in latent instincts, hereditary memories of fright, or a dormant sense of strangeness.'
It was a mistake. He turned round and looked me straight in the eye, with a gaze whose sharpness was worth more than vague suspicion. 'Actually,' he said, 'I do. In fact, I've become very interested of late in the molecular basis of memory and the biochemistry of phobia. I suppose my interest in my grandfather's experiences has begun to influence my professional interests, and vice versa.'
'That's only natural, Professor Thurber,' I told him. 'We all begin life as men of many parts, but we all have a tendency to consider ourselves as jigsaw puzzles, trying to fit the parts together in a way that makes sense.'
His eyes went back to the painting — to that strange distorted face, which seemed to distill the very essence of some primitive horror, more elementary than a pathological fear of spiders, or of heights.
'Since you have the painting,' he said, 'you obviously do have some of the things that Silas Eliot brought back to England when he left Boston in the thirties. May I see them?'
'They're not conveniently packed away in one old trunk and stowed neatly in the attic or the cellar,' I said. 'Any items that remain have been absorbed into the general clutter about the house. Anyway, you're really only interested in one thing, and that's something I don't have. There are no photographs, Professor Thurber. If Pickman really did paint the faces in his portraits from photographs, Silas Eliot never found them — at least, he didn't bring any back with him from Boston. Believe me, Mr. Thurber, I'd know if he had.'
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
'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
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
