he assumed came from the machine in a raspy voice, just one of its many spooky effects. His concentration began to falter only when he slowly realized that he smelled again the malodor he’d detected but couldn’t track down in the library and later in the kitchen. A ball escaped his control, slipped down the chute labeled Goodbye, and almost at once he lost another. He realized this would not be the day when he beat his previous highest score. With that recognition came a sudden keener awareness of the stink, which had gotten much stronger than before. He was not alone.
He turned, and Lee Shacket was three feet away. Shacket had been to this house three times during its construction, Purcell proudly showing it off. But this was Shacket monstrously changed, blistered and pocked with suppurating sores, scaly patches on his face, his eyelids red and swollen, and his eyes protruding as though subject to a terrible pressure in his skull. His lips were pale. No. Not just pale. White. Peeling and as white as flour, as if he had pressed his mouth into some acidic powder that burned the color out of his lips. He said, “Dorian,” his voice thick and gravelly.
The Haunted House pinball machine was at Dorian’s back. He would have to slip to the right, slide out of Shacket’s reach, and run for the arcade exit. He didn’t believe Shacket—this thing that once had been Shacket—could move fast, not in its condition. Dorian could escape, as he had always escaped the negative consequences of his actions. He could escape this, lock himself in one of the panic rooms, call for help. All he had to do was fake to the left and slip to the right and run.
But he couldn’t move. His muscles were locked. His body seemed to have turned to stone. “Dorian, I’m becoming. Do you see how I’m becoming?” It wasn’t just the terror of this creature that paralyzed Dorian Purcell, but something else, a greater horrific possibility that trembled at the back of his mind, that he couldn’t quite name. Or maybe he didn’t dare to name it, for fear that the naming of it would make actual what was at the moment only possible. “Becoming the king of predators,” Shacket said. He grinned, he licked his teeth, his tongue was as white as his lips. His teeth were stained, the spaces between them clogged with gray material, his breath foul, rancid. The tremulous thought that Dorian strove to avoid would not be repressed. Maybe it wasn’t his destiny to significantly extend the human life span, to live for hundreds of years; maybe he would not be one of the first transhumans, with vastly enhanced intellect and extraordinary powers. Maybe he would die as billions had died before him. Having lived with the conviction that the world could not evict him, he was paralyzed by the possibility of mortality.
When Shacket seized him by the arms with both hands, Dorian at last threw off the paralysis. He struggled, only to discover that this creature, even if terminal, was not weak, as he had thought, but inhumanly strong instead. The serum oozing from the sores in Lee Shacket’s hands was disgusting, potentially infectious, and so gluey that it penetrated Dorian’s shirt and seemed to bond with his skin. He felt something leeching into his biceps, so that the harder he strained to wrench free, the firmer became Shacket’s grip on him, until he made his most desperate effort and felt his muscle fibers tearing apart. Dorian’s scream of pain and fright and horror earned another grin from Shacket, who once more crowned himself: “I have become.” The former CEO of Refine tasted the arcade air with his white tongue and then he bit into the scream, bit and bit the tender lips.
125
Rodchenko had been taken upstairs and locked in a closet for the time being.
The humble study in the white clapboard house on the outskirts of Pinehaven did not look like the epicenter of a quake that would change the future. The storm that seared the night with lightning and shook it with thunder and hammered the house with rain might be taken, however, as a metaphor for the fury that great change often inspired.
Ben Hawkins knew this: The amazing bond between the Mysterium and humanity would change the world forever, but the world could not be radically changed overnight without widespread fear of the new and without dreadful consequences arising