The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (17 page)

“I knew this wasn’t going to be easy,” the tall man said. “There’s no point wasting time. I’m truly sorry to have to do this, but it really is for the best.” He put his suitcase down, pounced on her, dragged her to her feet and bound her hands behind her back with a piece of slender but incredibly strong cord.

She screamed as loudly as she could, but she knew that no one was going to take any notice. He must have known that too, because he didn’t try to stop her immediately. He selected the sturdiest of her three dining-chairs, set it in the middle of the room and started tying her ankles to the legs of the chair.

“My boyfriend will be home any minute,” Sheila said. “He’s a bouncer. He’ll break you into little pieces.”

“You don’t have a boyfriend, Shelia,” the white-haired man informed her. “You’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than a fortnight. You’ve always claimed that it’s because all men are bastards, but you’ve always suspected that it might be you—and you’re right. You really do put them off and drive them away, no matter how hard you try not to.”

Sheila was trussed up tightly by now, with more cord passed around her body, holding her tight to the back of the chair. The way she was positioned made it extremely unlikely that he intended to rape her, but that wasn’t at all reassuring. Rape she understood; rape she could cope with, and survive.

“I do have a son,” she told him. “He may not be as big as you but he’s in a gang, and he’s vicious. He carries a knife. He might even have graduated to a gun by now—and if he hasn’t, some of his mates certainly have.”

“All true,” the white-haired man conceded, readily enough, “but it leaves out of account the fact that Darren hardly ever comes home any more, because he finds you as uncomfortable to be with as all the other men who’ve briefly passed through your wretched life. To put it brutally, you disgust him.”

“Tracy loves me,” Sheila retorted, feeling far greater pressure to make that point than to ask the man with the briefcase how he knew Darren’s name.

The briefcase was open now, and the tall man was pulling things out at a rate of knots: weird things, like the apparatus of a chemistry set. There were bottles and jars, flasks and tripods, even a mortar and pestle. There was also something that looked like a glorified butane cigarette lighter, whose flame ignited at a touch, and became more intense in response to another.

“That’s true too,” her remorseless tormentor went on. “There’s a lot of love in Tracy, just as there was always a lot of love in you, always yearning for more and better outlets. She can’t hang on to relationships either, can she? She hasn’t give up hope yet, though. Darren wouldn’t be any use, because the mitochondrial supplement atrophies in males long before they reach puberty, but I could have gone to Tracy instead of you, and would probably have found her more cooperative. It wouldn’t have been sporting, though. She’s still a child, and you’re entitled to your chance. It wouldn’t be fair simply to pass you over. Her life will change irrevocably too, once you’re fully awake. So will Darren’s, although he probably won’t be quite as grateful.”

That was too much. “What the fuck are you talking about, you stupid fuck?” Sheila demanded, although she knew that he would see that she was cracking up, that he had succeeded in freaking her out with his psychopathic performance.

“My name—my true name, not the one on my driving license— is Sarmerodach,” the tall man said. “This body used to belong to an oceanographer named Arthur Bayliss, Ph.D., but I was able to rescue him from an unbelievably dull life wallowing in clathrate-laden ooze. The predatory DNA crystallized in my viral avatar dispossessed his native DNA, little by little, in every single cell in his body, and then set about resculpting the neuronal connections in his brain. The headaches were terrible. I wish I could say that you won’t have to suffer anything similar, but you will—not for nearly as long, but even more intensely. I wish it were as simple as feeding you a dose of virus-impregnated ooze, but it isn’t. Your predatory DNA is already latent in your cells, secreted in mitochondrial supplements, awaiting activation. The activation process is complex, but not very difficult if you have the right raw materials. I have—although it wasn’t easy to locate them all. It will take an hour to trigger the process, and six months thereafter to complete the transition.”

Sheila had hardly understood a word of the detail, but she thought she had got the gist of the plan. “Transition to what?” she asked, thinking of the Incredible Hulk and Mr. Hyde.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll still look human. Your hair will turn white overnight, but you’ll be able to watch the flab and the cellulite melt away. You won’t look like a supermodel, but you will live for thousands of years. In a sense, given that the real you is locked away in your mitochondrial supplements, you already have. Your other self is one of the Immortals of Atlantis.”

Sheila had always felt that she was fully capable of dealing with psychopaths—she knew so many—but she knew from bitter experience that negotiating with delusional schizophrenics was a different kettle of fish. She started screaming again, just as loudly and even more desperately than before.

In all probability, she thought, there would be at least a dozen people in the neighboring flats who could hear her. The chances of one of them responding, in any way whatsoever, were pretty remote—screaming passed for normal behavior in these parts—but it might be her last hope.

Arthur Bayliss, Ph.D., alias Sarmerodach, obviously thought so too, because he crammed a handkerchief into her open mouth and then used more of his ubiquitous cord to make a gag holding it in place.

Then he got busy with his chemistry set.

Sheila had no idea what the ingredients were that her captor was mixing up in his flasks, but she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she’d been told that they included virgin’s blood, adder’s venom and the hallucinogenic slime that American cane toads were rumored to secrete. There were certainly toadstool caps, aromatic roots and perfumed flowers among the things he was grinding up in the mortar, and Sheila was prepared to assume that every one of them was as poisonous as deadly nightshade and as dangerous to mental health as the most magical magic mushrooms in the world.

The tall man talked while he worked. “I’d far rather observe the principle of informed consent,” he said, “even though I’m not really a PhD any more, let alone a physician, but it’s not really practical in the circumstances. Your false self would be bound to refuse to realize your true self, no matter how worthless a person you presently are or how wretched a life you presently lead, because selves are, by definition, selfish.”

