Dead Human Ape -- A dark tale of evolution

 

Hemsly Durront felt the exam room spin. The steel shelves and white walls contracted at perpendicular angles. They look like mouths, he thought; and on the heels of that: Is the world just one big mouth? He massaged his temples and fought for his voice. “Can’t you do something?”  

“No.” The doctor spoke as if asked whether or not he’d eaten lunch—a composite of mortal facts condensed to a syllable. “I’m afraid the condition is quite aggressive.” 

Hemsly sunk within the eye of the hurricane. He saw his father mounted on his prized Belgian, strapped in ancestral leathers, whispering to an eight-year-old Hemsly in the hush of dawn. “This land made us what we are. It giveth and taketh away. Nature, son. We’ve harnessed it, but the bargain isn’t sealed; never sealed. The land owns us. One day it will digest us.” And here his father hunched forward in the stirrup, a rifle laid across the table of his forearm; a boom, a barrel flash, and the big buck twisting across the field, lumbering twenty paces before burying its antlers in the loam. “…In the mean time, it’s made us rich. So honor it. One day you’ll return to it. And the earth remembers.”

“Mr. Durront?” The doctor’s voice bounced as if through caves of dripping stone. “Drink this.” 

When Hemsly opened his eyes, the room had stopped spinning. He took the cup of water, cheap, thinly waxed, DIXIE printed in small blue script up its side. For twenty-thousand pounds they should have served him from a golden chalice. His arm lifted mechanically, deposited liquid that tasted of molecular rust.   

The doctor waited with all the earnestness of a pall bearer. Waited for what, Hemsly wondered? For him to speak? To ask more questions that could be balled like paper and crushed with another simple no. 

“I was assured you were the best.” 

“Even the best have their limits. The disease’s rarity is matched only by its research funding. It’s simple economics, Mr. Durront. A man of your means must know a thing or two about that.” 

“Supply and Demand.” 

“Quite right.” The doctor went to the light board, where an X-Ray of Hemsly’s torso was lit. The ribs themselves looked as if a spider had gone to weaving silk between each splint. “FOP—or fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva—is a mutation in your body’s repair mechanism. Instead of supplying injuries with endothelial cells, a genetic override is initiated to replace them with mesenchymal stem cells.”

“Now again, in English.” 

“Of course. Bone, Mr. Durront. A secondary skeleton. Those clusters on your X-Ray are nascent osseous matter. It’s…” Here the doctor leaned close with reverence, lips parting, as if he wished above all else to lick the image. “…Incredible. And rare. I’ve never seen it develop so late. By age ten, the sufferer usually notices nodules. Apoptosis, you see. Regulated cell death. But here you’ve lasted thirty-two years. It’s just … so … fascinating.”   

Hemsly wondered if the doctor was asexual. He envisioned this man combing medical texts as if they were pornography. And this made him think of his own sexual appetites. How many more would there—could there—be? 

“How long do I have? Before the limitations begin?” 

“You should have already started to notice. This is bad news, I understand, but you should be grateful for the life you’ve lived. And one of such luxury. The life expectancy of patients with FOP is forty years with proper treatment and care. But again, this late formation raises too many questions to answer. The condition could speed up instead of manifesting gradually, as is normally the case. The data is insufficient. There’s no suitable timeline I can—” 

The rage came black and powerful. His hand was on the doctor’s throat before he could stop himself. “Why the hell am I paying you if you can’t,”—he slammed the doctor’s head against the light board—“answer,”—another slam—“my questions!”

The doctor collapsed to the floor in a heap. His bottom lip was quivering. He looked at Hemsly as if the Devil now occupied the exam room, skin blackened, warm red light radiating from scaled and furling wings. 

“How long?!” Hemsly’s breath came in burning gusts. He lowered himself into a hunker and pulled the doctor’s pen from his pocket. Then oriented the ballpoint an inch from the doctor’s socket. “Give me a number.” 

“Six months,” the doctor whimpered. “Maybe three.” 

“Is it six? Or three?” He pressed the pen into the flesh beneath the eye, watched it dimple. 

“Three! Three months. Now please…” 

Hemsley stood and pulled the radiology film from the light board. It detached with a snap. “I paid for this.” 

When he was at the door, the doctor called, “You’ll be hearing from my barrister!” 

Hemsley turned. Felt the muscles in his face fix into the postured choreography of a jackal’s grin. “You’ll want to think that through. You know who I am. How I treat obstructions.”

“Are you threatening me?” 

Hemsly shrugged. “Who would begrudge one less impotent doctor in the world? Certainly not I.” 

Then he exited through a lobby filled with gaping faces and met his driver at the double glass doors. Another storm had struck the countryside. Black cells gravid with lightning chewed at the horizon. Hemsly allowed his driver to hold the umbrella as they made their way to the car. The storm would pass. But whatever sunlight had once shone in Hemsly Durront had surrendered to eternal night. 

***

For a month he awoke in cold sweats, panting, the weight of the world pressing on a ribcage where he could feel new structures hardening like resin. Things that had once brought joy stood ragged before the looming eclipse of fatality. Women? Mere flesh. Money? An agreement of paper with no real value beyond society’s willingness to recognize it. Family? His father, the only man he’d ever feared and respected in equal parts, had died of colon cancer, bequeathing the Durront Dynasty to Hemsly. He did have Ellington, his driver and bodyguard. Ellington who’d once garroted a diplomat from Berlin after discovering the man meant to expose certain corporate inconsistencies in the Durront shell corps that would have likely resulted in criminal charges, not to mention a grueling parliament interrogation. One friend in all the world was some small comfort. 

But not nearly enough.   

He had visited other doctors—experts, Hemsly thought with a scoff—but their diagnoses had been codified into a type of detached condolence. On his blacker, more paranoid, days he wondered if the first doctor had phoned his colleagues, warning them against Hemsly's impending visit. But no. That was foolish. No legal action had come of that first visit. But neither had a clear path to a cure. 

There was nothing to be done. He was to refrain from exercise, as muscular regeneration would likely result in superfluous skeletal growth. He was to refrain from moving and living. He was to exist as if in a bubble. 

It was imprisonment. 

“Call it what you want, Mr. Durront. If you bull forward, you’re signing your own death warrant. I wish there was a number you could write in that checkbook that would fix you. But there isn’t. Money doesn’t buy life. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and I’m sorry this is the path you must walk to grasp that.” The doctor who’d said this was missing. Ellington had nodded cooly when, one morning, Hemsly happened upon his picture in the London Times and mentioned the coincidence. Loyal, quiet Ellington always knew what to do and when to do it. 

Hemsly had marked the countdown to three months on his calendar. Thick red X’s marching closer and closer to his doom. He rose now from a carven four-post bed large enough to sleep seven and walked to the bay window of his estate. The sky was pissing. He saw the green swell of hills in the distance. Black tendrils of rainfall diffused like ink beneath the clouds. He should go somewhere sunny. Somewhere he could die to the rhythmic crash of tides. He was alone here. Ellington, loyal as he was, could do little to engender a feeling of company in the nineteen empty rooms. 

