Piercing the Veil

by Guy Riessen

  Mary spun the image in 3D again, leaned in and adjusted her glasses. “See, it’s eaten a channel through the tissue and all the way around the ankle bone. That’s what allowed it to move to avoid being x-rayed. When the tech repositioned his leg to take a different angled image, it would just walk around to the low point, following gravity like shit rolling downhill.” She glanced over the top of her glasses. “So to speak. That would always place it under the bone.”

  Sarah leaned in toward the monitor. “Can you get closer to the beetle, move around to the back side? Looks like there’s something there.”

  Howard said, “Ugh, what are those things under its shell there? On its back?”

  “That’s a part of the shell that covers the wings, typical for a flying beetle,” Mary said, “and those white balls look like ... eggs.”

  “Did it cause pain because of the eggs?” Howard asked. “Were they about to hatch or something? What kind of beetle is it?”

  Sarah held her tablet up and snapped an image of the monitor, then flicked through images. “Hang on ... searching.”

  “No need,” Derrick said. “I’ve seen one before. When I was a kid and the King Tut exhibit came to New York. My family went there for our vacation that summer and went to the exhibit in Times Square.” He swallowed. “That is an Egyptian Death Scarab.”

  “No shit?” Howard said.

  “Nope. Now ... not looking anymore! It’s giving me the willies—too gross!” Derrick said, turning his head away from the monitor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “OPTIONS?” SARAH ASKED as they all stared at the cold-immobilized Death Scarab inside Derrick’s foot.

  “Well, if those things are eggs, and we have no idea when hatching might trigger,” Mary said, leaning on the rolling cart that held the monitor and keyboard. When it started to move, she pressed the wheel brakes with her toe. She looked at Howard and Sarah. “I think we need to remove it immediately.”

  “I agree! It’s creeping me the heck out, folks,” Derrick shouted over the diminishing whine of the CT scanner as its rotation slowed to a stop. “And the chitchat isn’t helping. Get. It. Out.”

  “Agreed,” Sarah said. “But, at the same time, we don’t know what it is, or how it works. I think it’s likely involved in tracking Derrick’s movements. If we remove and destroy it, that might immediately tell the Frenchman, or whoever is pulling these strings, that their tracking system is compromised.”

  “What if we removed it while it’s still inactive, then placed it into another foot?” Howard said.

  “Yeah, put it in Howard’s foot!” Derrick said.

  “Not helping, Derrick,” Sarah said.

  “How about a cadaver foot?” Howard offered.

  “Could work,” Mary said, “But we’d need a cadaver. Can you clear it with the MU Med School, Sarah? After that debacle, a few years ago when what’s-his-name, that med student, brought his professor back to life, they’ve been pretty tight with access to the cadavers.”

  “You’re talking about Doctor Herbert West,” Derrick said, glad for the momentary distraction away from what was inside his foot. “He’s a pediatrician over in Innsmouth these days.”

  “No shit? Really?” Sarah asked.

  “How often is Derrick wrong?” Howard said.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “If you can get a corpse from the Med School, Sarah, I’ve got the formula for Doctor West’s reanimation serum right here,” Derrick said, tapping his head. “We can move this thing into a real live dead foot.”

  “That’s right. We pulled the research documents from the Vault for Derrick when we had that zombie infestation in the Miskatonic River Valley,” Sarah said.

  Derrick nodded. “Someone wheel me around a bit—it’s hard to look at you all with my foot in the scanner.”

  “If we remove the scarab while it’s all froze-up, and dump it right into a reanimated foot, it would never know. Then we can work to figure out if, and how, it’s been tracking Derrick,” Mary said as she pulled Derrick’s gurney back, swung him around and cranked up the top so he was in a reclining position. “We’ve gotta work fast, though people. We need to get the tourniquet off soon if we want to avoid calling Derrick stumpy till his end days.”

  “Uh,” Derrick said, “yeah, let’s get hopping, people!”

