The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

CATEGORY: Promethean Origination and Impacts

RULE 96.7: As You Sow, So You Shall Reap (or Even Geniuses Get What They Deserve)

SOURCE: Mary, laboratory assistant

VIA: Laird Barron

There’s also no Igor in the 1931 Universal Studios’ Frankenstein, although there is a hunchbacked assistant named Fritz (whose shoddy work as a brain-snatcher provides most of what’s monstrous about the shambling monster). It’s not until 1953’s House of Wax that we get the devoted assistant with that famous moniker. Somehow, cultural memory has married the hunchback and the helper and given us the iconic gofer: Igor, dumb as a post and twice as ugly, practically enslaved by his mad employer.

In our next story, Laird Barron gives us a whole new Igor. She’s not your run-of-the-mill lab assistant and she doesn’t have a hunchback. Oh, and she hates her boss. But when you’ve been created for your job, a career change takes more than just a new resume. It’ll take … genius.

Three years later, as I hike my skirt to urinate in a dark alley in the slums of Kolkata, my arms are grasped from behind. The Doctor whispers, “So, we meet again.” His face was ruined in the explosion—its severe, patrician mold is melted and crudely reformed as if an idiot child had gotten his or her stubby fingers on God’s modeling clay. I can’t see it from my disadvantaged perspective, but that’s not necessary. I’ve been following him and Pelt around since our original falling-out.

Speaking of the Devil … Pelt slips from the shadows and drives his favorite dirk, first through my belly, then, after he smirks at the blood splattering onto our shoes, my heart. He grins as he twists the blade like he’s winding a watch.

“—and this time the advantage is mine.” I laugh with pure malice, and die.

Storms unnerve me. I hate thunder and lightning—they make me jumpy, even in the Hammer Films I watch nearly every evening. Regardless of the patent cheesiness, it awakens my primitive dread. Considering the circumstances of my birth, that makes sense. Fear of the mother of elements is hardwired into me.

My nerves weren’t always so frayed; once, I was too dull to fear anything but the Master’s voice and his lash. I was incurious until my fifth or sixth birthday and thick as a brick physically and intellectually. Anymore, I read anything that doesn’t have the covers glued shut. I devour talk radio and Oprah. Consequently, my neuroses have spread like weeds. Am I getting fat? Yes, I’ve got the squat frame of a Bulgarian power lifter, but at least my moles and wens usually distract the eye from my bulging trapeziuses and hairy arms.

I also dislike the dark, and wind, and being trussed hand and foot and left hanging in a closet. Dr. Kob used to give me the last as punishment; still does it now and again, needed or not, as a reminder. Perspective is extremely important in the Kob house. The whole situation is rather pathetic, because chief among his eccentric proclivities, he’s an amateur storm chaser. Tornadoes and cyclones don’t interest him so much as lightning and its capacity for destruction and death. Up until his recent deteriorating health, we’d bundle into the van and cruise along the coast during storm season and shoot video, and perform field tests of his arcane equipment. Happily, those days seem to be gone, and none too soon. It’s rumored my predecessor, daughter numero uno, was blown to smithereens, and her ashes scattered upon the tides, during one of those summer outings.

My birthday was Saturday. I’m thirty, a nice round number. By thirty, a girl should have career aspirations, picked out a man, that sort of thing. I stuck the white candle of death in a cupcake, said my prayers, and ate the damned thing with all the joy of a Catholic choking down a supersized holy wafer. Then I doused my sorrows with a bottle of Glenfiddich and watched a rerun of the late night creature-feature.

I’ve decided to record my deepest thoughts, although I’m young to be scribing even this outline of a memoir. Some bits I’ve written in spiral notebooks with ponies and unicorns on the cover.

We live in a big Gothic mansion on a hill outside of Olympia. We being Dr. Kob, Pelt, and me. Pelt came to the United States with the Master. The old troll doesn’t talk much, preferring to hole up in his backyard treehouse and drink Wild Turkey and sharpen his many, many knives. I call him Uncle, although so far as I know he’s no more my uncle than the good Doctor is my father.

Dr. Kob’s workshop is the converted attic in the East Wing. He’s got a lordly view of everything from Olympia to Mt. Rainier. When he’s in his cups, he refers to the people in the city as villagers. That’s exactly how he says it—with a diabolical sneer. I think he reminisces about the Motherland more than he should. His skeletons are banging on the closet door. He just keeps jamming in new ones. I wager it’ll bite him in the ass one of these fine days.

