The Creature

The broken floorboards creak under his feet as Victor eases the door open and enters the room. He’s faintly aware that the house is crumbling, but he doesn’t care enough, or has the time, to fix it. His eyes immediately find Marie, and there she is, lying in bed, looking like a withered plant in winter—embodying the smell of sickness swirling in the confines—despite the sunlight streaming through the fluttering curtains.

“Marie”, Victor calls out, but she doesn’t open her eyes. Her lips keep moving silently, like she’s praying to the gods—more out of force of habit than faith. He moves to detach the IV line hooked to the vein in her foot—he has run out of places; the veins in her arms, hands, neck and chest are already bloated with countless needle pricks.

He’s inserting another IV line, when she says, “Victor, please.” Her voice is brittle, thin, but it still lands like a stone in his chest. He looks at her, just to see tears spring to her cornflower blue eyes—unable to hold her gaze longer, he looks away. He understands—and still does not understand at all—why he’s being punished for simply doing what he must.

Marie flinches when he inserts the needle, and her anger grows. It becomes so intense, that she wants to smash every syringe, monitor, and vial of medicine cluttering the room, and bring Victor’s entire lab in the basement down with her wrath alone. Yet, the second she draws breath to spew her rage, her chest feels as if it's filled with liquid, and a violent bout of cough traps the words between her mind and her lungs.

Victor quiets her with a soft “Hush”. His expression is both tender and distraught—as if he knows what she wants, but is unable to give it to her. Then he simply sits there in silence, and watches her eyes droop. But just before she slips into a feverish almost-sleep, she asks in a heaving whisper, “When…will this end?”

Even though he doesn’t know the answer, his voice is firm with resolve—

“One day”, he promises. “One day, very soon.”

Then, the door groans shut behind him, as he backs out of the room.

***

Inside Victor’s lab, the faint smell of ozone and antiseptic is masked by reek of blood and copper. At the heart of the lab is a containment pod, a pressurised cylindrical tank filled with an amniotic fluid.

And, suspended inside is Victor’s newest creation—curled and twitching in half-consciousness, attached to nutrient lines, oxygen circulation ports, and neural input probes that snake into its developing spine. It tries to hide its breathing, like it’s aware that it’s being observed.

With his shoulders hunched, Victor stands next to the pod and watches the creature—whose tiny hands and feet have already grown in size since morning—with self-loathing and disgust.

He was so sure that this was the one.

Its blood plasma, rich in high-oxygen affinity hemoglobin, lung regenerative peptides, and even modified anti-fibrotic enzymes that can break down scar tissue, had everything he needed to treat Marie’s Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. It even stayed alive much, much longer than the rest.

But it didn't work either.

Quelling his disappointment at yet another failure, and not allowing hopelessness to take root, he turns on the hearth. When it gains enough heat, he flings the creature, still alive, into the blazing fire—and passively watches its translucent skin char and burn. He should have preserved its body for reprocessing, but he could not bear to even look at it.

He has lost count of how many creatures he has created and expelled. Each brought with it that nagging hope—that this time, it will be different, that this time, he will be able to create the one.

Not letting himself dwell on what he had just done, he immediately starts splicing another combination of genomes that could work.

That he needed to work.

He’s no longer simply a genetic engineer, he tells himself, but is someone who has turned science into an art form. And, all he needed was to perfect his art. Filled with resolve, he once again loses himself in his obsession.

He’s deep into studying protein structures and CRISPR schematics when he suddenly notices a movement. He looks up at the banks of translucent biowombs grown from engineered placenta cells, and sees one of the thin outer membranes twitch.

One of his designs was already growing in the womb, but it wasn’t due to mature for another week.

Worried that the placenta might be haemorrhaging due to a defect, he unfolds from his chair to check on its vitals. That's when the movement in the womb becomes more pronounced with an undeniable rhythm. Realising that the womb might be in premature labor, he rushes to the manual override. But before he can push the lever, the organic actuators along the base begin secreting a proteolytic enzyme, breaking down the interface between sac and skin.

Stunned, he watches in wonder, as the womb splits fully open with a wet, moist, sound—like a tearing of paper soaked in syrup.

This is the first one that has chosen to come out on its own.

The fluid begins draining into the base channel, and he finally sees the creature. But, he cannot believe what he is seeing.

***

Victor doesn’t remember the last time Marie was sitting up in bed. In just three days since the creature was born, all her vitals have improved. She’s not exactly an epitome of health, but her cheeks have gained color, and her eyes look alive for the first time in years.

He feels an old familiar ache in his chest when she smiles at him.

“I feel like going out today,” she tells him in a wistful tone, with no coughing fits interrupting her words.

