The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (97 page)

I walked up to the cliff, the water lapping at my feet, the gun level at my hip, and there I found the cave. It opened behind the waterfall, an aperture some three feet high, completely hidden in the light of day unless one stood against the cliff face. The pool was slightly higher than the cave floor, and the water ran inwards, several inches deep. There was a smear of red against the angle of rock.

I had found far more than the creature’s waterhole, when I’d come to this cascade. I’d found its home.

Did it take a greater courage than I’d ever known I possessed to enter that black cavern, or were my senses and emotions too numbed with fever and excitement to feel fear? I know that I went into the Stygian darkness without hesitation, and that I felt very little at all. I simply did it, without thought or doubt. The only sensation I was conscious of was the water rivetting my neck and back as I stopped under it, and then I was kneeling in the cave. The floor rose and
the water penetrated only for a few yards. I shone the torch before me. It flowed well into the tunnel, but the blackness stretched on in the distance. It seemed interminable, and I had the sudden fear that it emerged again at some point and that the creature would escape me. The thought forced me on. I had to crawl for a few yards and then found it high enough to stand, crouching. It was narrow, my arms brushed against the sides, and it was straight. There was little danger. I had the torch and the gun and the creature could only come at me from the front. If I was forced to kill it, I would be able to. I didn’t want to, however. My anger at seeing my horse’s agony had lessened, I was more the scientist than the hunter once more. I determined that I would make every effort not to kill it; if I was forced to fire, my first blast would be aimed at its legs. But perhaps it was already dying, had crawled home to suffer its death throes alone. If that were true, it seemed brutal to pursue it, but there was no way to know, and I moved forward following the beam of light.

The walls were slimy with greenish moss, cracked with numerous narrow fissures where the mountain had moved in ages past. It was very quiet. My heavy soled boots made no sound on the stone, and the drops of blood underfoot became fewer and farther apart. The cave widened gradually as I moved into the depths, fantastic formations of broken rock emerged from the walls, pillars and trellises jutted up and hung down from floor and ceiling. I approached them warily, but there was nothing waiting behind. The tunnel continued to follow a straight course and it seemed I’d been walking a long time.

And then the light hit rock ahead, spreading out fluidly to both sides. I thought for an instant that I had come to a dead end, and then saw that the tunnel turned at right angles, a natural geometric angle following a fault in the solid stone. I approached the turning very slowly. If the creature were waiting for me, it would be here.

I stopped a few feet from the turn; held the torch under the stock so that I had both hands on the gun and the light followed the line of the barrels, took a deep breath, braced myself, and stepped out wide of the corner in one long stride.

I stopped dead.

The creature was not waiting there. There was nothing there. Nothing but a green metal door . . .

The door swung open, heavy on its hinges. Hubert Hodson said: “I expect you’d better come in.”

Hodson took the shotgun from me. I was too staggered to resist. I realized I’d passed completely under the mountain, and that we had inadvertently made our camp directly opposite Hodson’s house, separated by the unscalable cliff but connected via the tunnel through the rock; that the door he’d claimed led to a storeroom actually opened into the tunnel. I followed Hodson through the door, expecting to enter the laboratory, but in that respect I was wrong. There was a connecting chamber between, a small poorly lighted room with another green door in the opposite wall. That door was open and I could see the brightly illuminated laboratory beyond. Hodson closed the door behind us and turned the key. Heavy tumblers fell into place. He pushed me ahead of him, towards the laboratory.

A low snarl sounded beside me. I wheeled about, pushing Hodson’s hand from my shoulder, tensed and then froze. The creature was in that room. It crouched in the corner, behind heavy steel bars, watching me with comprehension and hatred. All the details instantly impressed themselves on my consciousness as a whole, a single, startling tableau. The bars fitted into the wall on one side, and were hinged so that they could be swung open and closed again, forming a cage with three solid rock walls. The creature was in the cage, only a few feet from me, a grotesque caricature of man. Its chest was rounded, its shoulders stooped and heavy, its arms long. Short, coarse hair bristled on its body, but its face was smooth and brown, wide nostrils flaring and small eyes burning beneath a thick, ridged brow. I saw a dark, damp patch on its side, a few spatters of blood on the floor, and standing between us, one hand on the bars, stood the old crone. She had turned to look at me, and her eyes glowed with malevolence, with a hatred more intense and inhuman than that of the creature itself.