The housekeeper, chef, and handyman stay in bungalows in the long shadows of the forest on the edge of the property. The gardener and his helpers commute daily. They tend the arboretum and the vast grounds. Yet despite their indefatigable efforts to chop back the vines, the brambles, and the weeds, the estate always seems overgrown. It looks a lot like the thicket around Sleeping Beauty’s castle in the classic cartoons. Some rooms in the mansion leak during rainstorms. Like the grounds crew, our handyman and his boys can’t replace rotten shingles and broken windows fast enough to stay ahead of entropy that’s been gathering mass since 1845. There’s not enough plaster or paint in the world to cover every blister and sore blighting this once great house.

But Dr. Kob doesn’t care about such trivialities. He’s obsessed with his research, his experiments. Best of all, there are catacombs beneath the cellars; an extensive maze chock-full of bones. Beats digging up corpses at the graveyard in the dead of night, although he waxes nostalgic about those youthful excursions.

I’m careful in my comings and goings despite the fact Dr. Kob crushes the servants under his thumb and virtually saps their will to live. He imported most of them from places like Romania and Yugoslavia. They’ve united in tight-jawed dourness and palpable resentment. None speak English. They’re paid to look the other way, to keep their mouths shut. They know what’s good for them.

I worry anyway. I’m a busy bee, fetching and toting for the Master; coming and going, sneaking and skulking at all hours. Capturing live subjects is dangerous, especially when you’re as conspicuous as I am. There can be complications. Once, I brought home three kids I’d caught smoking dope in the park. The chloroform wore off one of them, and when I popped the trunk he jumped out and ran into the woods, screaming bloody murder. Luckily, Pelt was sober enough to function, for a change, and he unleashed a pair of wolfhounds from the kennel. Mean ones. We tracked the boy down before he made it to a road. The little sucker might’ve escaped if I hadn’t cuffed his hands behind his back.

A circus rolled through town one week in the fall; in its wake, consternation and dismay due to a murder most foul. An article in the Olympian documents the spectacular and mysterious demise of Niall the Barker. The paper smoothes over the rough edges, skips most of the gruesome facts. The reporters in the know talked to the cops who know this: While hapless Niall lay upon his cot in a drunken stupor, some evildoer shoved a heavy-duty industrial-strength cattle prod up his ass and pressed the button. His internal organs liquefied. A blowhole opened in the crown of his skull, and shit, guts, and brains bubbled forth like lava from a kid’s volcano exhibit at a science fair. His muscles and skin hardened and were branded with the most curious Lichtenberg Flowers.

Dr. Kob requires that we take supper together on Fridays. We sit at opposite ends of a long, Medieval-style table in the dining hall. The hall is gloomy and dusty and decorated in a fashion similar to Dracula’s castle in the Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee films. God, how I adore Christopher Lee, especially the young, B-movie incarnation. His soliloquy to carnal delights in The Wicker Man stands my hair on end. Dr. Kob doesn’t know anything about cinema or actors. He says there’s no television where he comes from, no theatre. That’s likely an exaggeration—the Master is fond of hyperbole. Read a few of his interviews in the Daily O and you’ll see what I mean.

Dr. Kob’s father was an eminent scientist until some scandal swept him and his family into the shadows. After his expulsion from whatever prominent university, Kob, Sr., conducted his research in the confines of home sweet home. I think of the dungeons and oubliettes in those ancient European keeps and feel a twinge of pity for the peasants moiling in the fields beneath the Kob estate. Ripe fruit, the lot of them.

Snooping about the Master’s quarters, I unearthed a musty album full of antiquated photographs of Dr. Kob and various friends and relatives. Many feature the redoubtable Pelt. Has the hunter always been Kob’s henchman? Perhaps they are fraternity brothers or blood cousins. Today the good Doctor bears a strong likeness to Boris Karloff, which is also pretty much how he looks in his baby pictures.

On the other hand, the Pelt I know scarcely resembles the man posing with a pack of hounds, his curls long and golden, his bloodthirsty grin as sweet and guileless as Saint Michael’s own. What a heartbreaker (and likely serial killer) he was! One of the pictures is dated 1960. Now, he slumps over his plate and goblet. His hooked nose, his sallow cheeks are gnarled as plastic that’s been melted and fused. Oh, and he’s pot-bellied and bald as a tumor. It’s all very sad—he’s like a caricature of a Grimm Brothers’ illustration. Maybe this is how Rumpelstiltskin ended his days.

