As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  “And that’s what you think that is?” Jack pointed to the screen. “Viral matter from someplace else?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know this. These nano-structures don’t rely on living cells to replicate. They appear able to absorb any matter and reconfigure it to fit their . . . well, their programming, I suppose.” Kander looked again at the tentacle. “The nano-structures are incorporatively metamorphic. That’s how the specimen was able to generate the ganglia. It drew the necessary subatomic components from the suspension fluid surrounding it and rearranged them. I’d imagine it’s only a matter of time before it realizes it can do the same with the cylinder itself.”

  Jack felt the room begin to twist and was thankful for the chair. He repressed a shudder at the thought of that thing getting out, of something so invincible being set loose by Kander’s or the Division’s carelessness. “It can do this with any matter?”

  “Any. Including air. That’s how the anomaly was able not only to change shape but also to change size. Change mass. That’s how the anomaly was able to grow and then discard those scales. I think the limit to exactly what can be generated, and in what form, is circumscribed only by the anomaly’s mind—which appears limited or, perhaps, damaged.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that coupled with a more cogent intelligence, the metamorphic abilities would not be restricted to tentacles, tails, and scales. That the transformations could be refined to anything. Anything the coupled intellect could imagine. “But setting aside hypotheticals for the moment and focusing on the nano-structures alone . . .” Kander said, changing tack. He tapped the tablet. The image zoomed in on a single glob until it filled the width of the entire screen.

  At this magnification, Jack saw that the outer membranes of the nano-structures were not smooth, as had first appeared, but were, in fact, made up of tightly packed geometric shapes that meshed together like gear teeth.

  “Remind you of anything?”

  It did. Jack’s chest was clamped down as if by packing straps. It couldn’t be. But there it was, the same image he’d seen countless times through the lens of his own microscope. “The venom.”

  Kander smiled, and he tapped up a new image, one of the venom. “Yes. I believe that the creatures’ venom possesses many viral properties. Very similar, in fact, to the way their pheromone secretions do. Only these properties lie dormant except under very specific conditions.”

  A nagging unease crept up Jack’s spine. “What kind of conditions?”

  “Exposure to human DNA in low enough doses not to kill the subject,” Kander answered offhandedly, as if he were explaining how a microwave oven operated. “You see, that’s why the anomaly was at least partially vulnerable to salt—before she generated the armor scales, that is. That vulnerability is vestigial. She’s part creature—”

  “And part human,” Jack said, awe and terror slugging it out in his mind.

  “Or perhaps she’s on her way to transforming into something else entirely. At any rate, that’s why she was collecting the creatures, Jack. The venom. That’s why she was entombing them while they were still alive. She needs the venom, but instinct is telling her how much to feed on at any given time.”

  “How did this happen? How did she—”

  “We may never know,” Kander answered. “Perhaps it’s evolution, a next-stage leap. Or perhaps it’s part of the creatures’ life cycle. Maybe the venom itself is doing it. Maybe it’s the venom that’s really in charge. Perhaps, given certain unknown conditions, the venom triggers a response in the creatures, driving them to seek out and create an über-creature, a—”

  “A queen.”

  “Yes.” The doctor’s voice was that of a man so absorbed in possibilities that the mundane now had become nothing but wallpaper.

  All this talk of the venom and its power put Jack so far on edge it was nearly cutting him in two. “We should probably get back to work,” he said. “I’m not sure how much time I have left.”

  Kander snapped out of his reverie. “Of course. Of course. And speaking of that, I have your MRI scans if you’d care to take a look. It’s not pretty, I’m afraid.”

  Jack slumped back into the chair. “I didn’t think it would be.” That was true, but a sliver of hope had sat under his skin, festering nonetheless. And the last thing he wanted to hear was that his time with Beth—no matter how compromised—would be cut shorter than he’d thought.

  “Here it is.” Kander keyed a sequence into his tablet, and the magnified image of the venom was replaced by a bisected picture of Jack’s own body. “As you can see, what’s afflicting you is extremely aggressive.”

