22ND SEPTEMBER, 1935–22ND DECEMBER, 2035
EVERYWHERE
I
After that, the virus spread as might a drop of dark ink in cool water, moving slowly at first but then gathering speed and reach, denying all efforts to staunch its diffusion or divert its flow, until, at last, everything was altered.
II
Initially, the outbreak seemed to be confined to New York. To the other states of the union it was just a weird, unbelievable story, one more tall tale from a strange town known for its eccentricity. Reports emerging from the city were seen as wild innuendo or crazed campfire yarns which had taken on a life of their own. Some armchair observers dubbed it mass hysteria, others an infectious, inexplicable madness.
The residents of the Grosvenor Hotel, at the very epicentre of the change, already knew differently. On 23rd September 1935, Miss Angelique Dupont, having witnessed the escape of the being which had been Josephine Galligan, succumbed to that contagious agent which she had breathed in unwittingly as she stood, dumbstruck, in the corridor. She woke in the night, shivering and afraid, the surface of her skin filling up with dense, coarse fur, her very jaw restructuring itself into something like the snout of a tapir. Her sobs roused her roommate, Miss Betty Morales, who cradled Angelique in her arms, doing her best to dry her tears and reassure her.
“It’s just the flu, honey. Nothing but a cold and headache.”
That Betty had been infected became obvious two nights later on 25th September when her gait became suddenly simian and certain of her canine teeth began to grow into fangs. By this point, cases across the city had already reached the low hundreds.
The mark of Dr Moreau had become airborne and it was spreading quicker than anyone at that time could have guessed.
III
Too late, the Mayor of New York, a man called La Guardia, tried to act, closing down segments of the city and ordering strict curfews. Theories abounded at City Hall where many ingenious and well-argued cases were made for a resurgence of bubonic plague or some rogue strain of scarlet fever. All, of course, were incorrect. Besides, every action that was taken by the man who, as things soon turned out, would be the last to hold mayoral office in that place, proved utterly inefficient, like trying to use crepe paper to dam a river.
By 30th September, the virus was everywhere in New York City. Many fled, hoping to find sanctuary elsewhere in the country. In this too they were mistaken. There was nowhere to run, however far-flung, which would be free of it. La Guardia himself was last seen on the 1st October, crouched on all fours on the steps of St Patrick’s Cathedral, his face grown shaggy and lupine, his eyes a feral shade of yellow. No records exist to tell us what became of him.
IV
There began to be sightings elsewhere in the nation, escalating incidences of transformed Americans. On the same day as La Guardia’s transformation, a woman in Providence, Rhode Island, who had apparently been fused with some manner of bipedal dolphin was seen emerging confusedly from the water of Narragansett Bay, yelping four or five fractured, incoherent consonants before disappearing once again beneath the surface.
On 5th October, a group of hikers in the forest of Pine Grove, Maine, witnessed a couple of ursine creatures staggering almost drunkenly between the trees. They seemed, said the group, to be caught between wonder and hysteria, as though the beings had only just returned to the wilderness and were having to learn how to move through it again, a disquieting combination of the monstrous and the infantile.
On 7th October, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a gang of humansized entities with scaly, green-hued skin were seen wallowing in the swamp, watched balefully by the alligators who had, until recently, been chief predators there.
In all of these places – Providence, Pine Grove and Baton Rouge – there were fresh cases and new transformations within days of each sighting. The nation began to panic. There were now too many instances, too many eyewitnesses and too much damage already wrought to be able to deny the incredible truth of events. Phrases such as “unstoppable momentum” and “incremental spread” were used in public and in the press with considerable frequency.
On 10th October, the Democratic President told a terrified country in a wireless address that they need have no cause for fear and that whatever was amongst them he would root it out and remove the evil. He hinted at the influence of certain “anti-human civilisations”, a reference, most observers agreed, to the inhabitants of what was then widely known only as the City. That it was technological and medical advances from that place which had, some years earlier, allowed him to rise from his wheelchair and walk unaided, the President did not see fit then to mention.