“Mary had a little lamb,” Dr. Kob says, and titters as he downs another glass of port. That Mary business annoys me more than he can imagine. He doesn’t realize I caught on to his stupid inside joke and its antecedent years ago. I read classical literature, too, you pompous ass. I’ve Melville, Dickens, and Chaucer in the bedside cupboard. And Shelley, that bitch. On the other hand, perhaps I should be grateful. He could’ve named me Victor or Igor.

“—then she had a little mutton,” Pelt says in an accent so thick you’d need one of his pig-stickers to cut it. I don’t think Pelt likes me, our occasional drunken coupling notwithstanding. It’s not exactly easy to find a good screw in this pit. I wonder if Dr. Kob knows about Pelt and me. The Old Man is cagey—I wouldn’t be surprised if Pelt reported the results of our trysts as part of some twisted experiment like the Apted documentaries that appear on PBS every seven years. Man, I’d love to get in front of a camera and monologue about some of the shit I’ve seen. Yeah, there’s a frustrated actor in here. A frustrated nymphomaniac as well—sorry, Pelt.

Midday now and I taste the ozone; my joints ache. From the parapet of the attic tower I can see way out across the water to where the horizon has shifted into black. It’s coming on fast, that rolling hell.

The trees start to shake. Leaves come loose and flutter past my face. This is going to be a hummer. My hair is already frizzing. High elevations are bad places to be at times such as these. This particular roof is even worse than most because of all the lightning rods. Well, they aren’t exactly lightning rods in the traditional sense. They serve other uses, primarily transferring electricity to the Doctor’s lab equipment. Like a good gofer, I’ve come to make certain everything is shipshape—the array is rather delicate and must be aligned precisely. There’s nothing more complicated about the job than jiggling a television antenna until the picture clears, but it has to be right or all hell might break loose.

I make the adjustments and then retreat inside and head for the kitchen. One of the chef’s minions, a cook named Helga, fixes me cocoa and marshmallows. I’m sitting on one of the high stools, swinging my feet and sipping my hot chocolate when Dr. Kob comes around the corner, his usually slicked hair in disarray, his tie loose and shirt untucked.

“Mary,” he says. “You double-checked the array, I presume?” He scarcely acknowledges my answer; his mind is already three jumps ahead, and besides, my loyalty is unquestioned. “One of my specimens expired last night—but all is not lost. My revivification project awaits!”

“Remember not to talk on the phone during the storm,” I say. “I just saw an account of a woman who was fried doing dishes. Ball lightning exploded from the sink and set her on fire. It traveled through the pipes.”

Dr. Kob stares at me, his beady eyes narrowed. He rubs his temples as if experiencing a migraine. “You’re watching the talk shows again. You know how I frown upon that, my dear. Less daydreaming, more physical exertion. Remind me to have Pelt assign you additional duties. Idle hands and all that.”

“Out! Before I lose patience for your belligerence. And tomorrow, take the rod into our lovely village for quality-assurance testing. I’ve altered the design. It possesses more jolt than ever.”

“As you command,” I say sweetly. After he wanders off, I chew my cup and swallow it piece by piece. It kind of frightens me that my Pavlovian dread of the Doctor has ebbed, replaced by an abiding irritation. This is very dangerous. He’s a middle-aged megalomaniacal child—a L’enfant Terrible. We know what rotten children do with their toys, right?

He gave me a puppy, once. I loved her, and often imagined how she had crept into the caves of my ancestors to escape the cold and the dark. I accidentally broke the puppy’s neck. It’s probably a good thing he didn’t hand me the little brother I always wanted.

Some people mow the lawn, others take out the garbage, or walk the pooch. Among similar menial tasks, I kidnap and kill whomever the Doctor says to kidnap or kill. I enjoyed it during my formative years. My rudimentary self was a glutton for the endorphin rush, the ecstasy of primal release. As my brain evolved, I developed, if not a conscience, at least the semblance of ethics. The glamour has faded, alas, and now this, too, bores me to tears. Frankly, it’s about as stimulating as tearing the limbs off dolls.

Usually I do the deed with this device Dr. Kob invented that’s something on the order of an unimaginably powerful cattle prod. This prod is capable of emitting a charge much greater than the lethally electrified fences one might encounter surrounding a top-secret military installation. It fits in my coat pocket and telescopes with the flick of my wrist, like those baton whips cops use to pacify rowdy protesters.