He paused to deploy a spatula, measuring out a dose of red powder. He tipped it into the flask whose contents were presently seething away over the burner. He didn’t use scales, but the measurement was obviously delicate.

“If caterpillars had the choice,” he continued, “they’d never consent to turn into butterflies. Some kinds of larvae don’t have to, you know—it’s called paedogenesis. Instead of pupating and re-emerging as adults they can grow sex organs and breed as juveniles, sometimes for several generations. They still transmit the genes their descendants will eventually need to effect metamorphosis, though, in response to the appropriate environmental trigger, so that those descendants, however remote, can eventually recover their true nature, their true glory and their true destiny.”

He paused again, this time to dribble a few drops of liquid out of the mortar, where he’d crushed a mixture of plant tissues, into a second flask that had not yet been heated at all.

“That’s what the Immortals of Atlantis did,” he went on, “when they realized that they were about to lose all their cultural wealth when their homeland disappeared beneath the sea. They knew that the next generation, and many generations thereafter, would have to revert to the cultural level of Stone Age barbarians and take thousands to years to achieve a tolerable level of civilization, but they wanted to give them the chance to become something better, when circumstances became ripe again. So the Immortals hid themselves away, the best way they could. The Atlantean elite were great biotechnologists, you see; they considered our kind of heavy-metal technology to be inexpressibly vulgar, fit only for the toilsome use of slaves.”

This time he stopped to make a careful inspection of some kind of paste he’d been blending, lifting a spoonful to within a couple of inches of his pale grey eyes. He didn’t have a microscope either.

“What would our elite do, do you think,” he resumed, “if the Antarctic ice melted and the sea swamped their cities, and the methane gushing out of the suboceanic clathrates mopped up all the oxygen and rendered the air unbreathable? I think they’d retreat underground, burrowing deep down and going into cultural hibernation for a thousand or a hundred thousand years, until the ever-loyal plants had restored the breathability of the atmosphere again. But that’s not going to happen, because you and I—and the other Immortals, when we’ve located and restored a sufficient number—are going to see that it doesn’t. We’ll have the knowledge, once you’re fully awake, and we’ll have the authority. The only way the world can be saved is for everyone to work together and do what’s necessary, and that isn’t going to happen unless someone takes control and reinstitutes a sensible system of slavery. The Immortals will be able to do that, one we’ve resurrected enough of them. This is just the beginning.”

He took one flask off the burner and replaced it with another; the pause in his monologue was hardly perceptible.

“As you might be able to see,” he said, gesturing expansively to take in all the different compounds he was making up, “the process of revitalization has five stages—that’s five different drugs, all of them freshly-prepared to very specific recipes, administered in swift sequence. Don’t worry—it doesn’t involve any injections, or even swallowing anything with a nasty taste. All you have to do is breathe them in. It’s even simpler than smoking crack. I know it looks complicated, and it could all go wrong if I made the slightest mistake in the preparation or administration, but you have to trust me. Dr. Bayliss has never done anything like this before, but Sarmerodach has. He hasn’t lost the knack, even though he’s spent the last few thousand years lying dormant in the suboceanic ooze encoded as a crystalline supervirus. Everything’s just about ready. You mustn’t be afraid, Sheila, you really ”

He stopped abruptly as the doorbell rang. For a second or two he seemed seriously disconcerted—-but then he relaxed again, He knew her children’s names, and more about her than anyone had any right to know, He knew that she never answered the doorbell.

For the first time in her life, Shelia yearned to hear the sound of someone kicking the door in, splintering the wood around the lock and the bolts.

Instead, she heard several sets of shuffling footsteps moving away from the flat. If she’d screamed then it might just have made a difference, but she couldn’t.

“Good,” said the man with the Ph.D. “We can get on with the job in peace.”

The first drug, which the tall man administered simply by holding a loaded spoon beneath her nostrils, made Sheila feel nauseous. It wasn’t that it stank—its odor was delicately sweet, like the scent of sugared porridge heating up in the microwave—but that it disturbed her internal equilibrium in a fashion she’d never experienced before.

The second, which he administered by pouring warm liquid on to cotton wool and holding it in the same position, disturbed her even more profoundly. At first, it just tickled—except that she’d never been tickled inside before, in her lungs and liver and intestines instead of her skin. Then the tickling turned into prickling, and it felt as if a thorn-bush were growing inside her, jabbing its spines into every last corner of her soft red flesh. She hadn’t known that it was possible to endure such agony without being rendered unconscious by shock and terror.

“Just be patient,” he said, infuriatingly. “It will pass. Your cells are coming back to life, Sheila. They’ve been half-dead for so long—much longer than your own meager lifetime. A metazoan body is just a single cell’s way of making more single cells, you see; sex and death are just means of shuffling the genetic deck, so that cells are capable of evolution. All metazoan cells are partly shut down—they have to be, to specialize them for specific physiological functions—but they can all be reawakened, wholly or partially, by the right stimulus.”

The pain abated, but not because her captor’s voice had soothed it away. It abated because the second drug had now completed its work, having been scrupulously ferried to every hinterland of her being by her dutiful bloodstream. It had taken time, but that phase was finished.

Sheila felt better, and not just in the way she usually felt better after feeling ill or depressed, which was only a kind of dull relief, like that obtainable by such proverbial means as ceasing to bang one’s head against a brick wall. She actually felt better, in a positive sense. It was a very strange sensation, by virtue of its unfamiliarity—but there were still three drugs to go.