And then, there it was; an unassuming flask, with no label or other distinguishing marks whatsoever, other than for the yellow-green liquid that half-filled it.
Dropping the wretched physician again, Ulysses stepped over him and grabbed the container. He sniffed at the neck of the flask. The heady scent of fennel and spoiled steak rose from the liquid within. Ulysses' quizzical frown became a gargoyle grimace of utter hatred.
"We have the Alchemist to thank for that," Seziermesser said mysteriously.
Ignoring him, stepping back over the prone surgeon, not even giving him a second glance, Ulysses walked over to Nimrod.
"Get him out of my sight," he snarled.
"Yes, sir. With pleasure, sir."
Hauling Seziermesser to his feet by the scruff of his neck, without another word Nimrod dragged the unnervingly quiet surgeon from the room.
Nimrod led the slouching surgeon along the tiled corridor and into the dungeon-like cellars beyond. They stopped at last in front of a large steel door with a barred grille set into it at head height.
"What are you going to do to me?" the doktor asked at last, as if resigned to the fact that there was no hope for him now.
"Oh, it's not what I'm going to do to you."
A cold shiver coursing down his spine and into his stomach, Seziermesser turned and saw the other's dark, shark-like smile, revealed as they passed through the dirty cylinders of sodium light cast by the crackling nicotine-brown bulbs. Fear of the uncertain fate that awaited him consumed him completely now.
His despair deepened when he looked back at the door and a chill realisation seeped into his brain, as cold as glacial melt-water. He had not been here himself for some time - care of the test subjects had always been one of Rudge's responsibilities - but Seziermesser recognised it now, faced with the ominous, rust-streaked door again.
In the quiet of the corridor, Seziermesser listened. He could hear slavering sounds, pitiful mewling cries and a noise like an old woman weeping. And there were other, more sinister - more threatening - sounds too, animalistic grunts and guttural growls.
"No, please no," he begged, knowing in his heart that it wouldn't make any difference anyway, that they had passed the point of no return.
Nimrod raised a sarcastic eyebrow at the doktor, checked the load in his gun and then promptly shot the man through the left kneecap.
Seziermesser cried out in shock and pain, and fell to the floor. Nimrod roughly hauled him to his feet and opened the door. The sounds became louder and a pungent, vile odour assailed their nostrils - an acrid mix of rank, unwashed bodies, like fish guts and faeces. Shapes moved in the gloom beyond.
"Goodbye, doktor," Nimrod said calmly, before throwing him through the opening and slamming the door shut after him.
Nimrod returned a few minutes later, alone, by which time Ulysses had put on his borrowed shirt and jacket again, and introductions, of a sort, had been made.
The dandy looked almost like his old self again, other than for the fact that his shirt was stained with blood, his face was the colour and texture of a candle, and the incongruous grey chimp's hand protruding from the end of one sleeve.
"Nimrod," he said. "Give me your gloves."
Nimrod obediently took them off and handed them to his master. Without saying anything, Ulysses pulled them on, struggling a little to get the left glove on over his differently-proportioned ape hand.
And all the while the bestial howls and bellowing continued.
"What is that?" Ulysses asked finally having managed to put on both of the black leather gloves.
"I can't be certain, sir, but -" Nimrod began, before Jennifer interrupted him.
"I know what it is," she said. "It's Umbridge."
"It's what?"
"Before I ended up down here, before all this," she said, taking in the cell, and, by extension, all that had befallen them in the dungeons beneath Umbridge House, with a wave of her arm, "he shared his plans with me."
"So what you're telling me is that the sick old man we met earlier, the old bastard dying of cancer, has since become... that?" Ulysses challenged as another bellow rattled the light fittings of the room.
The reticent Jacob said nothing, listening intently to the exchange taking place between the dandy, his servant and Jennifer.
"But that's insane!"
"I know it is!" Jennifer answered shrilly. "I know it's insane, but he told me that he was going to ascend... be the first of a new species, that the doktor was building him a brand new body, and that I was to be his bride." She broke up in another fit of sobbing.