There are two basic methods of killing with the rod. (Dr. Kob encourages ample experimentation.) I jumped out of a hedge and zapped the last one, a banker in a suit and tie, from a distance of six paces. He shuddered and dropped in his tracks as if shot. Sometimes the energy exits from the temple or forehead and leaves a small hole like a bullet wound. I prefer to discharge from beyond arm’s reach as a safety precaution, but it’s not always feasible.

The second method is rather awful. The rod is thick at the base and gradually tapers to a point the diameter of a darning needle. A few weeks back I ministered to those two pole dancers who made such a sensation when the cops discovered them. And hell no, that particular job didn’t bother me a whit. I’m not altogether fond of the pretty ones, and when they’re haughty little bitch queens to boot … well, I consider it justice served. Anyway, their housemate walked in on the proceedings. I recognized him as a bouncer from the club where the girls worked—a powerfully built guy tattooed front and back, with head-to-toe chains and piercings, and yellow, piggy eyes that burned with a love of violence. He almost got his hands on me before I stabbed him in the chest with the rod and dialed up the juice. The force hurled him end over end into the wall, where he sprawled, limbs flailing grand mal style. His eyes sizzled like egg yolks and sucked into his skull; his teeth shattered, his hair ignited, and all that miscellaneous metal reduced to slag as his skin charred and peeled. I’m no weak sister, but the greasy smoke, its stench, always gets me. I ran to the window and puked into a flower box. Then I got the hell out.

My lifelong fantasy about running away with the circus isn’t likely to pan out. I’m okay with that. I buy tickets when a show’s in town and make excuses to disappear for a few hours. Dr. Kob took me once when I was a child; for a while, he had this fascination with pretending I was his little girl. We went a lot of places during that happy period: picnics on the beach, the carnival, ice skating at the mall, and similarly nutty stuff. Nutty, because it was so damned out of character for the Doctor.

The circus is what sticks in my mind and I’ve continued to go long after the Doctor lost all interest in passing me off as his ugly daughter. I’ve even convinced Pelt to come along a couple of times, but not since he got into a row with a gang of carnies and cut off three fingers of one poor bastard. Pelt’s an unpleasant drunk, to say the least.

A couple of weeks before my birthday, I’m scanning the paper and spot an advertisement for the impending arrival of the Banning Traveling Circus. Of such trivial things is treachery made …

This is a minor show, no Ringling Brothers extravaganza by any stretch, but it has elephants and trapeze artists and shiny women in leotards. One of the shiny women has long hair done in a single braid. A man dangles by his knees from the high swing, her hair clamped in his teeth as she spins below him with such velocity her limbs merge with her torso. The clowns zoom into the ring in their clown car, and the dancing bear wobbles in on his unicycle. Hijinks ensue. I clap, unable to contain my glee. It’s all so damned simple I could cry.

After the main show I wander the grounds, a paper cup of beer in hand, a blob of pink cotton candy in the other. I resist the urge to visit the freak tent, and always fail. It’s usually lame, and this collection is weaker than most. Crocodile Boy has a serious overbite, and that’s it. He’s from Georgia and works as a hairdresser in the off-season. No two-headed babies, no wolf men. The bearded lady is rather impressive, though. She’s a brawny, Bavarian lass named Lila, who’d fit right in with the mansion staff. Her beard isn’t particularly thick, yet it’s immaculate and descends to her navel. Its point is waxed and gives her a sort of Mandarin vibe. She has the softest, greenest eyes.

She does her thing and it’s getting dark, so the crowds trickle back to the parking lot under the pall of burnt kettle corn. Lila, Edna the tattooed lady, and I are talking and they invite me to the “after the show get-together”; a bunch of them always do. They gather under some tarps pitched between their trailers and wagons. I meet Cleo the strongman (who’s definitely over the hill and suffering from chronic asthma), and Buddy Lemon and his wife, Sri Lanka, the trapeze artists, and Armand, the guy who trains the lions and elephants, although I’m informed he sucks at both by Lila, who whispers that two of the lions have mauled people and Dino stomped on a carnie, all in the last three months. Judging from how fast Armand guzzles a bottle of corn mash, I suspect she may be on to something.

