by Watts, Peter
By hook or by crook, the McGovern’s got themselves a decent legal team. Larry Marx was the lead, and I know Larry well enough to say with some confidence that the man does not come cheap. I doubt Larry Marx could even spell the word cheap. But someone had paid for him, and the first day in court, the McGovern’s had the smug look of folk who thought they’d already won their battle, that everything that was going to follow was just so much noise. I got the sense that the families of the other 16 might not have given up the fight as easily as I’d imagined. They’d just decided to pay someone else to take centre stage.
~
Marx’s team began their attack with science. This was a curious strategy, given that Cochrane had guarded the secrets of whatever formula he used on his patients with an almost paranoiac degree of secrecy, but it made sense if those who were funding the McGovern’s action had their eyes on more than a defensive settlement from the good doctor, if they might also be looking for a way into his bag of inscrutable medical tricks. If that was the agenda, it proved to be futile.
They stuck a haematologist up on the stand, asked him to speculate, which he was only too happy to do.
‘Is it possible, in your trained opinion’ Marx said, straightening his three-hundred-dollar tie, ‘that a surgeon such as Dr. Cochrane can legitimately claim, as his advertising did, that a medical procedure is capable of halting the ageing process?’
‘Well, hypothetically, if you squint a little bit, it’s feasible, but also highly dubious and completely pointless. What the result of this procedure appears to suggest is some form of induced porphyria. In effect, voluntarily damaging the body’s enzymes to allow someone to react negatively to sunlight. Now, why anyone would want to do that to themselves is another matter entirely. It would only prevent aging in the way removing your skin might prevent pimples. And in terms of drinking blood, unless Dr. Cochrane can claim to have manufactured a new form of plasma with a completely different protein content, that isn’t going to happen. I think what’s likely on offer here is a protein shake dyed red to fool your friends. It’s just morbid cosmetic surgery with a bit of PT Barnum bunkum thrown in to get the man’s name on the evening news.’
‘And the suggestion that as well as halting the ageing process, Dr. Cochrane may have given his... patients,’ and he said that with a raised eyebrow to the jury, ‘prolonged life?’
The surgeon scoffed. ‘If that were true, I imagine he’d be charging more than seventy-five thousand dollars a shot don’t you?’
The jury laughed at that. Then it was my turn.
‘You’ve had the opportunity to examine Mimi McGovern, Doctor?’
‘I have.’
‘In your expert opinion, would you be prepared to describe her as a vampire?’
‘I wouldn’t describe anyone as a vampire. Vampires are fictional creatures, Ms McGovern is very much real and her... illness should be considered as such. An illness.’
‘But her current condition, her aversion to sunlight, the requirement for plasma as her sole source of nutrition, the fact that, by your own admission, she no longer appears to be, strictly speaking, human? She drinks blood and sunlight would kill her. Isn’t that what most people would describe as a vampire?
The haematologist shrugged. ‘I suppose they would, yes.’
And they should have dropped the action right there and then. But if the McGovern’s were certain of one thing, it was that they were going to have their moment in the spotlight.
They walked through the court with their heads held high, two middle aged, overweight people desperate to be centre stage. Every movement they made, every word they spoke, it seemed so ruthlessly rehearsed, so strategically planned, you couldn’t help but wonder if their entire lives were lived like this, if their whole existence was geared towards them grabbing the attention of anyone who might happen to notice.
It was the father who took the lead. His wife dabbed at her eyes throughout, and held an A4 photo of their beloved child out towards the court, the child as she was before they paid for Cochrane’s treatment, smiling out from a black and white portrait befitting a starlet, the face of an eight-year-old child upon whom impossible hopes had been pinned.
‘You know Fox news did a feature on us last week? ‘America’s Most Despicable Parents’ they called us. Monica, she wouldn’t leave the house after that, it was all I could do to stop her crying. Every day, we get a letterbox full of hate mail. It just never stops. And I can’t understand it; I can’t understand that hate, what people think we did that was so wrong. We just did what everyone tries to do. We wanted the best for our kid, that’s all.
