Metamorphosis

by Sesh Heri

  Wake up! Houdini shouted. Remember what George said! The rheostat dial! Turn it! Turn it all the way up! Now!

  My left hand stirred sluggishly within the confines of its thick glove, stirred against the confining force of the air tube which pressed against it from the outside.

  Move the fingers! Houdini commanded. Move them now! To the dial!

  The force of Houdini ran through the base of my spine, up my back, over my left shoulder, and down to my left hand, and it moved my fingers with tremendous, deliberate, and uncanny force. Brutally, against the surface of the pressing air tube my fingers pushed up, down, then grasped with lightening speed the dial and turned it— turned it until it stopped turning. Before the dial had been turned to its most extreme position, a brilliant flash of red light exploded in front of me and I saw the coil of the air tube rapidly unwinding and spinning away. I felt and heard the rush of air into my diving suit. I was freed from the coils of the air tube.

  Houdini had escaped.

  “George!” I shouted. “Anybody! Can anyone hear me up there?”

  I heard the same static, and no voices of any kind.

  The bright red haze still surrounded me, a halo of energy emanating from the backpack on my dry suit. Beyond my red halo the purplish-red arms reaching out from the bell-shaped object spun past me, and as they passed by me, seemed to reach up and strike out at me like a venomous serpent.

  I turned and made another long lateral swim, and after several hundred feet got to the ninety foot level. I stopped and turned around in the water. The purple arms of light were turning about below me in the depths of the sea. I felt myself caught in a series of cycles that were constantly repeating, constantly measuring my own endurance and will.

  Then I heard that inhuman voice break through the static of my helmet. It said:

  “Houdini— you think you own your thoughts— but I see through your mind like glass. You believe you have escaped me— but you have not. No one can escape me. Now you are not where you think you are. You are not what you think you are. In fleeing from me, you have lost your place, and you have lost your time. You cannot regain them except through me. You will know these things…you will understand these things…in time….”

  The voice ceased and was replaced with an explosion of static. Accompanying this explosion of sound was the appearance of that purplish-grayish, fish-like head I had seen floating above the bell-shaped object. The head came hurtling upward at me out of the depths of the sea— or perhaps it expanded in size toward me— I could not tell which. Its sudden explosive motion toward me made my heart jump— and in the next instant— it disappeared.

  The arms of purplish light spinning from below now seemed to slow down. I began swimming upward again. The static reduced in volume, and then above the static I heard the voice of George Ade. He shouted:

  “Harry! Harry! Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you!” I shouted. “Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear!” George’s voice came back in my helmet.

  “I’m coming back up!” I shouted.

  “Why?” George’s voice came back at me. “What’s happening down there?”

  “A lot,” I shouted. “I’ll tell you when I get back up there.”

  “We need those pictures!” George’s voice reverberated. “You have to go down and get them!”

  “I’ve got them!” I shouted.

  “What do you mean you’ve got them?” George’s voice sounded again. “That’s not possible!”

  “Oh, yes it is!” I shouted. “I’ve got them and I’m coming up!”

  “Wait!” George shouted over the air waves. “You’re coming up too fast! Make a stop or you’ll get the bends!”

  “I don’t need a stop,” I said. “I came up slow. I’m coming on up.”

  “Harry! Stop!” George shouted. “You’re killing yourself! Stop!”

  I was already swimming up out of the field of influence. I could see the Cypher floating above me, a long cylinder shifting its colors from red to purple. I kept swimming forward and upward, and soon caught sight of the two navy divers swimming in position next to each other.

  “You’re killing yourself, you idiot!”

  It was the voice of Captain Wilson. He had grabbed the microphone out of George Ade’s hand.

  “I’m giving you an order!” Captain Wilson’s voice blared in my helmet. “Do not swim one inch further!”

  “Too late, Captain,” I said. “I already see your divers directly above me.”

  “Bring that lunatic aboard!” Captain Wilson shouted into the microphone. “He’ll have to be put directly into the decompression chamber!”

  I swam toward the divers. I heard one of them in my helmet say: “You need to turn down your force-field, sir.”

  I turned the rheostat dial all the way off on my breastplate. The bright red halo of light surrounding me blinked off.

  The two divers then came forward on either side of me, each of them taking me by an arm, and we all swam upward to the top deck of the Cypher. We got to the hatch of the escape trunk. One of the divers went down through it, I followed him, and the other diver came down behind me. All three of us got into the escape trunk. One of the divers reached up, closed the hatch, and then pulled down a lever mounted on the bulkhead of the escape trunk. The water surrounding us immediately began draining away. We stood in the escape trunk, as the water level dropped down to our shoulders, then waists, and then ankles. A light flashed on above us, and, below, the hatch opened. One of the divers began descending the ladder. I followed him, and the other diver followed me down. I got to the bottom of the ladder. Three sailors suddenly surrounded me. One hit the emergency latch to unbuckle my suit. The top and bottom of the suit exploded apart, just as I had designed it to do, and I slipped the top of the suit off. The whole top of the suit, heavy helmet, backpack and all was pulled away from me by a big sailor nearly twice my size. The moment the top of the suit slipped away from me, I felt the hands of a man on my shoulders. It was another sailor taking hold of me, or steadying me. He thought I was going to fall over. I wasn’t going to fall over, but I was hit with a very strange feeling for which I had no words.

