Discovering Ezrabel conclusion * * * Though the specifics were different, Mikhail recognized the tools of Eller’s trade; he stood, chilled in air scrubbed of heat, humidity, and airborne contaminants, uncomfortable with the subtle, strange weight of the visitor’s badge clipped to the collar of his shirt. The air stank of antiseptics and aldehydes. IMMUNOLOGY glared in black stencil on a plaque above the door outside, and beneath it: PROJECTIONS. He stood—with Eller—on this side of a threshold, and deep within biological equationist’s territory. It was a cold place. Intimidating. It was—as Eller liked to say—where big science lived. His shins, Mikhail thought, were too hairy for a place like this; he should have worn long pants; he shouldn’t have worn sandals. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, hoping to steal some measure of comfortable warmth from the motion. He feet pressed into his sandals and made faint, rasping squelch-sounds as sweat-moist skin and leather pressed and parted, defining the rhythm of his half-swaying motion. He was all-too-aware of the sound, and so he stopped. Eller didn’t seem to have noticed. The lab itself was a whitewashed nightmare of sterilizers and refrigerator units, protein synthesizers, cable-linked to equation-analysis computers and other arcane machines vital to an immunologist’s trade. A microcentrifuge squatted—like an odd, cubist gargoyle—on the work surface nearest Mikhail’s left arm; he shied away from it. There were samplers here, electron microscopes, and more obscure devices, and for a moment, Mikhail fought the spine-tingling sensation that he’d just stepped into the real-life basis of those UFO nightmares percolating through mass social consciousness. Eller, he thought, worked with little gray men with slanted, black eyes; he knew them by name, Mikhail thought and he smiled at the phantom image. Scientists. Aliens. Were there any real differences between them? “Over here,” Eller said, touching Mikhail’s shoulder. “I suspect you’ll wanna get a good look at these little buggers…maybe help me pick the one that gets dissected.” The little buggers as Eller described them, were more than a dozen fragments of a turbulent, seething nightmare, squirming and burrowing through swamp mud in the bottom of something like a terrarium for its shatterproof glass sides and flat, seamless top. There were slots recessed into a metal plate in the color of aluminum…or something stronger. Stainless steel? Hinged panels covered the slots, locked with complicated bolts, threaded like screws. “They breed pretty fast, though I don’t know how. I only got three of them from the guys who had ‘em. By the time I left, yesterday afternoon, there were five. Now…” There were more than a dozen of them, like giant, bony maggots. They were not maggots. “These came from the Swamplands?” “Yeah.” “Like this? Alive?” “Like this,” Eller said. A shiver danced down Mikhail’s spine. He clawed at the insides of his sandals with toes curled under, nail crests scraping expensive, padded insoles. He took a step away from the glass containment box, shutting his eyes against the squirming monstrosities at home in whatever mud, muck, and biological offal had been carried from the swamp with them. He’d heard of the Swampland Monsters. He’d seen a few—more than some of which were flagrant displays of charlatanism in the guise of occult cryptoscientific exploration. He’d heard of a few legitimate things found there over the years: mutants with their basis in polluted groundwater. It wasn’t so unexpected that these would be so odd but in total truth, their oddness made nightmares pale in comparison. Living things were supposed to look like living things and not like… Not— “As far as I can tell,” Eller said. “These actually are human fingers; at least that’s how they look, right down to prints, nails, and the pattern of wrinkle-lines defining each of their intact knuckles. But…as you can see…they weren’t severed from any hand…there’s no damage, no proof of incision or other kind of trauma…they just…well…they bulge around the base knuckle, and then taper down to rather long…tails I guess you’d call ‘em. Flip ‘em over and look at the base of their tails and you’ll find genitals; they’re hermaphroditic, as far as I can tell…when two of them mate, both become pregnant. They’re viable life forms, but I’m beat as far as telling you what they actually are.” “Fingers…” Mikhail said, losing all he’d intended to say after that single, stunned word. He hugged himself against the chilled air. “Yeah,” Eller said. “Fingers.” Silence. A long, tense pause as Mikhail hugged himself, rocking back on his heels. He stepped away from the glass-walled container, away from the maggot-squirming fingers, their nails blackened with crescents of dirt beneath them; some wore ragged hangnails beneath their cuticles, peeling away and curling upon themselves like the gill structures of primitive and colorful amphibians. He closed his eyes. He shuddered, gasping—once—against the urge to gag. “Hey,” Eller’s hands find their way to Mikhail’s shoulders. “You okay?” “I’m a sound engineer,” Mikhail said. “I’m not accustomed to…I mean…fingers?” The threat of bile gave something bitter to his words. