'Here,' He said.
I followed the sound of His voice to the cellar steps. It was somehow different than it had been only six or seven hours ago, thicker, even more difficult to understand. He was halfway down the cellar steps in a painstakingly slow descent, like an elephant trying to negotiate a ladder. He almost filled the narrow stairwell from wall to wall. His head narrowly escaped brushing the ceiling.
'You've grown even more.' I said.
'A little.' He did not turn to look at me, but moved down another step. His weight settled, making the steps creak and groan, and His great bulk shimmered and trembled.
'Why are you going down there?' I asked.
'The beef.'
'You need it already?'
'Yes,' He said, taking another step.
'I could have gotten it for you. I could have brought it up in chunks.'
'It's better for me to go down. It's more private here. I can change without upsetting you.'
'The temperature.'
'I won't mind it,' He said. 'I can adapt.'
'But the beef is frozen.'
'I can eat it that way,' He said.
I stood there, trying to think of another argument. For some reason, I did not want Him to go into the cellar, to continue His changes down there. I guess I had read too many stories about cellars, about dark rooms under the house where sinister things went on.
'I have to ask you for something now,' He said, interrupting my search for another argument.
'What?'
'Food,' He said. 'I am going to need more food, maybe even before morning.'
Down another step. Creak, squeak, groan, moan of wood.
'What kind?' I asked.
'Whatever you can bring back.'
'Okay.' I started to turn.
'Jacob?'
'What?'
'I'm glad it worked. Thanks for the trouble.'
'It's my neck as well as yours,' I said.
He went down another step into the cellar
VII
I went outside with one of Harry's guns and a pocketful of ammunition on the pretense of hunting. True, I was going to hunt. But the chief reason was that I had to get away from Him, gain time to think things out a little more thoroughly than I had up to this point. I am basically a man of intellect, logic, and reason, not a man of violent passions and heroic actions. The most gut-inspired thing I had ever done was to kidnap Him. In fact, it was the only gut-inspired thing I had done. Even my relationships with women had been carefully planned intellectual plays with all the acts and scenes tediously considered before the affair started. It was not that I was cold and unfeeling, just that I liked to be sure of what I was getting into before I stuck out something that could be chopped off. Now things were being thrown at me faster than I could duck, and I needed to tote them up and find a sum that made sense.
The old Frankenstein tale kept coming back to me so that I could not think clearly. Mary Shelley be damned! She had written a book that still haunted me and which clashed too closely with my present reality. I knew He was not a beast that strangled little girls. I was not afraid of a great, stitched graveyard monster with a crazy-quilt body of once-dead parts who crept around in the night and looked for victims. But I was afraid of whatever the android was becoming. It was something I had not bargained for, something I might not be able to accept. Was the final change going to be that of the ugly caterpillar into the lovely, colorful butterfly-or was it going to be a strange reversal wherein the butterfly reverted into an ugly, stinging worm? Whatever, it was definitely more werewolfian than any writer of weird fiction had ever envisioned.
Yet He assured me so sincerely that these changes were necessary so that He might use His powers to help mankind. Did Dr. Frankenstein's demon whisper sweet words in his ear too, promises of wonderful things to come? No! Wrong train of thought, Jacob Kennelmen. I believed Him. Despite the horrid mutation He had become, I still put credence in His words, still trusted Him as I had trusted no man since Harry. Suddenly, I laughed out loud at my comparison, for the android was not even a man! I was placing my trust in an artificially-cultured mass of tissues and organs that had been made-thanks to a science apparently better than God's-superior to men. So be it. If I could not trust a being superior to Man, then it must follow that Man, being morally and intellectually lesser, was even, more untrustworthy. No, I had to stick with Him. I had promised Him that much. If He turned on me and devoured me to feed His great need for energy, then it would be as if the angels themselves had double-crossed me. Which was a distinct possibility, considering all of Man's holy books reported the fickleness of angels, but a possibility that I would not bother myself with.
Having irrevocably committed myself to a course of action, I felt greatly relieved. I am like that. I despise sitting on a tight rope. If I can't reach the other side safely, I would rather leap off and to hell with it. I was still afraid, but the anxiety over whether I was going to do the right or wrong thing drained away like the last of a filthy flood and left me purged. I unslung the rifle from my shoulder, loaded it, slammed the breech shut, and seriously set out for elk.
I found more wolves instead. Nasty looking fellows.
I didn't know whether it was the same pack that He and I had fought off the previous night or whether it was a different bunch. I heard their howls before I saw them, lonesome and penetrating, animal and yet somehow human in tone. I had a heavy gun with me now, plus the narcodart pistol, and I was feeling braver than I really had any right to. I topped a hill that gave me a clear view down the length of a small valley that ran for approximately a mile before a crossrun of foothills broke it off. A hundred yards down that valley, a pack of eight wolves were worrying something they had killed. I could tell from the racket they were making that they had eaten their fill and were now merely showing off for the benefit of any other beast in the neighborhood, also playing a game with the tattered carcass, tearing it from each other and running a few steps with it. After a few minutes of this, they left the dead thing, turned as a group, and wandered up the valley toward me.
I dropped to the ground and flattened myself as much as I could, blending into the scenery. If they spotted me before I wanted them to, it would ruin my hunting plans-and might even get a little sticky when they charged. Eight of them coming at full tilt would make a formidable wall of teeth and claws.
The wind was blowing my way, away from the wolves. I knew they wouldn't scent me. They broke into a lope for a few seconds, slowed and ambled again. When they were no more than a hundred feet from me, I aimed at the center of the lead demon's skull and slowly squeezed the trigger.
Wham!
The blast slammed around the hilly countryside and mushroomed back at me with the force of a dozen heavy cannons. The wolf's head shattered, and he was flung backwards six feet where he rolled over in the snow, leaking blood and dead, beyond question. The rest of the pack turned tail and ran down the valley until the darkness swallowed them. When we had fought them off with pin-guns, there had been no noise; it was the powerful rifle's retort that had scared them off this time. Indeed, that blast had been louder than I had expected. When it came, it startled me as much as it did them. I waited a few minutes until I heard one of the wolves howl at the sky. I knew, if I lay still, they would come back. And wolves were easier to carry home than elk.
Ten minutes passed before the first of the pack sneaked back along the edge of the ravine, trying to conceal himself in the scanty vegetation there, slinking, visibly trembling, but still full of the desire and the ability to kill. I would not have seen him but for a barren spot through which he had to pass. I caught the dark movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to watch him. I left him alone. Timidly, he moved opposite the body of his former
