Shadowfires

Staring in horror at the mirror, as if it were a window onto hell, he raised one trembling hand to his forehead and touched, again, the narrow rippled ridge of bone that had risen from the bridge of his nose to his hairline.

The catastrophic injuries he had suffered yesterday had triggered his new healing abilities in a way and to a degree that invasive cold and flu viruses had not. Thrown into overdrive, his cells had begun to produce interferon, a wide spectrum of infection-fighting antibodies, and especially growth hormones and proteins, at an astonishing rate. For some reason, those substances were continuing to flood his system after the healing was complete, after the need for them was past. His body was no longer merely replacing damaged tissue but was adding new tissue at an alarming rate, tissue without apparent function.

“No,” he said softly, “no,” trying to deny what he saw before him. But it was true, and he felt its truth under his fingertips as he explored farther along the top of his head. The strange bony ridge was most prominent on his forehead, but it was on top of his head, as well, beneath his hair, and he even thought he could feel it growing as he traced its course toward the back of his skull.

His body was transforming itself either at random or to some purpose that he could not grasp, and there was no way of knowing when it would finally stop. It might never stop. He might go on growing, changing, reconstituting himself in myriad new images, endlessly. He was metamorphosing into a freak… or just possibly, ultimately, into something so utterly alien that it could no longer be called human.

The bony ridge tapered away at the back of his skull. He moved his hand forward again to the thickened shelf of bone above his eyes. It made him look vaguely like a Neanderthal, though Neanderthal man had not had a bony crest up the center of his head. Or a knob of bone at one temple. Nor had Neanderthals — or any other ancestors of humanity — ever featured the huge, swollen blood vessels where they shone darkly and pulsed disgustingly in his brow.

Even in his current degenerative mental condition, with every thought fuzzy at the edges and with his memory clouded, Eric grasped the full and horrible meaning of this development. He would never be able to reenter society in any acceptable capacity. Beyond a doubt, he was his own Frankenstein monster, and he had made — was continuously making — a hopeless and eternal outcast of himself.

His future was so bleak as to give new meaning to the word. He might be captured and survive in a laboratory somewhere, subjected to the stares and probes of countless fascinated scientists, who would surely devise endless tests that would seem like valid and justifiable experiments to them but would be pure and simple torture to him. Or he might flee into the wilderness and somehow make a pathetic life there, giving birth to legends of a new monster, until someday a hunter stumbled across him by accident and brought him down. But no matter which of many terrible fates awaited him, there would be two grim constants: unrelenting fear, not so much fear of what others would do to him, but fear of what his own body was doing to him; and loneliness, a profound and singular loneliness that no other man had ever known or ever would know, for he would be the only one of his kind on the face of the earth.

Yet his despair and terror were at least slightly ameliorated by curiosity, the same powerful curiosity that had made him a great scientist. Studying his hideous reflection, staring at this genetic catastrophe in the making, he was riveted, aware that he was seeing things no man had ever seen. Better yet: things that man had not been meant to see. That was an exhilarating feeling. It was what a man like him lived for. Every scientist, to some degree, seeks a glimpse of the great dark mysteries underlying life and hopes to understand what he sees if he is ever given that glimpse. This was more than a glimpse. This was a long, slow look into the enigma of human growth and development, as long a look as he cared to make it, its duration determined only by the extent of his courage.

The thought of suicide flickered only briefly through his mind and then was gone, for the opportunity presented to him was even more important than the certain physical, mental, and emotional anguish that he would endure henceforth. His future would be a strange landscape, shadowed by fear, lit by the lightning of pain, yet he was compelled to journey through it toward an unseen horizon. He had to find out what he would become.

Besides, his fear of death had by no means diminished due to these incredible developments. If anything, because he now seemed nearer the grave than at any time in his life, his necrophobia had an even tighter grip on him. No matter what form and quality of life lay ahead of him, he must go on; though his metamorphosis was deeply depressing and bloodcurdling, the alternative to life held even greater terror for him.

As he stared into the mirror, his headache returned.

He thought he saw something new in his eyes.

He leaned closer to the mirror.

Something about his eyes was definitely odd, different, but he could not quite identify the change.

The headache became rapidly more severe. The fluorescent lights bothered him, so he squinted to close out some of the white glare.

He looked away from his own eyes and let his gaze travel over the rest of his reflection. Suddenly he thought he perceived changes occurring along his right temple as well as in the zygomatic bone and zygomatic arch around and under his right eye.

Fear surged through him, purer than any fear he had known thus far, and his heart raced.

His headache now blazed throughout his skull and even down into a substantial portion of his face.

Abruptly he turned away from the mirror. It was difficult though possible to look upon the monstrous changes after they had occurred. But watching the flesh and bone transform itself before his eyes was a far more demanding task, and he possessed neither the fortitude nor the stomach for it.

Crazily he thought of Lon Chancy, Jr., in that old movie, The Wolfman, Chancy so appalled by the sight of his lupine metamorphosis that he was overcome by terror of — and pity for — himself. Eric looked at his own large hands, half expecting to see hair sprouting on them. That expectation made him laugh, though as before, his laugh was a harsh and cold and broken sound, utterly humorless, and it quickly turned into a series of wrenching sobs.

His entire head and face were filled with pain now — even his lips stung — and as he lurched out of the bathroom, bumping first into the sink, then colliding with the doorjamb, he made a thin high-pitched keening sound that was, in one note, a symphony of fear and suffering.

* * *

The San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy wore dark sunglasses that concealed his eyes and, therefore, his intentions. However, as the policeman got out of the patrol car, Ben saw no telltale tension in his body, no indications that he recognized them as the infamous betrayers of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, of whom the radio newsman had recently spoken.

Ben took Rachael's arm, and they kept moving.

Within the past few hours, their descriptions and photographs had been wired to all police agencies in California and the Southwest, but that did not mean they were every lawman's first priority.

The deputy seemed to be staring at them.

But not all cops were sufficiently conscientious to study the latest bulletins before hitting the road, and those who had gone on duty early this morning, as this man might have done, would have left before Ben's and Rachael's photographs had been posted.

“Excuse me,” the deputy said.

Ben stopped. Through the hand he had on Rachael's arm, he felt her stiffen. He tried to stay loose, smile. “Yes, sir?”

“That your Chevy pickup?”

Ben blinked. “Uh… no. Not mine.”

“Got a taillight busted out,” the deputy said, taking off his sunglasses, revealing eyes free of suspicion.

“We're driving that Ford,” Ben said.

“You know who owns the truck?”

“Nope. Probably one of the other customers in there.”

“Well, you folks have a nice day, enjoy our beautiful mountains,” the deputy said, moving past them and into the sporting-goods store.

Ben tried not to run straight to the car, and he sensed that Rachael was resisting a similar urge. Their measured stroll was almost too nonchalant.

The eerie stillness, so complete when they had arrived, was gone, and the day was full of movement. Out on