Uncharted Waters
“FATE,” SAID NATE, “HAS PRESENTED US WITH A fortuitous opportunity.” Thus, with that offhandedly euphemistic remark, did he broach the topic with me. We had everything we could have hoped for, he continued, right here on the boat – more or less the exact criteria we had earlier discussed.
I was punch-drunk with tiredness and still reeling from the events of the night gone by. My brain seemed unable to grasp what Nate was driving at. Then the import of it filtered through.
My immediate response was rejection. He was talking about Intercranial Cognition Transference. He was proposing we take it to the next level and conduct the procedure upon human beings. To wit: we remove Junior’s consciousness from his dying body and insert it into the traumatised brain of Charley.
After all, Nate said, Charley was almost entirely bereft of his senses. Whatever the shoggoth had done to him – whatever awfulness he had been exposed to via that opening in its exterior – it had robbed him of his wits. His mind was now a tabula rasa upon which we could write anew, imprinting it with Junior’s cerebral essence. We might never get another chance like this. The very scenario Nate had outlined not so long ago had, through a stroke of extraordinary good fortune, come into being. We would be foolish – no, mad – to pass it up.
“Look at it this way,” he insisted. “At the rate he’s going, Junior Brenneman is unlikely to last the day. Charley is lost to us, even while his physical self remains in fine fettle. In granting the one a continued existence within the vacant, healthy frame of the other, as a hermit crab takes up residence inside the discarded shell of another mollusc, we may give Junior a new lease of life.”
I replied that we did not know whether Charley’s state of trancelike delirium was temporary or permanent, and until it could be established which, we would be acting pre-emptively. Then, too, there was the matter of dignity. How could we imbue his body with the consciousness of someone who so openly despised him? It was like some cruel jest, a final insult after all the copious other abuses he had suffered at Junior’s hands. I had found Charley to be an utterly honourable man, and even to contemplate subjecting him to the procedure was egregiously disrespectful.
Furthermore, I added, we would surely need the permission of Junior’s next of kin before we could begin – the man himself was insensible – and I doubted the skipper would grant it.
As to that, Nate said, he didn’t think it would be a problem. He could present the case in such a way that the skipper would see the sense in it and give his consent. My own refusal, he avowed, was more of a hindrance, but nothing that could not be got around.
So saying, he strode off insouciantly to the pilothouse, leaving me to carry on tending to the unconscious Junior. When he returned some while later, he looked satisfied. Skipper Brenneman’s compliance had been secured, it seemed. He had been reluctant at first, and deeply sceptical too, but Nate – silver-tongued Nate, who could charm the birds from the trees – had won him round. Above all else the skipper did not want to lose his son. If Nate could really help Junior live on, even in the body of another, then as far as the skipper was concerned there was nothing else for it. Especially since the alternative for Junior was a protracted, painful death.
I went to remonstrate with the skipper, but his mind was made up and it was like arguing with a block of adamantine. He was fairly drunk, what’s more, and became belligerent when I persisted. “Git gone with you, you bleatin’, lily-livered b–––––––!” he thundered, shaking a coal-blackened fist at me. “Mr Whateley knows what’s what, if’n you don’t. He has some backbone, that fella, some gumption. You made a cat act like as it were a dog, din’tcha? You used yer Ivy League smarts fur that. Naow use ’em ter save my boy!”
Had Junior Brenneman been one iota more decent a human being, and Charley one iota less so, I might well have capitulated and gone along with Nate’s scheme. But I simply could not bring myself to, and I thought that my continued steadfast demurral would leave it stillborn. I thought that I had some say in the matter.
It turned out that I did not. When I informed Nate that, the skipper’s wishes notwithstanding, I would still not undertake the procedure, my friend merely laughed derisively.
“What makes you think I need you?” he said. “I have been privy to the evolution of your experiments, their every up and down, their every in and out. I know as much about the omnireticulum and Intercranial Cognition Transference as you do. You are, to put it bluntly, Zach, surplus to requirements. Now, you can either help me or get out of my way. Which is it to be?”
His face was stony, his tone condescending and contemptuous. This was a Nate Whateley I did not recognise, a Nate Whateley who appeared to have cast aside all semblance of friendship and civility. I have likened him elsewhere in this memoir to a hurricane, and now I saw that I was just another of those obstacles that he could ride roughshod over and smash to smithereens. Any notion that I had been special to him, a younger brother, a soulmate, seemed illusory. Had I been kidding myself ? Had Nate been kidding me?
I was crestfallen, shattered, but I stood my ground regardless. I told Nate I would not help him perform the procedure. In fact, if he insisted on going ahead with it, I would actively prevent him from doing so.
When he scornfully asked how I intended to make good on that threat, I committed the mistake of telling him. I said I would go to the laboratory and destroy the necessary chemicals and utensils. My notes as well, if it came to that. There would be an end to the affair.