The creature lunged at me. One huge hand tore at the bars and the steel sang with vibration. I started to shout a warning to the old woman, but it was not after her. It ignored her. It reached out, groping for me through the bars, snarling with broad lips drawn back. I backed away and Hodson touched my shoulder.

“Come. We mustn’t stay here. He knows you injured him and I wouldn’t trust even those steel bars if he goes berserk.”

“The old woman – ”

“She will be all right,” he said.

He pushed me toward the laboratory. The snarling became less violent and I heard the old woman speaking in some strange
language – speaking to the creature. And the second metal door clanged shut behind us.

Hodson took me to the front room, motioned to a chair and began searching through a drawer. I saw him slip a hypodermic needle in his pocket.

“You aren’t going to use that on it?” I asked.

He nodded and brought out a large box of medicinal supplies.

“A tranquillizer,” he said.

“But it’ll tear you apart if you get near.”

“The woman can manage it,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll be back when I’ve repaired the damage you’ve done.” He went back through the curtains. I sat down and waited.

Hodson returned, his shirt sleeves rolled up, poured two large drinks and handed me one.

“It wasn’t a serious wound,” he said. “He will live.”

I nodded. Hodson sat down opposite me. The drink tasted strange on my dry tongue, and my fever was returning. There were so many things I wanted to ask, but I waited for Hodson to speak first.

“So this is the proper study of man? To shoot man?”

“Is it man?”

“Assuredly.”

“It attacked my camp. It was killing one of the horses. We had no choice.”

He nodded.

“Quite so,” he said. “That is man’s nature. To kill and to have no choice.” He shook his head wearily, then suddenly laughed.

“Well, you’ve found my secret. Now what?”

“I don’t know. It’s still a secret. I’d like a chance to examine the creature.”

“No. That isn’t possible.”

“You’ve already examined it completely, I suppose?”

“Physically?” He shrugged. “I’m more interested in studying his behaviour. That’s why I’ve allowed him to run wild and unrestricted.”

“And yet it returns here? It comes back to a cage of its own choice?”

He laughed again.

“I told you. It is man’s nature to have no choice. It returns because it is man, and man goes home. That is a basic instinct. Territorial possessiveness.”

“You’re certain it is human?”

“Hominid. Yes. Absolutely.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

“It’s a bit late for secrets.”

“How can you be sure it’s human? Hominid? As opposed, say, to some new form of ape? What is the definition, what criteria are you using?”

“Criteria? There is so much you fail to understand. There is only one definition of man. I used the absolute criteria.”

I waited, but he didn’t clarify. He sipped his drink; he seemed to be waiting for my questions.

“You discovered it here, I take it?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“How long have you known about it?”

“For a generation.”

“Are there others?”

“Not at the moment.”

This was telling me nothing. I said: “Why have you waited so long, why keep this secret? What have you gained by you silence?”

“Time. I told you once before. Time is essential. I’m studying him as a man, not as a curiosity. Naturally I had to have time for him to mature. Who can gauge man’s behaviour by studying a child?”

“Then you found it when it was very young?”

“Yes. Very young indeed.”

He smiled strangely.

“And when did you determine it was human?”

“Before I . . . found him.”

“You aren’t making sense,” I said. “Why give me riddles at this stage? What is your definition of man?”

“I need no definition,” he said. He was enjoying this. He wanted to tell me, his irresistible urge to dumbfound his fellow scientists returned, his countenance livened.

“I didn’t exactly discover him, you see,” he said. “I know he is man because I created him.”

He regarded me through a long silence.

“You mean it’s a mutation?”