  Then the ship’s doctor came looming around in front of my face, shining a beam of light from an electric torch about the size of a pencil. He shined that beam into my right eye.

  While the doctor was doing this, a medic rapidly wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my left arm and began pumping it up. Another medic stuck me with a needle, drew off a tube of blood, and then stuffed cotton on the puncture site and fixed it against my arm with a strip of white tape. “Hold it,” the medic said. I pressed down on the cotton and tape with my left hand.

  While the doctor and the medics were doing all this, George Ade and Captain Wilson appeared over the shoulder of the doctor.

  “Get him to the decompression chamber,” Captain Wilson ordered.

  “Normal pressure, sir,” the medic said to the doctor. “Pulse slightly rapid.”

  “How do you feel?” the doctor asked.

  I looked around. I was feeling very strange, but I couldn’t explain the sensation.

  “Something’s not right,” I said. “I don’t feel right.”

  “Come on,” the doctor said to me. He nodded to two of the sailors standing next to me. They started to take hold of me. I held up my hands and pushed them back.

  “I don’t need your help,” I said. “I can walk. I can lick any of yez. Just show me where to go.”

  I followed the medics down a corridor and turned into a room with a long, cylindrical tank. They opened a hatch at one end of it, and I slid inside. Before they could close the lid, another sailor came rushing in and said: “He doesn’t have the bends. His blood is normal.”

  “What do you mean?” the doctor said with irritation. “Let me see it.”

  The doctor left the room with the medic. I lay on my back in the decompression chamber with the hatch opened and breathed deeply.
I knew I didn’t have the bends, because I had made complete decompression stops and had resurfaced slowly. But I also knew that something was wrong with me, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what that was. Everything seemed strange, and yet, at the same time, normal. I could only explain it as the difference between on one hand watching a motion picture scene and on the other actually being in the scene. I felt like I was detached from my surroundings, watching everything happen and this even included my own body which seemed only a part of the surrounding scene. Also I had an acute sense of the passage of time. It seemed strange that an object or person could be in one place at one moment and then be able to shift to another place, yet still retain its identity as an object or person. Motion itself had become for me a bizarre magic trick, a series of vanishings and appearances. Reality presented itself to me as obviously unreal. The very blood coursing through my veins and the air passing back and forth through my lungs had a distant, unreal feel. How was it unreal? I could only explain it as being highly aware of my body without experiencing pain. When we experience pain we are aware of the particular part of the body that is hurting. I had this awareness all over my body, but without the accompanying pain. I no longer felt that I was my body, only that I inhabited it and could perceive it. I was one thing, my body another— and my body belonged to my environment— and all of it together— body, environment, and their motions— was all a thing apart from me, a thing which I only observed with a kind of dispassion I had never experienced before. In short, I felt very strange. But how could I convey this feeling to the crew of the submarine and to George Ade? I lay there trying to capture phrases and words to express what I was feeling. It was all so strange— so new— I could only grope for the right expression. Before I could clearly frame my thoughts, the ship’s doctor returned. He stuck his head down at the hatch of the chamber and said:

  “You can come out. You don’t have the bends. Your blood is completely normal.”

  I slid out of the decompression chamber and stood up on the deck.

  “I know I don’t have the bends,” I said. “I came up slow.”

  “You came up fast,” George Ade said coming into the room from the outside corridor. Captain Wilson came in directly behind him.

  “I came up slow,” I said.

  “You came up fast,” George said.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I asked. “I came up slow— no faster than thirty feet per minute. I was down there for over an hour.”

  “No you weren’t,” Captain Wilson said. “You were barely down there half that time. You hardly got down there before you were suddenly up at periscope level again.”

  “You say,” I shot back to the Captain.

  “I say,” the Captain shot back at me.

  “Wait a minute,” George Ade said.

  “Wait a minute is right,” I said.

  George Ade turned to Captain Wilson and said, “I think we need to clear the room. Let’s just have the three of us in here.”

  “All right,” Captain Wilson said to the medics and the doctor, “you heard the man. Everybody out.”

  The medical team started leaving the room. George Ade stopped one of them.

  “Bring me the watch that was on Houdini’s dry suit,” George said.

  The medic nodded and went out with all the others. Captain Wilson closed the door behind them.

  “All right,” Captain Wilson said to George Ade. “Speak freely.”

  “Don’t you get it?” George asked. “Houdini experienced a time distortion down there. I think he sustained acceleration in time down there on the sea floor.”

  ”That would explain it,” I said.

  “What?” Captain Wilson asked.

  “The things I saw down there,” I said. “The lights— the multiple images of myself— exact duplicates of me walking in a line. And then there was a head.”

  “A head?” George asked.

