Evolution Expects

by Jonathan Green

  “So, if no-one is willing to tell the truth, what are you going to do?” Madame Wong asked, daring to speak up for the first time.

  “Yes, how do you propose to resolve this situation?” said Dr Gallowglass.

  “I don’t,” the Host said flatly.

  “Then why bring us here?” Galsworthy fumed.

  “The Alchemist has a proposition for you all.” The Host’s mouth smiled, but his eyes did not.

  “What sort of a proposition?” Madame Wong asked suspiciously, eyes narrowing.

  “A gesture of goodwill if you will, on your part.”

  “Go on,” someone else said.

  The Host turned and beckoned one of the figures forward from the shadows. A number of those around the table of a less hardy spirit could not contain their surprise and disgust.

  Up until that point the brute’s grotesque appearance had been hidden from them by the heavy shadows, but now they could all see the thing with ugly clarity.

  The brute was naked from the waist up, his exposed, hairless, flesh a ghastly, pallid white, looking like kneaded clay riddled with knots of purple veins. It seemed likely that he had been a large man to begin with, but something had been done to him that had swollen his physique beyond what would be considered normal, so that he now stood eight feet tall, on swollen legs like tree trunks. His left arm was huge, bulging muscles and tendons writhing beneath the leathery skin, but his right-arm was of another magnitude altogether.

  The meat of the limb was shot through with steel cables and pieces of tarnished metal that looked like they had been bolted directly to his skeleton beneath. All of this augmentation served to turn his arm into something like a robotic limb or crane hoist. The additional muscle and machinery needed for the brute to be able to even move the arm meant that his right shoulder was a mound of flesh and metal that had become merged with the right-hand side of his head.

  But the artificial enhancements did not end there. His mouth had been transformed by the insertion of a pair of huge steel jaws and a red light flashed atop a gleaming metal box that had been clamped onto the brute’s neck.

  As the gathered members of the Crucible stared at the monster in appalled fascination, the brute lifted a doctor’s bag from the floor and dropped it onto the table in front of the Host, the contents clattering inside.

  “To put it simply,” the Host said, the others still unable to tear their eyes from the monster standing slack-faced at his side, “the Alchemist agrees to keep providing you with what you need.”

  Unlocking the clasp on the bag he opened it, revealing the unremarkable stoppered glass bottles inside. He removed them one by one – there were ten in all – and then extracted a bundle of documents from a pocket and slid a sheaf of papers across the table to each of those present.

  Curiosity getting the better of them, the Crucible members began to read the documents.

  “However, you will notice that the payments you each make to the Alchemist in appreciation of his help with your work has just gone up,” the Host continued.

  “But this is daylight robbery!” Galsworthy announced, his face reddening. “I can’t afford this.”

  “You are being provided with a unique compound with unique properties, which will allow you to accomplish great things that you never could have without its aid.”

  “This is blackmail!” Dr Gallowglass protested.

  “The Alchemist prefers to think of it as an insurance policy.”

  “But this is too much!” Doctor Doppelganger said, adding her opinion to the discussion.

  “The Alchemist understands that this arrangement might not suit all of you. This is, after all, a very exclusive group. If you feel that it is not for you – Mr Galsworthy, Doctor Doppelganger – then feel free to walk away, no hard feelings.”

  “Damn right I’m walking away! I’m not paying this!” Galsworthy announced. “I want out!”

  “Very good, Mr Galsworthy. That is your choice. Please, one of my colleagues will show you to the door.”

  Galsworthy got up from his chair, suddenly looking less than certain that this was what he really wanted to do.

  “Please, Mr Galsworthy, this way,” the Host said, gesturing to a different door to the one by which they had entered. The hulking brute moved with lumbering steps to accompany him.

  Galsworthy threw his fellow Crucible members one last uncertain glance, but they were all too busy digesting the new terms of their agreements with the Alchemist.

  Cautiously, Galsworthy accompanied the heavy to the door. The brute, the expression on its face still showing no hint of any emotion or even suggesting that it possessed anything more than a rudimentary intelligence, let Galsworthy through the door before squeezing through after him.

  The door closed quietly behind them.

  Silence descended over the room. A second later it was shattered by a scream that turned bowels to water and blood to ice.

  The expressions of horror on the faces of those present left no doubt as to what had just happened but no-one dared say anything, although Madame Wong stifled a cry within her handkerchief.

  The Host smiled at them in the same dead-eyed way as before. With a look that could have been described as nothing more than innocent enquiry, the Host gazed at each of the remaining nine in turn.

  “Would anyone else like out?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On Entomology

  “THAT’S THE LAST of them,” Professor Brundle said, placing another bundle of case notes on the reading table. “That’s the twelfth.”

  “So,” mused Ulysses distractedly, still skimming a crime report from the last sheaf of papers the professor had placed before him, “that’s my friend the cockroach, is it?”

  “That’s it. That brings you right up to date with all the recorded cases that have ended up here.”

  “It says here,” Eliza suddenly piped up from the other side of the table, “that this Delaque girl turned into a giant moth. I means, how’s that even possible?”