They’re a sweet bunch, raw and melancholy. As always, there’s got to be one asshole in the crowd, though. A barker named Niall. A pigeon-chested guy with a pencil moustache and a waist like a fashion model. His crappy yellow-and-white striped suit is cut a size too small, even for him. He makes a snide remark about my “swarthy, and exceptionally stout” personage in a smarmy English accent. He tells Cleo to “watch out, mate, she appears as if she could beat you out of a job.” I’m relieved and grateful when Lila glares and he slinks off to his quarters.

As the group drifts apart, Lila grabs my arm and says to come with her back to the trailer. I’m privately questioning the wisdom of this, because I’ve never had another woman come on to me before, and more important, there’s the Doctor to consider. He keeps strange hours. There’s no telling what mood he’s in. I might be punished for leaving the house without permission. But I’m in a perverse mood so I follow her.

We’re surrounded by farmland and it’s extra dark on account of it being a moonless night, which Lila tells me is perfect for stargazing. She says the constellation she’s been monitoring is tricky to capture due to its distance. Light pollution only adds to the degree of difficulty. She spends a few minutes adjusting the rig and muttering to herself, and I steady her elbow as she sways on unsteady legs.

Finally, she says, “Okay, all right, here we go. I’m getting damned good at this—you have no idea how hard it is to nail down the Serpens galaxy.” She guides my eye to the viewfinder and makes adjustments as I describe what I see, which at first isn’t much but black space punctuated by random lights.

Then, “Oh. It’s … beautiful.” And it is beautiful, an impossibly remote field of stars veiled in clouds of dust and gas, and at its heart, a wavering flame that illuminates from the inside out, like fire shining through a smoky glass. I know it’s old, old. Older even than my ancestors who scrabbled and clawed in the earliest days on this rock.

“No,” I say, slightly embarrassed that Dr. Kob often visits the Deer Mountain Observatory just a few miles from our house and yet I’ve never once asked to tag along.

“Don’t blink,” she says. “Like my Pa used to say, ‘You gotta hold your jaw just right’ when he taught me how to fire his deer gun. You blink, NCG 6118 will go poof and you might not ever find her again.”

“How do you find her again?” I don’t need Lila to explain her fascination with the constellation, her fear of losing it forever. Its austere beauty stirs something cold in my breast.

“I memorized her position. Also, I’ve got a chart with the coordinates and the Dreyer description. Doesn’t make it easy, though.”

I wrestle my gaze from the telescope and take her small hand in mine. “Something like that.”

I think about the mega-powerful telescope owned by the Redfield Observatory and tremble. “What about your family? Couldn’t your dad pull a few strings?”

“Yeah, if I hadn’t left him behind for all this.” She laughs. “I haven’t spoken to him in … a while.”

We pack it in and meander to her trailer. She shares it with a couple of other girls, but one missed the trip, and the other stays with a boyfriend when she’s in town. Nothing happens. We have a couple of Southern Comfort nightcaps. Then she falls asleep on her dumpy couch. After she’s snoring, I rummage through her bags and find the astronomical charts she’s gathered and stick the one I need into my pocket next to the cold, lethal smoothness of the prod. I smooch Lila’s furry cheek on my way out the door.

The Doctor has sent word that I’m to report to the laboratory at once. He requires me at the crank that revs up the dynamo. Like all his gadgets, the crank is unwieldy and impractical and nobody else is physically strong enough to make it turn with sufficient speed. The combination of my efforts and the electrical storm are crucial one-two punches in the pursuit of scientific progress. Tonight’s the night he jump-starts yet another patchwork corpse, and maybe this time it’ll work and he’ll snag the Nobel and show his lamentably deceased dad who the real scientist is in the family.

At the moment, I’m on the front porch, standing beneath the awning, goggling at nature’s wrath. Thin, jagged bolts of lightning splinter in white-hot strokes that repeat every fifteen to twenty seconds. Wind and rain crash upon the eaves like an avalanche. By some confluence of atmospheric forces, the air dims and reddens as the grounds have been transmogrified into the soundstage of a Martian epic. I swing my hand back and forth, fascinated at how it seems to float and multiply as it drags through the bloody light. I skip from the sheltering eaves toward the middle of the driveway, feigning carefree abandon as I throw my hands skyward and tilt my face so water streams from it. The reality is, the strikes are marching ever closer and I want to get the hell clear of the house.

