Harold’s reaction to the accident had been less melodramatic, though still somewhat puzzling. He had taken an extended leave of absence from his government research job. Then he’d bought several acres of land, and built a big greenhouse on it for the purpose of some sort of scientific experimentation, apparently on his own dime.
Ben vaguely remembered Harold claiming that the research was somehow related to secret government stuff he’d worked on in the past; security clearance stuff that he couldn’t talk about.
Ben wasn’t sure what ultimately happened with his brother’s experiments at the greenhouse, but whatever it was, Harold got tired of the whole arrangement pretty fast. He had the place demolished after about four months, and sold the land off.
Not long afterward, he got an invite to take part in another federal research program, something involving plant DNA experimentation that could only be done in a swamp environment. The job was a big opportunity, but it meant he would have to move to Louisiana.
Harold took the job, and offered to bring Ben with him, arguing that they could both benefit from a new place, and a fresh start.
Ben had agreed without hesitation. At that point in his life, more than anything in the world, he wanted a change. Maybe he could forget who he used to be, forget what had happened.
Maybe he could finally free himself from the survivor’s guilt that gnawed at him constantly…
- - -
A loud and violent splashing in the nearby water pulled Ben out of his reverie.
He glanced that way but saw nothing except for a few ripples spreading across the surface.
Probably something horrible and slimy…
His skin crawled at the thought of all the creepy disgusting things surrounding them, watching them.
It was amazing how fast you could get lost in this place. They’d only been walking for a few minutes and already they were enmeshed in an unbelievable wilderness. It was like an alien world.
Strange vines hung all round from twisted trees, and there were times when they walked on little fragments of moss-covered land that barely stuck out above the surface of the greenish, algae-encrusted water.
Harold seemed to know exactly where he was headed, and after a bit, Ben noticed they were occasionally passing over patches of bare dirt, covered with old, overlapping footprints.
Obviously Harold had been coming here in secret for a while now.
- - -
It took a full 30 minutes of walking before they finally came to the tree.
It wasn’t large, barely 20 feet tall, but the base was as wide as a mature oak, and the limbs had a distinct and unusually severe upward curve to them. The leaves reminded Ben of a fern, but they had prominent jagged edges like saw-blades and there was a thickness that made them seem almost fake, like plastic leaves on some overdone movie prop.
The bark along the trunk—if you could even call it that—was very strange. It had the color and consistency of scabby, burnt flesh. And it was visibly pulsating. He could actually hear it making sticky wet sounds that seemed to match the rhythm of the subtle movements.
The tree had a presence. Ben felt like it was watching him.
In a circle around the tree there was a moat about six feet wide, filled with thick, green fluid.
As they drew nearer to the tree, Ben could smell something strong in the air—a pungent aroma like onions and seaweed and beer and vinegar all mixed together. It was so strong, so overwhelming, that it made him want to gag.
Harold kept walking till he reached the edge of the moat, but some instinct forced Ben to stop about 10 feet short. Every sense organ in his body was screaming: WRONG.
Harold leaned over the liquid, reached into the plastic bag and brought out a wet, bloody strip of raw pork with a patch of pink skin attached to it. He held it out in front of himself, and shook it, like you would shake a toy in the presence of a small animal to excite its interest.
A moment later, a shape rose up out of the green depths.
It was, from appearances, a giant pea-pod.
It was about eight feet long, and one end was attached to a stem that was approximately 20 inches in circumference. The huge stem held the pod aloft in an almost horizontal position, slightly angled upward at the far end.
The pod kept rising out of the green goo until it was almost of an equal height with the dangling piece of meat, and then it split open right down the middle with a sound like hands, slick with lotion, rubbing together.
A naked woman lay nestled within. She had green skin and lacked any speck of body hair. There were dozens of dark roots buried into her flesh as if they’d grown there—piercing her ribs, her stomach, her neck, her groin. The roots seemingly linked her back to the pod like an umbilical cord links a fetus to its mother’s lifeblood.
The woman’s face was Leah’s face. It was exactly Leah’s face. This was not the missing woman. It was Harold’s dead wife.
Ben opened his mouth to scream, a reflexive action, but the terror inside him was so intense that he had momentarily lost his voice, and all that came out was a little whine.
What he wanted to do was look away; what he wanted to do was hide his eyes from the horror in front of him, but he couldn’t because his body wouldn’t obey.
Because how could he look away? How could he turn his back on this astonishing miracle?
Leah’s eyelids fluttered open, revealing oversized pupils that were the exact same shade of green as her strange skin. She stared around without comprehension, working her mouth open and closed like a baby bird begging for a worm.
Suddenly she jerked, letting out a little sound like a burp, and green liquid with the consistency of baby food erupted into her mouth, filling it up, overflowing, dribbling down the chin onto the neck.
Harold lowered the meat a few inches, bringing it into her line of sight, and she grabbed it out of his hands, brought it to her mouth, and tore into it like a wild animal.
