"Dammit," she said, looking into the scope herself and gasping. "Don't you see the souls there? You're supposed to be the seer, the prophet, the parapsychological genius, Dr. Stroud. Can't you see what's before your eyes?" She was shouting, out of control.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Don't treat me like a child or a fool!"
"Kendra, something is not right here."
"Don't you think I know that!" She pushed him away and insisted he look again. "Look hard. Open up that mind of yours."
Stroud saw nothing more than the microbes he had seen earlier, but he said calmly, "Where did this come from?"
"Substance on the left is from Weitzel."
Stroud saw that it was identical to that on the right.
"Substance on the right is from Leonard."
"Leonard?"
"Yes. Dr. Leonard. From his ear. Stuff just seeped out of him." Stroud gasped, realizing it was from the beast.
"Do you see the eyes?" she asked.
"Eyes?" He raised his shoulders, unsure what she meant by this.
"Mouths ... noses, ears, pained faces? All tangled and swirling in that microscopic world?"
Stroud wondered how long it had been since she'd gotten any sleep. He wondered if she was hallucinating.
"I see Dante's Hell when I look into the microscope," she said. "Which means I've either caught the disease myself and am going mad, or ... or your supernatural theory is ... is true."
Stroud put an arm around her and said, "You need some rest. Let's get out of here. I'll see you home."
"No, first you've got to see this." She pulled away and went to a table with a clear container that sat over a burner. She heated the brown slime and gases immediately rose and swirled inside the large container, creating a swirling, angry cloud that seemed bent on escaping the container. In the swirls, Stroud saw strange shapes come and go, come and go. He thought he saw a hand but it was immediately replaced by a fingerlike extension that was swept away by something resembling a half-formed eyeball that quickly disappeared, replaced by a scalp, a foot, a chin.
"Do you see it now?" she pressed.
"I see something."
"That's not all," she said, turning off the heat and allowing the gas to dissipate, returning the substance to its original state. "Look at this."
She led him to a curtained window which was actually a viewing port for a chamber within the chamber of the isolation lab. A scraping of the substance had been placed on a steel slab inside the chamber.
"Watch," she instructed him, and then pressed a button that sent a shower of water down over the brown scum. The water hitting the material caused a steam to rise off it and there rose a yellow fog that discolored the pane before them. In the fog more shapes ... more souls, as she had termed them.
"Whatever this is, it takes an airborne form when it is heated, or when it comes into contact with H2O. It penetrates the skin in the form of dampness, enters at the pores and gets to the nerve endings, and finally to the brain, traveling along the neurological pathways."
"Sulfur trioxide, sulfonethylmethane, narcotic--"
"And we've found mephitis is also part of the potent poison."
"Mephitis? What is that?"
"A foul-smelling, poisonous gas emitted from the earth--"
"Like methane with a stench?"
"Enough to do some damage to the neurological processes."
"It's a miracle any of us came out of that pit alive, then."
"Your protective wear, the clear oxygen you were breathing saved you. Neither you nor the other archeologists received the kind of dosage that others have gotten. Somehow it's transmitted from one person to the next. We haven't learned the mystery behind its transmittal yet, but it would appear from our tests that those infected, with the normal body heat, breed the bacterial infection, and there is a kind of invisible-to-us gas created around their bodies. This disease is expired through their breathing, through their sweat, through their pores. We're all very much in danger..."
"It's a wonder I didn't get it from Weitzel."
"I've thought about that quite a lot," she said.
"And? Any conclusions?"
"Luck, or simply that Weitzel had to expend so much energy trying to strangle you as you say that he ... the thing inside him ... simply spent itself. Perhaps the spitting up at you was its last hope of infecting you."
"Then you are now willing to believe that something from inside Weitzel spoke to me?"
"Yes ... yes, I am."
She shut down the shower and soon the writhing cloud of yellow steam and the bizarre forms within it dissipated.
"Why? Because of what you see here?"
"That, yes ... but also something happened with Leonard, just before I injected him with the antidote."
"Would you like to talk to me about it?"
"Take another look in the scope now."
He did so, and this time he saw what had so frightened her. In the Weitzel sample there existed amoebas and bacteria skittering all about, but now in the Leonard sample the same creatures had strange, humanlike appendages and eyes. It so startled Stroud that he pulled his eyes away.
"You see it."
"It takes some staring, but yes ... I saw it."
"Like the souls of men on the head of a pin."
"And something wants us all to join it in its private hell."
She went about shutting down everything, including lights, putting away instruments, when Mark came in wearing protective wear and telling her that he would see to the "drone" work. She didn't argue, just cautioning him about the dispensation of the strange, gummy material that had seeped from two human beings, one dead and one alive. Stroud and Kendra Cline went through the decontamination unit and were soon on the other side of the isolation chamber. From outside, she said to Mark, "Be very careful in there. This thing is lethal."
"Go," he told her.
"So," she said to Stroud, "you still offering to take me home?"
"Absolutely, and on the way you can give me an update on Leonard. I don't suppose I could see him for a few minutes tonight?"
"He could still be contagious. We're watching him closely, and seeing you will only complicate our work. Maybe tomorrow."
"Fine, then perhaps you can tell me what happened between you and Leonard earlier to bring you around to a better understanding of why I was attacked by Weitzel."
"That I'd like to talk about, yes."
"I've got a car waiting downstairs."
She said her good-nights to the staff, telling them that by tomorrow she would be replaced, a bit of sourness in her tone. "Be good to the new man, or men in this case. They're both top-notch men on bacteriological and viral infections."
The others thanked her and wished her well. Everyone told her to get some sleep. Soon they were in the backseat of the squad car, whizzing to her hotel. Along the way, between yawns, she told him what had occurred moments before Leonard received his final dosage of a metal-plated shot. Stroud found the story very interesting, and when she finished he said one word.
"Mephistopheles."
"No, mephitis, I said mephitis before."
"I'm talking about the medieval legend of the demon that purchased Faust's soul," he explained.
Sleepily, she replied, "Ohhhhhh."
"The same demon gave his name in a play by Marlowe."
"Goethe," she corrected him.
"Marlowe as well."
"But that's stories, literature."
"It has always been curious to me that both Marlowe and Goethe gave their demon the same name, and he spoke in German when he needed to and English when English was called for."
"Literary figures," she mumbled.
"Or so it has always been supposed. I recently learned that Dracula was more than just a literary figure. Think of it ... before a few days ago who would have ever dreamed that an Etruscan ship lay beneath the largest city in the country, below Manhattan?"