  “A head appeared above the object that was generating the energy field,” I said.

  “What did this all look like?” George asked. “Start with the object.”

  “It was shaped like a big bell,” I said. “It was about ten feet tall, I’d say. It was bolted to a metal platform and the platform sat atop a kind of circular floor.”

  “Stone floor?” George asked.

  “No,” I said, “it looked like it was some kind of ceramic material, some kind of tile.”

  “What about the head?” Captain Wilson asked. “Was it human looking?”

  “No, not exactly,” I said. “It was human-like, but not human. It was a monster, some kind of sea creature, fish-like. It was intelligent. Extremely intelligent. It spoke to me through the speaker in my helmet— it broke through all the static.”

  “What did it say?” George asked.

  “It told me that it could read my thoughts— could see through my mind like it was glass. That was almost its exact words.”

  “It spoke in English?” George Ade asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “At least I think it did. Its words were almost more like thoughts.”

  “Like it was speaking directly to your mind,” Captain Wilson said.

  “Possibly,” I said.

  “Was that all that the thing said to you?” George Ade asked.

  “No.”

  “What else was said?” Captain Wilson asked.

  “A lot was said. The thing claimed I was not what I thought I was, not where I thought I was, not in the time I thought I was in. Something like that.”

  “Was that all?” George asked.

  “It said that in trying to escape from it I had lost my place and time and that I could not regain them except through it— that monster. And it said that I would understand all this in time.”

  George Ade studied my face, his eyes searching my eyes. All of his easy, casual self-confidence had disappeared. For the first time since I ever met George Ade, I saw fear in his eyes.

  There was a knock at the door. George Ade opened it. The medic had the watch that had been attached to my dry suit. He handed the watch to George, and George took the watch and looked at it.

  “Over thirty minutes fast,” George said. “This proves it, Harry. You’ve been literally accelerated thirty minutes into the future. That thing on the bottom of the ocean really is a time machine.”

  “What do you advise we do now, Mr. Ade?” Captain Wilson asked.

  “We need to do an etheric scan of Harry’s whole body,” George said.

  “I’ll get the doc,” Captain Wilson said.

  “No,” George said. “If what I’m thinking turns out to be true, we don’t want the doctor to see this. It’s above his level of security classification.”

  “What the hell could be above the doctor’s level of security classification?” Captain Wilson asked.

  “An instance of soul transference,” George said. “I do not think this man standing before us is the Harry Houdini we have known.”

  “What are you talking about?” Captain Wilson asked with a growing anger. “This man is Houdini. I recognize him. You know him. He has a strikingly individual appearance and voice. How can you say he’s not Houdini? There couldn’t be another man in the world that looks exactly like him.”

  “I am Houdini,” I said. “But I’m beginning to doubt that either of you are who you say you are.”

  “I’m beginning to think,” Captain Wilson said, “that you have both lost your damned minds!”

  “You’re not understanding what I’m saying, Commander,” George said. “I did not say or mean to say that this man does not look and sound exactly like Harry Houdini. I did not mean to say that we are not in the presence of the body of Harry Houdini. I mean to say that this is Houdini’s body, but the rest of him— the soul, the mind, and most important of all, the etheric or astral body— none of these belong to the Harry Houdini we have known in the past.”

  “Then who the hell’s mind is in this body?” Captain Wilson demanded.

  “Anot
her Harry Houdini,” I said. “I’m another Harry Houdini— from a parallel dimension of time.”

  “You can feel it,” George said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How long have you felt it?” George asked.

  “From the moment they took off my diving suit,” I said. “I felt strange, like I was in another person’s body.”

  “This isn’t making any sense,” Captain Wilson said, shaking his head.

  “That’s why I want to do an etheric scan of Houdini’s whole body,” George said. “The scan will show that what we’re saying is true.”

  “What will it show?” Captain Wilson snapped.

  “It will show that his etheric body is pulsing out of resonance with his body’s electromagnetic field— a thing that up to now has been held to be impossible, since it is the etheric body which generates the physical body’s electromagnetic field.”

  “All right,” Captain Wilson said. “Do you know how to operate that scanning machine?”

  “I know how,” George said in a strange, grim tone.

  I followed George Ade and Captain Wilson down the corridor to another room where another cylinder much like the decompression chamber was located. I got inside this cylinder and George Ade closed a switch outside. I heard a hum, and then listened to the following conversation between George Ade and the Captain:

  “See?” George asked. “Notice here on the graph below as well. See how the spikes of the two lines are out of step with each other.”

  “Yes,” Captain Wilson said. “That’s the etheric field and the magnetic field out of step. That’s not possible.”

  “Oh, yes, it is possible,” George said. “We’re seeing it happen right before our eyes.”

  “What does it mean?” Captain Wilson asked.

  “Exactly what that man inside this scanning machine told us. He’s a Harry Houdini from a parallel universe. He’s switched places with our Harry Houdini.”

  “Switched places?” Captain Wilson asked.

  “Metamorphosis,” I said, climbing out of the cylinder and standing up on the deck.