Instead, in a stroke which his closest advisors considered too hasty and reactive, he closed all borders. In this the counsellors were entirely mistaken; it was far too late now to make any measurable difference.
V
The day after the President’s address, the first proven cases beyond the borders of the USA were confirmed.
In Quebec, an Englishman who had made his home there, by the name of Burgess Dawson, found himself transforming into a leonine hybrid, his fingers turned to claws and his ears, already large, becoming both rich in fur and acutely sensitive. Everyone who was in the Moonbeam Diner with him that night soon began to display similar symptoms.
In Monterrey, Mexico, a sudden outbreak of creatures, largely resembling goats, occurred. Glimpsed first in the mountains, they soon came down to the city itself, objects both of curiosity and fear. Some citizens tried to capture the beings although to no avail. Those that came too close soon found themselves undergoing alterations of their own.
Already a new kind of wildness seemed to be creeping in, at once a reversion and something startlingly new.
VI
The phenomenon was becoming a global one, impossible to ignore or to overlook.
On 13th October the office of the President of the United States demanded to speak to the Commander of the City. A telephone conversation was arranged in which the Commander (the third, elected democratically, since the death of Anta’Nar), a fox-man named Ar’Balar, denied all knowledge of the virus and of any City involvement in its development and spread.
This happened to be true. The works of the late Coral Mayfield and of the mind which whispered to her in the dark were not known at all to Ar’Balar or to the majority of his people. The antics of Albert Edgington had long since come to those who ran the City as something of an embarrassment. Yet the human President did not believe the words of Ar’Balar and so, blustering in the face of the tidal wave of fear, threatened all kinds of international sanctions. The conversation was left for both parties in a most unsatisfactory place.
In the White House, the President ordered enquiries and investigations aplenty, none of which would come to anything or even get close to discovering the true source of the currents of change which were moving across the world. On 25th October, he was moved underground at a secret location for his own protection. Above him, his country fell into chaos. No-one seemed to be immune. The infection rate of the virus was one hundred per cent and what it did to each of the infected was, at least so far as anyone was able to tell, both crazily unpredictable and altogether irreversible.
VII
On 2nd November, the virus reached Brazil. On 4th November, it arrived in China. On 10th November, the Tsar of all the Russia was informed by his courtiers that the virus had got to the edges of his great country. A handsome, fair-haired man who had barely turned thirty and who was to be married the following year, the Tsar too demanded at once to speak to the head of the City.
The line was crackling and the voice sounded very faraway. Nonetheless, he recognised it as belonging to Ar’Balar, whom he had met at a conference in Svalbard ten months earlier.
“Please, my friend,” said the Tsar in his own tongue. “Speak plainly to me. Do you know anything of this?”
“Nothing at all,” said the fox-man whose Russian was very good. “You have my word.”
“It seems… I don’t know… it seems almost like a judgement of your people upon mine.”
There came after this a very long pause. Then: “Speak not to me of judgement, sir. Not when you owe your health and your throne to our resources.”
The Tsar could not respond. There was very little doubt, after all, that the advances in arms provided by the Beast Folk of the City had staved off revolution, nor that what the physicians of that place had provided had made his haemophilia almost bearable.
“I’m sorry,” said the Tsar eventually and slammed down the telephone.
In the City, Ar’Balar and his inner circle began to panic. The Mayfield woman had been found dead and there were rumours that the Edgington man had been transformed. International blame seemed to be at the door of the City and no denial, however heartfelt, seemed to be sufficient. There were rumours not only of reparations but of imminent military intervention. As Ar’Balar announced to his council, his usually pensive face filled up with anger: “These are the drumbeats of war. If there’s anyone from the City who has any connection at all to what is occurring we need to find them and bring them to justice.”
They agreed, of course, and they applauded his words but many in the City were beginning to wonder, even then, whether there might not be something poetic in the virulence of such a thing, whether a world in which everyone looked less like the people of Washington, DC, and more like the denizens of the City might not be a true wonder to behold.