“A very special form of mutation. It is not a variation, but a regression. What little I told you on your last uninvited visit was true, but it wasn’t all the truth. I told you I’d discovered how to control mutation, but this went much further. In mastering mutation, I found it was the key to cellular memory – that the law of mutation be applied to unlock the forgotten replications.”

He finished his drink. His face was flushed.

“You see, cells forget. That is why we grow old, for instance. Our cells forget how to replicate youth. But this knowledge, although forgotten, is still there, in the same way that things a man forgets exist in his subconscious mind. Exactly the same, on a different level.
And as subconscious knowledge can be remembered under hypnosis, so the cells can be induced to remember by chemical treatment. And this, Brookes, is the very root of life. It may, among other things, be the key to immortality. We can teach our cells not to forget the replication of youth.” He shrugged. “But man, as he is, isn’t worthy of immortality, and I’m not interested in giving it to him. It will come. I am interested in man’s evolution, and I’ve applied my knowledge in that field. I am the first and only man who has seen evolution as it occurs. Brookes, I am the creator of my ancestor!”

There was more than enthusiasm in his face. There was something akin to madness.

“But how – ”

“Don’t you understand yet? I treated the parents, chemically affecting their genes so that they carried a recessed heredity. The offspring, the creature you have seen, is regressed back through aeons of time – carries the traits our cells have long since forgotten. I could possibly have taken it even further, back to the first forms of life, the single cellular creatures that existed in the dawn of life. But that, too, is of no interest to me. I limit myself to man.”

He took my glass, crossed the room and refilled it.

“How do you classify this creature?” I asked.

He sat down again, frowning.

“I’m not sure. The ancestor of a branch of modern man. Not our branch, perhaps, but a parallel line. Man as he may have been ten million years ago. Or five million years. Time is essential but indefinite.”

“And it was actually born of parents living today?”

“The father is dead. I’m afraid that his offspring – or his ancestor, whichever you prefer – tore his throat out several years ago.” He said this with clinical detachment. “The mother – did you wonder why the old woman could control it? Why it came back here when it was hurt? She is the mother.”

After a while I said, “Good God.”

“Shocked or surprised?” Hodson asked.

“Surely it can’t be right to create something so unnatural?”

He stared scornfully at me.

“Are you a scientist? Or a moralist? Surely, you know that science is all that matters. What does that old crone matter? What are a few dead sheep? Or a few dead men, for that matter? I have seen the behaviour of one of man’s ancestors, and isn’t that worth any amount of suffering?” He was talking rapidly, gesturing with both hands, his eyes boring into me.

“And the further possibilities are countless. Perhaps, with time to work in peace, I will learn to reverse the process. Even that. Perhaps
I will be able to progress cellular memory. To sidestep evolution. The knowledge must already be there, the cells simply haven’t learned it yet; they learn it gradually as they forget the old knowledge. But it’s there, Brookes. It was there when the first life crawled out of the sea. The future and the past, side by side. Think of it! To create man as he will be a million years from now!”

I was in two minds, on two levels. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not on the superficial scale, but deeper, where I couldn’t help but believe, magnetized by his voice, my reactions were divided again. The fact, and the possibilities, were wonderful beyond comprehension, but the details were appalling, the use of human beings in this experiment grotesque. To think of a living woman giving birth to that monstrosity in the cage was abhorrent. Perhaps, in some ways, I was a moralist, and certainly scientific interest struggled against a surge of repulsion.

“Think of it!” Hodson repeated, his eyes turned inwards now as he thought of it himself. His knuckles were white, tightening on his glass. He had been profoundly affected by this opportunity to speak of his discoveries, the overpowering urge to break the silence of twenty years. We had been talking for some time. A grey early light blocked the window; a bird was singing outside. In the surrounding hills day was breaking, day creatures awoke and night creatures slunk back to their warrens and dens, following the ways of nature, oblivious to the ways of science. But science was overtaking nature. I lighted a cigarette and drew the harsh smoke deeply into my lungs. I knew it wasn’t a good thing, and it went far deeper than outraged morality.