When the door swung open, a gust of very cold air flowed out. Just when Marilee started to shiver, the gray-eyed god draped a full-length fur coat over her shoulders. He handed a like garment to Martin.
The three then entered the vault.
“Don’t you wear something?” Marilee asked Lythe.
“I don’t get cold too easy,” he said with a smile.
Along the left side of the vault was a twelve-foot-high glass-like cabinet with hundreds of shallow drawers.
“For seven years I did volunteer work for a medical facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was an interuniversity research lab that did autopsies on people with exceptional qualities: scientists, savants, athletes, and those with odd bodily quirks—”
“Like people that are impervious to cold,” Marilee suddenly realized.
“Just so,” Martin said. “When I became a trustee of the lab, I began harvesting cells from the best, the brightest, and the strangest specimens that humanity had to offer.
“I brought those harvests here and began to create cocktails for the next step in human evolution.”
“You experimented on poor people who came to you as a plastic surgeon,” Marilee accused.
“I started with dogs. Once I was able to transplant memories and thought processes, once I was able to successfully alter breeds, sizes, and senses — only then did I begin my work on humans.”
“But there must have been many failures,” Marilee challenged.
“Yes,” Martin Hull agreed. “And some of them suffered; some died. But as a rule they were people suffering serious ailments, like Lon Richmond. I always told those first guinea pigs what the potentials were — and what the dangers.”
“You call them ‘guinea pigs’?”
“What else can I say? I used them as test subjects, and a few score of them died.”
“Is that what happened to your wife?”
“She left before my tests began. I would have injected her in her sleep, but she ran off looking for happiness in Europe.”
“My mosquito bites,” Marilee said.
“You’re at least an inch and a half taller,” Martin said. “And that dress looks very tight on you.”
Before she knew what she was doing, Marilee slapped Martin, hitting him with such force that he fell to the floor of the vault. Then she reached down and lifted him with strength she’d never had before.
That’s when LeRoy/Lythe Moss/Prime grabbed her and pulled her out of the big repository of cadaver cells.
6
They met at a coffee shop on Prince Street in Greenwich Village. Marilee had left a simple message on Detective Wade’s home phone — “I have something” — and gave the address of the coffee shop.
“He has the cellular remains of dozens, maybe hundreds of corpses in his basement,” she said. “And, and, and he’s experimented on people, many of whom have died from his experiments.”
“What kind of experiments?” Wade asked.
“He injects them with parasites.”
“Oh my God.”
“He’s a monster.”
“Did he do anything to you?”
“No,” Marilee said. She was afraid to confess about her expanding body, about her once hazel eyes that were getting lighter each day.
“Will you sign an affidavit about what you saw in his basement?”
“Yes. Yes I will.”
The day that Dr. Martin David Hull was brought to trial, Marilee Frith-DeGeorgio crossed the Canadian border headed for Montreal. She was now six foot two, with pearl-gray eyes and skin the color of alabaster. When she moved into the small studio apartment in Montreal-South, she opened a document on her PFP web address. There were seven e-mails in her virtual mailbox. Six of these were from lovers who wanted to see her again; one was from lytheprime@everchanging.uk.
Dear Valhalla,
Velchanos has directed me to inform you that he bears you no ill will; that he understands why you had to betray him. He also wanted me to answer one question you asked and two you didn’t.
About the five injections: 1) is a collection of data-cell clusters culled from some of the most brilliant minds in the world, 2) are similar clusters that contain the equations to best manipulate this information, 3) is a growth formula that allows the body to reach what he calls our god-potential, 4) is a small cutting from a Miss Ota Wangazu who is the only known adult to have produced viable stem cells, and 5) are a few liver cells from different donors who never experienced a sick day in their lives.
Your first unasked question is: Why did he decide to become so involved with you? Velchanos says that he needed passion in his life; that he was guilty of playing God and needed the chance for forgiveness. On his first date with you he was only looking for temporary companionship, but after a month he saw in you his salvation. He hoped that by exposing you to his treatments and telling you what he’d done that you might, after considering everything, send him a card telling him your verdict.
And finally, a question you didn’t ask and maybe never even thought of: Why hasn’t Martin Hull grown and developed our gray eyes? He knew that he would be arrested and that there would be a worldwide witch hunt for his patients. He wanted no markers for treatments to be lifted from his body.
P.S. There are 12,306 surviving patients that received Velchanos’s treatments. They have all gone into hiding, both to keep away from the official investigation that must come and to continue the Revelation — our name for the great change that this process will ultimately cause. You should stay in hiding. Your betrayal will not protect you from detainment, interrogation, and ultimately vivisection.
I have destroyed the lab. Only the living bodies of our tribe can be used against us.
Rereading the letter, Marilee realized that it had been written, almost wholly, in Latin. She migrated to Australia, kept her ex-husband’s last name, and adopted Valhalla as given forename. She moved to the outskirts of Melbourne and there studied her mind and her body, looking for the deliverance of the human species.
Between Storms
After the storm had passed, Michael Trey just didn’t want to leave his apartment anymore. There was something about the booming thunder and the dire news reports, the red line across the bottom of every TV show warning residents to stay inside and away from windows, even if they were closed and shaded. Subway tunnels were flooded, as were the streets. The airports would be closed for the next four days, and the Hudson had risen up over the West Side Highway, causing millions of dollars in damage in Lower Manhattan.
The mayor interrupted TV Land’s repeat of an old Married... with Children episode to report that the National Guard had been called out.
President Obama had taken a train (a train!) to Manhattan to address New Yorkers everywhere, telling one and all that he had declared them a disaster. He wore a white dress shirt with thin green and blue pinstripes. He didn’t wear a tie, because he was getting down to business — that’s what Michael thought. Even the president was afraid of the havoc that nature had wrought.
It didn’t matter that the sun was shining the next day or that the skies were blue and cloudless. The storm, Michael knew, was hiding behind the horizon. And there with it was a hothouse sun, crazed terrorist bombers, and women with HIV, hepatitis C, and thoughts of a brief marriage followed by a lifetime of support. In North Korea they were planning a nuclear attack, and there was probably some immigrant on the first plane after the storm infected with a strain of the Ebola virus that would show symptoms only after he had gotten past customs.