“Yes,” he whispered. “I’ll go to Greece. Maybe Mykonos. Corfu. I’ll bed everything I can get my hands on. Eat and drink to my heart’s content.” But it could not blur the crisp image of death. An image he saw when he closed his eyes: of him rolling a boulder up some rising circular road until the muscles cramped and hardened, until the hands grafted to the rock they held, and the stone absorbed him.

***

The letter came on a Tuesday. The sun shone dully through sheets of mist. Ellington entered the study, where a fire raged in a hearth the size of a small garage. The room was bulwarked with thick mahogany shelves, stocked with books Hemsly had never read. Will never read, a small voice whispered. 

Ellington nodded his good morning. “Can I get you anything?” 

“A new body.” He took the letter and stared at it. On instinct his eyes ticked up, locking with the glass implants of a mounted White Ibex his father had killed in the mountains of Afghanistan. The lips had been sewn open to reveal the yellow splints of teeth. Hemsly lifted his own lips back at it, as Ellington turned to leave. 

“Actually, Ellington, if you don’t mind...” 

His bodyguard turned and waited.

“Bring some brandy.” 

“Right away, sir.” And Ellington disappeared. 

Hemsly stared at the letter for a long time, still thinking himself half-mad. To have edged himself up to this last resort could only mean the stress had gone to work dissolving his reason. He was a man who speculated only when the odds leaned in his favor. His father had taught him that a king was only as good as the men whom carried his litter. Hemsworth Durront Sr. had built their empire on livestock. But it was his father’s team—those fabled carriers of the litter—who’d made the heavy acquisitions in oilfields and mines. Hemsworth senior had falconed and bred his horses until the day he died. There’s was an old blood tied to the land; it only seemed fitting the land would reciprocate from its veins, its flesh, to honor its loyal supplicants. 

A knock on the table caused Hemsly to jerk. 

Just Ellington, setting down a decanter and a glass, both items pinched in long powerful fingers. They were a surgeon’s hands, equal parts crudity and elegance. Ellington flattened his white housecoat and crossed his thick arms. “Will there be anything else?” 

“Yes.” Hemsly tapped the unopened letter nervously against the table. “You knew my father well.”

“Better than my own.” 

Hemsly smiled. “He had a way of taking broken things and somehow making them forget they were broken.” 

Ellington stared at the fire as if it were a portal into memory. “He taught me everything I know. Rescued me from Beirut. They would have hanged me.” 

“I love that story. Do you mind?” 

“Not much story, I'm afraid. There we were, working, when your parents pulled up alongside us in a jeep. A goatherd was blocking the road and they were forced to wait. The prisoners had never seen a woman so beautiful as your mother. And those men, such as they were, were little more than barbarians. They were lewd. Said things. Terrible things. Then one reached for her. The jeeps had no doors, you see. Before he could touch her, I wrapped the chain around his neck and strangled him. He would have died if your father hadn’t stopped me. 

“He placed his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I think he’s learned his lesson. Mercy, my boy.’ He spoke in my tongue. Perfect. As if he’d been raised in the desert. And that, more than the fact I had never been touched by an Anglo who didn’t regard me as an animal, transformed me right there in the road. Your father intervened when the guards began to beat me. Soon they were unloading a chest from the Jeep’s trunk. The guard was looking at your father as if he’d just traded rubies for scat. He took me to his hotel, bathed me, clothed me, then gave me a choice. I could go back to a land that would likely destroy me. Or I could come to work as his helper. He had the dignity not to call it servitude—and never did. As long as he lived, he referred to me as his helper. Your mother was pregnant with you then. And six months later, in the Scotland estate, I washed the birthing sheets while the halls echoed with your cries.”

Hemsly sipped the brandy he had poured during Ellington’s story, feeling a deep ache for his father’s strength, his inborn ability to read the winds of life and chart the fleetest course. “My condition,” he finally said. “What do you think he would say? About my intentions?”

Ellington thought for a long time. “Your father was wise enough to not think with his own mind. He saw from many angles. I do not think he would be as disapproving as you seem to be. I think he would want you to exhaust every resource before you gave in. I should have died in Beirut. But fortune has not fooled me, young master. The rope still waits. I have eluded it. But it is patient. I have seen things no one in my village could believe. I have travelled the world. Because I made a choice. I think the rope you keep at bay will only be stayed by the choices you now make.” 

“You don’t think I’m weak?” 

“The same lion that lived in your father lives in you.” 

“Thank you, Ellington. That will be all.” 

Again, when Ellington was at the doorway, Hemsly called after him. “Why did you abandon your birth name? Would you not rather I call you Muhammad?”

Ellington went very still until he appeared as lifeless as the grinning Ibex on the wall. Finally, his nostrils flared. “I like Ellington, sir.” 

“But why? It is your name.” 

“It was my name, young master,” Ellington corrected. “The boy Muhammed died in the desert.”  

***

Whenever Hemsly passed the study, he never failed to notice the letter. Sometimes he would pause above it, observing the peculiar way it obscured the table's inlayed surface: a mosaic of Balkan herdsman spearing an elk. With the spears covered by the envelope, the strain of each man’s face before the rearing hooves painted a picture altogether darker. The antique had been acquired from a dead Prussian Baron in an estate sale, if Hemsly’s memory still served. But he was no longer sure. With alarming rapidity, vast holes had punched themselves into the tapestry of his experience. A type of rot or thrush. 

No, he thought later, wandering the courtyard and its algae-blanketed pools. Not thrush, but stone. Calcification. My memory is a window. And the window is closing.  

The tightness in his chest increased with each passing week. 

Doctors came and went; charlatans, too. Despite his best effort to keep the condition secret, one of the specialists with whom he’d inquired must have let slip the biting irony that the heir of the Durront Fortune had dropped in, seeking miracles no amount of money could procure. By month four, they came in swarms, sometimes pairing with one another: Eastern with Western Practitioners; Spiritual Healers with Nutritionists; even a self-claimed Lebanese wizard. We can heal you, they’d say. We can make you whole.  

Of everything, this was the cruelest blow. To be superior in realms financial, educational, and societal, and yet be doomed to the slow compaction in the vise of one’s own flesh. 

By month five, he could no longer exercise. It was as if some devil had opened his joints and packed the flexible tissues with glass. The slabs of muscle fostered by an early life of fieldwork began to waste. Exostoses in his solar plexus made deep breathing impossible. He grew fatigued walking short distances. Standing was agony. Living was agony.

In a fit of madness, he stripped naked and wandered the courtyard, laughing at his wasted figure in each passing greenhouse window. There were nodes beneath his skin—just subtle enough to dismiss but so proliferative that, once seen, he could not look away. He stood for hours, tracing their arrangement, as if their configuration might hold some clue of salvation. When night came, he raved by moonlight, envisioning the twisted, bulbous changeling he would become. Sometime before dawn, he collapsed. 