There seemed, over Christmas, to be something of a lull in the procession of the virus. Cases appeared to decline. Fewer sightings were reported in the newspapers. Whole communities begun to wonder if they hadn’t been spared. Some members of the frantic and beleaguered scientific world even went so far as to theorise that the thing might have burned itself out at last, that its malignity had declined, that some sort of natural immunity was occurring in the population to ward it off. For more than a week the planet seemed to hold its breath, to see if this dark-winged angel had indeed passed over the human race.
Then, on 4th January, a flurry of new cases: in Athens, in Cyprus, in Vatican City. On 11th January, the first cases were reported in Africa. A flock of bird-people seemed drawn to the Sphinx of Giza as though they knew themselves somehow to be caught up into something mythic, as though, sensing themselves to be impossible things, they wished to make their homes by the figure of another of their kind, half-buried by the sand.
IX
For much of 1936, the world appeared to exist in a state of constant siege. The virus seemed to ebb and flow. Although many accusations were made against the City, nothing was ever proved and much attention was in any case taken up with combating the effects of the virus. During the twelve months, civilisation began to fray. Technology (even the strange technologies of the City) were laid aside and a simpler way of life embarked upon. Communities became little citadels, fortresses of the uninfected who kept away any sign of the transformed creatures who were now to be seen in almost every country. The world, divided, stood upon a precipice. It cannot be said, even now, that the humans did not fight, tooth and nail, for what they had built over centuries.
On 30th November of that year, a unit of Finnish scientists, led by a woman named Jarvela, announced that they had found a cure for the infection. They claimed to have had some success in reversing the transformations, though little substantial data of this was ever produced. They also asserted that they had developed a vaccine which would safeguard the unchanged against catching the transmogrifying agent.
Funds were found and a distribution network created in order to give this cure to a sizeable proportion of the surviving population of Europe.
It may be of some interest to the reader to discover that on 12th December, in a nursing home on the Cornish coast, a very old resident indeed, well in excess of his century and known to those who cared for him only as “the vicar”, died in his sleep with the comforting, erroneous, belief that some version of the world as he had known might yet survive.
X
By the summer of 1937 it had become clear that there was no cure and that the vaccine was largely ineffective. The virus itself seemed to move across the world in waves, transforming all with whom it came into contact.
The rich held out for longest, and those who were naturally isolated. The changes did not stop, however, and could not be evaded indefinitely. Societies across the globe broke down and governments had no choice but to frantically devolve power to a succession of smaller and smaller fiefdoms and local states. Things fell apart. It was as though time were being run backwards, as if humanity were being brought home, at an ever-gathering pace, to its beginnings.
XI
One by the one the old institutions were toppled.
On 3rd February, 1938, the President of the United States, who had spent almost the entirety of the past three years underground, was overcome by a version of the virus which made him into something canine and savage. On 5th April, the British Royal Family surrendered also to the transformations. The grounds of Windsor Castle, already by then starting to sink into wildness, soon played host to a menagerie of creatures of the strangest sort. On 19th May, the Pope was seen soaring on impossible wings high above the Sistine Chapel.
Such scenes were repeated all across the world as authorities crumbled and rulers were brought down. The great spirits of the age were metamorphosis and conversion. Nothing and nobody was left unchanged.
XII
Humanity lasted a good while longer, hiding out in the most isolated parts of the world, surviving in pockets, keeping clear of the altered population, cleaving to the high and the hidden sectors of the globe.
As far as it is possible to tell, the last human being to have been untouched by the transmogrification agent in the Western Hemisphere was a Greenland Inuit woman named Quneqitooq who died, a hermit, sometime early in the spring of 1963. Her counterpart in the Eastern Hemisphere was an Australian man called Hugh Olliver who lost his life on the Nullarbor Plain three years later, torn apart by a creature that was comprised in equal parts of dingo and gliding possum.
XIII
Decades passed. The virus mutated, and mutated again, creating the most erratic and unforeseeable results in its hosts. The world seemed almost to luxuriate in its strange new state. And the City of Dr Moreau – together with all of its inhabitants, at one time so talked about, thought about and feared – seemed, for a long while, to have been entirely forgotten.