The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(66)

Moreau clasped his daughter’s arm so he could stand up straight and stared back at Hernando. “You need to leave.”

“You heard the doctor,” Montgomery said, motioning with one of the pistols to Eduardo. “Get the hell out of this house.”

Eduardo and Isidro slowly walked to the door, behind Hernando.

“Eduardo,” Carlota said. The name was a plea, and she extended a hand in his direction. That single gesture would have broken any man’s heart.

But the boy flinched, his eyes skittered across Carlota’s face, filled with dread, before he crossed the threshold. Montgomery followed behind the three men, the guns pointed at their backs.

When they reached the patio, Hernando’s two men immediately looked at him in alarm and reached for their pistols.

“We are leaving; don’t draw your guns,” Hernando said, wisely surmising that there was a revolver aimed at his spine.

The men were shocked, but they did as their boss said and walked toward the doors of the hacienda. Once they were all outside Montgomery barred the door and moved quickly back toward the house.





PART





THREE



(1877)





Chapter 21


    Carlota


“Come, sit here,” her father said. “Montgomery, fetch me a syringe. There, yes, there.”

She was trembling all over. She felt as if she might vomit, and her hands ached terribly. They looked wrong, the fingers were unnaturally long, somewhat crooked, and her nails were too sharp, slightly hooked. She caught sight of her reflection in the surface of a glass cabinet. Her eyes were also altered. They shined, as if they were polished stones.

She pressed her arm across her midsection and bent down, weeping, not wanting to see herself.

“Let me have your arm,” her father said.

“No!” she yelled, swatting his hand away. “Don’t touch me! Don’t get close to me, neither one of you!”

Montgomery stared at her, and her father raised his hands in the air. His face was calm. “Carlota, you need your injection. My lamb, remember: blessed—”

“I need an explanation. You will explain this to me! What is happening to me!” she demanded and stood up, toppling the chair upon which she had been sitting and pushing aside a tray with medical instruments that had been placed on the table next to her. They clattered and fell on the ground.

The antechamber to the laboratory, which she knew so well, was alien to her. The animals in their jars and on the shelves, the books, the charts showing the bones and muscles of the body, they were wrong. She felt as if she’d never seen them before, and through her body there coursed a terrible, awful pain.

“He said I’m a hybrid! Look at my hands!” she exclaimed, raising them in the air and spreading her fingers. “Why do my hands look like this? I have claws!”

She did. Like a cat, nails long and curved and sharp, and she couldn’t understand how this was her body and these were her hands.

“You must calm down. You simply must. I don’t want to restrain you but I will.”

“Tell me why!”

“Carlota, little one, stop it.”

She hissed at him. The sound sprung from her lips involuntarily as she stretched her neck forward. She whirled away, placing the table between herself and the men. She began walking quickly, from one side of the room to the other. Her heart was beating fast, and she closed her hands into fists, pressing them against her temples.

“Carlota, you are like this because there is a part of you that is not human and which I have controlled and kept at bay for years. But your body has changed in ways that have baffled me in recent months and the treatment that suppressed those traits is not working.”

“How can there be a part of me that is not human? Am I not your child? Ramona said a woman came to see you. A pretty woman from the city,” she said, clutching at that strand of gossip. “That was your mistress. That was my mother.”

“The woman knew your mother.” Her father shook his head.

Her muscles ached as if she’d been running for a long time, and she breathed in quickly, her nostrils flaring. She could smell the one hundred scents of the laboratory, the chemicals and solutions and also the sweat pooling on her father’s brow and Montgomery’s scent. They were sharp and clear, all layered against one another.

“I was married once to a lovely woman. My Madeleine,” her father said, and he smiled a little. “You’ve seen her portrait in my room. But my wife suffered from a congenital ailment. She died while she was in the final trimester of her pregnancy. It should not have been so. But there was nothing I could do. The flaw lay in Madeleine’s body. The priests tell us God made us perfect, in his image, but they lie. Look at all the defects! All the mistakes nature wreaks upon our flesh. The deformed and the infirm and the ones who go to their grave early. I sought to rectify that. To perfect God’s creation. To eliminate the ills of man.”

Her father’s face had appeared calm up until this moment. Now it turned sour, and he frowned. “My experiments were too esoteric and wild to be understood in Paris. I was forced to leave the country of my birth and sought refuge in Mexico. But I needed money. Lizalde had money aplenty. Some of my research tickled his fancy. I had, at that point, managed to create rudimentary hybrids, and I’d had a thought that this line of investigation would be appreciated by someone like him. He offered Yaxaktun to me and his patronage, and my work was able to proceed at a more assured pace. You must understand, the hybrids were not what I wished to study, it was what I was forced to study. Workers! What would I possibly have wanted with field hands? That was Hernando’s concern.