Ellington emerged from a shady recess where he’d been watching and swung Hemsly over one powerful shoulder, humming a dirge as he carried his dying master through the fog.    

***

In bed, Hemsly groaned through spoonfuls of broth. “There’s no point in eating. I should let this run its course.”

“There is strength in you yet, young master.” 

“In my heart, yes. But my body? It’s dying.” 

“Is it not the nature of the body to die?”

“It’s easy to philosophize from a perch of perfect health. The doctor said six months. It’s only been five. It’s…” He sipped another spoonful of broth and spat it back into the bowl. “This is awful. Why is it so bitter? Take it away.” 

Ellington set the spoon in the bowl with otherworldly patience. “Have you given more thought to the letter?” 

The letter. He’d almost forgotten—but only with the dignified part of his brain. The restless animal part had never let its eyes fall from the object. Ellington licked his lips, felt the strange new ridges along his gumline. “No,” he finally said. “Not really.”  

Ellington stirred the broth, eyes fixed on the roiling steam. “Who sent it?” 

“That’s hard to say. There was no return address. No stamp. It just appeared. Well, that’s not entirely true, now is it? Certain inquiries were made. But then, maybe it’s all autosuggestion. A type of therapeutic mechanism to instill the failing organism with hope. Only there’s nothing at the end of that tunnel but smoke. Illusions like— God, listen to me, I’m rambling. Have you ever known me to ramble?” 

Ellington shook his head. 

“It’s eating me alive. My thoughts. My composure. Isn’t it bad enough my body’s filling with burrs? That every time I move I feel the scrape of hooks in muscle? No. God remains unsatisfied. He’s hungry, Ellington. Perhaps the only being with a greed to rival my own. If competition’s what he wants, he’ll damn well get it. But he won’t enjoy his meal without a fight.”

“You were telling me about the letter.”  

“Guiding me back to the point, are you? Like a toddler wandering too close to the street?” Hemsly felt the fire rising, his breath coming hot, the smoke behind his eyes making the bedside light go dim. “AM I SO PATHETIC YOU FEEL THE NEED TO—” But the rest shattered in a cough so violent his arms jerked stiff and knocked the bowl of broth into Ellington’s lap. 

When the white filaments faded from Hemsly’s vision and he could breathe again, Ellington bent over the bedside with a poultice. Hemsly glanced at the dark stains on Ellington’s housecoat and trousers. “I apologize. I’m not myself.” 

Ellington nodded once. “Tell me about the letter, young master.” 

“Why is it so important to you?” 

Ellington considered, dipping the poultice in aromatic water before replacing it. “I have seen you negotiate with dangerous men. Powerful adversaries. For you, they were easy prey. You’ve never been afraid. It’s a trait your father instilled in both of us. But that letter. It scares you.”

Hemsly looked out the window. It was raining again. The snows would be here soon. And how would his body fair then? Would he stay in this room, watching ice form on the panes while his bones mirrored the same molecular process? Would he die here, limbs splayed and stiff, a drying starfish? 

“The letter is an invitation. At least, I think that’s how it works.” 

“To where?”

“I’m not sure. A place. A meeting.” 

“And this scares you?” 

He met Ellington’s eyes. “It’s a last resort.”

“Is the road before you so dark you must exhaust all other options?” 

“The Moroccan, Jezbar. You remember him?” 

A shadow swept across Ellington’s face. “How could I forget.” 

The Moroccan had once been thought to be an ancillary button-pusher for important officials in the European Banking Complex. Certain offshore acquisitions, quite lucrative at the time, had been out of reach to Hemsly and his litter carriers. The cause, these Bankers claimed, was Jezbar: a speculative genius with ties to organized crime and older, stranger fraternities. They’d referred to Jezbar as an unfortunate obstruction to Hemsly’s pursuits. And so, when he’d sent Ellington to dispatch the nuisance and instead discovered his bodyguard near death in a Parisian alleyway, Hemsly had organized to meet Jezbar in person. 

To kill him, of course. 

On a rooftop cafe overlooking the Parthenon in Athens, Jezbar affected an otherworldly aloofness, as of one foot being firmly moored in some other, darker plane. He smiled often and in a way that engendered Hemsly with a feeling of being weighed and measured for a particularly tasty meal. They came to foster an immediate respect for one another, two veteran lions unwilling to expend the energy or risk of battle.  By the second course, Hemsly discovered his banking contacts had not been in charge of, but indebted to, Jezbar. Not only had the snakes almost cost him his most valuable bodyguard; they’d manipulated his greed in hopes it would cut their only leash. Hemsly offered to kill each one of them on principle. But the Moroccan smiled and said, “Bring them to me instead. Alive. There are worse things than death, Mr. Durront.” 

“We’ve stayed in touch over the years,” Hemsly went on. If Ellington was offended by his continued correspondence with the man who’d almost killed him, he didn’t show it. “Does that bother you?” 

“My post is bound by loyalty. A post cannot be bothered, young master.”

Hemsly could not help himself. As a child he had goaded his father’s workers, seeing how far they could be pushed. He’d found there were limits to all men. And it occurred to him now he had never seen Ellington’s. “We’ve never discussed what happened to you in Paris.” 

Ellington set his jaw. “The Moroccan tried to kill me. He did not succeed.” 

“How did it happen?” 

“I was quick but he was quicker. There is little else to tell.” But for a moment—just one—Hemsly had seen a spark of unease in Ellington’s eyes. 

“Tell me what happened. That’s an order.” 

Ellington smiled coldly. “If I discuss this, you discuss the letter.” 

“I think you’re confusing your role in this arrangement.” 

“No doubt it is the same confusion many slave owners suffered in the days proceeding the great revolts. When suddenly their human cattle was at their bedside with a razor pressed to their throat.” Ellington raised to his full height for effect. “You’ve never belittled me, young master. It’s best you don’t start now. Your father released me two years before he died. Were you aware of that?”

Hemsly was unafraid. Rather he marveled at the self-command taking shape before him. “No.” 

“I have my own bank account,” Ellington went on. “With enough to feed my village for a lifetime. I stay because you are my family. And this family has always held true to the tenants of gentlemanly conduct.” 

Hemsly was smiling. “Yes, old boy. Quite right. Forgive me my explorations of the psyche at your expense.”

“No need for apology, young master. Do you agree to the terms? The letter for my exploits in Paris.”

“Yes.”

“And do you agree to accept my explanation, no matter how concise or voluble?”

“Yes.”

Ellington nodded. Sat back down and crossed his legs. “I killed him. Shot him in the alleyway. Twice. Here,”—he pressed a finger to his sternum—“and here.” He tapped the hollow of his neck with a finger. “Hollow-point rounds. .45 caliber. They made exit wounds the size of fists. Wounds no man could survive.” Ellington shook his head. “When you met in Greece, did he show any signs of the encounter?”

