The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (18 page)

The ex-Ph.D. had been measuring her condition with his uncannily skilful eyes. He had to get the timing right, but he was as adept at that as he had been at the mixing and the cooking. He had the third compound ready, and he lifted the whole flask up and swirling its contents around to make the vapor rise up from its neck.

This time, the effect was narcotic, or at least anesthetic. Sheila felt that she was falling asleep, but she didn’t lose consciousness, and she didn’t begin to dream. It was a little like getting high, albeit more in the crystal meth vein than a heroin kick, but it was quite distinct. For one thing, it didn’t seem that she was only feeling it in her head, or in her nerves. It seemed that she was feeling it in every organic fiber of her being, and then some. It made her feel much bigger than she was, and much more powerful—but not, alas, powerful enough to break the bonds that held her tight to the chair. Its anesthetic effect wasn’t dulling, or straightforwardly euphoric, but something that promised to take her far beyond the reach of pain.

It was, alas, flattering only to deceive. It hadn’t taken her beyond the reach of pain at all, but merely to some existential plane where pain came in different, previously-unknown forms. The fourth drug—the first one whose vapor was hot enough to scald the mucous membranes of her nasal passages and bronchi—was a real bastard. It gave her the migraine to end all migraines, visual distortions and all; it plunged a millions daggers into her flesh; it sent waves of agony rippling through her like sound-waves, as if she were imprisoned in a gigantic church bell smashed by a sequence of steel hammers—but the vibrations were silent, even though she hadn’t gone deaf.

She could still hear Sarmerodach rambling on, and make out every word in spite of her excruciation.

“You’ll begin to feel more yourself soon,” he said. “You’ll begin to feel Sheila slipping away, like the husk of a redundant cocoon. You’ll be able to sense your true being and personality—not well enough for a while to put a name to yourself, but well enough to know that you exist. You’ll be able to catch glimpses of the possibilities inherent within you—not just the power but the aesthetic sensibility, the awareness of the physiological transactions of hormones and enzymes, the ecstasy of the mitochondria and the triumph of the phagocytes. The agony is just a kind of birth-trauma, a necessary shock. As it fades, you’ll begin to sense what you truly are, and what you might eventually....”

The last word of the sentence died on his thin lips as the doorbell sounded again. This time, the repeated ring was swiftly followed by the sound of fists pounding on the door. No one shouted “Police!” though—what they shouted instead was: “Darren! We know you’re in there!”

The boys at the door didn’t have Sarmerodach’s uncanny powers of intuition. What they thought they “knew” was utterly false. Wherever Darren as hiding, it wasn’t at home.

As the white-haired man reached for his spoon again, with a hand that had begun, ever so slightly, to tremble. The sound of thumping fists was replaced by the sound of thudding boots. The door had far too little strength left in it to resist for long. It splintered, and crashed against the hallway wall.

Sarmerodach was already holding the spoon up to Sheila’s nose. Wisps of vapor were already curling up into her nostrils. She could already sense its exotic odor—which she normally wouldn’t have liked at all, but which somehow seemed, at this particular moment, to be the most wonderful scent she’d ever encountered.

Time seemed to slow down. The sitting-room door burst open in slow motion, and the boys stumbled through it in a bizarrely balletic fashion, floating with impossible grace as they got in one another’s way. Only one of them had a gun, but the other three had knives, and all four were ready for action.

There was something irredeemably comical about the way they stopped short as they caught sight of the scene unfolding before their eyes. Their jaws dropped; their eyes seemed actually to bulge.

Under normal circumstances, of course, they’d have threatened Sheila with their weapons. They’d have threatened to hit her, and then they would probably have slashed her face, not because she was being uncooperative in refusing to tell them where Darren was, but simply because they were pumped up and incapable of containing their violence. They might even have raped her, and told themselves afterwards that they were “teaching Darren a lesson”—but when they saw her tied up and helpless, apparently being threatened by a man
in a suit
, if only with a spoon, a different set of reflexes kicked in. Suddenly, Sheila was one of their own at the mercy of a feral bureaucrat.

Somehow, the tall man had crossed the estate with his briefcase without attracting sufficient attention to be mugged, but he wasn’t inconspicuous any more.

The members of the pack hurled themselves upon the outsider. At first, they probably only intended to kick the shit out of him—but three of them were wielding knives. The one with the gun never fired it; he, at least, still had a vestige of self-restraint. The others were not so intimidated by the talismanic power of their own armaments.

The killing would probably would have qualified as manslaughter rather than murder, even if it hadn’t seemed to its perpetrators to be a clear case of justifiable homicide; not one of the boys was capable of formulating an intention to kill within the very limited time at their disposal. Even so, the tall man was dead within a matter of seconds—down and out in ten, at the most, and well on his way to exsanguination after forty, by which time his heart had presumably stopped and his brain was no longer getting sufficient oxygen to function.

The spoon flew from his hand and disappeared from view, taking its cargo of aromatic pulp with it.

Sheila had been saved, in the proverbial nick of time. If the spoon had been held in place for ten seconds more....

* * * *

Sheila really had been saved, and she knew it. If she had breathed in the prescribed dose of the fifth perfume, she would have ceased to be herself and would have begun an inexorable process of becoming someone else.