  “Hmm?” Ulysses looked up slowly from the case notes. “Wait a minute, you can read?”

  “I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”

  “I know that,” Ulysses said, adding under his breath, “you have a great arse too.”

  Eliza glanced up from her scouring of the papers and gave the dandy a cheeky grin.

  “What was that?” Professor Brundle asked, from his seat at the end of the reading table.

  “Sorry, Professor,” Ulysses bluffed, “did you say something?”

  “What? No. I thought you did.”

  “Oh, probably just thinking aloud. You know what it’s like.”

  The three of them were ensconced within the hospital library. It truly was the most incredible space, made all the more remarkable when one considered that it was located within a hospital for the insane. It was lighter and airier than the professor’s rather stifling study, and gave them more space in which to spread out all the papers associated with the metamorphosis cases, as Professor Brundle referred to them.

  “So this is him,” Ulysses said, opening the file Brundle had just presented to him. “This is our roach problem.” He looked down at the photograph of a gaunt-faced man in his mid-thirties – not so different in age to Ulysses himself – taken, it appeared, specifically to go with his Daedalus Clinic notes. “This is Francis Bird.”

  Thumbing through the file, Ulysses pulled out a photograph. Eliza, peering over his shoulder, recoiled in disgust. “Eugh!”

  “That’s right. The metamorphosis appears to have occurred incredibly quickly,” Professor Brundle said.

  “The cockroach shows no signs of de-evolving any further?”

  “No, none at all. Its new genetic form appears to be stable.”

  Ulysses was quiet again for a moment, one hand to his mouth as his eyes darted from one pile of open case notes to another.

  “And this one,” he said, pointing at a photograph of an elderly woman – whom he took to
be a grandmother, surrounded, as she was, by her extensive brood – grinning through a mouth missing half its teeth, “was the first?”

  “No. Not quite.”

  “But didn’t you say that Ethel Partridge, widowed butcher’s wife, seventy-four,” Ulysses said, now reading from the case notes in front of him, “was the first to be admitted?”

  “Yes, but she wasn’t the first victim.”

  Ulysses fixed the professor with an intense, penetrating stare. “So who was, and what happened to them?”

  “This was couriered to me here yesterday,” Brundle said, picking up a carefully folded pile of hole-punched paper. “This is a printout of the police report that concerns one Carlton Smithers, late of Bedford Park, Chiswick.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Ulysses said, his face suddenly lighting up. “I read about the incident in The Times last week. Butchered the whole family with a kitchen knife, before turning it on himself, didn’t he?”

  “Then you only read the official version as put out by the Department.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Well, as you know, the story that made it into the papers had him going on a homicidal rampage, killing his wife, their five children, the children’s governess, the maid and the cook, all with a kitchen knife, after he lost the family fortune when stock in the Carcharadon Shipping Line sank overnight –”

  “Rather like their flagship,” Ulysses couldn’t help adding under his breath.

  “– murdering them as a mercy to save them from a life of ignominy and destitution. But that version of events was nothing more than a hasty cover-up.”

  “So what really happened?” Eliza asked.

  “Oh, Smithers did it, there’s no doubt about that, but it wasn’t the Smithers who friends and neighbours all described as a loving husband and father, and a good God-fearing Christian who went to church every Sunday with always a good word for everyone. No, it was Smithers the giant deathwatch beetle.

  “The neighbours heard a commotion and called the police. When they finally managed to force entry to the house, and found the monstrous beetle feeding on the corpse of Mrs Smithers, a terrified constable shot it six times.”

  “I see,” Ulysses said slowly, considering the enormity of this revelation.

  “No-one had any idea it was Smithers until they found his clothes shredded in his study, and not a drop of blood on them.”

  “Did anyone examine the body, I mean the beetle?”

  “Yes. I’ve got the results of the autopsy here. But it doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.”

  “So then there’s Ethel Partridge who is now enjoying a new lease of life as an overgrown praying mantis,” Ulysses said, “and third, and the second to end up in Bedlam, was little Tommy, the boot black boy.’

  “That’s right.”

  “Little Tommy Shoeshine,” Ulysses repeated sadly, picking up a slim file. There was no photograph of Tommy as he had been, aged ten, before he turned into a spider with a six foot leg span.

  “Used to escape to the gin shops after his shift, before the beadle would drag him back to the Old Montague Street Workhouse. He was discovered vomiting into the bins out the back of the Sisters of Mercy of Orphanage. He had already started to change by the time a doctor was called.”

  “And he’s now a web-spinning arachnid.”

  Ulysses picked up the printout relating to the Smithers case and made space for it at one end of the table. Next to that he placed the case notes relating to Ethel Partridge and then made space for the report on Tommy Kettlewell beside them.

  “So, number four?” Ulysses said.

  “Clementine Umbel,” Professor Brundle answered.

  “Ah yes, the Covent Garden flower seller.” Eliza passed Ulysses the correct set of notes.

  “The next to be admitted was Joyce Hurst,” Brundle said, placing the relevant bundle of papers next to the flower seller’s file.

  “The board school teacher from St John’s Wood.”