Hemsly felt cold. He shook his head slowly. 

“He had no pulse when I felt for it. I dragged him behind a rubbish bin, glanced to be sure no one was watching, and began my walk to the courtyard, when I was blindsided. Something lifted me as if I were made of straw, crushing at the same time. My skull, my ribs, my joints—I heard them crackling. I use the word something because there were no arms or legs or breath or even the scent of sweat or cologne. No footsteps or noise. The force was constructed of the air itself.” 

Hemsly was shaking his head. “The surgeon said you must have been hit by a truck. The bruises. The injuries—”

“There was no truck, young master. But perhaps there was no man, either.” 

“What are you saying?” 

“The one you know as Jezbar is a djinn. Or at the very least, in league with one.”

Hemsly recalled the mystique and guarded posture, the way Jezbar’s pale gray eyes had never seemed to blink, even as cigar smoke roiled up before them. When he finally came back to himself, Ellington was rising with the bowl and spoon. “Where are you going?” 

“To bed.” 

“What about the letter? We made a deal.” 

But Ellington was already walking away. 

***

The next morning, all nineteen rooms were empty. Hemsly walked the grounds with his father’s cane, calling into the fog. When finally he reach the garage, he saw the Wraith was missing from its spot. He made his own breakfast, wheeled it into the study, and ate beneath the Ibex, watching the firelight dance in its eyes. 

Twice, he reached for the letter. 

And twice set it back down. 

He would wait for Ellington. He would speak aloud about the things thus stopping him from this final plunge. He would recall in vivid detail the dreams of him cavorting with unspeakable creatures through a land of snow and fire; how his skin peeled to birth tendrils with which to navigate the fissured landscapes; and how others, with anatomies too horrible to describe, navigated themselves with the same prehensile biology. 

But Ellington didn’t return. Not that night. Or the next. Hemsly called the County constable with whom he had discreet relations. An all-points-bulletin was put out on the Wraith with no luck. “It’s like the earth swallowed him up,” the constable remarked over tea. “A strange fellow, your servant.” 

“He’s not my servant,” Hemsly corrected. “He’s as an elder brother to me.” 

“Who waits hand and foot on ye?” The constable laughed, a crude, apish sound. “That’s rich. Wish I had a brother like that, meself.”

Hemsly saw the constable out, hating the way that, even with potbelly and bowed legs, he was able to walk without gritting his teeth. “We’ll let you know if we hear anything, Mr. Durront. I could reach out to Interpol if you’d like. Made a few friends there over the years, I have.”

“That won’t be necessary, Constable. I have my own friends.”

“Course you do.” He paused with a smile, the jaw hanging slack, ferret eyes darting from point to point along the trees encircling the driveway. “Awful big place to be up here alone. I could send a patrol by if you need anything. So quiet this time of year. It’ll make them remember they have a job.”

“I appreciate the offer, but again—that won’t be necessary. Take care now, constable. Please call immediately if he’s spotted.” He shut the door with a firm clap before the man could answer. 

Hemsly tucked the letter under his arm and went to bed, telling himself he would read it—at least, open it so he could see that it was real and not the ghastly myth his mind had made of it. He took a decanter and stoked the brazier by his bedside. It was a crude antique, requisitioned from a North Umbrian church. He’d thought often of replacing his father’s relics with contemporary equivalents. But there was something about the company of things that had survived so many human cycles that made him feel powerful. 

“I miss you, you know,” he said to the air. Was it his father he was talking to, or Ellington? Maybe both. The domesticated Arab had spent enough time with Sir Hemsworth to have absorbed his long silences and carefully-chosen responses. “Why did you go? Where did you go?”  

A sudden cannonade of thunder stomped its way through the western valleys. The storm built in his joints, in the new joints carving themselves into existence. He threw back the blankets and rolled up his night pants, prodding the aching lumps along his shins. His patellae had transformed to bulging sea urchins. One hard spill would be enough to punch the spurs up through his skin. He should have been confined to a wheelchair by now. His walks, painful or not, were the only things keeping him limber. Not the movement itself, but his will to make it. And how long would that last? How long until the well went dry? 

His eyes rolled to letter on the night table. It had been foolish and cruel to goad Ellington the way he had. Only he’d felt so weak, so useless, the temptation of psychological battle had bewitched him. Ugly as it was, he’d experienced joy in watching Ellington’s placid face erupt in that single fissure. To know that he had done that. And only with his mind. 

He wondered what Sir Hemsworth would tell him, desired it with such fierceness he could almost hear the warm rumble of his father’s brogue. A boy strikes out when he is afraid, Hemsly. It is a man’s game to calculate before deciding. You were a boy with Ellington. 

“But not so with the letter,” he said to no one. 

Aye, the letter too. You’re afraid.   

“Of what?” 

It being your last chance, and that chance being a failure. Opening that letter is your eleventh-hour. And what if there’s nothing there?  

That was true, of course. In a way, some deep part of him had known his other efforts would fail. That he would be reduced to the occult. And so what? Was it possible all of the hermetic aristocracy were nothing more than drunken patricians grown bored with the delicacies of the mortal coil? Were there truly rituals passed down from the earth’s first tribes, or only dark follies that masqueraded for heresy in laymen circles? It was easier to imagine them as fools dressed in cloaks, cavorting over a whore paid double to let them paint her with oxen blood. Candles and incense and primitive appetites. But to witness something real, something actual… the idea set his nerves ablaze with wonder.

How long will you last? Here in this room. Alone. How long will you motivate yourself to rise and eat and move?

“You’re alone,” he whispered. “You’re crippled. Your money is of no use. You have no wife, no family, no heirs. What are you waiting for? You’re already dead!” 

Hemsly tore the letter open and coughed against the bloom of whitish powder. It was an earthy smell. Of land gone to wild and decay. 

SIR HEMSLY DURRONT was writ in an elegant hand on the front of embossed stationary. It spoke of class and culture—a thing his father might send for a formal event. He unfolded it and read:

A cordial invitation  

To be reborn

through the lens of the zoopaxiscope

November 4th

“November 4th is tomorrow…”

The thunder beat like war drums, closer now, and hiding right behind, maybe within it, was the overwhelming pressure of puppet strings coiled tightly about his body. A flick of the finger, a twist of the wrist, watch Hemsly dance for his salvation.  

It was preposterous—and yet he’d had the letter for months. No logic could reduce the paranoid urge that the invitation would have held an earlier date had he opened it sooner. Was it possible it had changed within the darkness of the envelope? 

He retrieved his reading glasses from the night table and studied it. The card stock was marbled with rust-colored tendrils, so intricately mapped they appeared solid from a distance. Their texture left an oily residue on his fingers.

