mothers or sisters or daughters, and not to eat the flesh of other men. You have broken the second of those laws.”

  “Why should I care what the public thinks of me?”

  “Because there will be inquiries. And because nothing will be proven, people will think the worst. You will become notorious. Wherever you go, people will follow you, to interview you, to take photographs. Imagine the newspapers! ‘What Mr. Prendick the cannibal had for breakfast. How it compares with human flesh.’ But second, you are a scientist. What I am proposing is an experiment. I will bring pumas from the Americas, young ones, less than two years old. Fine, healthy specimens. I will operate on them in stages, changing them gradually. Allowing them, at each stage, to become accustomed to their new forms. Educating them. There will be no pain. There will be no deformity. My children will be as beautiful as I am.”

  I grasped at straws. “Your plan is impossible. You will never be able to build a clinic like that in England. Where would you hide? There is no part of the countryside that is uninhabited, no place obscure enough that your work won’t be observed. You will be found out.”

  She laughed. “I do not propose to put my clinic in the countryside. No, my clinic will be in the heart of England, in London itself.”

  “But surely the police—”

  “There are parts of London where the police never go. Parts where the inhabitants speak a babble of language, and everything you want to purchase is to be had, from a girl fresh from the English countryside to a pipe of opium that will give you distinctly un-English dreams. I have become familiar with them over the last few years. Do not worry about the practicalities. Those I have thought of already.”

  “And third—I did tell you there are three reasons—you are a follower of Mr. Darwin. Consider, Edward.” She turned again to look at the valley below. “The operation of natural selection is necessary for evolution. Without selective pressure, a species stagnates, perhaps even degenerates, reverting to atavistic forms. How long has it been since selective pressure operated on the human species? You have killed all your predators. How many men are killed by wolves or bears, in Europe? You care for your poor, your sick, your idiots, your mad, who give birth to more of their kind, filling your cities Your intelligent classes, who spend so much of their energy in their work, do not breed. This is not new to you, I know. You have read it in Nordau, Lombroso. Your very strength and compassion as a species will be your undoing. You will grow weaker by the year, the decade, the century. Eventually, like the dodo, you will become extinct. That is the fate of mankind. Unless...”

  “Unless what?”

  “You once again introduce a predator. That is what I’m offering you, Edward. Selective predation. A species that I create, to feed off the weakest among you, to make humanity strong.”

  She was mad, I thought. And I think so still. But there is a kind of reason in madness. Moreau had it, and as she claimed, she was Moreau’s daughter. He too had the directness, the simplicity, of a beast.

  I have not seen her since that day on the hillside. The money I send her is deposited into a bank account, and where it goes from there, I do not know. Do I believe that the creatures she creates will strengthen rather than weaken mankind? I do not know, but she has never lied to me. It takes a man to do that.

  There was a fourth reason that she did not mention. Perhaps it was kindness on her part not to mention it. But I do not think that, in all her interactions with men, she has learned kindness. Surely she must have known. Sometimes at night I still think of her, her fingers twining in my hair, her legs tangled in mine, her lips close, so close, to my throat. I do not think I loved her. But it was a madness that resembled love, and perhaps I still am mad, because I have not refused her. She must have known, because as she stood in the doorway, ready to depart, as respectable as any English lady, she stepped close to me and licked my neck. I felt the rasp of her tongue.

  “Goodbye, Edward,” she said. “When I am ready, not before, I will invite you to my clinic, and you can see the first of our children. Yours and mine.”

  Yesterday, in the post, I received her invitation. Will I go? I have not decided. But I am a scientist, cursed with curiosity. I would like to see what she creates and whether she is, indeed, a worthy successor to Moreau.

  Editor’s Note:

  I hesitate to publish this manuscript, left to me by my late uncle, Edward Prendick, because credulous members of the public may connect it with the series of brutal murders that is currently taxing the ingenuity of Scotland Yard. However, Professor Huxley, my uncle’s former teacher, has asked me to publish it as an addendum to my unc
le’s manuscript of his time on the island. I believe the conversation it records was a hallucination. It must be remembered that my uncle’s health was severely affected by the shipwreck that left him the sole inhabitant of an island in the South Seas, and that at the time of his death, he was attended by an alienist. I am satisfied that the cause of his death was natural. Heart failure can strike a comparatively young man, and even if we give no credence to the fantastical occurrences that he claimed to have witnessed, my uncle must have suffered a great deal. It is true that upon the execution of his will, his fortune was found to be significantly diminished. However, there are a number of possible explanations for the state of his affairs, and we should not draw conclusions before the investigation into his death is complete. I hope the public will do justice to the memory of my uncle, who, although disturbed in mind, was a man of intellectual promise before the shipwreck that embittered him toward mankind. And I hope the public will dismiss the ridiculous fancies of Fleet Street, and assist our police in catching the perpetrator of the Limehouse Murders.

  —Charles Prendick

  The Mind of a Pig

  Ekaterina Sedia

  A first shock of Joel’s life came when he saw a mirror for the first time. That elaborate affair of glass and wood was delivered to decorate Cassie’s room, and Joel approached it to investigate. He had not given much thought to his appearance, but assumed without ever considering that he looked like the people around him. He was conscious of some slight differences between himself and others, such as he walked on four legs, and did not speak. Still, he did not expect his reflection to be quite so grotesque.

  He twitched his snout, discomfited, and the creature in the mirror did the same. A real snout with a flat fleshy circle surrounding his nostrils. Joel surveyed slack ears, nothing at all like Cassie’s, the small eyes hiding in the folds of fat, a long corpulent body supported by four stubby hoofed legs, and a comma of a tail. Joel had seen enough picture books to recognize the image. A pig.

  He turned his back to the mirror and trotted away, his cloven hooves clacking on the hardwood floors of his home. He moved his legs carefully, afraid that an abrupt movement would shatter his heart, already aching as if from a blow.