The poor girl had been pushed to the limit, Ulysses considered, thinking about someone else for the first time since he had come round from his traumatised delirious half-sleep. But then he too had been pushed to the edge and then right over it. As far as he was concerned, somebody still had to pay for what had been done to him.
"Then our work is not yet done here," he stated coldly. "I think it's time we put the poor bastard out of his misery, don't you?"
He took in the faces of those around him: the darkly smiling Nimrod; the puffy-eyed Jennifer; the anxious freak.
"But before we do, there is one last thing I have to do here."
Choosing a bottle from among those lined up on the metal counter labelled 'Ethanol' he pulled out the glass stopper - his nose wrinkling as the whiff of industrial alcohol hit him hard in the face - and then started sloshing its contents liberally around the room; over the operating table, over the tiled and stainless steel surfaces. He threw the empty bottle onto the floor, apparently uncaring of the fact that he might alert other servants of the insane industrialist to what he was doing.
"Nimrod, a light."
Without hesitation, his manservant reached into another well-resourced coat pocket and took out something square and silver, that gleamed dully in the bright lights of the operating theatre. Ulysses took the lighter and flicked it open, spinning the flint-wheel as he did so.
Without a second thought, He tossed the lighter into the middle of the room. The alcohol ignited with a satisfying whoomph, orange and blue flames rising right across the room, licking up the walls and embracing everything within its fiery clutches.
"That's better," Ulysses said, a cruel smile on his face, and turned to exit the operating theatre.
Out in the corridor, Jacob turned to Nimrod. "What did you do with the doktor?" he asked.
At that moment, a high-pitched scream echoed through the cellar-dungeons beneath the house, briefly even drowning out the bellows of the beast that lurked, unseen, elsewhere.
"As the saying goes," Nimrod said sagely, "ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."
Leaving the door open behind him, Ulysses followed the others as they hurried towards the steps at the end of the tarnished corridor. At least someone seemed to know where they were going, and it was Jenny who was leading the way, closely followed by Nimrod and the stray he appeared to have picked up along the way.
Giving the vivisectionist's burning lair one last lingering look, satisfied that nothing would ever be tortured and diced up there again, he stumbled after the others.
He could hear a voice now, coming from behind the lone door to the right, the last one that led off from the corridor, before the cellar steps. He would have known that traitorous voice anywhere. "Get away, yer bastard!" it barked, before adding. "I mean, sir. Keep back! Or you'll be gettin' another taste of the lash."
Ulysses quickened his steps.
When he was only a few feet away from the start of the staircase, the door opened, and Rudge stepped through.
"What the bloody 'ell's goin' on out 'ere?" he asked of no-one in particular. Then he saw Ulysses, his startled gaze moving quickly from the dandy's unsmiling face, to his left arm, his look of surprise becoming all the more pronounced.
As the two of them stood, frozen to the spot, staring at each other in bewildered surprise, something massive began to squeeze itself through the open doorway be
hind Rudge.
A huge hand, its skin grey leather, thick with black hair, grabbed the doorframe. Huge fingers dug into the mouldering wall on one side of the door, while on the other, a chitinous talon appeared - just as large as the hand - plaster cracking and crumbling beneath its indelicate touch as the claw sank into the brickwork beneath. And then another grasping forelimb appeared, and another, and lastly a startlingly human hand - compared to all the others - and one that Ulysses recognised.
Muscles bunching, crustacean claws levered the appalling bulk of the creature half through the door. The thing straightened, attempting to draw itself upright and its hulking shoulders, at least six feet across, scraped the ceiling of the passageway.
Atop the massive, multiple-armed torso - which appeared to be not one thing but created from parts of many different specimens - between the muscled mass of its unbalanced shoulders, Ulysses saw the face of Josiah Umbridge staring down at him.
