Mutator

by Gary Fry

  The moment he entered the family’s garden from a side gateway, he realized what the problem was. Around the back of the house, where lawns sprawled and were surrounded by colorful borders and finely tended trees, the guy—the pompous father James had first met a few days ago and who’d visited him yesterday—was hugging his wife and children. They all stood together in front of a capacious stable situated on the fringes of their property boundaries, a solid building with a wooden door split horizontally across the middle. Both halves had been smashed open and now lay twisted up at peculiar angles on broken hinges. Then James switched back his gaze to the family gathering…but it wasn’t this that now drew his attention.

  In the restless gloom, a glistening mass of red stood behind them, littered with disjointed bones. It turned his stomach, sending him rushing across the neatly mown grass.

  After reaching the Barnes clan, James observed more of the scarlet travesty. Circumscribed by a chaos of slime, it was about twenty square feet, with great quantities of blood—gallons and gallons—sloshing against the stable’s sides and even reaching as far as a shed beyond it. As for the pitiful remains at the heart of this pool, James could only assume they’d once formed a horse, probably the steed the man had ridden while greeting James at his new home the day before. But now the stallion’s rib cage, fetlocks and coltish thighs were nestled in an unforgiving tide of gore; its skull bore eye sockets robbed of their bulbous peepers; and its spine was a disjointed strip of knuckle-strewn vertebrae. The beast had been reduced to its fragile skeleton, the second tragedy to befall this household in less than forty-eight hours.

  Disgusted and ashamed, James looked away, again thinking about why he’d failed to alert anybody in authority about his discovery, even if only his new neighbors. Perhaps this damage could have been avoided; maybe he and the Barnes family might have fled the area until experts had done what they must do in such crises…

  But then, in one corner of the large garden, James noticed the rabbit hutch, and his stomach turned again. It resembled a murder scene, ineradicable streaks of red decorating its hatched façade.

  At that moment, arms still wrapped around his wife and children, the man of the house spotted James standing close by. James observed this development in his peripheral vision, but then whirled to face the family. The guy’s eyes, illuminated by fierce starlight, appeared dismissive, his lips set in a ruled line whose severity was enhanced by his thin mustache. Then he slackened his grip, allowing the woman and two boys to also turn James’s way, all looking as if he was responsible for everything they’d suffered these last few nights. Indeed, that was when the attack came.

  “What are you doing on our property?”

  The man sounded like a member of the landed gentry chastising a peasant for illegal trespassing. Stress rendered people curt, James knew that well, but he was quick to rise to a defense. The truth was that the man’s supercilious manner had made him feel small again, not a feeling he’d often suffered since childhood.

  “There’s no need to take that tone,” said James, forcing steel into his voice, the way he always had during lectures while challenging disrespectful youths—those talking or fiddling with mobile phones—who had no interest in his subject. “I only came to see if I could help.”

  The man scoffed, clearly incredulous, and then turned to indicate the gurgling entrails of his horse. His sons—seven or eight years old—began sobbing again, the smaller of the two pressing his face into his mother’s slender belly. But the woman looked no less tearful.

  “Help with what, exactly?” said the homeowner, his voice reduced to a palsied tremor. “Unless you’re saying you had something to do with this. Actually, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.” He looked at his wife, saw her holding their children, and then, snatching his gaze towards James’s home along the lane, he added, “We knew it wasn’t over. Some properties must attract a certain type of person. No sooner are we rid of him than another troublemaker arrives.”

  “There’s no reason for this,” James replied, thinking about telling the man that he was an emeritus professor affiliated to a leading university. But what would be the point? The man and his family were in shock, and James had recently experienced what effect this had on people, leaving them irrational and delusional. Once reason was back in his grasp, James said, “I simply wanted to make sense of who…I mean, what caused this disturbance.”

  “You might have been right the first time.” It was now the woman’s turn to speak and her voice was no less forceful than her husband’s. Continuing to embrace her boys, whose sobs had faded to simpers, she went on. “He was always up to no good, the guy who owned that house before you. Dabbling in things nobody in their right mind has any business dealing with. Few in this area liked him. He was horribly disfigured and the rudest man I’ve ever known. He read many strange books, too.”

  Having spoken to the estate agency receptionist yesterday afternoon, James knew all this. But then he recalled vaguer aspects of the young woman’s testimony—particularly the way she’d claimed that Arnold Lister had “smelled like a zoo” and that she “wasn’t even sure he was a person”—and wondered if this new source of evidence could enlighten him further. That was when his neighbor continued.

  “And the noises that came out of his home…impossible sounds in such a small place. They were like…well, like giant creatures trapped in there. At first we thought it was just dogs, but what dogs could make the house’s windows rattle in their frames? What dogs could wake us in our beds at night, from so far away? Can you tell us that? We heard such sounds more often than was healthy, but…we were too scared to intervene. Even so, they used to…used to…” She faltered in her monologue, trying to utter its final words. But then, hugging her sons closer again, she finished, “They used to frighten the children half to death.”