  Jack tried to push the welling panic deep. He knew that the tumors would have spread, but he didn’t realize how fast or how complete that would turn out to be. The asymmetrical black splotches were everywhere, infecting not just his lungs anymore but also his bones, his brain, every major organ. “It’s funny,” he said, almost ready to laugh and unable to tear his eyes from the devastation inside himself. “I don’t feel sick.”

  “Life can be very funny sometimes.” Kander’s words had gathered an undertone, that of a flattened key change. He reached into his lab coat pocket. “Tell me, Jack, how often have you been exposed to the venom?”

  His eyes snapped to the doctor. In his hand, he held a vial of viscous chartreuse liquid. Jack gripped the chair’s arms, ready to bolt.

  But before he could, Kander punched his tablet. Suddenly, articulated steel coils sprang from the arms and legs of the chair, wrapping themselves around Jack’s wrists and ankles. He fought, but they drew him back down. The harder he struggled, the tighter they grew. “What are you doing?”

  Kander held the vial up, tilting it. “Yes, I do believe that the venom, ultimately, is running the show here. Of that I have little doubt.”

  “Kander, what are you doing?”

  “How often have you been injecting yourself, I wonder?”

  “Let me go!” Jack spit, tearing his skin against the metal bonds.

  “How many times over the years, Jack? Dozens? Hundreds?”

  “I said, let me go!”

  “It would be better if you didn’t struggle. Those shackles are designed to hold a subject much stronger than you are if necessary.”

  Jack looked down to see blood seeping from his wrists. “Please, Kander, let me go.”

  “Well, since you asked nicely.” Even the perpetually stoic doctor paused to chuckle at his own bon mot. “Honestly, I’m not sure why I didn’t see it sooner. Why you didn’t see it sooner, for that matter. It wasn’t just your blood that the venom affected. How could it be?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It isn’t cancer, Jack. It never was.” Kander clacked his tablet one final time, and the image zoomed in, zeroing in on one of the black splotches clinging to Jack’s lungs. At this magnitude, everything became clear. There they were, the geometrical latticework shapes, the free-floating nano-structures shuttling between them. Everything was identical to what Jack had seen in the sample taken from the specimen.

  “Those aren’t tumors at all, Jack. They are what make up that.” He stabbed a finger at the tentacle. “They are what make up the anomaly. They are what you are becoming. What the venom wants. What, perhaps, it has always wanted from you, Jack. What has been driving you to seek out the creatures—and their venom—for so long, just as the anomaly has been doing.”

  “Stop this. Kander, you need to stop this now.”

  “You see,” the doctor continued, as if Jack were just another specimen, “you aren’t dying. You’re changing. Changing into a being like her. Perhaps queen isn’t the right term—too gender-laden. Why don’t we go with monarch? Like the butterfly.”

  “Kander, listen to me. This is madness. You need to stop—”

  “But there is no stopping it, Jack. You are changing.” Kander produced a syringe from the top pocket of his lab coat. “However, I fear you might not be
changing fast enough.” He stabbed the needle through the vial’s stopper. “Let’s see if we can’t speed things up a bit.”

  Forty-Four

  The Copperwaite Library stacks weren’t exactly forbidden to outsiders, but thanks to a combination of centuries-old books, an endless warren of precode walkways, and miles of bureaucratic red tape about safe evacuations, the University kept it off limits to just about anyone but PhDs engaging in essential research.

  This restriction was a fact that Agent Thorne had known about since her undergraduate days. But somewhere deep inside the library’s labyrinthine archives might just be the secrets they were looking for, hidden in the only known copy of a monograph by the rogue scientist Emile Lascarre.

  Little was known about Lascarre, other than that he was a naturalist and inventor by self-proclamation and a cryptozoological quack by popular assent. The scientist had, indeed, disappeared during World War II, just as Sister Charity told them. And, darling of the University or not, history seemed to have forgotten him and his life’s work. But if any trace were to be found, it would be in the Copperwaite stacks, a repository of arcane volumes that had few, if any, rivals on earth.