  Sarah paced for a handful of seconds then slapped her thigh with her tablet. “Insects respond to cold by becoming more sluggish, right? As long as we keep the temperature low enough, the scarab’s metabolism will remain slow. The interior of Derrick’s heel is probably somewhere around, what? Zero to five degrees Celsius right now? The scarab is clearly in a hibernation state. So, we surgically remove the scarab now and drop it into a tunnel inside a chilled agar medium. We keep that environment freezing, and we may be able to fool the scarab until we can get a cadaver foot here.”

  “Assuming it has no DNA sensitivity,” Derrick said. “What if the thing is somehow ‘keyed’ to me?”

  “Seems unlikely,” Mary said, “since y’all were only missing for four days and it weren’t exactly a laboratory environment.”

  “Makes sense. So, can we please get on with it?” Derrick said.

  Sarah said, “OK I’ll head up top and call the dean of the Med School right now.” She turned and left the room, the door swinging shut with a click behind her.

  “Howard, there’s a scalpel and some probes and clamps in the autoclave,” Mary said, pointing across the room to the metal door beneath the counter as she moved to a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of betadine. She looked over her shoulder at Howard and asked, “What’s the time of injection on the morphine?”

  Howard walked to the sink and washed his hands, “Four thirty-five p.m.”

  “He wrote it in sharpie on my stomach. That’s the second time this month ... I think he’s beginning to like writing on me a bit too much,” Derrick said.

  “You’ve heard of books bound in human skin, right? I figure the whole leather-tanning process is overrated. I’ll just park you in that new tanning salon on the west side when you die ... instant book.”

  “The west side tanning salon ... you mean ‘Sunbody’s Watching Me?’” Derrick said.

  Howard shook his wet hands into the sink turned and made finger guns toward Derrick.

  Derrick said, “Turn me into a book and I’ll pun-haunt you until the day you die, man. Every time you close your eyes, I’ll be dropping so much wordplay into your brain you’ll beg for illiteracy.”

  Shrugging, Howard pulled on a pair of sterile gloves, then removed the instruments from the autoclave and brought them over on a tray to the rolling table by the CT scanner.

  Mary grabbed a petri dish of agar, sliced out a layer and carved a channel approximately the same size as the tunnel in Derrick’s heel. She pressed some buttons on a small glass-door refrigerator, setting the temperature for zero degrees Celsius, and slid the dish onto the top shelf. “You’re gonna grab that dish when I’m about to remove the scarab, Howard.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Now, help him roll onto his stomach so I can get to the bottom of his heel?”

  Howard lowered the end of the gurney, so Derrick was lying flat again, then supported his leg while Derrick rolled over. Then Howard placed a couple rolled towels under his shin, so his heel was held up at an angle. Mary swabbed his foot with betadine.

  “Don’t tell me what’s going on, just do it. And maybe hurry too ... you know Death Scarab, eggs hatching, your poor helpless buddy, Derrick, who’s counting on you?”

  “Don’t worry them pretty black locks, y’won’t feel a thing,” Mary said, dropping a local anesthetic syringe on the tray. “But once we restore your circulation, well, that’s going to hurt like a preacher’s ass on confession day,” Mary said as she pulled a mask up over her nose and mouth and leaned in picking up the scalpel.

  Ducking her head lower, Mary said, “And there we go. One ugly bastard ... and a scarab we gotta get outa his hee
l.”

  “Real funny ...” Derrick said.

  “OK, grab that dish, Howard,” Mary said, not looking up.

  Derrick heard the door to the fridge open and click back shut. Howard moved back out of sight down by Mary.

  “OK ...” Mary said, “and ... here we go.”

  Derrick felt some vague tugging on his leg, then quickly Mary said, “And ... done.”

  Derrick turned his head and watched Howard go back to the refrigerator and place the dish inside.

  Several minutes later, Mary had stitched Derrick’s heel up and wrapped his foot in a snug bandage. She and Howard rolled Derrick over and cranked the head of the gurney back up again.

  Sarah opened the door. “Okay, we’ve got one ankle with associated foot coming. It’ll take a day, maybe two at most. There were no fresh cadavers, so it’ll be one that’s already been through student dissection. You can just stitch up any dissection damage, right, Mary?”

