Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (40 page)

  I couldn't tell whether he believed me or not. "Would you be prepared to sell me this painting, Mr. Eliot?" he asked.

  "No," I said. "I'm sorry if that ruins your plan to corner the market—but who can tell what a Pickman might fetch nowadays if one ever came into the saleroom? It's not as if he's fashionable."

  The red herring didn't distract him. He wasn't interested in saleroom prices, and he knew that I wasn't angling for an offer. He sat down and picked up the second cup of tea I'd poured for him. "Look, Mr. Eliot," he said. "You obviously know more about this than you let on in your letters, and you seem well enough aware that I didn't tell you everything in mine. I'll level with you, and I hope that you might then be more inclined to level with me. Did your grandfather ever mention a man named Jonas Reid?"

  "Another of Pickman's acquaintances," I said. "The supposed expert in comparative pathology. The one who thought that Pickman wasn't quite human—that he was somehow akin to the creatures he painted."

  "Exactly. Back in the twenties, of course, knowledge of genetics was primitive, so it wasn't possible for Reid to entertain anything more than vague suspicions, but there was a time when colonial America was home to numerous isolated communities, who'd often imported sectarian beliefs that encouraged inbreeding. You don't expect to find that sort of thing in a big city, of course, but Pickman's people came from Salem, and had been living there at the time of the witch-panic. The people who moved into cities as the nation industrialized—especially to the poorer areas like Boston's North End and Back Bay—often retained their old habits for a generation or two. The recessive genes are all scattered now, mind, so they don't show up in combination nearly as often, but back in the twenties . . . "

  I felt an oddly tangible, if slightly premature, wave of relief. He seemed to be on the wrong track or, at least, not far enough along the right one. I tried hard not to smile as I said: "Are you trying to say that what you're actually looking for is a sample of Pickman's DNA?" I asked. "You want to buy that painting because you think it might have a hair or some old saliva stain somewhere about it—or even a blood drop, if he happened to prick himself white fixing the canvas to the frame?"

  "I already have samples of Pickman's DNA," he told me, in a fashion that would have wiped the smile off my face if I hadn't managed to suppress it. "I've already sequenced it and found the recessive gene. What I'm looking for now is the mutational trigger."

  I'd cut him off too soon. He was a scientist, after all—not a man to cut to the bottom line without negotiating the intermediary steps. He must have mistaken my dismay for incomprehension, because he continued without waiting for me to speak.

  "We all have numerous recessive genes of various sorts, Mr. Eliot," he said, "which are harmless as long as the corresponding gene on the paired chromosome is functioning normally. The ones that give us the most trouble nowadays are those that can cause cancer, if and when their healthy counterpart is disabled in a particular somatic cell, causing that cell to start dividing repeatedly, forming a tumor. Normally, such tumors are just inchoate masses of cells, but if the recessive is paired with one of the genes that's implicated in embryonic development, the disabling of the healthy counterpart can activate bizarre metamorphoses. When such accidents happen in embryo, they result in monstrous births—the sort DeVries was referring to when he first coined the word
mutation.
It's much rarer for it to occur in the mature soma, but it does happen.

  "Most disabling incidents are random, caused by radiation or general toxins, but some are more specific, responding to particular chemical carcinogens: mutational triggers. That's why some specific drugs have links with specific cancers, or other mutational distortions—you probably remember the thalidomide scandal. Jonas Reid didn't know any of this, of course, but he did know enough to realize that something odd was going on with Pickman, and he made some notes about the changes he observed in Pickman's physiognomy. More importantly, he also went looking for other cases—some of the individuals that Pickman painted—and found some, before he gave up the inquiry when disgust overwhelmed his scientific curiosity.

