Both of them ran to him. He was lying in the bed, rocking back and forth, his stomach bulging and puckering, a new system of sores visible on his neck and arms, his long back bent, and his head hanging low.
“How do you feel?” Levin asked in a whisper.
“It is inside me,” Nikolai said enigmatically but with extreme distinctness, screwing the words out of himself.
Levin took Nikolai to mean that lurking inside him was the spirit of death, which was determined to consume him.
“Inside me,” Nikolai said again.
“Why do you think so?” said Levin, so as to say something.
“Inside-inside-it wants to come out,” he repeated, as though he had a liking for the phrase. “It must come out. It’s the end.”
Marya Nikolaevna went up to him.
“You had better lie down; you’d be easier,” she said.
“I shall lie down soon enough,” he pronounced slowly, a great, thick pocket of flesh bubbling up from his torso. “When I’m dead.”
Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but the muscles twitched grotesquely from time to time on his forehead, living creatures dancing within the skin. Levin involuntarily thought with him of what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of all his mental efforts to go along with him he saw by the expression of that calm, stern face that for the dying man all was growing clearer and clearer that was still as dark as ever for Levin.
“Yes, yes, so,” the dying man articulated slowly at intervals, speaking with difficulty through a tongue that swelled and receded, swelled and receded.
“My God,” said Levin sotto voce to Socrates. “What manner of death is this?”
Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was still in the same condition. The sense of longing for his death was all felt by everyone now at the pitiable sight of the patient, writhing and moaning; all thought of capture, of the danger to the Class Ills, was forgotten in the face of such evident distress. Nikolai arched his back and gritted his teeth; he clutched at his pulsing stomach. Only at rare moments, when the Galena Box’s salutary hum gave him an instant’s relief from the pain, he would sometimes, half asleep, utter what was ever more intense in his heart than in all the others: “Oh, if it were only the end!” or, more ominously, “It is inside… it is inside… inside…” Occasionally, tired old Karnak plopped down on the floor and imitated his master’s agonized posture, his rusted end-effectors clutching across his dinged and dented midsection.
Such was the consuming horror of Nikolai’s suffering that when, on the tenth day from their arrival at the town, Kitty felt mildly unwell, Levin could not contain an anxious expression, which his wife immediately understood. “But you do not fear,” she began, choking back sobs, “that I have contracted Nikolai’s illness?”
“Of course not, dear. It cannot be so.” He gathered her to him for an embrace; only when he had brought her to bed and laid her down for a replenishing midday rest, did he carefully study her neck and forehead, for any signs of the terrible rippling that marked his brother’s flesh. But no; Kitty was untainted.
After dinner Kitty again donned her protective accoutrements and went as usual with her work to the sick man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled contemptuously when she said she had been unwell. That day he was alive with sores, his whole body covered with them, all of them throbbing and red like so many angry craters.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Worse,” he articulated with difficulty. “In pain!”
“In pain, where?”
“Everywhere.” He gestured to his body, covered in ulcerated divots and loose flaps of skin.
“It will be over today, you will see,” said Marya Nikolaevna. Though it was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed was very keen, must have heard. Levin said hush to her, and looked round at the sick man. Nikolai had heard; but these words produced no effect on him. His eyes, ringed though they were with tiny sores on his cheeks and eyelids, had still the same intense, reproachful look.
“Why do you think so?” Levin asked her, when she had followed him into the corridor.
“He has begun picking at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna.
“How do you mean?”
“Like this,” she said, scratching wildly at her arms and legs, as if clawing at something beneath the skin.
Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true. Toward night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to say the prayer for the dying.
While the priest was administering the blessing, the dying man suddenly buckled violently, his hands thrashing, his body contorting up and back, shaking like a bridge wracked by high water. The priest attempted to continue the prayer as the dying man thrashed madly on the bed, every sore on his body pulsing vividly; indeed, as he stretched and his eyes rolled madly in his head, the little sores started to spurt cobalt bile like hideous little dragon mouths spitting gouts of fire. The priest scrabbled for his Holy Book and desperately continued chanting, reaching forward with a tremulous hand to try and place the cross to Nikolai’s cold forehead, but the dying man was bucking forward and back, slapping at his stomach, which bulged forward to an obscene degree. He moaned terribly, and Karnak emitted an awful, high-pitched shriek of distress.
“It is inside,” cried Nikolai. “Inside…”
At that moment the door was kicked open, and two young and handsome men with regimental-grade smokers burst into the sickroom.
“We are representatives of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. We have come today to… dear Heavenly Father!”
For while the man was speaking, Nikolai sat bolt upright, and his skin tore clean from his body like the wrapping ripped from a Class I plaything, his flesh flying free and scattering about the floor of the room like paper and ash. All present, including the two Toy Soldiers, stood frozen as Nikolai Dmitrich issued his last gurgling scream before his head lolled backward at a terrible angle. The remains of his body were shook free like a useless husk: shook free by a hunched, slavering inhuman being, more than six feet in height, its flexing, green-gray exoskeleton rippling with knobby stubs. The monstrosity, now standing astride the sickbed, had some dozens of eyes, clustered around a jagged, reptilian snout ending in a crooked, dirty-yellow beak. A thick, scaly tail swept about the room, while four stubby arms, each ending in a grasping three-fingered talon, lashed out in various directions.
Levin cried out and threw himself in front of Kitty; the priest wept and murmured prayers into his beard. Tatiana leaped in a rapid jeté from where she had been hiding, along with Socrates, behind the curtain in the rear of the room-and landed on one of the Toy Soldiers.
“Ah! Help!” shouted the Toy Soldier, as the Class III, her normal pink hue tinged with furious orange, clawed at his eyes with her long, manicured groznium fingernails. “Help!”
His colleague was unable to respond: for, as the others watched, transfixed, the unearthly creature let out a high, shrieking war cry, bounded off the bed, flexed its gigantic claws in midair, and landed on the other Toy Soldier, who had only just gathered the presence of mind to raise the smoker and draw aim. Before he could fire, the beast snapped its beak shut on the man’s head like the jaws of a trap.
The monster reared back with the soldier’s body dangling limply from its mouth, smashed its fat tree trunk of a tail against the wall, and stomped off through the broken door.