  “Shouldn’t be an issue as long as everything is just stripped back. Y’know, no missing stuff. Usually they just remove organs and whatnot. If they work on the lower leg and foot, it’s primarily just to access muscle and tendons,” Mary said. “Get me an ankle and foot, and I’ll be able to patch it up good enough.”

  “Think that’ll be enough to fool the scarab?” Sarah said.

  “Yeah,” said Derrick, “once we get the reanimator serum pumped into it.”

  “Mythos risk with the serum?” Sarah asked.

  “None that was documented, no. And nothing in the research notes indicated the fluid as a risk to the Veil at all,” Derrick said.

  “Although,” Sarah said, “what we don’t know could hurt us.”

  Mary looked at Sarah and said, “True, but what we do know, right now, is hurting us.”

  Howard nodded. “And in ways we don’t even understand yet. We’ve got to find out who’s behind these attacks, and what they’re looking for. As it is, the Frenchman is staying multiple steps ahead of us, picking us apart piece by piece, and we don’t know where his information is coming from.”

  “All right boys and girls,” Derrick said, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s get the blood moving in my leg again, please. You may not realize it, but this ain’t exactly pleasant.” His shirt was drenched in sweat and his brow was furrowed.

  “You got it, D,” Mary said as she moved over to the gurney and started the process to remove the tourniquet.

  Derrick continued, “OK, someone get me a Vicodin or something out of the med kit, then grab a pencil and paper, and I’ll go over how exactly to brew up some Reanimation Juice.”

  Sarah opened the med kit and pulled out a bottle and tossed it to Derrick. He tried to grab it, but the bottle bounced off the edge of his thumb. The plastic bottle clattered to the floor, the lid popped off, scattering white pills across the tile. Howard picked up one of the oval caplets and looked at it. He rubbed it on his shirt then placed it into Derrick’s open hand.

  “Five second rule,” Derrick said, popping it into his mouth and swallowing.

  “Ugh. Gross,” Mary said.

  Sarah shrugged and pulled a small black notebook from her hip pocket, “Let’s get the shopping list going for the reanimation recipe.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  DERRICK SAT AT THE desk in his office two days later. He poked his mechanical pencil at the dismembered foot tied to a wooden dowel on one side of a circular wooden base. It had a metal ring pierced through the back of its ankle, encircling its Achilles tendon. A nylon cord ran from the ring to the post, making sure the foot couldn’t hop off on its own.

  The foot curled its toes slightly. It had been removed from the rest of the leg by a saw at about halfway up the calf of the cadaver it came from. Mary hadn’t sealed the wound or created a flap of skin to cover the top of the incision, but there was no blood, so it wasn’t exactly gory ... it looked more like a cut of beef shank you might see in the supermarket meat case.

  It moved when you poked it. Derrick wasn’t sure if that was funny or creepy. He poked it again.

  Definitely leans more toward funny. He thought.

  After creating the reanimation fluid per Doctor Herbert West’s recipe and notes, Mary used odd-shaped metal tools to carve out a tunnel in the cadaver’s heel, and removed the foot with what she called a BKA, or Below the Knee Amputation. They set the foot into ice water until it was chilled to zero, then they removed it and transferred the scarab to the foot. Mary stitched it all back up again and injected it with the reanimator fluid.

  As it warmed, the foot twitched and scrunched its toes. After having his own leg wake up from being frozen, Derrick did not envy the pain the poor foot might be feeling.

  Sarah said they should probably stimulate it frequently, to make sure the reanimation was working as intended, and to fool the scarab into believing it was still burrowed inside Derrick.

  So, Derrick kept it with him as he went about his routine. The wood base was the bottom of an old brass birdcage that Sarah found in Museum Storage in the Zoology building. The cage itself snapped to the base with four brass clasps. When Derrick went out in public, he’d cover the cage with a fabric blackout cover.

  Almost immediately Derrick began referring to the foot as “Petey.” He thought it was a pretty good name, being both close to the Latin for foot and also a name, he believed, might belong to say, a parakeet.

