He kicks a cabinet just like the one in which Elisa hides, denting the door right where her face would be. He flips the table to its side. Medical instruments catapult across the lab. Elisa draws more tightly into a ball. Strickland rubs his free hand over his face and the bandage unfurls, and in the underlayers Elisa sees concentric brown rings of blood as well as a splotch of yellow. There’s a dark ring, too. The wedding band she returned to him. He’s forced it back on, right over his reattached finger. Elisa, already sick, feels sicker.
“I dug you out of the jungle like I’d dig a stinger out of my arm. Now you get hot tubs and pools. And what do I get? A house no better than a jungle? A family no friendlier than all those native fucks in all their fucking villages? It’s your fault. It’s all your fucking fault.”
Strickland thrusts the prod like a fencing blade, triggering fire against the creature’s sutures, then back-swinging to strike them again. Elisa sees one of the sutures tear, scaled flesh peeling away from raw muscle. A stench of smoke and singed blood fills the lab, and Elisa buries her mouth into her elbow while her stomach convulses. She doesn’t, then, see the second cabinet being kicked over, only hears its clatter like a full drum kit being tossed down a staircase. Her own cabinet, she realizes, is the next in Strickland’s destructive path.
She peeks from the cabinet and finds, close enough to smell the insomniac stink, the back of Strickland’s legs, the trousers wrinkled from being slept in and spattered with old coffee and fresh blood. If she had a knife, she thinks wildly, she could slice his Achilles tendon or go stabbing for a calf artery, terrifically vicious acts she’s never before considered. What has happened to her? She thinks she knows, despite the dark irony: What has happened to her is love.
“You’re going to pay for it,” Strickland snarls. “All of it.”
There is the hum of the Howdy-do and the malodor of hot metal, and he bucks away, the prod striking Elisa’s cabinet with an incidental but deafening crash. She grinds her teeth, rigid with horror, and watches Strickland lift the prod like a jouster’s lance and gallop straight for the creature’s eyes, those former beacons of flashing gold turned flat, milky plashets. Though the cabinet vibrates, she envisions it clearly: The prod will pierce an eye, pump the creature’s brain full of electricity, and end the miracle of his life while she, every bit as slow as the Matron accused, does nothing.
Strickland’s foot glances against a small object. It twirls away in a mocking arc. He stutter-steps, nearly trips, and then halts to watch the object putter to a stop. He mutters, bends down, and picks it up. It is the boiled egg Elisa dropped upon seeing the chained creature, a fragile little thing of atomic potential.
12
IT WAS FLEMING who’d suggested they check F-1 for the truant Strickland. Hoffstetler had scoffed, opining that Strickland had no business in there, but seconds after he trails Fleming into the lab and sees Strickland’s anthropoid shape pacing about in the center of the room, he feels as naive as he has since arriving in Baltimore, the epitome of the cloistered professor duped by a real world that discarded rules as it saw fit. The Devonian—it’s on the floor. Hoffstetler hadn’t been notified the creature was being removed from the tank; thus, a rule follower to his stupid core, he’d believed it an impossibility.
Even Fleming, still crossing the lab, is sharp enough to suspect misconduct.
“Good morning, Richard,” he says. “I don’t recall this procedure on the schedule…?”
Strickland lets an object slip from his hand to the floor. Does Fleming not also see this? It’s the cattle prod, this ruffian’s armament of choice, and Hoffstetler’s heartbeat quickens. He goes on tiptoes like a child, trying to ascertain that the creature is all right. Strickland has something in his injured hand, too, but it’s small enough to palm. Hoffstetler was disturbed before; now he’s frightened. He’s never known a man like Strickland, so unpredictable in his acts of concentrated id.
“Standard,” Strickland says. “Disciplinary matters.”
Hoffstetler speeds up, passing Fleming, his cheeks flushing in the hot beam of Strickland’s sneer. Disciplinary matters, perhaps—the man did lose two fingers—but standard? There is nothing standard about this. The Devonian’s condition is appalling. The sutures over its original harpoon wound have ripped, and it’s bleeding everywhere, from its armpit, the back of its neck, its forehead. From grayed lips hang gooey strands of saliva long enough to touch the slurry of blood, salt water, and scales in which it kneels. Hoffstetler drops to his knees beside the Devonian without fear; it is bound with chains and, furthermore, barely has strength enough for breathing, much less unleashing its secondary jaw. Hoffstetler palms its wounds. Blood flows thick and dark through his fingers. He needs gauze, he needs tape, he needs help—so much help.
Fleming clears his throat, and Hoffstetler thinks, Yes, please, step in, stop this, he won’t listen to me. But what comes out of Fleming’s mouth is as far from a rebuke as Hoffstetler could imagine.
“We didn’t mean to interrupt breakfast.”
Only an utterance this preposterous could get Hoffstetler to look away from the mutilated Devonian. Strickland looks down like a boy called out for stealing candy and opens his left hand to reveal a single white egg. He seems to consider it for a moment, its possible meaning, but in Hoffstetler’s opinion, an egg is too fragile a thing for a beast like Strickland to understand, too gravid with purpose, too symbolic of the delicate perpetuation of life. Strickland shrugs, drops the egg into a wastebasket. The egg, to him, is of no consequence.
To Hoffstetler, it is the opposite. He hasn’t forgotten, and will never forget, how the quiet janitor had held just such an egg in her hand when waltzing in front of the Devonian’s tank. Slowly, Hoffstetler turns his head, as if he’s making a casual inventory of F-1. His neck bones squeak, trying to reveal him. He shoots his eyes into every potential hiding place. Under desks. Behind the tank. Even inside the pool. It takes ten seconds to find Elisa Esposito, big-eyed and clench-jawed, clearly visible through a cabinet door her own body prevents from being shut.
Hoffstetler’s throat feels choked by cords of rushing blood. He holds the eye contact with her, then closes his eyes once, the universal sign, or so he hopes, for keep calm, though he knows full well that panic is the pertinent emotion. There is no telling what might happen to this woman if caught. This isn’t stealing company toilet paper. A graveyard-shift woman like her? Apprehended by a man like Richard Strickland? She might simply vanish into the mist.
Elisa has become critical to keeping the Devonian alive. Perhaps even more so following these injuries. Hoffstetler has to distract Strickland. He turns back to the Devonian. The damage to the janitor is theoretical; the damage to this singular organism is real, and gruesome, and might yet kill it if Hoffstetler can’t get it back into the healing waters of tank or pool right away.
“You can’t do this!” Hoffstetler shouts.
Both Strickland and Fleming had begun to speak, but now both cut off, leaving the lab silent but for the Devonian’s gasping. Hoffstetler glares up at Strickland, who appears to relish the whippersnapper insurgence.
“It’s an animal, isn’t it?” Strickland mutters. “Just keeping it tame is all.”
Hoffstetler knows true fear: each time he’s accessed classified papers for Soviet agents. Never anger, though, not like this. Everything he’s ever done, said, or felt about the Devonian feels superficial, even flippant. His haggling with Mihalkov over whether the creature was smarter than a dog, their debate over Wells and Huxley. In some ways, he suddenly feels, this creature in F-1 is an angel that, having deigned to grace our world, had been promptly shot down, pinned to corkboard, and mislabeled as a devil. And he was a part of it. His soul might never recover.