  But first, they needed to get inside. Of course, Thorne could have pulled some Division chicanery—forged credentials or a fake maintenance order, perhaps. But that would have taken time. They could have brought along a couple of the more thuggish agents. But that would have brought unwanted attention. Ross’s admonitions about the Order of Sormen were still fresh in Thorne’s mind. If her boss was right and the Order was behind even part of this, it would be wise to tread lightly.

  Thorne had been holding an ace, however. A simple phone call was all it took to confirm that the night desk happened to be manned by an old acquaintance of hers, Marc DuPrix. Back when she was still a student and he was a graduate research assistant, Marc had held a special spot in his heart for Thorne, one that was as soft as the cashmere V-necks he’d always favored.

  “Ashland,” Marc said as both she and Becker entered the darkened lobby. Bashful as ever, his eyes were barely able to hold hers for longer than a few seconds. “It’s so wonderful to see you again. I mean that.”

  He offered his hand for a polite shake. The way he held it just a beat too long revealed that the thirtysomething classicist still kept a flame for her. Maybe no longer a torch, per se. But a flickering votive was all they’d need to light the way.

  “And you, too, always.” Thorne pulled him close—almost pulled him off balance—and brushed her lips against his cheek. They were well past the formality of a handshake. “You’ve grown a beard,” she said, noticing that it was doing little to hide his blush. “It suits you.”

  He flashed a shy smile and looked askance. “You think so?”

  “Very much.” She gestured to Becker. “This is my associate, Beth Becker.”

  Thorne heard Becker offer a whispered hello, but it might as well have been an errant breeze blowing past Marc. His eyes were for her alone.

  “Thank you again for this.” She casually brushed his arm, once up and once down, adding a quick squeeze when she hit his bicep. She could feel the electric excitement crackling beneath his linen sleeve.

  Marc nodded nervously. “Here,” he said, handing her a folded slip of paper. “These are directions.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I was afraid I might have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, if the rumors are true about what it’s like down there.”

  “They aren’t far off.” He chuckled, then gestured to the slip. “And that was not an easy book to locate.”

  “That’s why I have you.”

  Marc blushed once again. “Just don’t take too long down there, okay? If the higher-ups found out—”

  Thorne held up a hand, nodding. She knew that Marc was putting his job on the line for her. “We know. We’ll be quick.”

  Mark nodded and opened the small picket gate that separated the lobby from the rest of the library. “Well, you know what they say, abandon all hope . . .” Thorne could almost hear him hauling up courage as he struggled to mumble past polite pleasantries and on to something more substantial. An offer to meet for coffee while she was in town, perhaps. An opportunity to catch up on what she’d been doing since graduation.

  He’d been the same way back in school. And in those days, every time, Thorne would make sure to be all but out of sight before he’d mustered the nerve to ask her out. Always leaving him with nothing more than a close four-fingered wave—like a kitten batting yarn.

  A certain shame flared up in Thorne. She almost felt it was a different woman who’d behaved that way. Her life back then suddenly seemed hollow, as hollow as the vast tunnels they were about to descend into. She looked into Marc’s dust-brown eyes and said, “If you have time, let’s meet up later in the week. Dinner, perhaps?”

  “I’d like that.” His blush deepened.

  No doubt, Marc would have liked that, Thorne mused. But she knew that if she was still drawing breath by next week, she’d be long gone from New Harbor. Marc was sweet, but, as with all high-ranking agents, her spouse was the Division.

  “We’ll talk later,” she said as they slipped past Marc and headed toward the maze that awaited them beneath the humble exterior of this unassuming WPA-era building.

  The entrance to the stacks was hidden behind a mahogany bookcase topped by a marble bust of Dante. She would have bet the house that the choice of guardian had been Marc’s idea. The Inferno quote all but confirmed it for her.

  The poet’s chiseled blank eyes looked down his hawkish nose at them as they headed down the steep, rickety staircase. But even though his mouth was frozen in a scowl, she couldn’t help but think the man himself would have approved of such a descent.

