Widdershins
an excerpt

Tanner was already waiting when Wheatley’s car pulled up to the garage. The door went up behind him, and he stepped aside to let the car pass. He then stepped through the door before it closed again as Wheatley climbed out of the car.

“Tanner,” Wheatley said, as though it were a happy surprise that he was already there, as though Tanner had had any choice but to come running when his master called.

“Dr. Wheatley,” he said, nodding. He knew not to bother asking what the emergency was, knew that Wheatley would tell him what he wanted, when he wanted—no more, and no sooner.

“I have a new specimen for us,” Wheatley said, putting his key in the trunk.

“What is it?” Tanner asked, just for the sake of moving the conversation forward.

“Something very special,” Wheatley said, pausing before opening the trunk.

“What?” Tanner asked, knowing that Wheatley wanted asked for drama’s sake.

“Well,” he said, taking off his glasses and polishing on his lapel. “I’m sure you’ve been wondering about the strange samples I’ve been having you study lately.”

Surprised, Tanner agreed. He’d still not confronted Wheatley about the experiments he’d been performing.

“I think you’ll find this very interesting, then. I’ve collected a live specimen.”

“A live—?”

“Yes,” Wheatley said, now hauling the trunk lid up dramatically. “A live specimen.”

Tanner looked inside the trunk and went cold. He could feel the look of horror distorting his face, and couldn’t make it go away for Wheatley’s sake no matter how hard he tried. An unconscious man lay handcuffed and shackled in the trunk of Wheatley’s car. How had it come to this? Had Wheatley always been crazy, and Tanner had managed to ignore it until now, or was this a recent development? Who was this person in the trunk, and just how much trouble was Tanner already in for being an accessory to kidnapping? He didn’t know what to say first.

“What— Who— Why—“ questions kept surfacing then popping like soap bubbles before he could voice them.

“What is the one you’re looking for,” Wheatley said, cryptically. “Now, help me get this into the lab”

He wasn’t even using pronouns like he or him, Tanner noticed. He’d called the man “this,” as though he were an object, not a person. Every scrap of reason inside Tanner was screaming at him to run, to call the police, to cut his losses and get out of this horrorshow right now. But Tanner was a well-trained dog, and obeyed his master against any volition he may have still possessed.

Thankful at least for the cover of the garage, Tanner helped Wheatley to lift the man from the trunk. They settled him onto a wheeled cart and pushed him towards the door into the lab. The lab was attached to Wheatley’s house, but had a separate, outside entrance through the garage.

As the lab was actually an extended section of the garage, the walls were made of cinder blocks painted white. Once they were inside, Wheatley had Tanner help him move aside a metal storage cabinet, revealing a stretch of wall that had metal rings anchored in the cement block with lengths of chain and padlocks hanging from them. They then lifted the man down off of the wheeled cart and leaned him in a sitting position against the wall. There were two rings, and two chain-and-lock sets, one near the floor and the other at a height of about three feet. Wheatley took the chain from the higher ring, opened the lock, ran the chain around the handcuffs the man wore, and locked it again. He then did the same with the shackles around the man’s ankles, securing him to the lab wall, still unconscious. Tanner watched in silent horror, still unable to act or to speak his thoughts aloud to his sometime-mentor-turned-maniac. “Who is he?” he eventually managed to force out in a shaking voice.

“Ah,” began Wheatley, smiling. “The question isn’t who, but what.”

Tanner gave Wheatley a questioning look, but said nothing.

“Those samples you’ve been studying,” Wheatley went on, clearly relishing every moment of this dramatic disclosure. “They’re blood and tissue samples.”

“I know they are,” Tanner said.

“But,” Wheatley gestured with a finger. “They aren’t human.”

“I know that, too.”

“Any theories as to what they might be?” Wheatley asked.

Had they had this conversation a month ago, a week, even that afternoon, anytime, in short, before Wheatley had taken this prisoner, Tanner would have eagerly made his guesses. Now, however, he was still too stunned and horrified to much care about the bizarre slides. “No,” he answered.

Wheatley looked disappointed. “Oh, come on now,” he chided. “No guesses at all? What strange things have you found about them?”

Not appreciating a pop quiz right now, Tanner recited his strange findings, which Wheatley had never bothered to try to discuss before now, in a monotone. “The cells are missing several key organelles, most notably ribosomes and vacuoles.”

“And what does that indicate?” Wheatley asked, still behaving as though he were teaching a high school science class.

“The cells have no means of taking in nourishment or eliminating wastes. In other words, they have no means of keeping themselves alive.”

“And yet,” Wheatley went on, clearly delighted. “They are alive, no?”

Tanner was beginning to fall prey to Wheatley’s charisma yet again. He recognized the lapse, but was powerless to stop himself giving in to it. “They are, yes,” he agreed.

“And have your experiments shown you any ideas how?” Wheatley asked.

“One did, a little,” Tanner admitted.

“Which?”

“One of the tests had me take a sample of the weird blood and place a drop of normal blood onto it.”

“And what happened when you did that?” Tanner assumed these questions were just to lead Tanner to the correct conclusions, but couldn’t help but wonder if there were more to them. He wondered, and found himself hurt by the thought, whether Wheatley had ignored every report on the samples that Tanner had written.

He answered the question, however, anxious to get to the conclusion even while feeling an almost painful guilt about it. “The deficient blood essentially absorbed the normal blood. The cells in the blood missing the necessary structures each engulfed one of the healthy cells and merged with it.”

“And then? What did you find next?”

“After a few hours, the sample was missing ribosomes and vacuoles again.”

“Leading you to what conclusion?”

“That the cells in the sample can only renew themselves by essentially eating healthy cells.”

Wheatley appeared on the verge of jumping up and down and clapping his hands. “That behavior remind you of anything?” he asked.

“It’s sort of cannibalistic, I suppose,” Tanner ventured.

“It’s only cannibalistic,” Wheatley countered. “If both samples came from the same type of creature. What if they didn’t? What then?”

“Well,” Tanner said, now enjoying the theoretical workout in earnest, in spite of himself. “I suppose, considering that they’re blood cells, it’s sort of vampire-like.”

Wheatley smiled. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” he asked.

Tanner had just thrown the comparison out as a starting point, not as an actual answer. Vampires? That was ridiculous. “What are you saying?” he asked, looking again to the man chained to the wall.

“Non-human blood that devours human blood to regenerate itself? What do you think I’m saying?”

“That’s insane,” Tanner said, wishing that he’d run when his instinct had told him to.

“Is it?” Wheatley asked, turning to their captive. He knelt down before him and ran a hand gently, almost lovingly, along his pale cheek. Then he reached back and slapped him hard across the face. He jumped back just as the man stirred to life.

Although Tanner wasn’t now sure if it was correct to think of him as a man. He now understood why Wheatley had been using impersonal pronouns in reference to their hostage. The man, the creature, fought hard against the chains that held him, eyes wild, the whites entirely red. He made a bestial snarl, revealing teeth elongated into fangs. Tanner backed away, fast, until his back hit the counter on the opposite side of the room. He swallowed hard, his eyes fixed on the metal rings in the wall, his only thought that of the bolts in the concrete and the question how strong they were.