The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (33 page)

“You look better than when I
last saw you, on the island.”

“Catherine.”

“So I have a name now. Did you
forget it when you wrote this?” She held up a copy of my book. The book I
should never have written, that my alienist had urged me to write. “Did you
forget that we all had names? What a terrible liar you are, Edward.”

“Let me see your face,” I said.
The veil was disconcerting. I needed to know, for certain, that she really was
speaking to me, that this was not some sort of hallucination.

She laughed, like an ordinary
woman, and lifted her veil.

When I had last seen her, her
face had been seamed with scars, the remnants of Moreau’s work. Now, her face
was perfectly smooth. The high cheekbones were still there, the nose aquiline,
the best I think that Moreau ever created. The eyes yellow and brown together,
like Baltic amber. The tops of her ears were hidden by her hair. Were they
still pointed? She noticed me looking, laughed again, and pulled her hair back.
They looked completely human. I am a scientist, and no judge of female beauty.
But she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

“How did you...”

“Walk with me, Edward.” She
indicated the French doors, which opened onto the garden. Her gestures were
unnaturally graceful. “Let’s reminisce, like old friends. Eventually, I’ll have
a favor to ask of you. But first, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing with
myself for the last few years. Since, that is, you left me to die on the
island.”

“I didn’t leave you to die.”

“Didn’t you?”

I followed her into the garden.
It was an ordinary autumn day, the sky grey above us, with clouds blowing
across it, and a herd of sheep like clouds in the valley below. I could see a
dog driving them, first from one side of the herd and then the other.
Somewhere, there was a man, and it was at his whistle that the dog ran to and
fro. What dogs had done, and men had done, and sheep had done, for a hundred
years. A quintessentially English scene.

“To what fate, exactly, did you
intend to leave me?”

Her voice took me back to
another scene, an entirely different scene. The southern sunlight on Moreau,
lying in the mud, flies crawling over his shirt where the linen was stained
red.

“The Puma,” said Montgomery.
“We have to find her.”

“How did she do this?” I felt
sick, mostly I think with shock. I had never, somehow, imagined that Moreau
could die. Certainly not like this.

He pointed to Moreau’s head.
“She struck him. Look, the back of his skull is smashed in. Probably with her
own fetters. She must have torn them out of the wall. Damn.”

As a word, it seemed completely
inadequate.

We followed her trail easily
enough. She was heading, not toward the village of the Beast Men, but toward
the sea. I wondered for a moment if she might try to drown herself, as I had
tried to drown myself, my first few days on the island. But Beast Men did not
do such things. They killed others, not themselves. It took a man to do that.

“There she is.” Montgomery
gestured with his gun.

She stood, up to her hips in
the water. She looked at us, then shook herself, flinging spray from her wet
hair. She walked toward us. So might Aphrodite have walked when she rose from
the sea. But this was an Aphrodite with skin like gold rather than ivory, and
the eyes of a beast. Everywhere, her body was covered with fresh scars.

“My God,” said Montgomery. “So
that’s what he’s been hiding from me.”

“Hiding?”

“For a month, he wouldn’t let
me into the laboratory. He said the process was working at last. And look at
her. She’s his masterpiece. Poor bastard.”

“I killed the one with the
whip,” she said. Her voice reverberated, like waves in a cavern beneath the
sea. “Will you kill me for what I have done?”

“We will not kill you,” said
Montgomery. “It was not right to kill him, but we will not punish you for it.”

“Have you gone mad?” I
whispered to Montgomery. I aimed, but Montgomery caught hold of my arm.

“Can’t you see what he did to
her?” he whispered. “The man was a brute.”

“It was right to kill him, and
it gave me pleasure,” she said. She walked out of the sea, like a statue of
burnished gold.

With that unprepossessing
statement began our time with the Puma Woman.

Her scars faded, but they
remained visible all over her face and body. She looked like a south sea
islander, marked with cicatrices.