  “Someone certainly has a fan,” Becker muttered as they meandered out of earshot. “Think I actually heard his heart crack when you gave him that peck on the cheek.”

  Thorne simply nodded and pressed on.

  Five flights down, and the air had grown cool and musty. Intermittent light landed on them in patches from a haphazard string of overhead bulbs. Thorne had never been in the Copperwaite stacks, and she was surprised at the seeming randomness of it all. It appeared to have the organic flow of the city above. Rooms of various sizes, shapes, and ceiling heights were linked by narrow passages, occasionally opening to peekaboo balconies that looked out over nothing but the dusty tops of endless bookshelves.

  Like many of the University’s buildings, the current Copperwaite Library was only the most recent to bear that name. It had been built on the foundation of an older structure, which, in turn, had been erected above the ruins of a library still older. All the while, the tunnels beneath grew like the roots of some ancient tree, spreading tendrils into the dark underbelly of New Harbor.

  On they went, observing the silence reserved for all libraries. Occasionally, they would pass some pour soul hunched over a stack of volumes or loose broadsheets. Thorne couldn’t help but see them as prisoners in this dungeon, forging their own chains link by mental link. And even as they wound their way ever deeper, she wondered if she might be doing the same herself.

  “This is it,” Thorne said, looking down at Marc’s scribbled note. They’d arrived at the dead end of a dimly lit tunnel. Everything—books, shelves, floor—was covered in dust, belying the fact that they’d been the only visitors to this forgotten section of the stacks in years, if not decades. She noted that none of the spines bore even a faded label. No Dewey Decimal System or markings of any kind. The books simply stood there mute, dark sentries protecting even darker knowledge.

  “You start on that side. I’ll start here,” Thorne said, pointing to the far end of the passage.

  “Sure.” Becker was already shifting over. “But if we find the Necronomicon down here, it’s on you.”

  Thorne ignored her and got to work.

  As they flipped through tome after tome, she couldn’t help but be struck by the strangeness of it all. In this
age of seemingly boundless digital access, so much information was still stored only on fragile sheets of paper, locked away from view of all but the most determined eyes.

  • • •

  Time was impossible to judge down in the sunless confines of the stacks. But several hours and countless books had passed before they found what they’d come for.

  “I think this is it,” Beth said.

  Thorne looked over at what Beth was holding. The open book was as wide as a table leaf, and it bore page after page of drawings, each one laboriously detailed. Some were schematics, plans for devices that seemed simultaneously to belong to the Dark Ages and the distant future. Others were anatomical depictions of creatures that just a few weeks ago Thorne would have consigned to the realms of fantasy or dismissed as the delusions of a psychotic. “Stop.”

  Beth halted. The page showed a bipedal creature standing on short, stumplike legs. It had long, spindly arms that terminated in flat flippers, black eyes, and a wide mouth revealing a brace of razor-sharp teeth. There it was, the nightmare that had brought them all together.

  Beth turned the page. Then did so again, and again, and again. Sketch after sketch of the creature was there bound up in this book. Some in motion. Some in hypothetical attack scenarios. Some vivisected, innards laid bare for observation. Each drawing had been annotated in a minute, near-indecipherable scrawl. It was more information than the Division or Jackson could have dreamed of possessing. And here it had been all along, buried as deep as the creatures themselves.

  “Keep going,” Thorne said, terrified of what the next page might show but unable to stop.

  Becker turned over another leaf, revealing crude blueprints for a containment device that looked identical to the ice coffin Conrad had described. She took the book from Becker, who seemed more than happy to be rid of it. She studied the schematics. They were frighteningly detailed. At the bottom, she spotted a date: 1937. It fit the timeline perfectly.

  Thorne flipped back to the first page. Sure enough, Emile Lascarre’s name was there, signed in his own fluid hand. The monograph seemed to posses no title, but beneath Lascarre’s signature was a neatly engraved inscription: solum in tenebris praeteritis lux futura est.