He began by swallowing all the charcoal pieces that were relatively pill-sized. Then, using water from a basin in the corner, he made little balls of the black powder and managed to force down several dozen of these.
Mixed with a little water the stuff was adequately malleable, and after a while he stopped eating the black lumps and began pushing them together to make a little man-shaped figure. His skill surprised him, and he resolved to get some modelling clay at the first opportunity and begin life anew as a sculptor—for he’d only rolled the limb columns between his fingers for a few moments before pinching them onto the trunk lump, but now he noticed that the swell of thigh and bicep and the angularity of knee and elbow were faultlessly done, and the few quick thumbnail scratches he’d made on the front of the head had somehow produced a face like Michelangelo’s Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He’d have to save this little statue—sometime it would be reverently exhibited at the Louvre or someplace: Doyle’s First Work.
But how could he have thought the face looked like Adam? It was the face of an old, a hideously old man. And the limbs were twisted, shrunken travesties, like the dried worms you find on the sidewalks on a sunny day after rain. Horrified, he was about to crush it when it opened its eyes and gave him a big smile. “Ah, Doyle!” it croaked in a loud, harsh whisper. “You and I have a lot to discuss!”
Doyle screamed and scrabbled back across the floor away from the gleeful thing—with difficulty, for the floor had again begun its rising and falling tricks. He heard a slow, tooth-jarring drumbeat from somewhere, and as huge drops of acid began to form on the walls, break surface tension and trickle down, he realized too late that the entire house was one living organism, and was about to digest him.
He woke up on the floor, profoundly exhausted and depressed, staring with no interest at the drops of dried blood spattered in front of his eyes. His tongue ached like a split tooth, but he didn’t think it was anything urgent. He knew that he had survived the poisoning and the hallucinations, and he knew that eventually he’d be glad of it.
His face itched, and he brought a hand across to scratch it—then halted. Though the hallucinations had passed, the hand was still covered with golden fur.
Instantly the explanation, the explanation of all this, that had been in the back of his mind came to him, and he knew it was true. It increased his depression a little, for it meant more work for him when he gathered the energy to get up and begin dealing with things. Just to confirm it formally he felt his face. Yes, as he’d suspected, his face too was bushily pelted. All I needed, he thought sourly.
Obviously he was in the latest of Dog-Face Joe’s cast-off bodies; and Joe himself was off God knew where in Doyle’s own.
And whose body, he wondered, was this one I’m in? Why, Steerforth Benner’s, of course. Benner mentioned that he had lunch with old Joe a week ago, and Joe must have fed him whatever mixture of alchemical herbs it is that unscrews the hinges of people’s souls, and then on Saturday made the switch.
So, Doyle reasoned, it was Dog-Face Joe, in Benner’s pirated body, that I met Saturday at Jonathen’s. No wonder he … didn’t seem to be himself. And of course that’s why he was so anxious to have me eat or drink something there—so he could give me a dose of the soul-switch stuff; and when I didn’t want anything, he had to send me outside to look for a doubtless fictitious man so that he could get a cup of tea, fling his filthy leaves into it, and harass me into drinking it.
Despite his weary apathy, Doyle shuddered when it came to him that the red ape that he had seen shot that day had been Benner himself, the poor bastard, carelessly shoehorned into Dog-Face Joe’s last body.
So now, Doyle thought, he’s got my body and is free to go see Darrow and make the deal, without having to cut Benner or me in at all.
Doyle sat up, permitting himself a loud groan. His mouth and nose and throat were crusted and rusty-tasting with dried blood, and he realized with a dull sort of amusement that good old Joe the Ape Man must chew the hell out of his own tongue just before vacating the body, to make sure its new tenant wouldn’t be able, in the short time before the poison hammered him down, to say anything that might make people wonder.
He stood up—a little dizzily because of his new, increased height—and looked around. He was not surprised to find scissors, a brush and straight razor and a cake of gray soap on a shelf by the bed—Dog-Face Joe probably bought a new razor every week. There was also a mirror lying face down on the shelf, and Doyle picked it up and, apprehensively, looked into it.
My God, he thought, as much awed as frightened, I look like the wolf man—or Chewbacca—or the guy in that French movie of Beauty and the Beast—or no, I’ve got it, the Cowardly Lion of Oz.
Thick golden fur billowed in waves down over his chin, and outward across his cheeks to become exaggerated sideburns, and snaked upward along his nose to join the upside down waterfall of luxuriant golden fur that began at the eyebrow ridges and swept in a wild mane right up over the top of his head and hung down shaggily to his broad shoulders. Even his neck and the area under his jaw were thickly furred.
Well, he thought, picking up the scissors and stretching out a lock of his forehead hair, no point in delaying. Snip. There’s one handful of it gone. I hope I still remember how to use a straight razor.
An hour later he had clipped and shaved his forehead—being careful to leave eyebrows—and his nose and cheeks, and he decided, before moving on to the tricky task of shaving his hands, to see how he looked. He leaned the mirror up against the wall at a different angle, stepped back and cocked an eyebrow at it.
His chest was suddenly hollow, so that his quickening heartbeat echoed in there like thumps on a drum. After the initial shock he began reasoning it out, and he almost wanted to laugh at the neatness of it. For of course I did go to the Jamaica Coffee House on Tuesday the eleventh, he marveled, and as a matter of fact I did write—or at least copy from memory—”The Twelve Hours of the Night” there. And I did stay at the Hospitable Squires in Pancras Lane. And this body did shoot one of the Dancing Apes in Jonathen’s Saturday. It hasn’t been an abduction or an alternate 1810 at all.
For Doyle recognized the face in the mirror. It was Benner’s, of course, but with the wild mane of hair and the Old Testament prophet beard, the new, haggard lines in the cheeks and forehead and the somewhat haunted expression of the eyes, it was also, beyond any doubt, the face of William Ashbless.
BOOK TWO—The Twelve Hours of the Night
CHAPTER 8
“He told me that in 1810 he met me as he thought in St. James Street, but we passed without speaking.—He mentioned this—and it was denied as impossible—I being then in Turkey—A day or two after he pointed out to his brother a person on the opposite side of the way—”there”—said he “is the man I took for Byron”—his brother instantly answered “why it is Byron & no one else.”—But this is not all—I was seen by somebody to write down my name amongst the Enquirers after the King’s health—then attacked by insanity. Now—at this very period, as nearly as I could make out—I was ill of a strong fever at Patras… “