  “I wasn’t frightened, Mummy,” said one of the boys, the elder to judge by his taller stature and fuller face. Then, turning to face both his dad and James, he went on in a willfully confident voice, “In fact, I saw the…thing that ate Fletcher tonight.”

  James, bewildered by so many erratic comments from different members of the Barnes family, could only conclude that Fletcher had been the late horse’s name. James was certainly keen to hear what the boy had to add and was mercifully obliged within seconds. He paced forward, away from his mother, and then launched into an eager account.

  “It was as long as Fletcher, but a lot wider and had a much bigger head. It had wings that looked as if they were made of a millions diamonds, all arranged in lots of columns. Its body was all wet and wriggly, like giant rubber tires stuck together in a row and dripping great puddles of gooey stuff. When it sneaked up on Fletcher, all its legs or arms crawling and creeping, it hardly made a noise. But that was when it…when it bit him. Its mouth was as wide as a bathtub and full of teeth like penknives which glinted in the moonlight. And its eyes—it had so many of them, Daddy, Mummy, Carl and Mister—its horrible eyes were all over its massive face, like a carpet covered in marbles. But they couldn’t be really, because all the flesh on its head seemed to flex with…with living liquids. It made a sound like the world’s biggest dog that had a disease and had noticed a cat nearby and chased it. That’s what woke me up. And that’s why I got out of bed, pushed the curtains back, and looked out my window.”

  If the boy’s testimony could be taken seriously, and he hadn’t been as afraid as his younger brother, mother and even father, it couldn’t have been him who’d cried out earlier, waking James in the process. But then James, still hearing that diminishing shriek in his head, wondered what on earth it might have been. Had he heard the hideous thing’s cry?

  James looked at the boy, hoping for more evidence, but that was when Barnes senior spoke. James was promptly put in mind of his own father, who’d overcompensated for a similar ineffectual nature by often acting bullish and cocksure.

  “Becky, get Carl and David back inside the house. It’s time I took charge
here.”

  “Don’t do anything foolish,” his wife replied, her face pale as she drew her sons back, holding them even tighter. “I think we should call the authorities and let them handle it. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, do we? I mean…”—she pointed at the shimmering red riot nearby—“…what could do that to a horse?”

  Despite lowering her voice to a whisper, possibly to avoid alarming her children again, the woman’s question remained valid: what could have caused such hideous damage to such a relatively large creature?

  For a moment, her husband appeared uncertain, glancing down at the ruin of his steed, his brow corrugated with confusion. But then he seemed to reach a resolve, his hands clenched so hard the knuckles had run as white as the lurking moon.

  “Whatever it is, I’m more than a match for it,” he said, and if a masculine pride motivated him, handed down across generations in his social class, James found it difficult to disapprove. After all, he’d had a similar opportunity yesterday to get in touch with the authorities and had failed to take it.

  After Becky and her boys agreed to depart, kissing the man goodbye and then reentering the property, Barnes moved away from James, headed towards the shed beyond the stables while carefully avoiding stepping in his late horse’s squirming contents.

  James was left exposed to whatever might still lurk hereabouts. But surely there was nothing. Beyond the garden, only shadows stirred; the sounds were of foliage ruffled by the breeze and nothing more than that. Glancing elsewhere, he spotted Barnes returning from an outhouse beyond his stables. He was carrying a single-barrel shotgun.

  In response to James’s shock, the guy hefted the weapon and then said in an unwavering voice: “It’s perfectly legal, a landowner’s perk. It keeps vermin at bay. Foxes, squirrels, rats.”

  Despite the weapon’s thick shaft, which glistened in starlight, James wasn’t sure the gun was enough to deal with the thing that had now troubled the area for two nights. But he owed the man some leeway. The household rabbit and his beloved horse had been mutilated, and the master of the family, however deluded at present, would want swift vengeance.

  And the frightening truth was that James, still holding that silver ball in one jacket pocket, thought he knew how the man could carry out his retribution.

  15

  Returning to the small shelter formed by rock and tree roots—the one he’d spotted after tracking the damage from his underground room to the woodland—James speculated about the creature’s nature.

  Barnes, his condescending neighbor crept beside him, refusing to speak as presumably he gathered his thoughts, the way James had struggled the previous evening. The man had his gun fully cocked, but James doubted he could hit the thing in its present incarnation; it would be like shooting at something the size of an otter. And it was surely this, now James’s thought had dwelt on all the information he’d acquired lately, that was the key to understanding it. Last night, after landing on Earth in the silver ball James held tightly in one hand, the thing must have expended all the energy it had stored before the long voyage, when its aging process had been suspended by otherworldly aspects of the incredible spacecraft. That accounted for the burst of size in James’s cellar and then the woodland nearby. But the entity’s strength must have faltered, leading it to shrink before escaping the expanse of trees. It had required more energy, but in its reduced size, all it had managed was the rabbit from the Barneses’ garden. Nevertheless, this had helped it to sleep and grow stronger in advance of its next adventure.