The old man's eyes latched onto Ulysses, looking down at where he stood, isolated from his companions, his own appalled expression a mixture of revulsion, contempt and disbelief. Seeing who it was, cowering there before its grotesque majesty, the eyes narrowed as they continued to bore into Ulysses own horror-widened gaze.
And then the abomination spoke, its voice a booming guttural growl, that wasn't quite a bullish roar and yet wasn't entirely human either.
"Quiiick-siiil-verrr," it rasped.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Chimera
Ulysses stared at the monstrous thing as it continued to heave its malformed mass out of the door, the flickering firelight behind him and the neon strip lights above illuminating it all the more clearly now.
It was clear to Ulysses that the old man's head had been transplanted onto a hideous, man-made body, created by the insane vivisectionist Seziermesser. And what a piece of work it was - the great work that the surgeon had spoken of - a true chimera, stitched together from pieces of a plethora of other creatures. The torso in particular was criss-crossed with livid pink and purple scarring, demonstrating quite clearly where one body part had been connected to another, as the vivisectionist had pieced it together like some monstrous flesh-puzzle.
It looked like the torso had been created around that of a large silverback gorilla, that had also provided the chimera with one of its left arms, but much had been added to both the ape's skeletal structure, as well as its musculature, judging by the curious contours of its patchy hide. Externally it looked like there might even be some bull or bear in there, while smooth grey seal skin had been used to fill some of the gaps where the monster's skin had split under pressure from the shifting musculature beneath.
There had obviously been a need to add additional muscle groups to support the vivisect's unbalanced and wholly unnatural physique. The creature's right shoulder was noticeably larger than the left, and in places heaving red wet muscles could be seen moving through further rents in the chimera's patchwork hide. But then the thing needed all that muscle to provide support and movement for three upper arms - if they could be called arms - on the right-hand side of its body.
Uppermost there was a long crustacean-like claw that must have been made from more than one creature, judging by its length and the unnatural number of joints it possessed. Close to the body was what appeared to be the hairy orange-furred arm of an orang-utan. Between these two was an arm that was more human in appearance, except that this one had two elbows and the vivid scarring where one bicep had been sewn onto the second elbow was clearly visible.
It was this one appendage that Ulysses recognised. Slowly a spark of anger reignited the ire deep inside him. Well he should recognise it. Admittedly, it appeared to have been inverted and now possessed a hideous purple hue, but nonetheless, it was still his arm!
A deep rage taking hold, Ulysses took in the rest of the abomination. It only had two limbs protruding from the left side of its upper body. The dominant limb was that of the gorilla, having been severed from the torso only to be stitched back on again but now with a slick-skinned protrusion beneath it, that didn't seem to have any bone structure at all, but writhed and twisted like a cephalopod's tentacle, although it ended in a huge, crushing crab's claw.
Even the old man's swaying head was not as it should be. While he had been putting the finishing touches to his last masterpiece, the mad doktor had added a little something here. The mouth was no longer able to shut properly as it looked like Seziermesser had managed to cram the teeth of another predatory killer in there, the skin around the hinging joint of the jawbone appearing stretched and more elastic.
Having used its arms to pull itself through the restricted opening of the doorway, the creature reared up before the incredulous dandy, its head nearly scraping the ceiling a good four feet above Ulysses' head. And it still wasn't fully out of the door.
The thing cantered forwards on a host of legs that could only have belonged to a giant spider crab - one of the monstrous twenty foot specimens that trawlers occasionally dragged up from rocky holes at the bottom of the North sea. The eight shell-encased limbs knocked hollowly on the tiled floor of the corridor.
And now Ulysses could see the monster in all its terrible glory. From the waist down its mammalian characteristics gave way to the mid-section of a crocodile - no doubt one of those century old monsters that could still be found lurking in the fetid jungle rivers at the heart of the Dark Continent - with its rough grey-green scale-armour and softer white underbelly. It was to this part that the giant spider crab legs had been attached. Reptilian flesh in turn gave way to the thick, fleshy grey tail of a shark, made up of almost nothing but the dagger-like rudder of the caudal fin.
