The blood was turning into infinitesimal flakes. And the flakes were dissolving. "Look, look at your gown."
The blood was crusting, flaking off there as well. She crumpled the flannel, brushed at it. She reached up to grasp the flaky residue that still clung to her hair. It was all crumbling.
"I see now," Reuben said. "I understand. I understand everything." He was in awe.
"Understand what?" she asked.
"Why they keep saying the Man Wolf is human. Don,t you see? They,re lying. They don,t have proof of this or anything else. This is what happens to us, to all particles of us, to all fluids. Look. They don,t have any samples from the Man Wolf. They took samples of what they found at the crime scenes, and probably even before they,d completed their work, the samples were no good, dissolving, dissolving like this."
He crawled forward and leaned down over the head. The face had fallen in. The head was a small puddle on the rug. He sniffed at it. Decomposition, human scent, animal scent - a mixture, subtle, very subtle, so subtle. Was he himself scentless like this to others, or only to others of this species?
He sat back again on his heels. He looked at his own paws, at the soft pads that had replaced his palms, and the shining white claws which he could so easy retract or extend.
"All of it," he said, "the transformed tissue, it dissolves. That is, it dehydrates and breaks into particles too fine to be seen, and finally too fine to be measured, even in whatever laboratory chemicals or preservatives that they have. Oh, it explains everything - the ridiculous contradictions from the Mendocino officials, and from the San Francisco laboratories. I see now what,s happened."
"I don,t follow."
He explained to her about the failure of the tests on him at San Francisco General. They,d gotten some results, then gone back only to find that all the original material was useless, or contaminated or lost.
"In the beginning, with my tissues, perhaps the process of dissolution was slower. I was still evolving. What did the man say about the cells ... you remember ..."
"I do. He referred to pluripotent progenitor cells, cells we all have in our bodies. We,re a tiny mass of pluripotent progenitor cells when we are embryos. Then those cells get signals, chemical signals to express themselves in different ways - to become skin tissue cells, or eye cells, or bone cells - ."
"Right, of course," he said. "Stem cells are pluripotent progenitor cells."
"They are," she said.
"So we all still have such cells inside us."
"Yes."
"And the wolf fluid, the Chrism, it caused those cells to express themselves to make me into a Morphenkind, into this."
"Chrism," she said, "it has to be in the saliva, a metaphysical word for a toxin or a serum in the bodily fluids of the Morphenkind that triggers a whole string of glandular and hormonal responses for a new kind of growth."
He nodded.
"And you,re saying that even right after you were bitten, while you were still evolving, the tests they took still went bad."
"More slowly, but yes, the specimens definitely went bad. They lasted long enough to get results about hormones, and extraordinary amounts of calcium in my system, but my mother said that eventually all the lab results failed."
He sat quiet for a long while, thinking about it.
"My mother knows more than she,s letting on," he said. "She must have realized after the second battery of tests that something in my blood itself was causing the specimens to destruct. She couldn,t tell me this. She might have been trying to protect me from it. God knows what she feared was happening. Oh, Mamma. But she knew. And when the authorities came back to her, asking for another DNA sample from me, she said no."
He felt a heavy sadness that he couldn,t talk to Grace, couldn,t present her with all of this, and have her loving counsel, but what right had he to dream of such a thing?
All her life Grace had saved lives. She couldn,t live without saving lives. And he would not ask her sympathy and complicity now for what he was. It was bad enough that he had brought Laura into this. Bad enough that he,d given Jim troubled sleep for the rest of his days.
"You do realize what this means," said Laura. "All that talk on the television about human DNA and manipulating the evidence."
"Oh, yes, I certainly do realize it. It,s just talk." He nodded. "That,s