“Oh, Zach, Zach, Zach,” Nate said, with a pitying shake of the head. His expression hardened. “You really think you can give me an ultimatum? Me, Nathaniel Whateley? You would really be that rash?”
Drawing myself up to my full height, which was a couple of inches shy of his, I unleashed a defiant “yes”.
Next thing I knew, there was pain, an explosion of lights in my vision, and then a profound and all-encompassing blackness.
* * *
When I came to, my jaw was aching, my head was spinning, and I felt nauseous. It was some while before I could raise myself from the bed I was lying on, some further while still before I managed to stagger upright. I was in my cabin. I tried the door. It was locked from the outside. I hammered upon it with my fists and called out. No one came.
I retreated back to the bunk and took stock. The Innsmouth Belle was still chugging eagerly eastward, downriver. Scenery scrolled past the porthole window. It was gone three o’clock in the afternoon. I had been out for five hours. My best friend had knocked me out cold, and all because I had had the temerity to stand up to him.
Five hours was more than enough time for Nate to have carried out the operation on Charley and Junior Brenneman. Had it been a success? I must confess to feeling a certain sneaking curiosity as to the outcome. A part of me was appalled at what Nate was attempting, but another part – the rational scientist in me, never far from the surface – had its ears pricked and its tail raised. There was knowledge in the offing. There was the tantalising prospect of an unprecedented accomplishment.
Eventually, shortly before six, Nate came to unlock the door and release me. He eyed me with concern, registering the egg-sized bruise that swelled my jawline and offering an apology that sounded not a million miles from sincere.
I could not help myself. I wanted to rail angrily at him, but all I could say was: “Did it work?”
“Come and see, Zach. Come and see what we’ve done.”
* * *
Junior was dead. His corpse lay in his bunk, a sheet drawn up over the face. Charley, conversely, was up and about – and bewildered. He stood in his cabin staring at his hands, brow furrowed, turning the twin appendages over and over, backs then palms, palms then backs, as though seeing them for the very first time. When I addressed him, he seemed not to recognise his own name. When Nate addressed him as “Junior”, his head twitched, as though he were hearing a snatch of a familiar song issuing from a distant window.
The operation had gone smoothly, Nate told me. There had been no complications. Both patients (neither having much say in the matter) had submitted passively to being chloroformed. Gauging the requisite composition of the three separate Conroy’s Solutions had seemed a daunting challenge, but my notes were thorough – admirably so – and left little scope for misconstruction. Now all that remained for us to do was to keep the patient under observation and see how things developed.
We left Charley – or was it Junior? – to recuperate, and went to Nate’s cabin for a celebratory glass of wine. As twilight descended over the Miskatonic, Skipper Brenneman hove to shore and joined us. Nate’s patently ebullient mood answered the question he seemed poised to ask.
“So it come aout all right, eh? Well, there’s a relief. I sorta wanted ter know and sorta didn’t, if’n that makes sense. Kin I go an’ see him naow?”
“Why not?” said Nate. “Remember, he may still be disorientated. His mind is having to adapt to an entirely new physiological schema. His body is not the one he had been accustomed to for thirty-odd years. There are no hard and fast rules for a situation like this. We are in uncharted waters. Him seeing your face may be beneficial, however. A lighthouse to guide him out of the mists of confusion.”
It did not go quite like that. No sooner did Charley’s dark brown eyes fix upon the skipper than a moan escaped him. He gesticulated at the older man, even as the moaning continued, a thick, guttural, animalistic noise like the lowing of a cow crossed with the grunting of a hog. He held out his hands, as though asking a question. I could see it etched in his face: What has happened? Who am I?
The skipper was at a loss. He reached out several times half-heartedly to Charley, as though wishing to make contact then thinking better of it. The lines on his face doubled and deepened until it was a mask of furrows. This impassioned tableau lasted until the skipper abruptly turned on his heel and quit the cabin. I caught up with him outside, where he was taking great agitated draughts from his hipflask.
“Is that my boy?” he said. “I mean, it’s Charley on the outside sure enough, but he ain’t a-holdin’ hisself like he used ter. He’s got that kinder forward lean, jus’ like Junior used ter have, an’ I kin tell he’s trying ter communicate, only the words ain’t comin’ aout. I’m not sure we done the right thing here, Mr Conroy.”
I did what I could to reassure him. Uncharted waters, I said, reiterating Nate’s metaphor. Nobody had ever attempted a feat of this nature before. All we could do was monitor the patient’s progress and hope for the best.
“Hope fur the best? That’s a tall order. You hed better be right, is all I kin say. Otherwise we’ve done gone damned my son’s mortal soul, sir, an’ I reckon as haow we may’ve damned our own inter the bargain.”