Ben took an involuntary step back.
And then another.
Harold grinned. “Say hello to your sister-in-law, Benny.”
Chapter 4
“How,” said Ben when he finally managed to find his voice. “How… did you do this?”
Harold smiled like a little kid at recess with secret candy in his pocket. “Science!” he said. “Everybody’s always talking about science like it’s some kind of perfect answer for all the problems of modern society. Science is the new religion of the intellectual class. They think they’ve got it all figured out. But they don’t get it. Not at all. The world, the universe, is soooooo much weirder than they believe. The bounds of science include things they could never comprehend, things they could never accept. There are horrors out there in the dark corners, in secret places that border our reality, that would drive them insane, and there are wonders that would make them weep with joy. The world is a magical place, little brother, and science, the REAL science, is full of amazing secrets. What you see before you is a perfect example. This plant doesn’t really belong in this world at all. It comes from an entirely separate plane of existence! An alternate reality. A place where they’ve taken bio-technology to levels that would boggle your mind.”
Ben croaked, “But this… It just… It can’t be real…”
“Then what is it?” Harold asked. “Do you think it’s some sort of magic trick? Something like a movie special effect?”
Ben could think of nothing to say, so he just shook his head and kept staring in shock.
Harold continued, “This is my life’s work, little brother. This is the fruit of all those years doing experiments for Uncle Sam. During most of that time, I was working on a secret project involving research into organisms from an alien plane of existence. A parallel reality. I spent a great deal of time studying these particular trees, learning how they worked, learning what was possible. And eventually, when I began to really understand what could be accomplished, I kept most of my discoveries secret from the others in my lab. The
knowledge was too dangerous. Some things can’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. At one point I even considered sabotaging the whole project. But then the RV accident happened, and as soon as the police called and told me the extent of the tragedy, I knew what I had to do… I pulled some strings, used some leverage I had with certain high ranking people, and had their bodies put into cryogenic storage. That’s why I insisted that all the funerals be closed casket affairs—their bodies were already long gone by then. At the time I was very concerned about cellular damage, and thought freezing would be necessary. Later I learned that wasn’t true, but at the time it seemed critical, and I didn’t know how long it would take before I could begin the resurrection process. As you can see, it has taken me quite a while to start the project in earnest, so it was probably good that I froze them. I decided to start with Leah, because I couldn’t bear to live without her for any longer than was absolutely necessary. Later I’ll do Mother and Marianne and Father. I think Father would want to be last, though I sometimes think I should do him sooner and let him help me. He was always a very practical man, and a quick thinker. He would be useful to have around.”
Ben’s mind was finally beginning to work again, and he started piecing together some of the things Harold was saying. But there was something missing. An important detail. He looked at his brother, and asked, “What about the woman you kidnapped? What did you do to her?”
“You’re looking at her,” said Harold. “This is what she has become. She is being transformed into a clone of Leah. I chose her specifically because of the resemblance—it would take much longer, perhaps even several years for the tree to complete the transformation process if I chose a woman with fewer natural similarities. That’s one of its main limitations. It took me more than a little time to find a woman with just the right look. But as you can see, it was worth the effort. The major structural changes are already complete. The face is so perfect I can’t even tell the difference.”
“But that’s just her face… It’s another woman, not Leah.”
“Wrong. The tree creates exact clones. It even clones the mind somehow, copies the data left inside the dead brains.” He paused a moment, and then shook his head. “Or… maybe that’s not exactly what it does… These trees, in the strange realm where they originate, are tied to certain myths… Those myths talk about the body as a mere vessel for the soul. I’m a scientist, and scientists don’t believe in things like that. But some of my experiments have shown me that even severe cell degradation—more than a week of rot in summer conditions, to be precise—doesn’t seem to cause any long term harm to the thinking ability or memories of the resurrected person. Even if they start off with some cognitive issues, they seem to recover everything over time, so maybe the soul, or something non-physical, does play into it. I don’t know… Perhaps all this strangeness is slowly turning me into a crazy mystic.”
“Mystic? What the fuck are you even talking about?”
Harold shrugged. “It’s just something I’ve been thinking on lately… It’s rather upsetting to have my whole world view called into question.”
“Mysticism upsets you, but you’re fine with crazy shit like this? You’re fine with kidnapping innocent people?”
Harold shrugged.
The two lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, and Ben’s mind started working over the details of his brother’s explanation, piece by piece, making logical calculations, which soon pointed him in the direction of an inconsistency.
He looked at Harold and said, “You told me you froze their bodies after the accident, right?”
“Yes.”
“So, if this is that other woman, the one you led off into the swamp that night, then why did you need Leah’s body?”