‘It’s not a nice thing to realise, that your kid isn’t special, that they’re not going to go all the way to the top. We tried, though, we had Mimi in coaching from the age of three. She was doing ballet and contemporary dance and Monica spent all her spare time getting her to classes or coaching her at home to try and give her that extra little edge over all the others. It’s a tough world out there. Everyone is aiming for the stars. I only wanted to give my daughter a step up the ladder.
‘She’d done local talent shows, began to make her mark so we took her to America’s Got Talent. She didn’t even get past the first stage. We were completely shocked; we’d booked a hotel for three days—we were so convinced she’d get all the way to the judges. Monica said we’d just chosen the wrong routine, so we took off home and went back to basics, and the next year we tried again. But the same thing happened. Monica reckoned that Mimi wasn’t trying hard enough, or she had stage fright. We took her to a talent agency, and they finally told us what we already knew and didn’t want to admit. That there was nothing special about Mimi; she was just an eight-year-old kid with a nice smile and good hair, and there’s an awful lot of them out there already. We could have given up then; I guess most people would have. But we take our responsibility as parents seriously. We were determined to give our daughter every chance to make her mark on the world.
‘It was Monica who saw the story about the clinic on TV. “Anything to give Mimi an edge”, she said. I wasn’t sure at first, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. There were a lot of singing and dancing eight-year-olds on the market, but there weren’t many singing and dancing eight-year-old vampires. It wiped us out, cost us all the money we had put aside, but we really thought it was worth it, we really thought we were giving Mimi the best chance in life. How can people hate us for that? Isn’t that what we all want?’
He put his arms around his wife, who had cried crocodile tears throughout, and she made damned sure that even then she kept the photo up, the smiling soft focus face of her daughter in full view of everyone.
I had no intention of cross examining them, no desire to humiliate them anymore than their own personalities had already achieved. I only had one question, one that cut to the heart of the whole business.
‘I’m holding the consent form provided to you by Dr. Cochrane before the procedure was undertaken. Did you sign this form willingly and without duress, Mr. McGovern?’
‘Well, yes I did, but-‘
‘I’ve got no more questions for you.’
The McGovern’s left the court. I think they imagined they’d depart to a round of applause, perhaps a standing ovation. Neither was forthcoming.
There was a recess after the parental testimony, to allow the court to swallow its collective bile, perhaps. Larry Marx smarmed his way up to me and offered to discuss a settlement. It was a half-hearted approach, he knew as well as I did that there was only one way this was going to end. They had only one more card to play; Larry just didn’t want to be the one to play it.
I laughed at his offer. He’d have to bring Mimi into the court.
You’ll all have seen her by now, I’m sure. The McGovern’s were going to get their pot of gold one way or another, and ‘Little Mimi’, as they always introduce the thing she’s become, she’s the sideshow freak of our age. If there’s a TV show she hasn’t appeared on t
o terrify a captive audience, it isn’t for lack of her parents’ trying. Now the other sixteen are slowly joining the ride, keen to get their own cut of the McGovern’s action. There’s talk of a TV series. A movie.
The thing is, you can see what they look like, but without them being there with you, physically, you don’t get the sense of what they aren’t. Because what they are not is human. The moment you’re in the same room as one of the seventeen, your senses simply go haywire.
I’ve asked people about this, people who know what they’re talking about, and they tell me that we take a lot of our normal everyday contact with other people for granted because it’s all based on small, commonplace signals that most of the time we don’t even realise we’re making. Body language, pheromones, all of that. When Mimi was unveiled in that courtroom, she transmitted nothing to the rest of humanity apart from hunger. Everything else about her was gone, she was like a human-shaped hole in the world that something else had rushed in and filled. Whoever she might have been before Cochrane operated on her, she wasn’t that person anymore.
I was watching the jury, because their reaction to Mimi McGovern was the only thing that could queer what should have been a straightforward judgement. Juror number two, he just puked into his lap and then sat there with it running down his legs as if he hadn’t even noticed. One of the women behind him screamed, one of them started sobbing. The old guy, number seven, he started to pray like some old time preacher, giving it the ‘Jesus Christ have mercy on us all’ shtick. I couldn’t judge any of them. First time I saw one of the seventeen, all I wanted to do was break down and cry.
So what did we see that day?