He flipped it over. On the bottom left corner was this:

Burn to RSVP 

Hemsly began to laugh. It leapt from the hollows of his slowly calcifying skeleton and filled the room. For a moment it rivaled the thunder. Then his teeth snapped shut. His breath came in short, whistling bursts. Though he could not see it, his face held all the calculation of a man staring over the cliff off which he plans to hurl himself. 

“Damn your fear!” 

He cast the invitation into the brazier. It ignited as if doused in kerosene. The small red tendrils pulsed like the capillaries of an eye between flame that burned with the shifting colors of the aurora borealis. Ashes swirled into the air. He held his breath as the cinders settled along his bed, had a vision of his thrashing body engulfed in flames, then eased himself  into the pillows as each flake went cold and black. 

“Cold and black,” he crooned. “Like your heart, old boy. Like the fingers some embalmer will lace atop your belly before they box you up and feed you to the land.”

There was a comfort in that. To know it was over, that his fight was at its end.

***

Ellington was sitting in the leather lounger when Hemsly opened his eyes. The storm had shifted above them in the night. All was darkness but for the soft red light. Rain lashed the windows in sheets. It looked like blood.

Hemsly rubbed his eyes. “Is that you, Ellington?”

“Who else were you expecting, young master?” Ellington glanced at the night table. “I see you’ve opened it.” 

“Where have you been?” 

“I went to think. About you. And the future of things.”

“Did you come to any conclusions during your abandonment?” 

Ellington nodded, his eyes opaque as stones. “I’ve decided to help you. Even if it means building the gibbet for your execution. I swore to Sir Hemsworth I would look after you. I’ve done that, and more. If you were to die tonight, I would live on without regret. Scales tipped in the desert long ago have been balanced.” 

“I’m breathing yet,” Hemsly said, with a touch of ire. 

“Yes. But for how long?” Ellington’s expression was unreadable. His posture—straight back, feet flattened, thick arms resting on the inside of his thighs—was an illusion of repose from which a man of his size and power could easily lunge. “You are entering into commerce altogether blacker. With parties and people you know nothing about.” 

“And who knows more? You?” 

“Where is the letter?” 

“I burned it. It was part of the deal.”

“There are no deals made with beasts, young master.”

“If you have something to say, have out and say it.” 

“I would rather show you.” Ellington stood quickly and with perfect balance. In two quick strides he was at the brazier, plunging his hand into the coals. The skin around his fingers peeled up like tattered gloves, sloughing from the muscle. 

“Ellington! Stop that! What are you—?”

“Silence!” Ellington tightened his jaw, pushing through the coals to his wrist, then his elbow. “It’s time you met your future.” 

Ellington grabbed hold beneath the cinders, the muscles in his shoulder jerking to hang on. The white sleeve of his housecoat caught fire. He snapped his face up in an expression of confirmation. 

“Ellington, stop!” 

He did not stop. He stood and yanked a thick blind larva from the coals behind him. It whipped at the air, an engorged hook snapping from its tail. 

Hemsly’s scream lasted precisely two seconds. In the next Ellington’s burnt hand was squeezing the hinge of his jaw open. 

Hemsly felt a heavy thump and looked down to see it advancing along the sheets. It was heavy with a denseness built for other worlds, other gravities. The dry click of mandibles filled the room, fluttering like moth wings. Ellington squeezed until Hemsly felt the pop of his own jaw dislocate. Then the cold wetness of the larva push past his teeth.

    

***

The empty house swallowed his scream. Hemsly jerked against the headboard, slapping at his face, his chest. The bed was empty, and the room beyond. No Ellington. No pale questing worm. The brazier by his bedside had burnt itself to ashes, its deep red core still pulsing. He studied it for what felt like hours, trying to recreate the topography of the ash in reverse, to see if those small dunes and ripples showed any evidence of what he still could not wholly convince himself had been a dream. 

“Evidence,” he mumbled, unable to stop the laugh before it turned to violent hacking. 

By the time he could breathe again, blood and saliva peppered the thick white sheets. He rose in a chorus of crackles, sweaty and trembling. The gray light issuing from his chamber windows flexed and pulsed with his heartbeat. How could one in his condition even be sure of what he was seeing? How could he convince himself this house was even real? A frightening thought occurred to him: that he was somewhere in London, tied to machines. He imagined Ellington standing over his hospital bed, perched at all hours like a gargoyle over the immensity of a castle wall. 

Somewhere a telephone began to ring. Hemsly wondered if he had the energy to reach it. Or maybe the phone was another fabrication of his mind. 

The phone rung ceaselessly. For hours. Hemsly watched the day resolve to white, then slowly sink toward darkness. He needed to eat, but needed Ellington to feed him. He needed to live, but needed his body to machine him through the obstacles of what had become a three-dimensional hell. A great vivisection had taken place between the functional joint of need and ability. He was an island in a sea of rising stone. Maybe it was better to watch it rise. Better to surrender. 

But you RSVP’d. 

The thought struck his body like cold water. The ringing phone—not even Ellington would keep his ear pressed to the line for so many hours. 

Hemsly gasped and stood and turned with a fierceness one could only describe as heroic. November 4th. It was November 4th. Now that he understood the purpose of the call, he was positive it would cut out before he got there. What was it Ellington had said? 

There are no deals made with beasts, Young Master. 

To Hell with beasts and Ellington. To Hell with his disease. 

“MOVE!” He wrenched his left foot up from the floor and planted it toward the brazier. Pain flared in hot bands of liquid steel. His hip socket crunched as if packed with shavings. The brazier’s firestoke was leaning against the wall. He focused on it, the details of his periphery dropping away until the twenty paces through the room became a tunnel through which he must trudge. He screamed with the first three steps, then only grunted. He could feel things crumbling, imagined his bones as great calcified splints of machinery, breaking free of their rust. By the tenth step, the pain retreated to a low pulsing ache. He could live with that. He could bear it. 

He swiped the fire stoke from where it leaned against the wall and began his exodus to the parlor. The sharpened end punched into the marble, flung chips into his ankles and the suits of armor standing at attention in their alcoves. He didn’t care. It seemed he was no longer capable of caring. His night shirt was pasted to his misshapen belly by the time he reached the parlor door. 

He snuck a glance at the ivory-handle of the rotary telephone. It sat on the escritoire near a mighty shelf of books. The certainty that he must somehow sneak up on it came in a flash of revelation. Six months ago the thought of a sentient telephone would have been laughable. But now?

Hemsly dropped to his knees and began to crawl. The bony protrusions threatened to burst from his skin. He clamped his teeth, afraid that any sound would scare it to silence. The memory of hunting with his father washed over him in a sensory flood. He smelled the decay of peat and heather with perfect clarity; felt the biting wind of the Scottish Highlands blow cold across his sweat. And there, eighty meters beyond a swale of slowly materializing reeds, he saw the powerful musculature of a Red Stag. It lifted its muzzle from a stream bed. The fur of its chin was blood dark, dripping so slowly Hemsly thought he could see the cosmos reflected in each cascading drop. 