  While investigating the area in the afternoon, James had almost certainly stood only yards from its diminished form hidden in that small shelter. But later, once dark had descended and the creature’s alien instincts had roused from slumber, its first feed in many years coupled with a long sleep had rendered it capable again. Then it had gone prowling a second time, invading the stable, taking down the Barneses’ horse, and acquiring renewed energy. Little by little, it was gaining power, but was still required rest to store its strength, sleeping between kills as all living creatures must, however different from any ever known on Earth.

  As James and Barnes approached the patch of woodland marred by broken trees and dissolved foliage, the soil underfoot grew less firm; in what little light filtered from the branch-strewn heavens, huge patches of slime could be observed; it resembled a monstrous slug’s trail, glistening and glutinous, like a spillage of glue from some grotesque haulage vessel. James recalled his dislike of insects, especially spiders, and again considered about how paradoxical human fears of such creatures were. But now he was confronted by a very different phenomenon, which would surely baffle even evolutionary theorists. It was an entity that could modify its physical form on the basis of a complex dynamic involving existing energy levels and the relative size of quarry. If it had the strength to take down a large beast, it would do so, but without such food-derived power, it could focus on smaller creatures instead, building up its reserves until striking again, this time at something more substantial. This creature must alternate between large and small victims in an energy-efficient way, maximizing chances of survival in any ecological niche. This rendered ideas about corporeal structures evolving over millennia in response to environmental cues and chromosomal mutations vulnerable to falsification. But the beast’s variable nature wasn’t will at work; it remained a result of interactions with its experiences. Darwin’s natural selection still held sway here. But when confronted by such an alien force, even that monolithic approach must be reconstructed.

  That was the virtue of responsive systems; James recalled dwelling on this point only last night. He’d compared the entity’s physical characteristics with his own psychological ones, the way he’d been transformed from a council estate resident to one of society’s leading figures, a respected academic with a fine reputation. Whatever distant world the creature had come from, its race had achieved in organic form what people possessed cerebrally, a power to vary its size the way humans adapted their psyches to differing social circumstances. That might make people every bit as alien as the thing James was about to confront, and that was a troubling thought.

  But he must now concentrate on his next step.

  Taking the silver ball from his pocket, he weighed it in one hand. He tried shielding it from Barnes, whose shotgun was still primed to cause damage. Light from the sky caught on the object’s surface, and amid that multitude of hieroglyphic figures, James’s and Barnes’s reflections looked too distorted to continue observing. Barnes looked particularly ferocious, his teeth exposed like an animal’s and limbs disproportionate to his torso; he seemed positively simian, as if he’d slipped down the evolutionary ladder and become one of humanity’s less civilized predecessors. But then James turned to face the man directly, thrusting this image from his mind.

  “Give me a few minutes,” he said, still covering the ball with his free hand. Nevertheless, stooping towards the small shelter, he thought part of the object must be visible, because that was when the man spoke for the first time since they’d left his property.

  “What is that thing?” Barnes asked, hoisting his gun, as if uncertain anger or panic might trigger it at any moment, shattering the silence all around like a hammer breaking plates. As the man shuffled forward, headed James’s way, he added, “What are you up to? Do you know something I don’t?”

  As usual, Barnes sounded imperious, as if it was his natural right to be in control. In response, James felt momentarily like a child again, the socially rigid world putting him in his place. But then, with a surge of energy, he recalled all he’d achieved since, and was transformed from an ineffectual entity to an imperious being. Gazing fiercely at the man and even beginning to feel sympathy for the creature he was just about to tackle, he said, “Drop that gun…now. Don’t you think we’ve seen enough bloodshed? Do you want to frighten your family even more?”

  James had no children of his own, nor a wife to create them with, but of course that wa
s how the world naturally selected the survival of people who took what they desired. It was all blind and cruel, but such was life. James had ceased lamenting his solitary status many years ago. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had opportunities with others; he’d just always valued his privacy and had been reluctant to get drawn into another strained relationship, like those he’d suffered with his mother and father. It was tragic but true; he’d become a bachelor through fear, a flight-not-fight solution to the perils of existence.

  Drawing on personal experience, he thought he understood how the creature surely lurking up ahead might feel. It was possibly even fearful, simply devouring what it needed to survive. Some biological imperatives—to eat or procreate, for instance—were difficult to overrule, even though James had somehow managed the trick. And that was the main difference between him and the beast: one had a changeable psyche, the other just a modifiable body. It was why humans, once fully fed by inventive methods, would always prevail. Despite the creature’s brutality, it was certainly vulnerable to James’s and Barnes’s intervention.