They wheeled in a tall plastic box, like a transparent coffin, three air holes in the top beyond Mimi’s reach but, other than that, sealed at every point. There was a canvas sheet over the top of the coffin and the light was lowered so you couldn’t see much beyond shadow and suggestion when the sheet was whipped off. This was a mercy for all of us.
She was naked. I doubt you could have kept clothes on her for so much as a minute before she shredded them, and even then, who was going to get in that cage and dress her up anyway? She had no hair left, she’d ripped that out a long time ago, and her head was covered with scabs and weeping sores where she’d been tearing at herself. She was so thin; her limbs were like those bendy straws kids use. Her flesh was grey, you could see the veins sticking out beneath it but those veins looked black underneath the skin, like whatever was being pumped through her body was rotten and decayed. She certainly smelt like it. And the way she moved! You’d think as emaciated as she was, Mimi McGovern would be weak, that any movement would be a struggle, but she was like lightning trapped in a bottle, twitching, hurling herself around the walls of that little cell, her head thrashing on her shoulders, and she snarled and growled like something you’d find on death row in a dog pound.
After a few minutes in the court, she started to smash her head against the plastic wall of her cell repeatedly, baring teeth that, I tell you now, no orthodontist had a hand in creating, and the plastic was smeared with the rotten stain of her skin where she was striking it, over and over again. It might just have been the lighting in there, but her eyes looked to me as if they were glowing with red fire that came from a long, long way away.
‘She can smell you. She’s hungry,’ said Larry Marx, holding down his lunch as much as we all were.
They couldn’t feed them anymore, he explained. Their hunger had grown beyond the capacity of the formula that Cochrane had developed to feed them and they’d started to reject the animal blood that they’d initially been given as a substitute. They wanted human blood. The hunger for it had driven the seventeen insane just as quickly as the stuff they’d had pumped into them had wrecked their bodies.
For a time, as they put the sheet back over the monster and wheeled her back to wherever they were keeping her hidden away, I worried that the sight of Mimi McGovern was so extreme, so heart rending, that the jury might be swayed in their judgement. Larry certainly tried to press the point home; getting them to imagine their own loved ones reduced to the level of a rabid animal. Their own daughters, grand daughters. Heart strings were pulled. There were tears. But, and you can never rely on it being the case, they didn’t let the theatrics cloud their judgement. I like to think I had more than a helping hand with that outcome. But all I really needed to do was to remind the jury that the McGovern’s had given their consent. They had signed the waivers without coercion. They asked Dr. Cochrane to turn their daughter into a vampire and he did just what they asked him to do. If they didn’t take the time to think through the implications of that, if they didn’t stop to consider what a vampire might actually be, that was hardly the doctor’s fault now was it?
The jury agreed. The case against Cochrane was dismissed. The McGovern’s were left with a hefty bill for legal costs and a child that hungered for human blood and who might, for all anyone could say at this point, end up living forever. They seemed strangely sanguine. Larry Marx certainly seemed cheerful enough in defeat, so I imagine his fees had been generous in the extreme.
As indeed had mine. And if aspects of the case had disturbed me a little, well that was nothing new. I’d defended far worse.
As we left the court, I asked Cochrane the one question that still bugged me. The one that no one had brought up during the case.
‘Are they really vampires, doc?’
Cochrane shrugged. ‘I don’t know what they are.’
‘What would happen if they attacked someone else? You know, like in the films? Would they infect another person? Could they spread?’
Cochrane, he actually smiled at me. And for the first time I saw the truth in his eyes, eyes that, if you looked closely enough, betrayed the fragile sanity that he was desperately trying to hide from the world. They told me what I hadn’t seen so far, that he had no more idea of what he had created than I did, and that whatever they were, those seventeen people he’d ruined, they were not part of his plan. He’d opened up a box, and he had no idea how to close it again. And I knew then that we were screwed, all of us.
‘What was it Oppenheimer said? “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds”?’
‘What does that mean, doc?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’ he said, and giggled in a manner that made my blood run cold. Then he shook my hand and I never saw Dr. Cochrane again.
Not alive, anyway.
Jonathan Templar lives in Cheshire, UK.
He copes with the constant, constant rainfall by writing dark and speculative fiction, much of which has been published in anthologies and compilations from a wide range of publishers.
