Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol I Read online

  "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.

  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 d
o 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 uncle'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.

  Joel pushed a door open with his forehead and lay in the straw bed of his pen. The pen took up most of the open porch of a great, old house, and Joel had a view of flowerbeds, bursting forth with blue of irises and red and black of tulips, and a vast green lawn. He needed to think.

  His discovery, as unsettling as it was, explained much. He now knew why Cassie and her father talked about him as if he were not there, and why newspapers were often snatched from under his nose. Most importantly, he realized why Cassie never acknowledged small signs of affection he offered. At least, it wasn't about his personality. It was about him being a pig.

  His ears pricked up, and he raised his snout to inhale the smell of gas and hot metal. Cassie's Dad came home. Normally, Joel was not very interested in the old man---he seemed more of an aged barnacle appended to Cassie's loveliness than a being in his own right. This time, Joel watched him.

  Cassie's Dad heaved his old body up the steps with the help of his cane, and spoke addressing a young man with a tape recorder in hand, who followed close behind. "I hope the tour of the farm assuaged some of your and your readers' concerns. As you could see, it's a perfectly scientific and humane operation."

  "Yes." The young man stopped and cocked his head. "But did you have any issues with patients being squeamish about their transplants? About these organs being grown in pigs?"

  The old man rasped a laugh. "You have to understand that people who need a transplant do not have the luxury of being squeamish. And think of the alternatives---would you rather receive a liver extracted from a human corpse?"

  The young man made a small non-committal sound and looked away.

  "You're too young to remember it, but back in the day..." Cassie's Dad looked over the flowerbeds, his fingers tapping on the railing of the porch. "There was a lot of controversy over human cloning---human rights activists feared that people will be cloned only to harvest their organs. That never happened, of course---it is much easier to grow human organs in pigs, and there's a whole lot fewer ethical questions. Animal Righters, of course, made a fuss, but they always do. Most of them don't even know what they believe in."

  "Why pigs?"

  "They are similar to us." The old man smiled, and snapped his fingers at Joel. "Joel, come here, boy."

  Joel trotted up, obedient, hoping that his dark unease did not reflect on his face.

  "Joel, here," the old man said, "is a miracle pig. He has a human brain---he's the only one of his kind. A real innovation. Hope your paper will enjoy this little factoid."

  The young man rubbed his face. "A brain? Forgive me, Dr. Kernicke, but a brain transplant reeks of a bad joke. Why would you need a brain?"

  Cassie's Dad rolled his eyes, and petted Joel's sagging head. "Not a whole one. But you know that people suffer injuries, or---God forbid!---tumors. Wouldn't it be nice to have a replacement frontal lobe in case you lost one?"

  The young man nodded. "I suppose. But what about personality?"

  Cassie's Dad shook his head, impatient. "What personality? He's a pig. He's just keeping this brain warm, in a manner of speaking. It's a blank slate. A person who receives Joel's frontal lobe will eventually develop connections between his brain and the transplant, and gradually claim it as his own, regaining function as the time goes by. Brain tissue is just tissue until a human mind shapes it into something grander."

  The young man turned off his tape recorder. "Doctor," he said in a hushed voice, and gave Joel a sideways look. "How do you know that this pig is not sentient?"

  "Because pigs did not evolve with this brain!" Cassie's Dad struck the boards of the porch with his cane for emphasis. "It's like sewing albatross' wings on a pigeon---it won't make him a better flyer, and chances are that he won't fly at all. Every animal is made by evolution, and all parts should fit together to function. Joel's DNA says that he's a pig, and thus he will remain a pig forever, whether we furnish him with a different brain or not. He has no other human equipment, such as neurotransmitters and sensory system, and thus he cannot make use of the brain. Interview is over."

  The young man ran down the steps, traipsed across the lawn, and disappeared behind the bend of the driveway. A part of Joel wanted to run after the man, to seek his help, while the rest of his soul reeled, as if an abyss had opened in front of his hooves. Betrayed by the very people who took care of him and pretended to love him---surely, Joseph did not feel worse after being sold to Egypt! If
Joel could speak, he would've called anathema upon the old man's aging, balding head. If he could cry, bloody tears would have stained his face. Joel did the only thing he could do. He ran.

  The gravel of the driveway exploded from under his hooves in small, angry fountains, and the greenery of the hedge melted into a green smudge. He careened around the turn, just in time to see the young man's car exhale a pungent cloud of exhaust and disappear behind the gate.

  Joel's heart pumped harder than ever as he kept running. The metal bars of the gate came into motion, sliding, silent, smell of grease and black metal radiating from them. Through the opening, Joel could see a grey snake of the road, he could hear honking of the cars, he could smell an unfamiliar world that he had previously seen through the gate but never entered.

  Until now. Joel's face thrust into the street, into the warm shimmering air filled with asphalt fumes, just as the gate slid into his flank. He could feel the pain of bruised flesh, followed with a jolt the likes of which he had never felt. Every muscle twitched with the searing shock that radiated from the metal grid of the gate. Then, it ceased. Joel planted his front hooves in the pallid grass that separated the gates from the sidewalk, and pulled. The pain renewed---another jolt, then another pause. Joel thought that he could smell burnt hair, but it seemed too inconsequential in the face of the necessity to free himself. He pulled and strained, until the next shock set his flank afire, radiating across his back and down every nerve. Joel looked outside, at the traffic that flowed by, oblivious to a pig stuck in the gates. The next shock exploded in his eyes, in a shower of white stars, and Joel saw no more.

  * * * *

  Joel woke up in hell. Before he even opened his eyes, he realized that he was paralyzed. He sent his muscles a signal to move, to close his mouth, but they would not obey. His throat and tongue felt dry as felt, and he could not swallow. His ears hurt.