Seize the Night

was an associate of Roger Stanwyk’s, a professor at Ashdon, also a biochemist, and no doubt deeply involved in Wyvern business.

The body showed no signs of corruption. It couldn’t have been here a long time.

Reluctantly, I touched the back of my left hand to Sparkman’s brow. “Still warm,” I whispered.

We followed Roosevelt to a button-tufted sofa with carved-wood rails at seat and crest, on which a second man lay, with hands folded across his abdomen. This one was wearing his shoes, and his drained glass lay on its side on the carpet, where he’d dropped it.

Roosevelt peeled back the square of black silk that concealed the man’s face. The light was not as good here, the corpse not as close to the television as Sparkman, and I wasn’t able to identify the body.

Two seconds after switching on my flashlight, I clicked it off. Cadaver number two was Lennart Toregard, a Swedish mathematician on a four-year contract to teach one class a semester at Ashdon, which was surely a front for his real work, at Wyvern. Toregard’s eyes were closed. His face was relaxed. A faint smile suggested he was having a pleasant dream — or was in the middle of one when death claimed him.

Bobby slipped two fingers under Toregard’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. He shook his head: nothing.

Batwing shadows swooped along one wall, across the ceiling.

Sasha spun toward the movement.

I reached under my jacket, but there was no shoulder holster, no gun.

The shadows were only shadows, sent flying through the room by a sudden flurry of action on the television screen.

The third corpse was slumped in a huge armchair, legs propped on a matching footstool, arms on the chair arms. Bobby stripped away the silk hood, I flashed the light on and off, and Roosevelt whispered, “Colonel Ellway.”

Colonel Eaton Ellway had been second in command of Fort Wyvern and had retired to Moonlight Bay after the base was closed. Retired. Or engaged in a clandestine assignment in civilian clothes.

With no additional dead men to investigate, I finally registered what was on the television. It was tuned to a cable channel that was running an animated feature film, Disney’s The Lion King.

We stood for a moment, listening to the house.

Other music and other voices came from other rooms.

Neither the music nor the voices were made by the living.

Death lives here.

From the living room — a chamber grossly misnamed — we cautiously crossed the front hall to the study. Sasha and Roosevelt halted at the doorway.

A tambour door was open on an entertainment center incorporated into a wall of bookshelves, and The Lion King was on the television, with the volume low. Nathan Lane and company were singing “Hakuna Matata.”

Inside, Bobby and I found two more members of this suicide club with squares of black silk over their heads. A man sat at the desk, and a woman was slumped in a Morris chair, empty drinking glasses near each of them.

I no longer had the heart to strip away their veils. The black silk might have been cult paraphernalia with a symbolic meaning that was comprehensible only to those who had come together in this ritual of self-destruction. I thought, however, that at least in part, it might be meant to express their guilt at being involved in work that had brought humanity to these straits. If they felt remorse, then their deaths had a degree of dignity, and disturbing them seemed disrespectful.

Before we had left the living room, I had once more covered the faces of Sparkman, Toregard, and Ellway.

Bobby seemed to understand the reason for my hesitancy, and he lifted the veil on the man at the desk, while I used the flashlight with the hope of making an identification. This was no one that either of us knew, a handsome man with a small, well-trimmed gray mustache. Bobby replaced the silk.

The woman reclining in the Morris chair was also a stranger, but when I directed the light at her face, I didn’t immediately switch it off.

With a soft whistle, Bobby sucked air between his teeth, and I muttered, “God.”

I had to struggle to keep my hand from shaking, to keep the light steady.

Sensing bad news, Sasha and Roosevelt came in from the hall, and though neither of them spoke a word, their faces revealed all that needed to be said about their shock and revulsion.

The dead woman’s eyes were open. The left was a normal brown eye. The right was green, and not remotely normal. There was almost no white in it. The iris was huge and golden, the lens a gold-green. The black pupil was not round but elliptical — like the pupil in the eye of a snake.

The socket encircling that terrifying eye was badly misshapen. Indeed, there were subtle but fearsome deformities in the entire bone structure along the right side of her once lovely face: brow, temple, cheek, jaw.

Her mouth hung open in a silent cry. Her lips were peeled back in a rictus, revealing her teeth, which for the most part appeared normal. A few on the right side, however, were sharply pointed, and one eyetooth seemed to have been in the process of reshaping itself into a fang.

I moved the beam of the flashlight down her body, to her hands, which were in her lap. I expected to see more mutation, but both her hands were normal. They were folded tightly together, and clasped in them was a rosary: black beads, silver chain, an exquisite little silver crucifix.

Such desperation was apparent in the posture of her pale hands, such pathos, that I switched off the light, overcome by pity. To stare at this grim evidence of her final distress seemed invasive, indecent.

Upon finding the first body in the living room, in spite of the black silk veils, I’d known that these people had not committed suicide solely out of guilt over their involvement in the research at Wyvern. Perhaps some felt guilty, perhaps all of them did, but they participated in this chemical hara-kiri primarily because they were becoming and because they were deeply fearful of what they were becoming.

To date, as the rogue retrovirus has transferred other species’ DNA into human cells, the effects have been limited. They manifest, if at all, only psychologically, except for telltale animal eyeshine in the most seriously afflicted.

Some of the big brains have been confident that physical change is impossible. They believe that as the cells of the body wear out and are routinely replaced, new cells will not contain the sequences of animal DNA that contaminated the previous generation — not even if stem cells, which control growth throughout the human body, are infected.

This disfigured woman in the Morris chair proved that they were woefully wrong. Hideous physical change clearly can accompany mental deterioration.

Each infected individual receives a load of alien DNA different from the one that anybody else receives, which means that the effect is singular in every case. Some of the infected may not undergo any perceptible change, mentally or physically, because they receive DNA fragments from so many sources that there is no focused cumulative effect other than a general destabilization of the system, resulting in rapidly metastasizing cancers and deadly autoimmune disorders. Others may go mad, psychologically devolve into a subhuman condition, driven by murderous rages, unspeakable needs. Those who, in addition, suffer physical metamorphosis will be radically different from one another: a nightmare zoo.

My mouth seemed to be choked with dust. My throat felt tight and parched. Even my cardiac muscle seemed to have withered, for in my own ears, my heartbeat was juiceless, dry, and strange.

The singing and comic antics of the characters in The Lion King failed to fill me with magic-kingdom joy.

I hoped Manuel knew what he was talking about when he predicted the imminent availability of a vaccine, a cure.

Bobby gently draped the square of silk over the woman’s face, concealing her tortured features.

As Bobby’s hands came close to her, I tensed and found myself repositioning my grip on the extinguished flashlight, as if I might use it as a weapon. I half expected to see the woman’s eyes shift, to hear her snarl, to see those pointed teeth flash and blood spurt, even as she looped the rosary around his neck and pulled him down into a deadly embrace.

I am not the only one with a hyperactive imagination. I saw a wariness in Bobby’s face. His hands twitched