Pelt sits in a rocker by the rail of the third-floor balcony. He strikes a match on the sole of his cowboy boot and lights one of his nasty hand-rolled cigarettes I can smell from a hundred yards away. He eyes me with the cold intensity of a raptor studying a mouse and I wonder if his instincts are actually that damned sharp. Could he really know? The notion chills me in a way the deluge can’t.

A second later none of that matters. Lightning flares directly overhead, and I feel in my bones that this is it, this bolt has been drawn into the array. And man, oh, man, had I screwed that over big-time earlier in the day. I clap my hand over my eyes. The blue-white flash stabs through the cracks between my fingers. The top of the house explodes and the effect is epic beyond my fondest dreams. The concussion sits me down, hard, as all the windows on this side of the building shatter. Fiery chunks of wood, glass, and stone arc upward and outward in a ring. Debris crashes to earth in the gardens, is catapulted among the waving treetops. It’s glorious.

The house remains upright, although minus a substantial portion of the third story. Smoke pours down the sides of the building, thick and black, and chivvied by blasts of wind; it roils across the muddy yard and acres of lawn, lowering a hellish, apocalyptic shroud over the works. I’m on my feet again and primed for violence. Pelt will be coming for me. Except, the sly bastard’s vanished—his left boot is stuck in the mud near the front steps. I hope against hope he’s dead. Servants stumble through the smoke, clutching each other. Their quarters occupy the ground floor, so I doubt any got caught in the explosion. This is their lucky day. None of them glance at me as they file past, moaning and sobbing like a chain of ghosts.

I have to be sure. The rain kills the worst of the flames, snuffs them before they can create an inferno. The grand staircase is in sorry shape. Several steps are gone. I hopscotch my way onward and upward while lightning flashes through the giant hole in the ceiling. Happily, the laboratory, its various sinister machines, have been obliterated. Upon closer inspection, I spy the Doctor’s mangled and gruesomely mutilated person fallen through the floor where it lies pinned beneath a shattered beam. His body is burnt and crushed. He’s quite mindless in his agonies, shrieking for his dead parents and the friends he doesn’t have.

Yeah, I should finish the job. That’s the smart move. Alas, alack, I’m too melodramatic to take the easy way out.

The Doctor keeps a machine in the cellar. When I’m feeling blue I sneak down and bathe in its unearthly glow. It kicks mad-scientist old school; a mass of bulbs and monster transistors, Tesla coils, exposed circuitry, and cables as thick as pythons going every which way. At the heart of this ’50s gadgetry is a bubble of glass with an upright table for a passenger. Allegedly the bubble shifts through time and space. Dr. Kob’s grandfather built the prototype in 1879, powered it via lightning stored in an array of crude batteries. The new model still runs on deep cycle batteries Dr. Kob Jr. scavenged from backhoes and bulldozers.

The main reason the Master traps lightning to energize his devices is because they suck so much juice the electric bill would draw prying eyes sooner rather than later. There’s a backup diesel generator gathering dust for a true emergency. The Doctor is sentimental about his methods, obsessed with the holistic nature of the process. He won’t drive or fly, won’t operate a computer, not even a typewriter. He scratches in his voluminous journals with quill and ink. In the mansion, every lamp runs on kerosene; the stoves and furnaces, coal; our black-and-white televisions and radios, batteries. We’re like an evil alternate universe version of the Amish.

The T&S machine holds special significance for me, because that’s the device of my genesis, my cradle and incubator. Dr. Kob reached back into the great dark heart of prehistory to pluck an egg from my mother’s womb and fertilized it with God knows what. He effected a few cosmetic alterations to bring me marginally in line with the latest iteration of the species, dressed me up like a real girl, taught me to walk and talk and hold a spoon. He forbade my partaking in any sort of significant education—apparently he couldn’t reconcile his anthropological interest with his fear that I might become too smart for his health. Indeed, I’m certain if he ever had the slightest inkling of my true intellectual capacity, he’d have sent Pelt to slit my throat in the night.

However, I learned to read, no thanks to him. Poor dearly departed Goldilocks took care of that on the sly. I was ripping through college-level lit by the tender age of fourteen. Eliza Doolittle, eat your heart out.