“Not yet, but soon.” He responds absently and her smile dips.

Victor's mind is in too much of a whirl to notice her fallen expression.

It worked, he thinks to himself in wonder.

But, he knows that this creature is still not the one.

He can make it better, perfect it even.

He has the right formula now, the key.

He just needed to create a more advanced version, one that can cure her for good.

As he unfolds from beside her, to go back down to his lab, he doesn’t register Marie calling his name.

***

He has been observing the creature for the past hour, and has asked himself repeatedly: how is this possible?

It doesn’t need the containment pod to survive, and has already begun crawling on the floor. It's age-advanced by design, so that Victor doesn’t have to wait years to harness its lungs for a transplant. Except for the talons on its too long fingers, jaggedly sharp teeth, and the slightly translucent pallor of its skin—that faintly resembles an amphibian's hide, beneath which he could see its veins running like roots from its spine—the creature, for the most part, appears human. Especially its eyes. None of his earlier prototypes had retained human DNA to this degree, while also exhibiting the characteristics of all the other genomes he had spliced in.

He’s wondering if that’s the key, when he hears a soft gasp at his back.

With her oxygen tank beside her, Marie’s frail body frames the door as she watches in horror.

"What have you done Victor”? She asks in barely a whisper.

Raising both hands, like he’s warding off her ire, Victor says, “Let me explain.”

But Marie doesn’t look away from the creature, who has dashed under Victor’s desk at a kind of speed he wasn’t aware it was capable of. She walks to the desk with unsteady steps, dragging her tank alongside her. And, the moment she bends down to look underneath; her eyes meet another pair, so much like hers, and nothing like hers at the same time.

They are huge, and blue, framed by a ring of reflective gold, not blinking often, but when they do, it’s slow, with a vertical membrane, not a horizontal lid. The creature is trying to hide behind the table’s leg, but its head is still cocked to the side as if it too, is curious.

With emotion clogging her throat, Marie looks up at Victor and says, “It's just a baby.”

Victor scoffs “No, it's not. It's something I designed to save your life.”

Shaking her head in dismay, Marie burrows deeper under the desk. Sitting side by side with the creature, she croons, “Come here.”

The creature keeps its distance at first, but after long moments of coaxing, it tentatively draws closer. And, when it climbs into her lap, laying its head against her chest while making squealing sounds of pleasure, she bursts into tears at the chest-opening relief she did not expect to feel.

***

“No,” Victor pleads with Marie. “What you’re doing is not right!”

“And what you did, was that right?” She quips back.

“I didn’t have a choice!”, he yells in frustration. He did what he had to, the only thing he knew how to.

Taking a deep breath, Marie says, “Victor, all I wanted was the peace of sleep beneath a broad bough.” She goes on “ To be buried in the same ten-meter plot where my ancestors are. Instead, I had to suffer through years of your obsession”. Her tone softens at his distraught expression, “But, now I’m happy. Look around.”

Victor cannot deny that the house has come to life. The heady smell of baking bread and sugar dwells in the air, the window sits open, thin curtains ripple softly in the draft. He now finds Marie working in her garden—hands busy with her wild vines of squash, picking weeds from the thorny spine of a raspberry bush.

The creature follows her wherever she goes; watches her dig through the mud, hang linens out to dry, and sit, curled up in her lap, as she knits for hours.

Yesterday, he found Marie laughing with delight while playing a game of how long the creature can step perch from perch before it fell.

He has run out of arguments to dissuade her from treating the creature like a child.

He finds it an insult that she wants to name it Laura, a name they’d reserved for their own child. They had tried many names over the years, both for a boy and a girl—Jemma, Henry, Ruth, Betty, Eli—but none of them had fit. One night, there it was, tripping from her lips, easy as breath. But, there was never a child to be named due to Marie’s illness. And, now she wanted to give that name to this thing.

How can he explain that the creature is an abomination, at odds with nature itself. It prefers to be mouth fed, but not human food. Instead it likes the bio-material Victor creates in his lab. He finds it disgusting that Marie lovingly feeds it by hand. It doesn’t fit in their lives, except to offer Marie breath, the only thing it was born to give.

What frustrates him the most is Marie’s decree, forbidding him to continue his experiments. She doesn’t want him to create any more versions. Or, treat her with the creature's plasma or fluids.

He cannot argue with her when it seems that the creature is healing her just by touch. Amazingly, they have formed a bond of skin-to-skin parasymbiosis, which, beyond his wildest imaginations, likely resulted from the axolotl genomes it possesses. Just holding the creature against her chest eases Marie’s breathing.