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and tried not to gag. “It’s okay. I can do my work fairly quickly…I just need a blood sample, a tissue scraping, stuff like that. Basic. I can do stuff like that in my sleep, so if you want, you can—I dunno…there’s coffee down the hall. There’s a break room: vending machines, last month’s magazines and stuff like that…I can leave you there…start my work, and join you when things get slow.” With eyes closed, Mikhail nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. That’s a good idea.” * “What are you doing?” Mikhail asked, Ezrabel. “Why are you making monsters?” The small break room mocked him with silence, with the whisper of air through ventilation ducts; his questions—whispered—lost themselves in the faint, white noise. He’d consumed three mugs of coffee. He felt caffeine as a jitter in his fingertips. He began his fourth cup as Eller walked in, a dark and troubled expression on his face. He carried printouts in one hand and settle across from Mikhail at the small, corner table. There were times when Mikhail had seen a similar expression masking, Eller’s features, but those times were rare, and exhaustion, if anything, lay at the root of the mask’s past appearances. He sensed a difference now: something like defeat, and Mikhail felt himself shy away from it. For a long moment, there was silence: a void like something between two people who had just seen the world change while everyone else wasn’t looking. Eller spread charts and whole pages of cryptic text on the cheap, linoleum table top. He sat back, rubbed his temples, and drew a deep breath. “I’m still running tests, and so I won’t know everything for sure…not by tonight, at least. But—preliminary sequencing indicates that the…fingerlings—or whatever the hell you wanna call them—are human, at least genetically. I ran a basic assay, just to determine the basics…dropped the sample onto a slide, ran it through the sequencer. In a way that relies on a lot of technical jargon, I basically set the sequencer to the baseline human genotype: it’s easier to run a comparison that way. The damn machine just dinged with the results, before I could do something else, and the results”—he slid a sheet of paper across the table, flipping it to give Mikhail a clear view—“well…just look here.” A line divided the sheet into two halves; something like a column of ghostly bricks darkened one side of the page. Its exact twin occupied the second half. “Genes?” Mikhail asked. “Human genes,” Eller said. Mikhail closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. He opened his eyes and focused on Eller’s dark, downcast gaze. “But there’s more to this, isn’t there? I mean…you can look at those things and see…well…human fingers.” “Yeah. That’s not the surprising part.” “You ran the equation?” “I ran it.” “You found the zero sum sequence…the…modification tag?” “I found it.” “Ezrabel?” “Those squirmy little fingers in containment…she’s responsible for them.” Eller spoke as if delivering bad news, as if he had to sit—as calmly as possible—and tell Mikhail that someone—his father, perhaps, or his mother—had just died. And as Mikhail considered the words, their significance grew, dumping sodden weight into the pit of his stomach. For a long moment, there was silence, as Mikhail considered the arcane, inscrutable data inscribed on paper before him. “She’s alive, in there…somewhere in The City, Ezrabel’s alive…and working.” “She promised to come back,” Mikhail said. He could think of nothing else. “I know.” “These…things,” Mikhail began. “Um…I mean…Ésus…?” A shrug. A shake of the head. “No. Not this one. The genotype’s consistent with the Caucasian ethnicities. Ésus and Ezrabel…they’re…what? Ecuadórō…?” “Norté Columbián, but they were born in the Republic of Texas.” And now— —so far from home, they were trapped in The City. “So,” Mikhail said. “This is why we’re here, right…I mean…you only needed to find out if there was a zero sum tag. You found it.” “Yeah.” Ezrabel. She was alive, and apparently breeding fingers and sending them down-river and into the Swamplands. In there. “Yeah,” Eller said. “I got what I was hoping not to find.” He reached across the table, paper hissed and shifted with his motion. His fingers, warm and welcome, found the chilled pallor of Mikhail’s hand. “I’m sorry, Mishek…I was kinda hoping that I was wrong, that my hunch was a stupid one that didn’t pay off.” Mikhail shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think it’s good this way too…I mean…I…I don’t like it, but it means she’s alive right…? I mean, The City…it didn’t kill her.” “No,” Eller said. Softly. “She’s alive. And these things”—he gestured at the gene-print schematics—“are…what…? Messages in bottles? I don’t know…but yeah, she’s tagged them; though I couldn’t begin to fathom the how and the why.” Mikhail closed his eyes. “Can we go home now?” Eller’s hand-clasp tightened. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go home.” …THE END… * * * Hmmm…fingers…what do you say about something like that? I have no clue, but if a woman can walk around a city with live anchovies in a red bucket, she can probably be responsible for freak-show monstrosities squirming around in a swamp. I’m sure that there’s an even more bizarre reason for this than I’m aware of now, and rest assured, the next time something really bizarre appears in my gallery, Ezrabel might just be behind it…unless, of course, it’s Agaran or Nemaean. (By the way: why have the Nemaeans been so quiet lately? What are they up to? Oh, maybe I shouldn’t ask that.) Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this odd little jaunt into Ezrabel’s world (if not her city) and thank you for reading and commenting. I hope to catch up with gallery stuff as I seem to have a day off this week. WOW! A day off! What do you do with one of those?