It smells us, his father whispered. Sir Hemsworth laid beside him, a rifle aimed through the brush. They had covered their knickers in mud and rubbed their skin with a fresh female pelt. The Stag’s vision is poor. But it sees with its nose, with its heart. 

Must we kill it, Father? It’s so… 

Beautiful? Sir Hemsworth asked, with a cold smile. 

Yes, Hemsly said. It’s beaut—

Sir Hemsworth’s rifle barked fire, and it was done. 

The Stag jerked and stumbled back, looking south and then north. Hemsly saw a geyser of blood arc from the low trunk of its neck. It took two steps, then folded on its forelegs in the mud, mewling low in its throat. 

Standing above it minutes later, Sir Hemsworth took its rack in his powerful grip, wrenched its head up, and plunged a blade into its heart. 

Hemsly stood shocked for a long moment as the animal shivered. But when Sir Hemsworth knelt to fill a cup with the flowing blood, Hemsly allowed himself a drink. 

Sir Hemsworth smiled up at him. Now you have absorbed its beauty.

Hemsly was around the couch by the time he came back to himself. He was aware of the pain not in an acute sense, but rather a blanket of vibration that seemed to be holding him up. The pain was his foundation. He poked his head out to get a better look. Supposing the phone had eyes, his best chance of attack was to creep along the bookshelves. But what if it had senses beyond his ability to calibrate? 

At that moment he almost broke himself of the delusion—but he clubbed his logic and watched it fall back into the darkness. Perhaps the act itself was the thing keeping the phone ringing. Another type of autosuggestion, as first he had suggested to Ellington when recalling his desire for correspondence with those forces still unknown to him. Perhaps belief is the catalyst to everything. 

And wouldn’t that be something? To discover after all these years those witches burnt alive by Spanish Clerics had in fact been crones of the Black Ram … only because they believed they were; that magicians could truly saw their assistants in half; that holymen could perform miracles not because they had channeled the power of the correct deity, but simply because they believed. 

“I believe,” he whispered, as he dragged his aching body toward the wall. The thick carpets and pelts made his nose itch. Dust stifled him. He felt his nasal passage contracting and only fought off the sneeze by an immense feat of will. He believed the sneeze away. Yes. He believed his body into action, as he had heretofore believed himself too powerful for a wheelchair. And now he believed the telephone held answers from another place. That it wanted to give him those answers, if only he could prove his worth to know them. 

He slid beneath the escritoire, breathing slow and steadily into the sleeve of his night shirt. 

Now, he thought. Do it now. 

He leapt up and tore the phone from its cradle, slamming his elbows onto the table in a half-crouch. His entire body tilted there, breath coming in hot blasts, muscles trembling head to toe. 

Hemsly pressed his his ear to the speaker. Waited. Then: “Hello?” 

“Sir Hemsly, so good to hear you.” 

He knew that voice. “Jezbar?” 

“How nice to see the disease hasn’t eaten into your memory. You received my letter?” 

“I did.”

“And you agree to the exploration of what you are? What you truly are?”

“Yes.” 

“How wonderful. I think it’s time we saw each other.” 

Hemsly licked his lips. “When?” 

“Now would be best.” 

The knock on the front door sounded like a battering ram. Hemsly dropped the phone and slipped, crashing to his side. The fist, if it was a fist, wrapped six times upon the oak paneling before falling silent. Hemsly was confused. The certainty of belief he had crafted on his journey to the phone seemed to be unspooling itself. How could the man be calling him and also be at his front door? Unless it wasn’t Jezbar. Unless it was a trick. He thought back to the night in Athens, the way the man had so easily redirected suspicions back at the bankers who had sent him there. He thought of Ellington’s account of what had attacked him in the alleyway. And what of his condition’s mysterious origins? That first doctor had gushed over its near impossibility. Evidence of the pathology should have announced itself long ago. He recalled the lamb steaks he’d eaten in Jezbar’s company, the rawness of the meat.

He thought these things in a matter of seconds. 

In the next he heard the groan of the entrance door opening—and the deep clap of it slamming shut. 

***

Hemsly froze where he was, eyes widening. It wasn’t just the impossible phonecall—it was the four footsteps he’d heard before Jezbar appeared at the parlor entrance.  It was fifty paces from the entrance to the parlor. Fifty—not four.

“Are you just going to lay there, or shall we talk?” Jezbar’s voice was husky, its accent unplaceable. “It makes no matter to me. I’ll sit. You can grovel.” 

Hemsly managed to turn onto his other side and pull himself onto his knees. Jezbar was already on the couch, one leg crossed, a lit cheroot tucked into the corner of his mouth.  He patted the cushion. “Come. Let us speak of mysteries and the unmaking of your pain.”

“How…” Hemsly began, but Jezbar cut him off. 

“—Did I call? How did I press myself through this ridiculous expanse of luxury without making a sound your mind could use to comfort itself?” He smiled and let the smoke drift up into his nostrils. “How, indeed.”

It took a great effort to gain his feet. Hemsly leaned back against the escritoire, wishing he hadn’t left the fire stoke at the entrance. 

“You didn’t,” Jezbar said. “It’s right there, in your hands.”

Up from nothing, the cold weight of iron flooded his grip. He studied it wordlessly, before resting his weight upon it. The moisture disappeared from his body. Were he to bleed, he was sure it would come in great floods of dust. He hated the pity he saw in Jezbar’s eyes. He’d been a lion once. He’d been strong. Hemsly straightened his back and broadened his shoulders in a great chorus of ratcheting bones. “What are you?” 

“Well, now, it sounds so crude when you say it that way. Though, it’s nice to see you can address me without slouching.”

Hemsly could feel the posture wanting to return, as if a system of pulleys were slowly cranking. The pain was tremendous. But even more tremendous was his pride. He stepped as straight as he could, balancing on the fire stoke. His knees made sounds like spades digging into gravel. “Tell me something…” 

“I will if it suits me.” 

Hemsly sunk into the chair facing Jezbar with a poisonous rush of air. “Is this some ploy?”

“Everything is a ploy.”

“Yes, I suppose you're right. What do you mean to gain?”

“Your assets, for one. Your trust, for another.” 

“You appear on the doorstep of a dying man, employing some system of parlor tricks, and expect him to surrender his fortune?”  

“I expect it would be offered in gratitude. What is money without life, Mr. Durront?” 

Hemsly felt the room stiffen into place, the walls sharpening with his focus. The pain withdrew behind a veil. He dug his fingers into the armrests. “Are you saying you can stop this?”  

“Perhaps.” 

“How?”

Jezbar leaned forward and blew a cloud of cigar smoke. It gushed from his mouth like oil, obscuring the table’s surface. When it cleared, there was a black metal suitcase that hadn’t been there before. Jezbar grinned with half his mouth. “We are older than you think, Mr. Durront. Darwin offered us a broken timeline. Science cannot comprehend the true age of man, nor his antecedents.” 