Montgomery took her to live
with us, in the enclosure. He gave her his bedroom and slept in mine. We
cleaned out the laboratory, releasing whatever still had its own form, killing
the results of Moreau’s experiments. We had food, guns, and M’Ling,
Montgomery’s favorite Beast Man, to guard us at night. We planned to wait until
the next supply ship came, and then—what? I assumed that we would leave the
island, leave Moreau’s abominations to their own fate. But what about her?
Montgomery seemed to have become particularly attached to her. She walked around
the enclosure in one of his shirts, tucked into a pair of his trousers tied at
the waist with rope. She looked like a gypsy boy.

She walked so quietly that I
never knew, until she spoke, that she was beside me. When I launched one of the
boats to go fishing, she would suddenly appear, help me push off, and leap into
the boat. Montgomery would stare at us from the shore, with one hand on his gun
belt. I didn’t want her with me, but what was I supposed to do, push her into
the water? She would sit, silent, and stare at me with her golden brown eyes—a
woman, and not a woman. No woman could have sat so still.

It was Montgomery who named her
Catherine. “Catherine, get it?” he said. “Cat-in-here. There’s a cat in here!”
He had been drinking. He watched her cross the enclosure, so lightly, so
silently, that she seemed to walk on her toes. I did not like the way he looked
at her. Perhaps he had initially been disgusted by the Beast Men, as I had been
when I landed on the island, but he had long ago grown accustomed to them. They
seemed to him human, and natural. I suspect that if you had set him down in the
middle of London, he would have exclaimed at the deformity of the men and women
who passed. She was Moreau’s finest creation. Montgomery had always had his
favorites among the Beast Men: M’Ling, Septimus, Adolphus. What did he think of
her?

It was he who taught her to
shoot, to read the books in Moreau’s collection. As she learned, he answered
all of her questions, first about the island, then about the world from which
we had been isolated, and finally about Moreau’s research. If we had been
rescued then, I think he would have taken her with him. I imagined her scarred
face, her long brown limbs, in an English drawing room. But it seemed to me,
sometimes, that she had a preference for my company. And sometimes at night I
would imagine her as I had first seen her, rising from the sea like Aphrodite,
fresh from her kill.

Once, sitting in the boat, she
said to me, “Prendick, how large is your country?”

“Much larger than this island,
but smaller than some countries.”

“Like India?”

“Yes, like India. Damn
Montgomery. What has he been telling you?”

“That your English queen is the
Empress of India. How could a country as small as yours conquer a country as
large as India?”

“We had guns.”

“Ah, yes, guns.” She looked at
her own complacently. “So, like on this island, it was a matter of guns and
whips.”

“No!” I tossed a fish with
bright orange scales into the basket. “It was a matter of civilization.”

“I see,” she said. “You taught
them to walk upright and wear clothes and worship the English queen. I would
like to see this English queen of yours. She must have a long whip.”

What were the Beast Men doing
all this time? With the control that Moreau had exercised over them gone, they
reverted to their natural behaviors. The predators formed a pack, with Nero,
the Hyena-Swine, at its head. They moved to the other side of the island. The
others stayed in the village, with Gladstone, the Sayer of the Law, to organize
what vestiges of government they retained and Adolphus, the Dog Man, to
organize their defense. Septimus, the jabbering Ape Man who had been the first
Beast Man I had met in my initial flight from Moreau, attempted to create a new
religion for them, with various Big Thinks and Little Thinks, but the others
would have none of it. Montgomery thought that we should give them guns, but I
refused. His sympathy for them angered me. Let them all perish, I thought, and
let the earth be cleansed of Moreau’s work.

So we went on for several
months. It was, I later realized, a period of calm between the killing of
Moreau and what came after.

She walked through the garden,
stopping once to touch a lily with her gloved hands. “Your native English
flowers,” she said, “have many admirers. But have you seen anything more
beautiful than this? The original bulb was brought generations ago from the
slopes of the Himalayas. It flourishes in your English soil.”