  Even with just one crutch, he was getting around pretty well now. His physical therapist insisted he put as much weight on the leg as he could before relying on the crutch. By the end of the day the pain usually had him sweating like a pig, even with Vicodin. Derrick was still sure his physical therapist was the biggest sadistic jerk he’d ever come across.

  Derrick poked Petey again, watching it wiggle. He frowned then and said, “What’s your secret, Petey? How’s that scarab track me?” Petey’s toes curled, then relaxed.

  Once the foot had been reanimated, Derrick had arranged to take it to a specialized office space on the top floor of the Physical Sciences Building, which was now called the Electromagnetic Radiation Archival Recording Space, or EMRARS. He’d personally converted the unused office space two years ago, wiring it to detect a very wide range of electromagnetic radiation, everything from just above one-kilometer wavelength all the way to ten-nanometers.

  Originally, he’d set it up to detect emissions from an out-of-phase Mythos creature that was attacking Miskatonic University professors who had been on an expedition to an Iraq antiquities site. But even after that, it seemed like it might be valuable for detecting any kind of unwanted transmission, so Sarah arranged to keep the office on the books, occupied by one Professor Watley Dunswich.

  Thanks to a little subroutine Derrick added to the online registration system, Professor Dunswich’s classes in The Dialectic Variations of Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty—Howard got to name the class—always filled up before the students had a chance to register. But beyond that, they didn’t work too hard to keep the room secret. Any university professor could reserve its use for up to forty-eight hours.

  Derrick put the top of Petey’s cage and cover over him, stuffed his cell phone into his pocket, and levered himself upright. Tucking his one crutch under his arm, he grabbed Petey and hobbled out the door, locking his office behind him.

  The top floor of the Physical Sciences Building was bright enough to make him squint as he moved down the hallway. It was just after 9 a.m. and the overhead skylights let the morning sunlight flood in. Unlocking Doctor Dunswich’s office, he stepped into a tiny round room. It was a repurposed darkroom door Howard had found for him a year ago. The inside was covered in lead foil to stop stray EMR. He pulled the handle, rotating the inside wall around until it opened to the main part of the office.

  There was a chair in the middle of the empty office and a single side table. Derrick smiled. One of the team had left a pitcher of water, a glass, two books, a pen, and a pad of paper. He couldn’t use any electronics ins
ide the empty office, of course, since that would produce EMR which would be picked up. He had his phone in his pocket, since he was looking for any stray signals, but the team wasn’t going to call him for the next six hours.

  He walked over and sat in the chair, laying the crutch to one side. He picked up the pad of paper.

  Derrick chuckled as he read the note written on the top page of the pad. “Have a nice vacation, dude. Let me know if you find your spirit animal! Seeya in six. Cheers, H.”

  It wasn’t the most pleasant situation, but six hours didn’t sound that long.

  But it was.

  DOZING IN THE CHAIR, his head bobbing down to his chest then back up again, Derrick started when he heard rattling at the exterior lock. The book he’d been reading had fallen closed in his lap. He groaned as soon as the interior door spun open. “Finally.”

  Howard walked through the curved door. “Hey, D. Time’s up!”

  “Cool,” Derrick said as Howard bent down and retrieved Derrick’s crutch. He held Derrick’s tablet out for him.

  “Yeah, and now you’ve got six sweet hours of data to study. I’m sure those lines of numbers will be absolutely fascinating.”

  Derrick nodded enthusiastically.

  “That was supposed to be a joke, but OK. How were the books?” Howard dipped his head toward the two paperbacks on the table next to the chair as Derrick stood, leaned on the crutch, and stretched.

  “Meh. I don’t know how you can read that stuff, Howard.”

  “Huh?”

  “Physical books. They’re chunky, inefficient, bulky.” He stooped and picked them up. “Look at all this space they take up,” he said, holding them up to show how thick they were. “Plus, the worst part, if your thumb slips.” Derrick made a sound with his mouth. “Pffft. You’ve lost your place. Give me my e-reader any day.”