  “That’s right. Fifty-two, divorced, no children.”

  “Number six is Alexander Kostov, the Russian immigrant omnibus driver from Bethnal Green,” Ulysses recalled from his perusal of the case notes. “Believed to be in his early thirties.”

  “Transformation occurred whilst he was at the wheel of the Number 63, unsurprisingly causing the ’bus to crash. Captured because the giant wasp he had become was trapped within the wreckage.”

  “And then we have Magnus Tyson, the banker.” Ulysses took the proffered file from Eliza. “Sixty-two, onto his fourth wife, more than thirty years his junior, heart condition – I’m not surprised! – found shut inside the pantry of his Bloomsbury townhouse, now a giant termite.”

  The banker’s case file joined the arrangement on the reading table.

  “You’re going to run out of room,” Eliza remarked, looking at how much space the ordered papers were taking up.

  “No we’re not,” Ulysses countered, skipping past her and dragging another table from between the bookshelves and joining it to the one they were already using. “Number eight!” he demanded excitedly. He was buzzing now, possessed of a passion for answers that gave him a veritable adrenalin kick.

  “That would be Marie Delaque,” Brundle offered.

  Eliza handed him the girl’s file. “Poor little Marie Delaque,” she said, genuine sadness in her eyes. “She’s almost better off now.”

  It was a pitiful case indeed. From what Professor Brundle had been able to find out, her mother had been a French immigrant who ended up working as a prostitute at the Wapping docks. A gin-addict, she had died when Marie was eight years old. Five years later, when the girl’s body turned into a cocoon from which emerged a huge moth with a five-foot wingspan, she too was one of Madame Bovary’s girls, having followed in her mother’s footsteps, joining the oldest profession in the world.

  Noting Eliza’s reaction, Ulysses wondered how she really felt about her own position in the world. There was no doubt that she was very good at her job, and he had thought that she had enjoyed the time they had spent together, but she was obviously an intelligent girl. Was the oldest profession in the world really the only one that she could have opted for?

  “The ninth was the opium addict,” Brundle thumbed open the relevant file. “Charlie Chin, mid-twenties, half-Chinese, from Stockton.” He placed the slim file beside Marie’s on the tabletop. “Now deceased.”

  “What happened to him?” Ulysses asked, his features knotted in concentration as he desperately tried to find a link between the cases.

  “Found on the Circle Overground Line. Looked like he had thrown himself in front of a train, probably when he realised he was starting to transform.”

  “Or he was in an opium-addled daze and didn’t know what he was doing,” Ulysses pointed out.

  Ulysses Quicksilver might have given in to various temptations during his life, and opium might be the most widely used recreational narcotic in the empire, but the dandy and the drug had never been friends.

  “And then there was Sergeant Reginald Hazlitt,” he said, “late of her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police, due to retire next month. Such a rum do!” Ulysses took the penultimate document from Eliza and placed it next to the sergeant’s file. “Followed by ‘Old’ Bailey, the tramp from the Shadwell doss house. And that brings us back to Francis Bird, my friend from the clinic.”

  Ulysses stared at the ordered row of documents laid across the two tables in front of them.

  “If things continue at this rate, the Department’s not going to be able to keep a lid on these spontaneous transformations for much longer.”

  “No,” Brundle agreed, “and these are only the ones we know about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Orientals have a curse that goes, ‘may you live in interesting times’. And the times we are living in could certainly be described as interesting. Not all people readily report every strange or untoward thing that happens to them. There might be othe
r cases with these poor wretches being cared for by friends and family. Think of the stigma with which people still treat cases of physical and mental handicap, even within families. And then multiply that shame by one hundred when your cousin Wendy turns into a cockroach one night.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose.”

  “If there’s one thing I know, it’s people,” Professor Brundle pointed out. “And then there must be the cases that have escaped detection because no-one was there to witness the transformation. We only know of ‘Old’ Bailey because he was staying at the Shadwell Street Refuge when he changed. There could be countless others living on the streets, metamorphosing in the same way but then escaping into the sewers or the flooded Underground network and no-one would ever know.”

  “You have a point, professor. You have a point.”

  He was quiet again for a few moments as he surveyed the piles of paperwork.

  “So we’ve got Smithers in Chiswick – forty-three, businessman; Ethel Partridge in Spittalfields – seventy-four, grandmother; Tommy Kettlewell, aged ten; Clementine Umbel, nineteen, Covent Garden; a Russian immigrant; an opium fiend; a mangy old tramp...” Ulysses suddenly broke off from his musings. “But what’s the connection?” he snarled, throwing up his hands in frustration. “They had nothing in common before this... before these transformations began, how many weeks ago?”

  “Three. There is nothing in their backgrounds I can find linking them, no.” Brundle said. “Age, socio-economic class, location; nothing. You’ve seen that for yourself.”

  “And there’s nothing else? You’re sure of it? Forget their backgrounds, is there anything else – anything at all?”

  “Well,” the professor began, “there was the same deposit present in the blood samples I took.”

  “What?”

  “Something in the blood, a biological or chemical residue of some kind.”

  “And this is in all of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this before?”