“Fuck Darwin!” He suddenly screamed. “CAN. YOU. CURE. ME?”

Jezbar laughed, the cheroot jogging up and down between his teeth. “I can do no such thing. It's you who must cure yourself.” 

Hemsly eyed the case on the table, riveted with shiny black steel. It looked like the case from which a magician might pull scarves and doves and weighted blades. “With that?” 

“No. But it's a gateway.” 

“To what?”

“To the past.” Then Jezbar stood and dusted the ash from his suit, walking toward the parlor door.

“Wait!” Hemsly cried. 

Jezbar shut the door behind him. 

Hemsly grabbed the fire stoke and lumbered across the room. The footsteps in the hallway changed direction, coming back in a run. “Please! I have more questions! I—”

The door flung open and knocked him on his back. He squinted through clouds of agony and saw Ellington. “Young master! I heard you screaming. I heard—“

But the words disappeared beneath the pain. 

He allowed Ellington to guide him to the couch. His bodyguard’s questions rolled like chains of thunder in the distance. Hemsly curled there while Ellington paced behind him. He couldn’t take his fingers from the cushion where Jezbar had been sitting. By all logic, it should have been warm. But it wasn’t. 

It was cold as a block of ice. 

***

The pain was beyond bearing. He retired, ordering that the black case be brought to his chamber. Sleep eluded him though oceans of agony. At midnight he awoke in a sepulcher of torment. His bones throbbed in the darkness of his room, seemed to throw their own light against the walls. 

He held his hands before his eyes, but they had no definition. Not until he blinked and felt tears slip free did he relax. He’d been crying in his sleep. 

“You are much worse.”  

Hemsly jerked his face to the right and froze. 

Ellington was sitting just as he’d sat in the dream. Hemsly held his breath and looked down at the burning brazier. It was as if the corners of the room were constructed of silk and a strong gust had just grazed them. Something rippled just beyond the shadows, building mass. 

“What is it?” Ellington asked. 

Hemsly looked up with the full intention of telling him everything, but a moment of uncertainty caused his eyes to drift back to the brazier. His mind was playing tricks on him; it wasn’t where it had been in the dream, but five feet to the right. Occupying the space it should have been was Jezbar’s case. 

“I cannot help you if you do not speak!” Ellington rose, walking around the bed. He paused at the brazier.

“Any moment now,” Hemsly whispered. 

Ellington’s dark features confused. “Any moment now what?” 

“In my dream. You were standing there. Before you attacked me.” 

Ellington sat back down, shaking his head. He didn’t speak but Hemsly knew what he was thinking. The same thing Hemsly had been thinking more and more: that the disease had finally eaten into his mind. “I’m sorry I left you.” 

Hemsly didn’t know what to say. So he stayed silent. 

“It’s difficult to see you this way. I was weak. I made it as far as the train station. Never in my life have I been more certain of a thing. I wanted to run. Felt it was my duty to run.” 

When Hemsly was sure the dream wasn’t going to recreate itself, he found his voice. “And what did you do instead?” 

“I used my time to research your conspirators. You might be interested in what I discovered.” 

Hemsly sat up and winced. “Jezbar?” 

Ellington nodded. “Not just him. It seems he is in league with many others. They call themselves The Philosophers.” 

“The Philosophers.” Hemsly tasted the word.

“They are barons of a sort. Immense wealth. Immense influence. A man in Brussels we’ve consulted for acquisitions in Africa had quite a lot to say.” 

“Go on.” 

“This man claims two of his clients came under their council last year. Both of them infirm—diagnosed with fatal conditions.” 

“And?”

“They haven’t been seen or heard from since. Furthermore, their assets have been absorbed.” 

Hemsly stared into the brazier. He remembered Jezbar in the parlor, his unhappy smile, the ribbon of blue cigar smoke uncurling past his eyes. I expect it would be offered in gratitude. What is money without life, Mr. Durront. 

“When I told our contact of your plans, he urged against it. Adamantly. He claims they are dangerous.” Ellington followed Hemsly’s eyes and looked at the case. “What is it?” 

Hemsly ignored the question. “Did you see anyone in the driveway when you came back?”

“No.”

“Anyone in the hall?”

“No, of course not. Should I have?”

“Yes.” Hemsly dragged his eyes away from the case and felt the tears coming back. Not because he was afraid, but because he wasn’t; because he was so hungry for knowledge the nerves of his teeth were throbbing. “Open it.” 

“What?”

“Open it.” 

Ellington offered a sidelong glance before rising. He knelt before the case as if it might explode. And maybe it could. Maybe the entire event had been hallucinated—the letter, the dream, the ringing telephone. Maybe he had jarred his skull under the escritoire and invented the purposeful story to project a beam of hope through mortal darkness. But the case seemed real enough. It was there, in Ellington’s hands, the thick iron buckles unlatching with a clack! 

Unbidden, the image of the larva clicking its mandibles unfolded in his mind. Hemsly jerked forward as Ellington cracked the lid. “Be careful!” 

Ellington looked down. 

Something in the air was contracting, preparing to strike. Hemsly fumbled with the sheets. "Be CAREFUL, I said!" He was still struggling to untangle himself, when Ellington raised a disarming hand. 

“What?” Hemsly was breathless. “What is it?” 

Ellington offered a curious smile. “It seems to be a projector of some kind.” 

***   

          

It was a projector, though Hemsly had never seen one quite so primitive. He’d viewed the famed zoopraxiscope on display in Paris, its discs of painted glass affixed to a wheel that spun in such a way that the light projected a galloping animal upon the wall. But this was different. Older. Altogether more upsetting to behold. The steel housing was bearded with calcite, as if salvaged from a shipwreck. The suspicion of some hallucinatory aspect of his illness had all but fled. This was real. After searching and failing and coming within reach of his own unmaking, he had chanced upon something actual. 

“Be gentle.” Hemsly perched at the edge of the mattress, as Ellington elongated the tripod and set the projector upon its anchor bolt. "Yes. That's it."

Ellington secured the last thread of the bolt with a squeak and turned in surprise. 

“What?” Hemsly asked. 

“Your knees.” 

Hemsly looked down in wonder. He was seated like a samurai, heels folded under him with hips splayed. By all means, he should have been in agony. And yet… “It must be the zoopraxiscope.” 

“The what?” 

Hemsly smiled. “The zoopraxiscope. In Paris. Don’t you remember?” 

Ellington looked at the device and nodded slowly. “Where did you come by this one?” 

Hemsly read the undertones in Ellington’s voice. “I ordered it from a man.”

“What man, young master?” 

“A man who says it can help.”

“This?” Ellington shook his head. “I can't understand how.” 

“Oblige me my lunacy. What other option do I have?”  