She never believed, even momentarily, that she would actually have become one of the Immortals of Atlantis, ready to take command of her faithful slave and restore her sisters to life, in order that they could take over the world and save humankind from selfdestruction by means of benevolent dictatorship. She wasn’t
that
mad...but she knew that, however crazy or deluded Sarmerodach had been, he had been dead right about one thing. She wasn’t really the person she thought she was, and never had been. There really as a flab-free, cellulite-free, thinking individual lurking somewhere inside her, in the secret potentialities of her cellular make-up—a person who might have been able to get out, if only four pathetic rivals of Darren’s equally-pathetic gang hadn’t decided that it was his turn to be taken out in their lame and stupid drug-war.

Sheila had no idea who that latent person might have been. She certainly couldn’t put a name to her. One thing she did know, though, without a shadow of lingering doubt, was that all that hideous pain would somehow have been worthwhile, if only she’d been able to complete the ritual.

It was a ritual, she decided, even though it really was some kind of occult science, and not mere magic at all. It was an initiation ceremony: a symbolic process of existential transition, like marriage or graduation, but a million times better and more accurate.

Whether she had turned out to be one of the Immortals of Atlantis or not, Sheila knew, she would have become
somebody
. She would have become a butterfly-person instead or a caterpillar-person—or maybe, even better, a dragonfly-person or someone equipped with a deadly sting. She had not seen anything distinctly when she had sucked those first few wisps of vapor number five avidly into her aching lungs, but she had felt such a yearning for sight as she had never conceived before, or ever thought conceivable— and still did.

But she had lost the opportunity, probably forever.

The police came, and she told them what had happened, naming no names. For once, though, when the police had rounded up the usual suspects, the boys also condescended to tell the police, proudly, exactly what had what had happened. All the stories matched—which made the police furious, because they really wanted to put the boys away for something meaty, and knew full well that even a charge of possessing illegal weapons wouldn’t stick, in the circumstances. They would have liked to have put Sheila away too—for perverting the course of justice, if nothing else—but they knew that they wouldn’t be able to make that stick either, even though the victim had once been a respectable oceanographer before he had flipped his lid and gone utterly gaga.

In the end, the body was taken away. Sheila was kicked out of the flat, because it was a crime scene, and because the bloodstains and all the “miscellaneous potentially-toxic contaminants” would need the careful attention of a specialist cleaning-squad before the council could “deem it fit for re-habitation”. Darren couldn’t be found, but social services managed to locate Tracy so that she could be “temporarily rehoused”, along with her mother, in a single room in a run-down B&B.

In the twenty minutes or so before Tracy skipped out again to find somewhere less suitable to sleep, Sheila gave her a big hug.

“There’s no need to worry about me, love,” she said, unnecessarily. “I’m okay, really I am. But I want you to know, before you go, that I love you very much.”

There was, of course, much more that she might have said. She might have said that she also wanted her daughter to know that she was the flesh of her flesh, and that it was very special flesh, and that if ever a mysterious man came into her life who’d been messing about with ooze dragged up from the remote ocean bed, and had picked up some sort of infection from it that had driven him completely round the twist, then maybe she should show a little patience, because it would probably be Sarmerodach, reincarnate again and trying heroically to fulfill his age-long mission, just like the freak in bandages from The Mummy, but in a smoother sort of way. She didn’t, of course. It would have been ridiculous, and Tracy wouldn’t have taken a blind bit of notice.

Once Tracy had gone, though, and she was alone in her filthy and claustrophobic room, with the TV on for company but not really watching it, Sheila couldn’t help wondering whether there might be a glimmer of hope, not just for her and Tracy, or Darren, but for the whole ecocatastrophe-threatened world.

She decided, eventually, that she might as well believe that there was.

BETWEEN THE CHAPTERS

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

[
Genesis
3:23-24]

There had been no wind within the garden, but there was a wind without; Adam, who had never felt a chill, shivered as it stung him. Night within the garden had always been softly starlit, but the sky without was heavy with cloud and the darkness was almost total. Adam, who had only known the fear of the Lord God, trembled as new anxieties tormented him.

In the distance, a lion roared. Within the garden, the lion had lain down with the lamb until they were sent forth into the world bearing names, but Adam—who had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—knew that the lion and the lamb stood in a very different relationship without.

Adam had been put out of the garden beside one of the four branches of the river that divided within its bounds. Adam followed the river, because it seemed the natural thing to do. The river had direction, and direction was something he needed. He did not think to wait for the woman to whom he had finally given a name. He remembered, instead, that Lilith had been expelled before him, and he wondered whether he might be able to find her. Their parting had been his first sorrow. The Lord God had refused to explain why He had expelled her, but Adam suspected now that she might have tasted forbidden fruit before him.

Adam had never felt fatigue in the garden, but he soon became weary as he walked. He was thirsty, and drank from the river, but found the water foul. In the garden, its parent’s water had always been pure, but even the most perfect garden generates waste; Adam supposed that all four outflows must be equally polluted.

Dawn broke while he dozed, and the light woke him. Adam walked on. The cloud soon cleared, leaving him at the mercy of the blazing sun. He found bushes bearing fruit, and was able to appease his hunger, but the fruit was bitter. The fruit in the garden—which he had eaten purely for pleasure, never having felt hunger there— had always been sweet, but Adam was beginning to sense a pattern in the course of events.