“Where did you learn botany?” I
asked her.

She did not answer, but walked
ahead of me, over the fields, up the hill, so quickly that I had difficulty
keeping up with her. At the top of the hill, we looked down on the valley, with
its English village sleeping under the grey sky.

“Would you like to hear what
happened after you abandoned me on the island?”

I nodded. I looked at her
again, sidelong. What had she done, to become what she was? She had a way of
moving her hands when she spoke that was charming, almost Italian, although no
woman could have had her fluidity of movement. Her grace was inhuman.

“I lived in the cave we had
shared. I kept track of the time, as you had taught me. I had a gun, but no
bullets, and anyway there were only a few of his creatures left on the island.
You think that I cannot say his name, but I can—Moreau, the Beast Master. It
was burned into my brain, remember? Doubtless it will be the last word I say
before I die. But that will not be for a long while yet.

“You wrote that the Beast Men
reverted to their animal state. What a liar you are, my husband! You know that
would have been an anatomical impossibility. But you do not want your English
public to know that after Montgomery’s death, after the supplies were gone, you
feasted on men. Oh, they had the snouts of pigs, or they jabbered like apes,
but they cried out as men before you shot them. Do you remember when you shot
and ate Adolphus, your Dog Man, whom you had hunted with, and who had curled up
at your feet during the night?

I looked down at the valley.
She was bringing them all back, the memories. My hands were shaking. I lifted
them to my mouth, as though they could help with the wave of nausea that
threatened to engulf me.

“They were animals.”

“So too, if your friend
Professor Huxley is right, are you an animal. As am I. You are startled. Why?
Because I mentioned Huxley? I have done more things than you can imagine, since
I left the island. I too have taken a class with Professor Huxley, whom you
described so often. Your descriptions of his examinations served me well. He
thought, of course, that the questions I asked him after his lectures were
theoretical. He was delighted, he told me, to find such a scientific mind in a
young lady. He did not know that I had been created by a biologist. I cut my
teeth, as you might say, on the biological sciences. Or had my teeth cut on
them.”

During our time together on the
island, after the death of Montgomery, I taught her about the origin and
history of life on earth. We looked at geological formations, examined and
cataloged what we found in the tidal pools, or the birds that roosted on the
island. There were no species native to the island higher than a sea-turtle
that laid its eggs there, but we studied the anatomy of the Beast Men we shot,
discussing their peculiarities. I explained to her what Moreau had joined
together, how pig had been joined to dog, or wolf had been joined to bear. I
even, eloquently as I thought then, showed her what Moreau must have intended,
where the beast became the man.

“You feasted on them too.”

“They were my natural prey. If
I had still been the animal Montgomery bought in a market in Argentina, I would
have hunted them without thought, without scruple. But I’m getting ahead of
myself. For months, I was alone. I reverted, not in appearance but in behavior.
I hunted at night, ripped open my prey, ate it raw. After I thought all of
Moreau’s creations were gone, I lived on what I could find in the tidal
pools—fish when I could catch them, clams that I smashed open on the stones. I
dug for turtle eggs. I was half starved when the
Scorpion
came. There
was nothing left on the island but some rabbits and a Pig Man that had somehow
managed to escape me, and rats that I could not catch in my weakened state.
They would have devoured me eventually.

“It was searching for the
remains of the
Ipecacuanha
. The captain took particular care of me. He
thought I was an Englishwoman who had been captured by pirates, and brutally
treated. I have to thank you, Edward, for teaching me to speak so correctly! I
did not realize, when I imitated your accent, that I was learning to sound like
a lady. Montgomery’s cruder accent would not have suited me so well. I told the
captain that I had lost my memory. He took me to Tasmania, where the Governor
treated me kindly, and a collection was taken up for me. Imagine all those Englishmen
and women, donating money so that I could return home, to England! It was a
great deal of money, enough for my voyage to England and a surgeon, a very good
surgeon, to complete what Moreau had left undone.