Most prior prototypes died within a few hours of being born, collapsed under the weight of scrambled instincts and genetic incompatibility. Others lived longer, until their hearts simply stopped. One lasted three days. That one had learned to blink in response to light.

But in the two weeks since it was born, the creature's movements have gained control, even grace, as though its motor neurons were learning faster than they should. He suspects that the creature’s bizarre ability to adapt, and why it has lasted this long, is because of the bond it shares with his wife. It’s solely attuned to Marie’s movements, and even mimics her facial expressions. The moment she coughs, the creature scrambles across the room to lie on her chest.

The creature and Marie are exchanging life, each nourishing the other.

Victor is playing along with this grotesque fantasy for now. His plan has been clear from the beginning: when the right time comes, harness the creature for its lungs.

***

Victor wakes up with a start. The world is still inky black, telling him that it’s not morning yet. But something woke him up. He throws off the blankets, and scavenges the bedside table to switch on the lamp. Putting his glasses on, he walks up to Marie’s room, where she sleeps with Laura. In the last month, he has started calling the creature by the name his wife prefers. He might have even grown attached to the little gremlin against all his natural instincts. But when he enters the room, the bed is empty.

He’s met with silence when he calls out her name.

An eerie feeling ripples up his spine and grows heavier as he starts padding down the stairs. The lower level of the house is lit only by weak, grey, moonlight filtering through the windows, and it is in that sliver of light he sees her, lying on the ground, twisted on her side.

“Marie!” Victor yells rushing to her. His knees make a squelching sound when they hit the floor, landing into something wet and sticky.

Blood he realises in panic.

He turns her on her back, but she remains motionless. His eyes adjust to the darkness, and the horror of what’s in front of him seeps in. Her eyes are wide open, glassy and unblinking. Her skin appears waxy, stretched tight across bone and muscle like parchment pulled too taut. And her entire right side looks ravaged, consumed. There is no anger or fear in her face. Only a kind of calm, unique to the dreaming or the dead. Victor realises Marie is gone.

No, not gone, taken.

Marie had once asked him, “What if hell is real, Victor? And, what if you’re bound for it for things you’ve done?” He had simply said, “There's no such place as hell.”

But, now he knows that’s not true, there is hell, and he’s burning in it.

He drags himself up, full of hatred—unsure if it's aimed at the creature or himself—a feeling easier to hold on to than the grief threatening to overwhelm.

His gun in hand, he searches for the creature. His mind has descended into an odd sense of calm. There’s a strange freedom to it, a peculiar comfort in knowing that he’s going to burn it alive, and enjoy watching it burn.

Just then, a crash from the basement rings through the house, splitting the silence. With quiet steps, he walks down the stairs to the basement, where it all started and where it will end.

He can hear a rhythmic squelching sound as he enters the basement, coming from the far left corner of the room. Despite the risk of being seen, he flips on the light, and what he finds leaves him shaken.

Its hands and mouth smeared in blood, the creature is eating one of the wombs. And, with the carnage all around it, it seems, it has already devoured several more. But that’s not what shocked Victor, it's the creature itself. It has changed, grown. Its limbs are longer, more mature. As if it has shed a layer and emerged as something else, different from what it appeared even hours ago. Victor cautiously approaches it, and when he’s near enough, he kneels next to it. That’s when it turns its head, and looks at him with an expression he has seen a thousand times before. He has studied these eyes, he’s familiar with how they look when they reflect amusement or temper. He’s familiar with slightest change in them, and right how he knows they are darkened to almost-black with annoyance.

His mind blanks at first, then becomes a whirr of what he needs to do next.

***

Stretched on the balls of its feet, the creature tries to peer out of the window. From this angle it's almost tall enough to see the garden. But, for some reason it makes it feel restless, quickens its heart—with a feeling it doesn’t understand.

Turning away, it picks up the sheaf of papers lying on the ground, and presses a piece of charcoal to the paper. With wild strokes, it draws vague shapes. Then it smudges the lines to turn hard edges into shadow and spends the next hour copying the lines. It stops when a clawing feeling grows in the pit of its stomach, and as if driven, it goes to the door and scratches it.

Victor enters the room, carrying a small bowl with enough food to douse its hunger, but never to quelch it. He watches as the creature eats quickly, then looks at him expectantly for more. But he shakes his head, and the creature squeals in frustration. Victor has realised that the more it eats, the faster it grows. The only way to make it live longer is to keep it hungry. He's currently working in his lab to find a cure for its rapid ageing.

When it's clear Victor is not going to give it any more food, it eagerly points to the window—just like it does everyday.

And, Victor promises in a soothing tone, “One day. One day, very soon”.