  "People were so anxious to hide the monsters away, of course, that Reid couldn't find very many, but he was able to observe a couple. His examinations were limited by available technology, of course, and he wasn't able to study the paintings
in sequence,
but I've got the DNA, and I've also pieced together as complete a list of Pickman's paintings as is still possible, along with the dates of composition of the later items. I've studied the progression from 'Ghoul Feeding' to 'The Lesson,' and I think I've figured out what was happening. It's not traces of Pickman's DNA for which I want to search your canvas—and any other Pickman-connected artifacts your grandfather might have left you—but traces of some other organic compound, probably a protein: the mutational trigger that activated Pickman's gradual metamorphosis, and the not-so-gradual metamorphoses of his subjects. If you won't sell me the painting, will you let me borrow it, so that I can run it through a lab? The University of Southampton might let me use their facilities, if you don't want me to take the painting all the way to America."

  I was glad of his verbosity, because I needed to think, and decide what to do. First of all, I decided, I had to be obliging. I had to encourage him to think that he might get what he wanted, at least in a superficial sense.

  "All right," I said. "You can take the painting to Southampton for further examination, provided that it doesn't go any further and that you don't do any perceptible injury to it. You're welcome to look around for any other objects that take your fancy, but I doubt that you'll find anything useful."

  I cursed, mentally, as I saw his gaze move automatically to the bookcases on either side of the painting. He was clever enough to identify the relevant books, even though none of them had anything as ludicrously revealing as a bookplate or a name scribbled in ink on the flyleaf. The painting was almost certainly clean, but I wasn't entirely sure about the books—and if he really did decide to scour the rest of the house with minute care, including the cellars, he'd have a reasonable chance of finding what he was looking for, even if he didn't know it when he found it.

  "It's odd, though," I observed, as he opened one of the glassfronted cases that contained older books, "that you've come all the way from America to the Isle of Wight in search of this trigger molecule. I'd have thought you'd stand a much better chance of finding it in the Boston subway, or the old Copp's Hill Burying Ground—and if it's not there, your chances of finding it anywhere must be very slim."

  "You might think so," he said, "but if my theory is correct, I'm far more likely to find the trigger here than there."

  My sinking heart touched bottom. He really had figured it out—all but the last piece of the jigsaw, which would reveal the whole picture in all its consummate horror. He began taking the books off the shelves one by one, very methodically, opening each one to look at the title page, checking dates and places of publication as well as subject-matter.

  "What theory is that?" I asked, politely, trying to sound as if I probably wouldn't understand a word of it.

  "It wasn't just the syphilis spirochaete that was subject to divergent evolution while the Old World and the New were separated," he told me. "The same thing happened to all kinds of other human parasites and commensals: bacteria, viruses, protozoans, fungi. Mostly, the divergence made no difference; where it did—with respect to such pathogens as smallpox, for instance—the effect was a simple loss of immunity. Some of the retransferred diseases ran riot briefly, but the effect was temporary, not just because immunities developed in the space of four or five human generations but because the different strains of the organisms interbred. Their subsequent generations, being much faster than ours, soon lost their differentiation. The outbreak of monstrosity that occurred in Boston in the twenties, as variously chronicled by Pickman and Reid, was a strictly temporary affair; it hardly spanned a couple of human generations. My theory is that the trigger lost its potency, because the imported organism carrying it either interbred with its local counterpart or ran into some local pathogen or predator that wiped it out. The reverse process might easily have occurred, of course—at least in big cities—but I believe that there's a better chance of finding the trigger molecule over here, where families like the Pickmans and the Eliots probably originated, than there is in Boston or Salem."

  "I see," I said. While he was leafing through the books, I went to the window to look out over the chine.

  To the right was the English Channel, calm at present, meekly reflecting the clear blue September sky. To the left was the narrow cleft of the chine, thickly wooded on both sheer slopes because the layers of sedimentary rock were so loosely aggregated and wont to crumble that they offered reasonable purchase to bushes, whose questing roots could burrow deep enough not only to support their crowns but to feed them gluttonously on the many tiny streams of water filtering through the porous rock. Because the chine faced due south, both walls got plenty of sunlight in summer in spite of the acute angle of the cleft.