The procedure hasn’t been without unexpected complications, however. You wouldn’t believe my psychedelic dreams, and if I’m ever caught and placed on trial for crimes against humanity, I’ll get an insanity pass on the descriptions alone. Genetic memory? I dunno; all I know is that in dreams I go for a ride on an astral carpet to a high desert wasteland that spreads under a wide carnivorous sky. The tribe kills with rocks and clubs; it assembles in caves and lays its feasts upon the dirt. They haven’t invented fire, thus meat and skin is crushed and smeared on rocks, like fingerpaint and wet clay. The brutes, my people, see my apparition, doubtless grotesque in its familiarity, and hoot in alarm and outrage, jam-red mouths agape. Then, the large males, the killers, snarl and snatch up their clubs and their stones, and hop toward me with murder on their minds.

Nine times out of ten, I jerk into wakefulness, alone in my dingy cell with the television screen full of snow. The tenth time out of ten, I come to in a field, naked and covered in scabs of blood, with no memory but the dream memories.

Even the Doctor isn’t quite mad enough to do what I’ve done. He’s a lunatic, yes indeed. He’s also a survivor. Better than most, he understands that one screws with the infinite at one’s own peril. I’m sure the meticulously recorded results of those Victorian experiments with peasantry cooled his jets.

Those nights the good Doctor and his toady spent drunk off their asses, I took the T&S machine for joyrides. The calibrations weren’t difficult—I simply plugged in the various sequences from Doctor Kob’s logs. The wild part is, the machine goes forward and back and to any physical location in the universe, provided one has the coordinates. The places I’ve gone, weirder and more frightening than those Technicolor nightmares.

After Doctor Kob and Pelt murder me in that squalid alley, I give them a moment to wonder at my dying words. But it’s only a possible me, a shadow. Travelers exist in duplicate during collocation. It’s complicated; suffice to say, each of us unique snowflakes, aren’t. We exist as a plurality. That old saw about meeting yourself … it’s only kinda true. The universe didn’t unravel when I skipped ahead and met one of my future selves, an inveterate alcoholic and aimless wanderer, one bound to run afoul of Dr. Kob’s plots of revenge. If she’s anything like me (ha-ha!), she won’t mind making the sacrifice to even the score.

Pelt knows something’s wrong, but even as he turns I tap him with the prod and he’s gone in a belch of gas and flame. The Doctor takes it in stride. He’s a hobbled shell of a man, yet arrogant as ever. He commands me to drop the weapon and submit to my well-deserved punishment. I slug him and he falls unconscious. That feels so good, I’ve revisited the moment a dozen times.

This is how it ends for Daddy dearest: I strap him into the machine and send him to the land of my ancestors, and once he’s evaporated into the abyss of Time I take an axe to the machine. I’ve gotten my kicks. That conscience I’ve been incubating stings like hell. Who knows what havoc I might wreak on material existence were I to keep dicking around with the timestream.

I sent the Doctor with a mint copy of Frankenstein, a dozen bottles of wine, and the prod with a full charge. It’s the least I could do. The very least.

I track the Banning Circus to a show in Wenatchee. The owner, the great-great-grandson of Ezra Banning, is skeptical when I apply for the strongman job. He’s got a strongman, he says, and I say I know. I also know his guy is getting long in the tooth and suffers from asthma, or emphysema, or whatever. Banning tells me to hit the bricks, he’s a busy man, blah, blah. I walk over to the lion cage and tear the door off its hinges—naturally, I try to make it look casual, but the effort does me in for the day. The owner picks up his jaw. He sends one of his flunkies to break the news to poor Cleo. He doesn’t even mind that it takes Armand the better part of two days and the assistance of local animal control to corral their lion and get him into his cage.

I knock on Lila’s trailer door. A monster storm cloud is massing in the north and that could be good or bad. It certainly sets the scene. My hair is standing on end. Lila screams and throws her arms around me. She’s crying a little and there’s snot in her beard.

“Hey, this is for you,” I say and give her a small wooden coffer I bought off a guy at a garage sale where I also scored some dumbbells to get in shape for my strongman—strongperson—audition.

“What is it?” She lifts the lid and gasps. An eerie golden light plays over her face.

I take the folded, spindled, and mutilated piece of paper with the Dreyer entry for galaxy N1168 from my pocket and give it to her. Lightning parts the red sky like a cleaver. It reflects twin novas in her eyes. I grasp her free hand and press it against my heart.

Laird Barron is the author many short stories, many of which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in anthologies such as Inferno, Black Wings, Haunted Legends, Lovecraft Unbound, and Supernatural Noir. Much of his short work has been collected in the volumes The Imago Sequence and Occultation, both of which won the Shirley Jackson Award for best collection. His work has also been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. His first novel, The Croning, recently came out from Night Shade Books.