Ellington studied him with great care, his eyes ticking back and forth between the machine and his master. “If Jezbar is the one who sent this, I advise you to burn it at once.” 

“Your advisement is noted.” Hemsly licked his lips, staring at the rusted plates, the old-fashioned crank, moss-green brass sprockets. “Point it at the wall.” 

The muscles in Ellington’s jaw twitched. 

“Point it at the wall. Now, please.” 

With a sigh, Ellington complied. 

“Now crank it.” 

*** 

           

The colors wove up from a place no colors lived before, spreading across the wall in fluid galaxies. Hemsly sat prone, his mouth open, while Ellington gasped and backed away.  The springed crankshaft locomoted itself with a grating shriek, but soon both that and Ellington’s gasping fell away. Hemsly watched what first had appeared as stars coalesce into a mitosis of cells, dividing and dividing, until the wall itself was covered in a parabola of quivering biology. Images flashed in chains with all the clarity of lightning: a tornado devouring a mountain village; a bolus of centipedes digesting the carcass of an elk; robed figures encircling a tree that’s immensity eluded the camera’s limits. Faster and faster, the cells growing into a shape that appeared human, before degenerating into some hidden network of biological presets far older. The legs and arms split rootlike, their separate strands dissolving and reforming to make new shapes Hemsly had never seen before. More images flashed over the footage: an old man levering himself onto the handrail of a bridge and waving before leaping out of the frame; a group of what might have been Quakers surrounding a bed in fervent prayer, an inhuman shape screaming atop the sheets.

The last image pierced him with all the force of a railroad spike, for it was his face he saw there. Questions tried to form and were swallowed in a cresting tide of blood. His veins stretched with pressure, his heart thumping like a war drum against his ribs. He had a vivid image of an engine revving at top speed, its welded joints slowly parting with the consistency of taffy.   

Ellington collapsed in seizure against the chamber wall behind him, his hobnailed boots clacking against the marble. Hemsly heard his cries no more than he heard his own laughter. Something had hold of his mind, disjointing the data, reshaping it. His tears glowed in flashing reds and grays as the zoopraxiscope grew beyond its square projection, sliding up the ceiling and down the floor.

It’s eating the room, a frantic voice whispered inside of him. It’s eating you, too… 

His muscles seized, levering his joints beyond their frozen range of motion. He fell from bed and slammed the floor with a grunt. He heard branches snapping in the distance. No, he thought, not branches. Bones.

He wanted to scream, but the idea of speech seemed suddenly alien. Stars speak in vibration, not words. The thought was certain and firm and very real. It settled into him with the permanence of spiritual truth. More and more, unknown knowledge piled. Like blocks. Things beyond articulation. Pyramids upon which painted magicians paid homage to the burning sky gods in their hungry thrones of ash. 

That’s when he felt it move in a quick arc from his left shoulder to his stomach, like the retracting of a hidden limb; then in his back, twisting slowly along his spine. He understood the posturing at once, had a disjointed, feverish vision of Ellington as he’d perched in the chair of his dreams. 

It means to lunge. It means to—

—he was sitting in the study and all was quiet. He heard the slow crackle of a fire somewhere to his left. The air was thick with scents of the butcher’s block. He looked down and felt the stock of his neck bend in a floating motion. His vision stayed where it was. He moved his arms and legs, one by one, but nothing happened. They were far away. He was far away. 

“You never grow accustomed to the strangeness,” a husky voice said behind him. Shoes clicked on marble, until Jezbar came into view beside him. “But in time, the personality accustomed to such judgements and calibrations will be molted. Hemsly Durront never existed. He is a dead human ape.” 

Hemsly could not argue this. His eyes tilted to a plate of Egyptian glass leaning against the bookshelf. He would have screamed had his fascination not been greater than his horror. He understood now why he couldn’t move—why his limbs felt far away. 

“Humans are only the latest iteration of earth’s populace—the simplest and most soft-minded, I’m afraid. But life must change. Life must acclimate. Have you ever wondered what made this place its home during the holocausts and deep-freezes of earth’s atmosphere? What sleeps in DNA like a secret puzzle waiting to be unlocked?” Jezbar knelt and looked down at what Hemsly had become. “Wonder no longer, my child.” 

Hemsly had a foggy recollection of being rich, though the idea of ownership held little meaning in this moment. The earth was his and he was the earth. He remembered a man with a dark, blocky face and broad shoulders, a man who cared for him and whom he cared for in return. He became aware of a gurgling chirp and felt something wet discharge down a bloated a malformed torso. 

“Don’t try to speak,” Jezbar said. “I can hear you just fine. Ellington gave his life for your transformation. A most honorable friend. Do you feel pain?” 

There was no pain. There was only truth. Only hunger. Ellington. Such a strange word. Even as he held the cumbersome phrase in his mind, the pictures were fading. Whatever linguistic translators might once have existed had paralyzed in the wake of something greater. He glanced to the fireplace and saw a pile of smoldering garments. A white house coat, dark with blood. 

Ellington gave his life for your transformation. 

Yes, he was starving. So hungry. And now the earth itself was calling him. The places of deep heat and deep cold. There were others, far older, far wiser. Others like him. His desire to be near them was explosive. His body felt as a pile of loose chains suddenly drawn taut, and his vision rose, lifting him to the ceiling twenty feet above.  He could hear the wet liquid sloshing of limbs and the crash of furniture. They were clumsy now. But not forever. They would remember those old forgotten truths in time.

“One last detail,” Jezbar said from far below. He was holding a piece of paper with small black scribbles. In his other hand he held a thin metal cylinder. “I’ll need you to sign this.” 

Hemsly opened his mouth and another gush of warbling confusion ripped through the empty house in a roar. 

“Yes, yes, just a triviality, I know. However, in ten minutes you won’t remember. This is the price of your pain. The price of your freedom. Let me help you.” 

Hemsly watched the small creature lift one his ropey appendages and wrap it around the cylinder. The feel of his touch disgusted him, so dry and cold. “There,” the creature said, blowing on the page to dry the ink. “We’re done.” 

Hemsly did not bow in thanks, for thanks was an abstraction unknown to him. There was only movement and power and the dark places of the world. There was only hunting and feeding to hunt and feed again. He ripped through the wall and felt the sting of rain against his immensity; blasted through the glass structures of the greenhouses and snapped tree trunks like twigs as he passed. He raced deep in the mountains of soft wet loam, sinking into the fissures. And much later, he slept. 

He dreamt he was a dead human ape trapped in a world of meaningless possession. He dreamt of betrayals and black secrets and unimaginable loneliness. He dreamt he lived in a structure that banished the seasons of earth. And when he awoke deep beneath the crust to the boom of thunder far above him, Hemsly screamed in terror and confusion. 

The fear subsided as he felt the others tunneling nearer. Their groans and chitterings calmed the tremble in his limbs. He was not alone. He would never be alone again. He was the earth and the earth was him.