  Directly below the window, there was only a narrow ledge— almost as narrow now as the pathway leading down from the cliff-top—separating the front doorstep from the edge. When the house had been built, way back in the seventeenth century—some fifty or sixty years before Richard Upton Pickman's ancestor had been hanged as a witch in Salem—the chine had been even narrower and the ledge much broader, but it had been no fit home for acrophobes even then. If it hadn't been for the vital importance of the smuggling trade to the island's economy, the house would probably never have been built, and certainly wouldn't have been kept in such good repair for centuries on end by those Eliots who hadn't emigrated to the New World in search of a slightly more honest way of life. The bottom had dropped out of the smuggling business now, of course, thanks to the accursed European Union, but I didn't intend to let the place go—not, at least, until one landslip too many left me no choice.

  By the time I turned round again, Alastair Thurber had sorted out no less than six of Pickman's old books, along with a mere four that just happened to be of similar antiquity.

  "That's about it, I think," he said. "Would you care to show me around the rest of the house, pointing out anything that your grandfather might have brought back from Boston?"

  "Certainly," I said. "Would you prefer to start at the top or the bottom?"

  "Which is more interesting?" he asked.

  "Oh, most definitely the bottom," I said. "That's where all the most interesting features are. I'll take you all the way down to the smugglers' cave, via the spring. We'll have to take an oil-lamp, though—I never have got around to running an electric cable down there."

  As we went down the cellar steps, which he handled with rigid aplomb, I filled in a few details about the history of smuggling along the south coast—the usual tourist stuff—and added a few fanciful details about wreckers. He didn't pay much attention, especially when we went down through the trapdoor in the cellar into the caves. He was a little disappointed by the spring, even though he was obviously relieved to reach the bottom of the parrot-ladder. He had obviously expected something more like a gushing fountain, and probably thought that the Heath-Robinsonesque network of copper and plastic tubing attached to the pumps wasn't in keeping with the original fitments. I was careful to point out the finer features of the filtration system.

  "The water's as pure as any mains water by the time it gets up to the tank in the loft," I told him. "Probably purer than much mainland water, although it's pretty hard. The real problem with not being connected to the mains is sewerage; the tanker that comes once a fortnight to drain the cesspool has to carry a specially extended vacuum tube just for this house. They have to do it, though—regulations."

  He wasn't interested in sewerage, either. In fact, he lost interest in the whole underground complex as soon as he realized how empty it was of artifacts that might have been brought back to the old country from the home of the bean and the cod. The smugglers' cave left him completely cold; there obviously wasn't a lot of romance in his soul.

  He didn't notice anything odd about the kitchen, but he scanned the TV room carefully, in search of anything un-modern. Then I took him upstairs. He didn't waste much time in the bedroom, but when he got to the lumber room, his eyes lit up.

  "If there's anything else," I said, unnecessarily, "this is where you'll find it. It'll take time, though. Help yourself, while I fix us some lunch."

  "You don't have to do that," he said, for politeness' sake.

  "It's no trouble," I assured him. "You'll probably be busy here all afternoon—there's a lot of stuff, I'm afraid. Things do build up, don't they? It was a lot tidier when I last moved back in, but when you live alone . . . "

  "You haven't always lived here, then?" he said, probably fearing that there might be some other premises he might need to search.

  "Dear me, no," I said. "I was married for ten years, when we lived in East Cowes, on the other side of the island. This is no place for small children. I moved back here after the divorce—but anything that came back from the U.S.A. in the thirties will have stayed here all along. Couldn't rent the place, you see, even as a holiday cottage. It was locked up tight and nobody ever broke in. Not a lot of crime on the island."

  I left him alone then in order to make the lunch: cold meat from the farmers' market and fresh salad, with buttered bread and Bakewell tarts, both locally baked, and a fresh pot of tea. This time I used two bags of Earl Grey to one of Brown Label, and I ran the water from the other tap.

  "What I don't understand," I said, as he tucked in, "is where the anatomy of the terrible and the physiology of fear fit in. What do cancers and trigger molecules have to do with latent instincts and hereditary memories?"