“It’s the nature of the process,” said Harold, smiling like a kid eager to explain the workings of his newest toy. “To accomplish the resurrection, you start with a seed for one of these trees, and a dead body, someone you want to bring back to life. You want the body to be relatively fresh if possible, though I found out later it is not actually necessary, or at least not quite as necessary as I had assumed. You take the body, cut it open, and put a seed inside it. Then you bury the body, and wait. After a few days, the seed comes to life, and sends millions of tiny tendrils out. The tendrils have a kind of intelligence, they study the body and record every tiny detail of the cellular structure. And then when that process is complete, the seed takes root in the earth, and begins growing into a new tree. When the tree fully matures—it doesn’t take long, only a few months—it forms a pod like the one you see here, and if you place a living person into that pod, the tree will slowly transform the person into a perfect clone of your dead loved one. As you can see, the process is a bit convoluted, which is why no one else at the lab could figure out how it worked. I was able to decipher it only by spending months studying folklore and myths, something that most scientists are loathe to do.”
“So you’re saying you brought Leah’s body here…”
Harold nodded. “Yes. Several months ago, I removed my wife’s body from frozen storage and brought her here. I cut her open… put the seed right in the center of her abdomen. Then I dug a shallow grave and planted her… Later, when the tree reached adulthood, I brought the lookalike here under false pretenses, drugged her, and placed her inside the pod. The tree did the rest. It works through a process involving biological nanomachines.” He gestured towards the moat. “This green liquid is full of millions of them. The stuff seeps out of the tree, a bit like sap—huge quantities of it, which is why it’s better to plant these things in a swampy environment. They need lots of moisture—”
“Okay, enough,” said Ben. “I think I get it. And I don’t even care how it works at this point. Doesn’t matter how you did it. What matters is you killed a woman, an innocent. You took her life so you could bring back Leah.”
Harold snorted. “Don’t be naive. No one is really innocent. At the end of the day she was just another meat sack, like you and me. She made mistakes. She did horrible things. Human beings are a dime a dozen. I’m sure she was no great loss.”
“Is that how you justified it?”
“I did what was necessary. She looked so much like Leah that I had to seize the opportunity. Choosing to take this woman’s life was the easy part. I’m not going to get all weepy about it. The hard parts for me were the months of preparation, finding the right candidate, getting established here in Louisiana, keeping everything a secret from your prying eyes. That was all quite difficult. But the decision to act was rather easy for me.”
“And you plan to do this again, for Mom, for Dad, for Marianne?”
“Naturally.”
“You’re going to find a little girl to kill so you can bring back Marianne?”
“I’m not squeamish and moralistic like you, Benny. I’ll do what is necessary to allow my little sister to live again.”
“Do you think Mom would be okay with that? Do you think Dad would?”
“I don’t think they have to know the whole story. You didn’t have to know either. I had an edited version of events that I was prepared to give you at a later time, one that didn’t involve kidnapping. If you’d just minded your own business we could’ve avoided a lot of this unpleasantness.”
Ben shook his head and said, “No Harold. This ends now. Since you’ve already started with Leah, I’m gonna let you finish. I’ll even help you with things until she… recovers… Or whatever… But there won’t be any more of this. I think I even understand how you talked yourself into doing something so evil, but it’s just inexcusable, and it stops here. Just Leah. No more.”
Harold smirked. “Just Leah?”
“Yeah. Just Leah.”
“You’re such a coward, Ben.”
“Save it. This whole thing is unbelievably selfish. This woman, who did nothing wrong, has lost her life. I won’t allow it to happen again.”
“It’s very interesting how you’ve decided you can dictate
things to me now. I wonder if you would feel the same about all this if you understood the whole truth.”
“What truth?”
“You’ve always been weak, Ben. A pathetic person, really. But I have still been astonished by the degree to which you’ve been able to delude yourself. I half expected that seeing Leah here, under these circumstances, would cause some of the memories to surface.”
There was something in the way Harold was looking at him that Made Ben’s skin crawl. “What’re you talking about?”
Harold grinned. “Yes, I think I’ll enlighten you. Before you throw ice water on my little experiment, you should probably understand the full extent of your own part in it.”
“My part?”
“Yes Benny. You see, Leah wasn’t actually the first person I resurrected. My first attempt, my proof of concept for this whole endeavor, was you.”
Chapter 5
As soon as he heard the words, Ben felt something inside himself begin to crumble, like a brick wall collapsing in the spasms of a violent earthquake, but he kept his face from showing it, and said, “I’m not some little kid that you can trick with your stupid lies anymore, Harold.”
Harold laughed. “Ha! That’s right! I used to trick you all the time didn’t I? You were always so damned gullible, Benny. A very disappointing sibling, even then. But this is no trick, and deep down you know it.”
“This is bullshit.”
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Harold. “After the RV accident, when you were doing hard drugs 24 hours a day, living alone in that big old house, you made some sort of mistake—took a few too many pills, or maybe mixed the wrong things together. Or maybe you were just weak, and decided to off yourself on purpose.”
The DARK Trilogy: Titan's Song Chronicles Volume 1 (Books 1 - 3) Page 26