Jonathan's recent acclaimed work includes the story 'The Meat Man' in the charity collection 'Horror for Good', 'Basher' for the shared world anthology 'World's Collider', 'Love the Ride' in Postmortem Press's 'Ghost in the Machine' and tales for Smart Rhino's 'Zippered Flesh' and 'Zippered Flesh 2'.
His novella 'The Angel of Shadwell', the first in a series of stories for steam-punk detective Inspector Noridel, is available from Nightscape Press and his first collection of stories, 'The Geometry of Hell', is currently available as well.
Jonathan has an author site with a full bibliography at www.jonathantemplar.com.
CHRYSALIS
Jason V Brock
I.
On the coldest night ever recorded in the antique city of Paladinsk—formerly known as Istanbul—Ambassador Aral'ucaRd waited for the MagLev train to depart. As he glanced from the ice-laced window to his holowatch, he noted that they should have departed nearly eight minutes ago: Things might be more treacherous now that it's completely dark. I hope we can make it to the meeting in the Old City by morning… He had always despised the May Day Rituals, but understood their importance; even before being reassigned back to Earth, Irfan had never enjoyed the Process or PазумLink. It was exhausting, thankless work, but essential, he knew, to the continuation of the Pekelný Republika.
Irfan—a family name—narrowed his shimmering brown eyes as he peered through a dreamy veil of smoke swirling up from one of the hydrail locomotive engines. He stroked a day's rough on his jaw, tracing the scars along his face, an unconscious habit when thinking. As he studied the growing assembly just beyond the reinforced fence at the perimeter of the old Sirkeci Terminal, he was once again transfixed by the way their skin softly glowed in the deepening gloom, at the strange, wispy patterns that they displayed across their features, almost like bioluminescent fingerprints; each form was a unique signature of their particular contagion—loops, whorls, and swirls in various pastel hues of faint purple, green, blue, red. It covered their whole bodies, he knew, in eccentric configurations across their strange, pale skin, following the invisible Lines of Blaschko—if they survived the initial infection. With a hint of alarm, he observed that as recently as a half-hour ago there had been just a few individuals, then tens, and now hundreds, adding a ghostly illumination to the already surreal display. Soon there might be thousands amassed at the giant gates—watching… waiting under the dark, starless skies in tense anticipation, seething with quiet rage.
He was grateful then that the cars, at least for him and his detail, were reinforced, the windows impenetrable; he tugged at the collar of his thin tunic, suddenly warm. Shifting his gaze, the focal plane moved forward—blurring background minutiae, rounding off jagged edges—as foreground details sharpened, and he saw his own tired reflection emerge in the armored glass: He looked haggard, drained; his almond-shaped eyes were hollow, the deep maroon feathers crowning his head seemed lackluster against his dark brown skin. There were new wrinkles along his cheeks; as he aged, he had prematurely begun the process of transformation, and displayed the irregular light blue blemishes of pigmentational erosion characteristic of psychic stress in his species. The locomotive engines surged, breaking his attention; it was a sensation he felt more than heard. A whisper of snow began to fall as he once again considered the people at the fence, simultaneously repulsed and sorrowful. The languorous pan of searchlights revealed their deadened faces in sharp contrast: Men, women, children—festooned in ragged clothes, pushing and pulling at the bars of the fence in an ever more frantic rhythm. Irfan knew the only thing that prevented their surge over the top of the gates was the patrolling, heavily armed and armor-suited guards, ominously resplendent in black metallic dusters and jackboots. They were frightening in their attire, even to Irfan; the strangely angled facemasks on their helmets were fierce, reminding him of samurai masks from ancient Japan. Indeed, as he watched the weird parade of sentries choking back their leashed German Shepherd/Wolf hybrids, he imagined it as a kind of surreal kabuki presentation, the glowing hordes beyond the gates a sort of disenfranchised audience. The irony of the situation was not lost on him: The original gulags were built to keep "his kind"—The Righteous—in. And those trains—primitive, rough—had been used to deport them to the Reformation camps… The present-day guards were intended to keep the Nons out; to keep the triumphant safe. The trains now—opulent, sleek—were for State use exclusively.