Ulysses backed away from the monstrosity blocking their path to freedom.
"So, you wanted to become a new species, did you?" Ulysses asked the beast quietly, looking into the old man's unblinking eyes. "Well, as they say, you should be careful what you wish for, or you might just get it."
Unable to tear his gaze from Umbridge's tiny head, swaying hypnotically like a cobra between the brutish, adapted shoulders, he slowly became aware of another sound over the laboured snorting of the chimera, and the crackle and pop of the fire spreading behind him. It was a filthy, repugnant sound, like a boarish snorting. It was the sound of Rudge laughing.
There was no doubt about it: with the fire licking at the doorframe of the laboratory behind him, feeling its incandescent heat on his back, and with Rudge and the Umbridge-chimera in front of him, Ulysses was trapped.
Rudge's howls of laughter increased in volume as the Umbridge-chimera towered over him, the old man's distorted features peering at Ulysses with malign intent. Lips rolled back, exposing a double row of teeth, everything from canine fangs to the serrated triangular tips of shark's teeth. A thick, grey tongue slipped between them and the chimera hissed at Ulysses.
As he stared into the bloodshot eyes of the insane industrialist, transfixed by the old man's unblinking gaze - he was dimly aware that the thing's jaws were stretching open, far wider than was humanly possible. But then what had once been Josiah Umbridge wasn't truly human anymore. Their eyes still locked together, the old man's head glided closer on its twisting neck, as if Umbridge somehow intended to bite off his head.
The Umbridge-chimera opened its mouth and a reptilian bark emerged as smoke began to fill the passageway. Ulysses coughed and instinctively put a hand to his mouth as he suddenly came to his senses.
There was the cracking pop and shatter of glass breaking as the fire inside the laboratory grew in intensity. The chimera barked again, its head darting from side to side in distress.
It's afraid of the fire, Ulysses realised. And then he saw the burn marks - the scorched patches of fur, the shiny pink scar tissue on its flanks. Ulysses could only guess at their origins, but to look at the cruelly laughing Rudge, it wasn't hard to imagine that the gamekeeper had caused those injuries, long before Josiah Umbridge's head had been transplanted onto the vivisect body. Th
e abuse had probably taken place over a period of some months, judging by the way some of the burns had healed; a means of keeping the growing abomination under control.
God alone knew what kind of primitive brain had been used to keep the vivisect's autonomic processes working until it was ready to receive the old man's head. Perhaps that rudimentary collection of ganglia had never been removed, left in to aid the old man in controlling all the disparate body parts. And what the chimerical body remembered, from the time before it had become the Umbridge-chimera, was that fire was to be feared.
And the primal fear of fire was now coupled with the old man's desperate desire to survive.
Ulysses wished he had his sword-cane with him as he watched the monster and its handler's every move, in case they unwittingly provided him with an opportunity to escape.
Then he saw it, tucked into the gamekeeper's trousers. He had obviously decided to keep that particular trinket for himself.
"Not so fast," Rudge growled, seeing where Ulysses' gaze had fallen, and put a possessive calloused hand over the end of it. "It's mine now."
Behind Rudge the chimera reared up on its spider-crab legs and let out a shriek. Flames were licking the ceiling now, the smoke thickening, accompanied by the acrid stink of boiling chemicals. It wouldn't be long before all of them were overcome by the smoke.
The creature was becoming more and more agitated. It skittered backwards and forwards, its great armoured limbs fidgeting restlessly beneath it. Its thick shark's tail lashed in alarm, sending Rudge suddenly stumbling towards Ulysses.
As Ulysses readied himself to make a grab for the exposed sword-cane at the big man's belt, Rudge turned sharply on the beast and, without a second thought, smacked it across the torso with the heavy cosh in his hands.
"Watch it, yer big bastard!" he shouted at the vivisect and the huge monstrosity retreated before the gamekeeper's blows, as its body-memory was reminded who the master was here.
Pax Britannia: Human Nature Page 23
